## Metadata - Author: [[To Hemenway]] - Full Title: Gaia's Garden - Category: #books ## Highlights - permaculture shows us where and how to apply these important ideas. It is a linking science. ([Location 237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GLMASS&location=237)) - The aim of permaculture is to design ecologically sound, economically prosperous human communities. It is guided by a set of ethics: caring for Earth, caring for people, and reinvesting the surplus that this care will create. ([Location 238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GLMASS&location=238)) - Solid blocks of the same plant variety, though easy to seed and harvest, act as an “all you can eat” sign to insect pests and diseases. Harmful bugs will stuff themselves on this unbroken field of abundant food as they make unimpeded hops from plant to plant and breed to plague proportions. ([Location 354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GLMASS&location=354)) - Each nonhomegrown meal, each trip to the lumber yard, pharmacy, clothing store, or other shop, commissions the conversion of once-native habitat into an ecological desert. The lumber for a typical American house of 2,500 square feet scalps roughly three acres of forest into barren clearcut— thus, living in a modest house will aid native species vastly more than will installing a few mountain laurels on a small suburban lot. ([Location 393](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GLMASS&location=393)) - Every bit of food, every scrap of lumber, each medicinal herb or other human product that comes from someone’s yard means that one less chunk of land outside our hometown needs to be denuded of natives and developed for human use. ([Location 399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GLMASS&location=399)) - And urban land can be incredibly productive. In Switzerland, for example, 70 percent of all lumber comes from community woodlots. ([Location 404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GLMASS&location=404)) - The term invasive is emotionally loaded with negative connotations. The term implies that a species by itself can invade, yet the ability to invade is not held by any one species. Whether an organism can invade a new landscape depends on the interaction between it and its environment, both living and inanimate. Dropped into one new home, a species may thrive; in another it may fail utterly. Calling a species “invasive” is not good science. Following David Jacke in his book, Edible Forest Gardens, I will use the word opportunistic, which more accurately gives the sense that a species needs particular conditions to behave as it does. ([Location 413](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GLMASS&location=413)) - I’ve often heard blame put on one or another opportunistic species when a native species goes locally extinct. That’s understandable. When we lose something we love, we search for a scapegoat, and a newly arrived species makes a ready target. But virtually every time I’ve examined that charge, it turns out that the place had first been severely disturbed by development, logging, or other human use. The opportunist moved in after the primary damage was done and often in direct response to ([Location 438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GLMASS&location=438)) - Opportunistic plants crave disturbance, and they love edges. Those are two things development spawns in huge quantity. Unless we stop creating edge and disturbance, our eradication efforts will be in vain, except in tiny patches. ([Location 441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005GLMASS&location=441))