02/02/2025
For several years, I have had the idea of writing a book called, "The 5 to 9 Homestead. This year I am writing that book. Here is an excerpt:
Life is full of life and is highly varied and dynamic, but through this dynamism, nature is ultimately seeking balance. But to the unaware and hapless bystander or farmer witnessing the carnage, it seems like mayhem. A plague that must be beaten into submission. However, the solution to a plague of pestilence or a scourge of w**ds taking over the garden is not to nuke all of it or even any of it. The solution is as cliche as it gets. The answer is balance. Oftentimes what we are perceiving as a problem, is actually nature's solution to a problem that we don’t see. The problem is not the pestilence but rather the extensive monocrop which gives no food to sustain sufficient predator pressure to the pest, and nature is attempting solve that problem by using the pest to wipe out the monocrop in order to promote a more biodiverse flora (plant life) which will in turn balance out the “pestilence” (fauna, animal life). The imbalance in fauna is a result of the imbalance in flora. Likewise, the infestation of w**ds is not the problem, but rather it is nature's solution to bring fertility back to a soil that is lacking a key nutrient which that "w**d" (aka a pioneer species) is particularly adept at recovering thus setting the stage for once again, more biodiversity. The imbalance in flora is a resultof the imbalance in bioavailable nutrients. Nature, like mankind, is full of specialists. When something is out of whack, a whole lot of specialists adept at solving the imbalance will suddenly emerge out of nowhere to solve that problem because to them, nature's problem is their opportunity. And like us, nature exists for its own sake and the natural byproduct of doing as such is the insatiable appetite of resource acquisition and recycling, aka nutrient cycling, and the efficient cycling of nutrients is precisely what drives specialization, speciation, and biodiversity, and balance through interdependency. Nature is innately driven to maximize resources to sustain more life of evermore complexity, specialization, interdependence, and balance.
