Philosophy – Page 3 – Gallifrey Forest Farm

June 10: Art and Happiness

2016/06/10 Danielle 0

Everyone understands the need and desire for nourishing food, to provide us with energy and amino acids and essential nutrients. That’s pretty straight forward. But as a social species, we actually need more than that. We have needs that go beyond the physiological – we need things like acceptance, love, appreciation, and autonomy. We seek happiness, or self-actualisation, or a sense of belonging and community (or all of these things, they’re not mutually exclusive). We create meaning for ourselves out of the things we do, because we need our actions and our lives to have meaning. There are many […]

eating meat

2016/04/03 Danielle 1

In WA, it’s legal to kill animals for meat, providing you own the animal, and no part of the carcass (including waste, bones and offal) leaves your property. And assuming that your local council hasn’t restricted slaughter of animals in your area via local by-laws, of course – many do. You can’t legally sell the meat, though. You can eat it, or feed it to friends, family, or employees, but not to paying guests (i.e. restaurant or bed & breakfast guests). If you want to sell meat (raw or cooked), the animal providing it must be killed in a […]

if not you..

2016/01/18 Danielle 0

This weekend just passed, I attended an event called GenghisCon. It’s a small science fiction / speculative fantasy & gaming convention, which runs every year in Perth. It’s run every year for the last 15 years, which is a pretty impressive run for something which gets no funding or support from any corporate or government body. Every year the committee (elected at the previous convention) does fundraising to make sure there’s enough money to pay for the venue and insurance, and organises a program of events to run at the convention, including discussion panels (on anything and everything from how to […]

urban agriculture and space habitats

2015/12/09 Danielle 0

I’ve been thinking a lot about space, recently. As in, spaceships and stars and planets. I know, I know, that sounds like it has nothing to do with our fledgling smallholding – but in reality it has quite a lot to do with it. When I say I’m thinking about space, I mean I’m thinking about humans going to space. Space habitats and the ecosystems we’ll need to support them, producing enough food not just for a few scientists but for entire villages of people living in colonies on the moon, or Mars, or Venus, or even in permanent space station […]

aesthetics vs utility

2015/11/17 Danielle 0

One of the things which many, many permaculture practitioners seem to struggle with is a particular type of hoarding. I have this problem myself. You hold on to things because they might be useful, and because the idea of simply throwing them away is distasteful. After all, we know where “away” is in this context – it’s the mid-ocean garbage patch, or the local waterways, or at best the local landfill. I can throw away biodegradable things without a moment of guilt, because I know that they’ll just rot down and return to the soil. But those things tend to […]