Cross Pollination
- Cross Pollination
- Definition from wikiepedia
Cross-pollination, also called allogamy occurs when pollen is delivered to a flower from a different plant. Plants adapted to outcross or cross-pollinate often have taller stamens than carpels or use other mechanisms to better ensure the spread of pollen to other plants flowers.
How does this apply to urban homesteading?
Cross pollination can be also thought of one of the strengths of human civilization because, like plant systems, human communities can thrive with the help of knowledge sharing.
For communities, cross pollination can be as simple as neighbours teaching each other and sharing ideas. This helps the overall community's resilience by ensuring skill set redundancy and helps foster an understanding of how all of our wonderful technology sustains our way of life. Any understanding how the complex systems around us impact our lives can help the individual find their way through mis-information and fear.
Cross pollination is what you do when sharing ideas with others. It is what helps spread enthusiasm for new ideas and sow the seeds of change.
Since the agricultural revolution some tens of thousands of years ago, specialists have been able to concentrate their energy and time on study rather than basic needs. Specialists are our experts who design and plan complex systems that we all rely on. We have all benefited from the specialists' knowledge and deeper understanding of the world around us through the development and evolution of new ideas and technology.
Specialists are very important to our civilization because they have designed and built key pieces of infrastructure and pillars of our way of life. Some areas of knowledge are so complex that it takes years to know all the hows and whys of a particular topic, which the specialist are only able to do with the help of their community. Urban homesteading is the application of knowledge that a few enlightened individuals recognized as being key to our societal evolution. Permaculture is based in science which is learned by direct observation and experimentation.
Most of us have some sort of specialty that we have been working on for many years if not decades. The hard won knowledge of the specialist expert is what we all turn to when problems and challenges come up that we cannot solve ourselves.
Human nature is a complex idea of self that is often simplified to the extreme. One facet of human nature is to share our ideas with those around us. Generalists are people that have skill sets which span multiple disciplines and are capable of providing for themselves and their neighbours. Generalists are capable of applying the specialist's knowledge to real world challenges and adapting to better solutions as they are found. It is the generalist rather than the specialist that can help a community adapt and thrive through change and transition because they are capable of altering their patterns of doing when there is a chance to improve outcomes. An example of a generalist may be a citizen who can grow their own food, repair helpful tools, help raise balanced children, etc. Hmmmm... that sounds like the idea of urban homesteading, doesn't it?
Cross pollination in human society happens when the specialists share their knowledge with others. This helps foster the development of techniques essential to survival and a high quality of life for all community members. Many ideas and theories are thought of and developed, but it is the application of that knowledge which really matters. When ideas, like the permaculture principles and ethics, are spread throughout the community individuals will change their daily routines and therefore help a community change as well.
Urban homesteading is a great example of what we can all apply when we accept new ideas and thinking about how to live with more responsibility and comfort in a world that is facing some daunting challenges. Thank you to all of those scientists, farmers, permaculture teachers, and the goodness of human nature and sharing that have all laid the foundations for the next step in our social evolution.
TNT - 2010.04.17