Metrosideros: As an anthropologist, I am keenly interested in hand tools. As you know in archaeoloogy, that's all there is left of some societies. And it is the job of the archaeologist to reconstruct what those people were like, often from an inventory of the tools they left behind.
Also, I grew up on a farm and I do have a sampling of my grandfathers and my Dad's hand tools.
In our excavations we rarely use gas tools--if its on a creek or river, we may use a trash pump to run fire hoses to screen artifiacts from dirt. But otherwise our tools are shovels, pruners, mason's trowels and sometimes a grapefruit knife for intracate excatations.
For site clearing we use a bush axe and loppers.
Shadegardener: I found also that there was not much interest in permaculture at DG, and to date the permaculture forum here has not attracted that much attention either. I hope that situation will change. There has been a problem as Metrosideros mentioned, some of the PDF "permaculturists" invent their own rules with no reference what so ever to the ecological principles first out lined by Bill Mollison. And capitalist enterprise in some cases has reared its ugly head: As for example grants used by outsiders to replace native practices such as swidden horticulture. Rarely do Europeans know better than Africans about how to farm their own land.
I hope we can inspire more interest in the subject matter of this forum, so that all of us can behave more intelligently in the future. There is so much to learn!
