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  • From: Martin Naylor <martinwnaylor@yahoo.com.au>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Better the devil you know
  • Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2005 14:25:51 +1000 (EST)

so may be all we need to realize is to coserve what we have and

Jara <jara@otenet.gr> wrote:Dear Toby,

Some bloody good points here.

It's about applying principles where you live. If
> we limit Pc to those wanting to live off the land, then in a society where
> not even most farmers--about 1% of the population--are living off their
> own
> land, Pc would be irrelevant, ignored. . What do I teach? Working
> with what you have, whole-systems thinking, and awareness of the
> consequences of your actions. I want people to figure out their own
> solutions, not think their only choice is to be farmers. That journey is
> going to be monumentally
> difficult--it has never been done. I am fairly optimistic, but I'm trying
> to
> encourage people to improve the places they live rather than have
> urbanites
> fantasize about rural homesteads.> Permaculture is about starting at your
> doorstep right now, not about dreaming that someday you will move to the
> country, start a community, and
> then be sustainable. That's what I try to teach.


The question many people ask is what can I do. When faced with the
bewildering mess that we are in the second question is often where do I
start. You have answered both questions succinctly - DO WHAT YOU CAN, HERE,
NOW !!

Let's not idealize the past. Local? Pacific NW Chinook used Mexican
> obsidian. And many practices of earlier cultures were unsustainable. Like
> logging and grazing North Africa's forests into desert, and depleting
> soil,
> trees, and water at Chaco Canyon, or shitting upstream of neighbors almost
> everywhere. Other cultures just didn't have the population levels to make
> their destructive effects immediately obvious, but many died of ecological
> collapse.

Quite right. As Alvin Toffler the futurist says - Many proponents of the
'back to the land' philosophy idealize some dreamy past utopia that existed
somewhere, once upon a time. Life in the agrarian rural past and before in
the hunter gatherer era was SHORT, CRUEL, HARD, DIRTY , BRUTAL,
INEFFICICIENT, and OFTEN HIGHLY DESTRUCTIVE.


To be sustainable, we can't go back to the old ways, but must
> combine a little old and much new.

Quite right - Gandhi with satellites ;-)

> If we don't fix the places we live now, why would we expect not to repeat
> the same mistakes somewhere else? That's been our pattern. The existing
> socio-economic framework, bad as it is, has the advantage of being known
> and
> moderately functional, so the odds of success are greater if we transform
> it
> rather than abandon it (which is impossible, anyway) for something we
> don't
> know how to do.
>

Abondoning it is also a total waste of all the embedded resources and energy
in that socio-economic framework.


> Old communities were not intentional (some religious communities
> excepted).
> You lived in a village because you were born there. There was no intention
> or shared vision, and little social justice. Villages had oppression,
> oligarchy, feuds, (Tolstoy refers to "the idiocy of village life,") and
> all
> the other problems that have been with us forever. Although I support, and
> work with, intentional communities, the ugly reality is that the majority
> fail within a couple of years. Knowing how they fail is easily as
> important
> as learning from successful ones.

I can bear witness to this having grown up in a small English village. Even
now English village life is far from being anything close to 'intentional'.
Greek village life is even worse !!!!!!


> Community living is supremely difficult. Plus, you need 100+ people to
> have
> a sufficient skill set for even partial self-reliance. How many 100-person
> intentional communities are there in the world? And 100 is still not
> enough
> people to support a bicycle factory. Where do the rubber and alloy come
> from? I'm not saying "no one should try to start a rural community," I'm
> saying, peak oilers, get real. People who think the easy answer is to
> traipse off to the woods and live happily with friends, let alone with
> other
> frightened, paranoid survivalists, are delusional. Even moderate
> self-reliance is hard work. Total self-reliance at any but a stone-age
> standard of living is impossible. I like my iPod and think we are smart
> enough to have a sustainable culture in which they can exist, and that
> means
> large, sophisticated networks. That's why cities evolved--large groups of
> people are a good way to create a culture.

Having also tried this I tend to agree that it just don't work - Have you
ever met anyone let alone a group of 100 people that you get on well enough
with to share a common vision and work towards it ??????

> (Broken record here: rural life requires more inputs than urban; check the
> laws of physics.) Re store-bought: Raising your own chickens is great, but
> perhaps even more powerful is buying organic chicken at the natural food
> store. The growers and stores thrive, and eventually Tyson and Safeway
> notice (as they do now) that they have competition, and they change. A
> home-grown chicken is rarely an option for city dwellers (2/3 of humanity)
> but more importantly, may not have the transformative social effect that
> supporting good business does.

Once again you are spot on here - I have attempted to be self-sufficient on
my 8 acres of natural edible forest garden !!! - It is bloody hard work
without the help of either loads of friends and/or loads of cash. You have
to be really popular and have loadsa money to be self-sufficient in my
experience so far !!! Interdependence is the way to go I feel. Do what you
can do here and now and give as much away as you can.


Andrew.

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