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  • From: Stella <stella@finca-luna.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] politics and permies
  • Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2007 22:00:16 +0100


given what ONE Ghandi was able to do, or one Martin Luther King, in terms of social change .. I think we should seriously ask ourselves why, with so many permaculturists loose ... we haven´t re-designed society yet.

it´s only a revolutionary system of design if some revolution actually happens.

evaluations are not necessarily excercises in one upmanship, nor put-downs of anyone.
Maybe they are just evaluations. They can be used to improve the design, instead of dismissing the people who aren´t feeling served by the design as emotional, backward or not seeing the 'real' reality (i.e. yours).

And I really hope we're well beyond the attitudes that if feelings are involved the people having them must be irrational, or what they say isn´t ALSO 'real'. In this case the very opposite is very likely true: centuries of brutal colonization doesn´t make you just angry, it also makes you very perceptive of the subtleties of the workings of the system that has your people enslaved.

Maybe we should just listen.
It would be very strange if the opressed and those benefiting from the opression actually agreed on 'realities'.



El 03/12/2007, a las 19:52, Scott Pittman escribió:

I have to disagree with most of the posts on pc and politics, including the
quoted comments of my Australian/Brazilian friend Lucy.

To my mind the very act of enrolling for a permaculture design course is one
of the most political acts most people ever engage in. Since I have
certified over 3,000 people I feel that I have helped create a small village
of active, engaged and aware folks who now have the tools to change the
reality around them - and many of them are very busy doing just that.

The very act of reading "Permaculture - A Design Manual" is extremely
radical and political as the information and realizations sink in of the
ultimate outcome of following the pc path. The beauty of permaculture has
always meant, to me, that I can travel all over the world in some of the
most brutal dictatorships espousing a revolutionary system of design and I
am considered harmless by the powers that be. That is an incredible
advantage folks, in a world that has become increasingly polarized by the
paranoia of rampant capitalism and lack of ethical guidance.

To state that pc practitioners in the first world are any less political
than any other place is an exercise in one up man ship that may describe the
feeling but not the reality. It would be something else to say that
permaculture in the third (developing - what ever) world is more relevant
for survival than in the first then I would be the first to agree, if we are
talking in the short term, but if we are talking in the not to distant
future I think it will be equally needed for survival in the whole world
with the third world having a slight edge, just because they are a couple of
generations closer to the land.

The effect of Permaculture worldwide is certainly more profoundly political
than Students for a Democratic Society of which I was a proud member for
several years. The primary difference being SDS was fighting against
something while permaculture is fighting for something. Within the ethical
guideposts of permaculture are contained all the political guidance one
could need. While changing laws and ordinances is good and necessary work
it is extremely time consuming and deadening of spirit and I only resort to
it when I see a real chance of succeeding otherwise I begin to feel a little
bit like Don Quixote.

Most of what we understand to be politics, Democrat, Republican, Labor,
Communist, etc. are games that have been developed to keep us thinking that
we can make a difference by staying in the cultural/economic system and that
we are involved in "democracy". It is an incredible demonic and clever way
of controlling an increasingly disenfranchised populace. For the most part I
don't play except for the occasional trip to the polls in an attempt to ease
the painful descent into the inevitable change that must come.


Scott Pittman
Director
Permaculture Institute
www.permaculture.org

-----Original Message-----
From: Stella [mailto:stella@finca-luna.com]
Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2007 1:43 PM
To: permaculture
Subject: [permaculture] politics and permies

hi Jim,

thanks for your post, i liked your letter .. and hearing what u did
after your pc course - good on you :)

wanted to comment on this bit you wrote:


If there is one critique I'd make of permaculture, I would say that it
is too anti-political; that it doesn't think about how the things it
wants need political change.


i´d say that fortunately the permaculture movement is so eclectic, that
it´s really not possible to say "it" thinks one thing or another - what
we all have in common is that we share ethics, principles, a try for a
systemic form of thinking .. what you learned in your PDC. But people
hear and apply all this in very different ways and - especially -
within very different political realities.

One highlight of the last international convergence (IPC8) for me was
hearing Lucy Legan (a founder member of IPEC, where we were staying)
say that although for us in the west permaculture is still mostly a
passtime and a fashion, for them in Brasil, PC is Political.

She's an australian who has lived in Brasil for a long time and it is
perhaps her double identity that gave her 'permission' to be so blunt
in public, but infact speaking privately with many south american
permaculturists, I came away with the distinct impression that they are
pretty disgusted with how feebly we apply permaculture in the west.
ie. mostly to get more confortable ourselves, or build up & show off
our 'expertise' (then try to 'sell it back to them') instead of
really using it to shift OUR society, and DO political change with it.
This they see as doubly outrageous given how much privilege we have in
the west and how much leverage we COULD do with it.

I´ve been collecting interviews of permaculture pioneers since 2003
now, and my impression is that mostly they are very politically aware
people, who do work directly on this level when it makes sense. And
are pretty clear about the fact that any good permie design is ALWAYS
working also on a political level.

The latest interviews I did in IPC8 with permaculture pioneers from
Argentina, Guatemala, ElSalvador & Colombia, and what is interesting
is that most of them also infact came to permaculture through their
political activism. Starhawk in the US is now a permaculture teacher,
and she definately came to PC through her political activism work. So
did I, so perhaps I just notice these people more.

Yet other pioneers here in Europe are also busy changing laws: eg.
Margrit Kennedy in Germany is working at central governament level to
change the law around community currencies, as she figured out a long
time ago that monetary change is essential to making any type of
permaculture project really viable - and has been patiently and
constantly building that movement for decades now (with very impressive
results).

In England there are permies working to change the law around land
rights, also from decades back (I don´t live there anymore so am not up
to date with the successes so far, but I believe there have been some
important ones), and in Spain we had the law change around strawbale
building a few years ago - because of permies working at it I believe.

And I gather there are now permies in australia working to get a
permaculture political party together.

and that is just considering 'permies' those who have done a PDC. But
as I believe that the great majority of those who sit through a PDC
don´t really understand how far reaching these ethics & design tools
really are, I mostly work a 'backwards' and consider good 'permies'
those people who actually DO permaculture, whether they have officially
studied it or not.

And so I would say that for eg. Brudtland is a great permie - because
she led perhaps the biggest political shift the planet has ever seen.
What the Brudtland comission did was a SUBLIME and unparalleled
achievement in terms of design for sustainability, precisely because it
took well into account the whole political situation at the time (as
well as the ecological, the social, the economic...). PC textbook
stuff.

The fact that a lot of people in the PC movement didn´t read or value
this work (and so have been unable to use this to move permaculture
forward) is tragic.
But perhaps it has more to do with lack of understanding of design than
distrust of politics.
I´ve heard for eg. many a pc colleague say that "sustainable
development" is a contradiction in terms and so it´s meaningless ... or
some such dismissal of the whole thing.
Yet that pardox that Brudtland launched with that exact combination of
words was the piece de resistance of the thing! We just didn´t get
it.
Political naiveté? Perhaps.

PC's birth had a lot to do with taking a pro-active stance, which is
sometimes changed to just "anti-protest" & so might be interpreted as
anti-political by some. By those who want to hear it that way tho.

It is also definately true I think that in most 'first world' countries
PC is deeply tinged by the privilege & middle-class patterns of the
people who have adopted it and been very good at 'spreading the word'
(and make believe that their stance is the 'right' or indeed only one).
Dont´be fooled.

If you look beyond appearances and adjust for privilege & 'divulging
power' (eg. consciously focus more on the edge species and what the
lower class people, the women, the young people, the ethnic minorities
are saying and doing), the picture is a LOT more interesting.

In the wide world as well as (sadly perhaps) within the PC movement.




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