Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Toward Financial Permaculture: New Farms in the OldSystem

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Robert Waldrop <bwaldrop1952@att.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Toward Financial Permaculture: New Farms in the OldSystem
  • Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2012 23:37:18 -0800 (PST)

"Surplus" is not just a rhetorical construct, it is a reality. There is a
surplus in this world as it exists now, in our human ecologies, and one of
the
graphic's at Rafter's site illustrates it really well, showing the amount of
wealth controlled by each quintile of world population. It looks like a
cocktail
glass, with the top 20% controlling 82% of the planetary wealth, while the
other
80% get 18%.


And it's being reinvested, but most of it isn't invested in any ways any of
us
would agree with. So maybe rather than reinvest, we ought to decentralize the
surplus.


That's where invisible structures come into play. It's not an accident that
the
20% have the 82%, that's the way the system is designed to work. Our rules
favor
centralization of wealth.


I think that problem starts with the limitation on the liability of
corporations. The evidence of history seems clear to me about that. It's a
bad
idea to let people with capital carry on business operations where they
aren't
actually personally liable for their actions. It's like whiskey, teenagers,
and
cars.


I think this is a good conversation.

Bob Waldrop
Oklahoma City




________________________________
From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Mon, December 31, 2012 1:13:45 AM
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Toward Financial Permaculture: New Farms in the
OldSystem

If we must have a soundbite, then "reinvest the surplus" offers much more
direction, in a way that suggests beneficial connections, than "redistribute
surplus." Redistributing doesn't suggest focus or relationship. It could be
simply a random throwing around, or a concentration where it won't do much
good.
Reinvestment suggests that it goes to support the systems that it came from:
people and earth. "Return" is pretty good, too.


Paul, to me it is the ethics that distinguishes permaculture from all the
other
groovy design methods that humans have used to loot, bomb, torture, and
enslave.
Is a prison with a green roof permaculture? No. So let's reverse the
question:
if a hip design with guilds and sheetmulch harms people and the earth, and
concentrates wealth, can it be called permaculture? No. That's why the ethics
matter. It's that simple, and that obvious. Just as the principles insure
that
we are designing a whole system, the ethics guide us to design a moral
system,
something likely to do good and not harm. Without principles and ethics,
it's
not permaculture. It's just a bunch of cool techniques, and we use cool
techniques to do shitty things all




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page