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  • From: Douglas Hinds <cedecor@gmx.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Visual_Pages - Very graphics heavy pages (Lion Kuntz)
  • Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2013 23:11:42 -0600


On 3/28/2013 Lawrence and I discussed a couple of friends who were ahead of the time:

(Lawrence has a penchant for idealizing those who left us - Eric
Kindberg is another that comes to mind).:-)
Yes, very much so because of what they accomplished that you and I have
used and enjoyed.

Lion definitely had the capacity to be insightful and incisive, but couldn't tolerate anyone else amplifying on themes he himself had presented, which I consider a lamentable defect, because nobody is capable of covering all the angles of a given phenomena (that's why each of the blind men characterized the elephant from a different perspective, and without any of them being wrong, they were ALL wrong).

Your issues with them are not my problem.

MY issues? Naw, I just take things as they come and can dish it out too, when necessary. (Besides, I can recall quite clearly that you too had experiences with Eric in person, that I characterized as evidence of the existence of an "Organic Insider Elite".

Now that was just like Lion on a bad day, contentious for no reason.

Paranoid schizophrenics made good advance guides during the Vietnam War for good reason, Lawrence.

Anyway you know what I mean, Douglas.

Of course, Lawrence. That's why we have been friends for so long.

Those folks were not people you meet very often. They made their connections
with _us_, directly. Neither made their living pushing paper without a good
reason for doing so, theirs was hands on in the field or at the E-typewriter
creating documentation, publishing or in Eric's case, occasionally writing
grants.

Yes, I remember how that worked. (He came to visit me in Mexico, you know). In a cooperative enterprise, Eric figured that half for himself and half to be divided among everyone one else involved, was a pretty fair shake. He certainly was a likable guy, though.

They each made significant contributions.

Very visible contributions.

One of Eric's most significant was his shop fabricated tillage and bed
making implements and also his experimentation with natural farming
methods, knowledge gained and advice passed to us. Lion continued the
research and documentation on what was essentially permaculture coupled
with homesteading and natural gardening and farming, trends started in the
1960's that helped provide momentum for the back-to-the-land movement that
has continued to this day.

That was all positive stuff which could have been even more positive if either had been capable of collaborating with others within a context that they didn't themselves control.

You and I don't have that problem (which may be why we're still going strong and they aren't). :-)

How is your soil and compost testing lab coming?

The organization of the participants has moved along OK (and during the course of this week I was able to find someone willing to work with me full time to move 20 different but interrelated projects along), but since the agencies responsible for funding that particular project are on vacation, we'll have to wait another week before following up on that.

It's a complicated issue, because we want to recover a building that was constructed 50 years ago to house 7 agricultural labs that operated for 45 years before being turned over to an important governmental agency whose activities don't include the operation of those labs, and this was done by the party that lost both the state and federal governments during elections held last July, although the State government just took over at the beginning of this month. The position they take will be critical because they participated in the creation of this asset in support of agriculture in the first place (although we want to give it a new biologically integrated direction, which our University partner supports).

Also, since October of 2010 I've been working with a biologist and the person beginning next Monday is in Sustainable Urban Planning and the Environment, who appreciates our intention to make use of legislation and the creation of Agricultural Land Trusts to preserve farm land in the face of pressures from those seeking to profit from unleashed urban development, which has already wiped out over half of the farmland and more than doubled the urban area over the course of the past 15 years.

Another of our projects is designed to first quantify the damage done and then place responsibility for it on those responsible, in conjunction with state legislators, who (since re-election is illegal in Mexico) are all new (and that means more work on our part).

Additionally, my younger brother (who directed the Marin Community Development Agency for a dozen years or so), managed to redirect half of the family funds that supported my work toward his own retirement (which no longer involves sustainable development, AFAIK), making my efforts a bit more tenuous and requiring an increased degree of commitment from those collaborating. (But WTF, as the first born child of a now 94 year old woman whose broken coccyx made giving birth for the first time more difficult, I am used to adversity). :-)

(I also now recognize that the California System of Justice turned out to be a nonfunctional, crony operated misnomer and in any case, Jalisco No Se Raja and after 39 years I am now a permanent resident here, and eating guamuchiles -the fruit of a wild leguminous tree- and seedling mangoes, at the moment, so things could be a lot worse).

Douglas




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