permaculture

[Lee Flier <lflier@mindspring.com>]

Dan wrote:

>In the 70s the issue of
>polyculture vs monoculture was long since old hat.  The persistence of
>monoculture has nothing to do with a lack of alternatives but is a direct
>result of the industrial model, heritage of Eli Whitney, being applied to
>agriculture.  I don't want to get deep into this theme as it is beside the
>point and we are all limited in our time.

Actually I think it isn't beside the point and it's a very important point:
I didn't mean to imply that NO ONE knew about polyculture.  However because
of the reasons you state above, the AVERAGE PERSON did not.  Still doesn't,
in fact; you can (and I do) still mention it to the average farmer and it's
a new concept to them.  This is no insult to their intelligence; as you say
it's just something they were taught to do and most alternatives are not
widely advertised.  Bill Mollison's idea was to distill this information
into a system which would not just educate the student but allow the
student to turn around and educate others.  This would get the word out to
the greatest possible number of people who need it.

Why does this matter?  Because to a farmer or a starving person or anyone
else who isn't a "professional" permaculture student or teacher, it doesn't
matter by what terms you call these things - they need answers, and they
may need to have something to go on in a very limited time.  As Mollison
told us in class: "You may feel that you aren't qualified to start
designing after only a two week class, but you've got to get out and try
because you can't really do worse than what's been done!"  It sounds as
though you don't agree with this philosophy Dan.  Well that's OK, but I do.
 And for some people it's a matter of survival that they agree with it and
get on with it.

>Recipes of any sort have no place in
>the fundamental permaculture design.  We already have an excellent, valid
>Mollisonian term for things arrangements that tend to repeat in enough
>designs to be formalized.  We call them Standard Designs.  This can be a
>species assembly, where one is know to work.

OK (sigh...), but a guild isn't necessarily a Standard Design either.  It's
a concept for a species assembly and not a specific assembly.  That doesn't
mean we can't have some standard designs for guilds.  But it doesn't
matter.  You have a problem with the terminology and you have a problem
with the guild concept, and of course you're entitled to your opinion but
some of us don't have these problems with it and would like to discuss guilds.

>RESPONSE;  I disagree with Bill, or at least Lee's account of Bill's views,
>here.  I've worked teaching permaculture in many places and I have not found
>any great difference in intellectual capability between peasants and college
>professors, except that probably the peasants have less in the way to
>understanding what we are talking about.  What people of limited means and
>limited formal educatio need is some space to work out their permacultures,
>not being talked down to, being given the Dr. Suess version of permaculture.

Has nothing to do with intellectual ability and it isn't talking down to
anybody.  It has to do with "appropriate technology" in education - the
ability to put a lot of people to work and quickly.  It's more of an insult
to people to give them a lot of analysis they can't use than a conceptual
idea they can apply themselves to their own circumstances - and a lot of
college educated people just don't have any clue how to talk to a
"peasant".  I mean that as an insult to the professor much more so than the
peasant!

Is it an insult to a village to give them 300 shovels instead of one
bulldozer? Considering that the shovels will allow everyone in the village
to go to work immediately using equipment they can maintain themselves, no.
 A hand tool is a simple, elegant concept - and by no means an insult to
anyone's intelligence, even though it doesn't represent the most complex
technology available for the job.  Likewise the idea I got from Bill
Mollison was that he is trying to find those gems of essential knowledge
which people of any culture or means can apply.  Anything else is
extraneous and possibly disempowering.

We see so many bad examples of oversimplification in our culture that we
sometimes forget the essentials of survival really are simple, elegant,
beautiful, and obvious once we learn to look for them.  I'm not talking
recipes; I'm talking the conceptual tools to come up with these ideas on
your own, and perhaps a few starting recipes if you happen to know what
will work in that bioregion.

> Living close to survival margins does not allow for the risk of change, even
>very, very promising change.  That is the central difficulty, not that these
>peopel can't think permaculturaly.  In is my personal view that literacy is a
>barrier to permaculture-type thinking.  Non-literate people have more of an
>"of course" reaction.

I agree!  So, non-literate people don't care by what term you call
something as long as they can put it to work.  I'm with them.

>>But the important thing is that if you
>>plant out hundreds of species right away, SOMETHING will grow, and you will
>>both learn something and have something to eat, probably even if there's a
>>bad drought or other adverse condition.
>>
>RESPONSE;  This is good advice right up until the last point, which is
>irresponsible.  Something might indeed grow and choke out what you had going
>that was right.  Experience is what we need and we can't afford to take short
>cuts on wisdom.... we need experience to know
>what places are so far gone that we are in an "anything is better than
>nothing" situation.  And we need to understand that the more isolated places
>are, e.g. island, high valleys, etc., the more sensitive they are to being
>irreparably damaged by a shotgun approach.

Agreed.  And I believe Mollison's comments applied pretty much to Zones 1
and 2, anyhow - which I should have stated earlier.  Beyond that of course
we must be more careful, particularly as you say if we're trying to restore
a badly damaged natural system which is a different task from producing our
food outside our front doors.

That having been said, I see no problem with such an experimental approach
with guilds outside our front doors.  You seem to be saying that you don't
want to give out what you call "recipes" for guilds, and that we need
experience to determine what will work, but you don't approve of the
experimentation required to gain that experience either.  So then how do we
gain this experience?  Only by having access to a permaculture "guru"?  I
don't buy that.

>NO RESPONSE.  I can't figure the point here.  If we are in a bind, we need to
>be more careful, not more reckless, no?

I'd say probably some of both.  Sometimes you have to make a risky move in
order to bail out of a desperate situation.  If the world were paved over
with parking lots and we were running out of oxygen and topsoil, you'd have
to dig up the parking lots, forthwith, and plant something - ANYTHING would
do just to start up some sort of succession again.  Kudzu would be great.
Any sort of fast growing tree would be necessary to produce oxygen and
biomass for soil building.  Well, for some people that's really how it is -
they have to get something growing within the year or they'll lose everything.

If we can afford to be careful and deliberate, we should of course.  But we
should learn what to do when we're dying too, because we probably are.

= Lee =


==================================
Lee A. Flier
lflier@mindspring.com
http://lflier.home.mindspring.com
Atlanta and Ellijay, Georgia, U.S.A.