permaculture

[Elfpermacl@aol.com]

I'll pass on the politically correct froth with which everyone seems to be
lathering him/herself (mostly him so far) in the color and texture of the day.

The reason why problem solving is the point of permaculture is that, according
to the people who claim coinage of the term, notably Mollison, the development
of permaculture was sparked by awareness of the decline and apparent collapse
of global ecosystems.  There is no need to design eden where eden persists.

Where no problem exists, it violates the most basic permaculture conservation
principle, which is to act only insofar as action is required, espoused by no
less luminaries than Mollison and Fukuoka.  If there is no problem, design
music and paintings--you already have a sustainable life for you and yours.
Permaculture is then un-needed.  The first principle of permaculture design,
the conservation principle, admonishes us in all terms most teachers can think
of to do little or nothing to the extent possible.  We design first on paper
because it is fairly harmless to make our mistakes, there, so long as we
discover them. If it ain't broke, we don't fix it.

It is not so harmless to make our mistakes on a discusison group on the
internet, where the core of permaculture can be even further diluted from the
discipline it started out to be by misinformation and misunderstanding left
uncorrected.  

Yes and No are rarely  if ever "both right."  That is foolishness.  Yes,
everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, even wrong opinions.  That is
where the discussion of organic got us into this one.  That there are
frequently more options than yes or no is another matter.  However the point
or something, that is the intent, is based in fact.  Somone devised
permaculture with a purpose, and th e purpose is to solve problems.  Surely it
solves them in the direction of joyfulness.  Surely it solves them by design.
And surely the design is four dimensional, unfolding in human-scale steps
toward the vision.  Anyone with a significant fraction of the usual human
mental equipment can concoct a vision, indeed a nice vision.  In permaculture,
because we are focussed on fixing what is wrong, it is a practical vision, one
we can achieve with available resources, in a human scale timeframe, within
the specific context of place, culture, and history.  

Being right or wrong has nothing to do with cooperation, unless one means to
go along with wrongheadedness for the sake of uniformity.  Uniformity is
another concept with only slight application in permaculture.   It would have
been nice if people could have been introduced to permaculture with something
like courses of a uniform quality.  Ok.  But we always value diversity.
Mollison did not cooperate with the status quo when he brought the concept of
permaculture around the world.  He did so as an individual and without his
individualism we would not be having this conversation.

In my course I teach that there are two basic forces, affinity and entropy.
they appear to the limited human mind to oppose each other but they do not
cancel, they pulse back and forth so a comet is pulled toward the sun by
forces allied with affinity and hurled back into space by entropy, always
changing, always individual in terms of mass, spectrum, direction and relation
to every other particle and energy ray in the universe.  the pulsing as these
two forces throb back and forth creates all form, and every form above the
sub-atomic or atomic levels appears to be individual.  They are joined by
general laws in to general behavior.  As animate, by our limited terms,
systems develop, there is cooperation in the sense that individuals or species
ally in certain aspects of survival, while the same individuals and/or species
almost always compete directly in other regards.  The balance between
competition and cooperation is a hallmark of a healthy ecosystem, one that
efficiently uses the resources available for the perpetuation of life.
Extremes in one direction, say complete competition and the other, complete
cooperation, are unhealthy and the systems do not persist.

So long as we  have an honest attempt to share views and experience here on
this list, we have an adequate amount of cooperation.  When we start
suppressing views, as in implying that black and white are the same, for the
sake of uniformity, permaculture starts to die.

For Mother Earth, Dan Hemenway, Yankee Permaculture Publications (since 1982),
Elfin Permaculture workshops, lectures, Permaculture Design Courses,
consulting and permaculture designs (since 1981), and annual correspondence
courses via email.  Copyright, 1998, Dan & Cynthia Hemenway, P.O. Box 52,
Sparr FL 32192 USA  Internships. YankeePerm@aol.com  

We don't have time to rush.

A list by topic of all Yankee Permaculture titles may be found at
http://csf.colorado.edu/perma/ypc_catalog.html
Elfin Permaculture programs are listed at the Eastern Permaculture Teachers
assn home page: http://home.ptd.net/~artrod/epta/eptahmp.html