permaculture

[Elfpermacl@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/4/98 2:49:47 PM, you wrote:

<<      What do you do when someone in a class you are teaching prefers
a different explanation for what moves comets and grows plants and
animals and so on?

        John Schinnerer>>

Let them have their say and move on.  All explanations are metaphores for
inexpressible forces, but not all explanations are valid metaphores.  If
theirs is valid, they will have a good design report, and I'll certify them.
If it isn't a good report, I won't certify them regardless of whether they
agree with me or not.

Competence isn't a matter of agreement or disagreement.  They just have to
solve the problems that the client sets before them in a practical or
realistic way.  Most students seem to find that my explanation helps
understand the principles we are working with.  Some like to reduce it to Yin
and Yang, which personaly I find inadequate due to the concept that these Y
forces are always "at war."  An imperial explanation is likely in a system
generated by an imperial culture.  However it is the ;problem solving ability
that matters in the end.  If the design is coherent, joyful, efficient in its
use of resources, restrained to the minimum of change needed to achieve its
goals, likely to increase local life in both biomass and in functional
diversity, keeps everyone fat, happy and with time to contemplate things like
entropy vs affinity or write poems, or engender a new generation of folks, or
whatever, and moves toward sustainability in human-scale, entirely possible
steps, I am happy.  the problem with most beginning designs isn't that people
have the wrong philosphy; it is that most students haven't done any direct
work in the world with their own, personal strength.  (I'm talking now only
about courses I teach in industrialized societies.)  Often these are the ones
who say that there are no problems.  If someone has raised children on a
shoestring, built a home, grown cabbages for market, practiced massage
therapy, or any of thousands of activities that give one a sense of what
people can ecompass and accomplish, then they take to design like ducks to
water.  

In our APT (Advanced permaculture training) program we REQIRE people to design
a place and then implement their design with handtools.  We do not require
them to make the tools, but that would be an interesting refinement.  By hand
tools I do not mean a rotary lawnmower, I mean a sickle.  The purpose is to
get direct experience in how much energy one's design requires.  We don't get
many takers, which is part of the design too.  You have to be very serious
about design to dig a pond with a shovel and wheelbarrow, as my daughter did
when she did her apprenticeship.  Now, if she engages a bulldozer to move an
equal amount of soil in her place in Vermont, she knows exactly how much
energy she calls upon.  So she is way better qualified than most folks to
evaluate whether or not there will be a net return of energy from the work
that the buldozer accomplishes.  this is the sort of problem a permaculture
designer must routinely solve in the process of permaculture design.  Some
people find it useful to quantify these matters; personally I feel that the
human being is designed to live on earth and if we do not isolate ourselves
from the problems and experiences of life, we will integrate such experience
into something that may eventually qualify as wisdom.  Meanwhile, the
intuitive faculties that reflect such integration can do a good job at making
things better than they were--in short working toward the solution of our many
problems.

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