permaculture

[Elfpermacl@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/23/98 1:08:57 AM, ddevries@scu.edu.au wrote:

<< if thats not new-age clap-trap then
I'll trade-in my crystal dolphins.>>

Trade 'em in. Maybe for a dictionary.  Permaculture is design.  I think we
have established that amonst anyone who is willing to accept that it is not
useful to postulate his/her own wishful thinking on sysems developed and
perfected by others.  Ok.  Design requires vision.  In permaculture, vision
must be practical.  This site really could become like this with the actual
energy expended by these folks in the setting, all limitations of reality
accepted.  Fine, so we get an alleged design painting a picture of a possible
future reality for the site. Is this permaculture?  Not close, no cigar, not
even a ciggie stub.   But this process is indeed the best documented and
worked out part of permaculture.  To be real, to fix things, to solve the
global and personal problems, we need staging, as bill calls it.  A set of
step by step measures that get us from where/what we are to where/what we want
to go/be.  This is the process of transformation, of going from one form to
another.  Like design, transormation has principles.  Unlike design, no one
has done a good job of working them out.  I've made bumbling, start, about as
good as you'd expect from a crude country bumpkin who stumbled into this
permaculture stuff like it was deep mud and never was able to pull out.  It is
a piss-poor job, but at that a billion to the umpteenth power better than what
else I've seen.  I try to get students to add and improve in our section on
transformation, but so far very little luck.  We are a people conditioned to
instant gratification and we don't fined it easy thinking of the actual
process of change, how it pulses and cycles, what practical measures now build
for the next step later on, etc.  That's why we are playing chicken with
oblivion and looking about to win. We have no sense of process.  The universe
is all verb and we are all noun.  So I spend 5% of the class looking at how we
actually bring off this design stuff, what the principles are, etc.  

Want more.  Take the class.  I'm only in on this discussion because I haven't
figured out how to unsubscribe and I'm too embarassed to ask Larry London to
do it for me again.   Class starts next Sunday and runs about 6 months.  Maybe
I'll sign on again at that point.

Sherry continues to be wrong about permaculture.  Sustainable agriculture is
an oxymoron.  Bill said permaculture IS NOT sustainable agriculture in the
first 15 minutes of the course I took in 1981 but seems to recanted now that
SA has become a buzzword.  Motivation?  Ask B ill.  However, since
permaculutre is possible and sustainable agriculture isn't, I figure that they
are roughly opposites.  Greater men than Bill (e.g. Darwin, Copurnicus, etc.)
have recanted their insights under cultural inducements.  That doesn't mean
that Lamark was right, that the sun revolves around the Earth, or that
permaculture is sustainable agriculture.

Fight it out and have fun.  I'm really gone this time.

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
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