permaculture

[John Schinnerer <JohnS@STLabs.com>]

Aloha,

Small rant first, "practical" comments a bit further down...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Elfpermacl@aol.com [SMTP:Elfpermacl@aol.com]
        >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.  

        I'd agree about the postulating of one's own thinking (wishful
or not).  There's "further development" with respect to original
fundamentals and then there's "co-opting" and "exploiting" (like the
whole fuss with "organic" food labeling).  If I really wanna make it
something else, I can take responsibility and call it something else (if
the government will let me... :-p).  
        Now...developed by others, no doubt!  Perfected, I doubt it -
but only because perfection is such a slippery (and dangerous) concept.
C'mon, what's "perfect?"  

        "1 a : being entirely without fault or defect : FLAWLESS <a
perfect diamond> 
            b : satisfying all requirements : ACCURATE 
            c : corresponding to an ideal standard or abstract concept
<a perfect gentleman> 
            d : faithfully reproducing the original; specifically :
LETTER-PERFECT 
            e : legally valid
        2 : EXPERT, PROFICIENT <practice makes perfect>
        3 a : PURE, TOTAL 
           b : lacking in no essential detail : COMPLETE"

        ...says Webtser's.  What a silly human concept!  Gets us in a
lot of trouble, I reckon.  "Good enough," now there's a useful design
tool.  If I'd come up with permaculture I'd threaten to shoot anyone who
called it "perfect," and I'd keep "developing" it and encouraging others
to do the same until my last breath, while simultaneously grousing about
the co-opters and exploiters.

        And now, a few "practical" comments on:

        >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.
        <snip>
        >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.  

        Gee, I don't have any trouble *thinking* of change, in stages or
otherwise.  It's *living* change that I find difficult often enough.
This seems the case for most people I know well enough to guess about.

        In the design course I took, we implemented a few stages of
previously worked-out designs.  We didn't implement our group designs
because a) we did 'em near the end of the course, as is typical and b)
the community hosting the course needed time to consider, refine, and
decide on what might be implemented of our designs.  However, it was
made clear that some of the implementations we did (swales,
sheet-mulching, etc.) were stages of transformation in realizing a
portion of a prior design, and that after the passage of appropriate
amounts of time further stages would be implemented.

        Also, in the design group I worked with (and seemingly most of
the others), stages of transformation were implicit in the designing.
We couldn't produce an instant transformation using permaculture
methods, so we mapped out a few phases of how things would progress,
including various inputs and outputs and how they would shift over the
course of several years or more at least (depending on what our various
tasks were).

        I hope this is happening in most design courses.  It seems to me
it would be hard to avoid having it happen in a live hands-on
residential course.  Other comments on living "transformation?"

        John Schinnerer