permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

Graham Burnett wrote:
>I was reminded of the PC intro course I did with carl Smith back in 1995,
>when he explained
>zoning he referred to 'Zone 6', the 'place you never visit' and 'here be
>dragons'. . . . I've never heard it >mentioned since in Permaculture
>circles- can anybody point me to some specific literature that engages in
>exploring this concept?

I've heard "zone 6" referred to in several ways; as sacred space, as
"pristine wilderness" (as opposed to wilderness that people have altered at
some point), and other definitions similar to Carl Smith's. Here we're back
at that old dichotomy between lumpers and splitters. I'm generally a
lumper, one who avoids dividing things up into many subtly distinct,
hard-to-remember categories. For me Zones 0-5 cover all the bases. If I've
heard right, even Zone 0 was added on to the original 1-5, and has since
been refined (justifiably, in my mind) to include the mental and emotional
state of the designer (see Permaculture Dryland Journal v27 p4, by Peter
Cooke and Ingrid Kelley). I feel that Zone 5 encompasses everything that
the others don't: wilderness, sacred space, places we never visit, the
unexplored frontier, etc. Mollison (Design Manual, p50) calls it "the
natural, unmanaged environment used for occasional foraging, recreation, or
just let be." That final phrase includes all that Carl and Graham mention;
I'd rather see this sense of Zone 5 made more explicit than add yet another
zone for us to memorize. With tongue in cheek, I'd ask why stop at Zone 6?
Zone 7 could be ancient landscapes destroyed by plate tectonics, Zone 8 the
surface of other planets, Zone 9 other dimensions, Zone 10 the afterlife,
and on and on. In Zones 0-5 I think we have categories that work well; we
just need to reflect upon and unpack their definitions more fully.

Toby