permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

Myk wrote:
>To be fair the only people who have referred to any spiritual/religious
>connotations have been those who doubt the validity of zoning/zones as
>understood by some -

Au contrair, friend Myk. Let me pull a few quotes:

from Graham:
>to 'Zone 6'. . .  'here be dragons'. . .
and
> Zone 6 is kind of the
>COLLECTIVE subconsious, cultural mythologies, the dreaming, legends, folk
>tales . . .

from Myk:
> zone 6. As far as I recall he defined it as our imagination, inhabited by 
> the
>mythical creatures such as dragons, elves, dwarfs, unicorns etc.

from Lawrence:
> Zone 6 might be considered the human consciousness edge zone
>(analagous to the Biodynamic people's Devic Realm).
and
> I like the idea of "Zone 6" . . . a concept not too unlike the
>aborigine's Dreamtime - a spiritual resource. . .

I'll stop there; there are plenty more from Zone 00-6 aficionados in this
thread. The above are all  spiritual concepts, ones not shared by many
organized religions, not to mention agnostics, atheists, and those
skeptical of Jung and Joseph Campbell. What I was trying to say was that
our spiritual views are so deeply embedded that we don't recognize when
we've overlaid them on non-spiritual material like Mollison/Holmgren
permaculture. Zones 0-5 don't require the assumptions about psychology and
spirit that zones 00 and 6 do. Sorry for being such a Philistine; but Zones
00 and 6 don't involve material objects and thus don't have the
universality that the other zones do (of course, the assumption here is
that there are material things "out there" that we can agree on and design
with, but that's pretty universal).

I want to add that this thread interests me in part because I'm hashing out
the design chapter of a book I'm writing, and I'd love to hear any other
insights or comments about how people view or use zone and sector: new
applications, using zones 3-5 in the city, how sectors affect zones, etc.
I'd also like to know if the idea is original with Mollison or if he got it
somewhere else (wish he'd indicate that sort of thing!).

Toby