permaculture

[Judith Hanna <jehanna@gn.apc.org>]

Emily posted, from Wendell Berry:

>>The same decay is at work on words such as "conservation," "sustainable,"
"safe," "natural," "healthful," "sanitary," and "organic." The use of such
words now requires the most exacting control of context and the use
immediately of illustrative examples.
 Real organic gardeners and farmers who market their produce locally are
finding that, to a lot of people, "organic" means something like
"trustworthy." And so, for a while, it will be useful for us to talk about
the meaning and the economic usefulness of trust and trustworthiness. But
we must be careful. Sooner or later; Trust Us Global Foods Inc., will be
upon us, advertising safe, sanitary, natural food irradiation. And then we
must be prepared to raise another standard and move on. >>

Berry puts his finger on a very central problem in the passage above -- as
he says, grounding the buzzwords/jargon in concrete examples is one of the
best ways of countering the Alice through the Looking Glass tendency for
people to use words to mean what they want them to mean. 

This is a problem for permaculture, already. In Australia, anyone who
gardens organically and makes compost, recycles their trash and is kind to
furry animals tends to say "I'm into  permaculture, you know." In Britain,
dreadlocked crusties opting out of the ratrace also pick up the term.

As Lee said in the Guerrilla Gardening thread, the challenge is to find
ways to catch and direct that casual sympathy with a vaguely understood
buzzword. I reckon this starts with practical examples of permaculture in
practice -- which can then feed into PDC courses, to local
environmental/Local Agenda 21 networks, and to the dreaded media, which
gets information in words and pictures out to the widest audience. 

What the populist media illustrates is that 'human interest' is what
catches people's attention and forms their sympathies. That is, people seem
to first react to their impression of the person behind the message, and
whether they cast that person as hero or villain determines their attitude
to what that person stands for. Thus, promoting the ideas of sustainability
and awareness of permaculture as an inspiring and useful thing comes down
to identification with an 'acceptable face'. 

That is why, to my mind, deliberate unattractive untidiness is bad
permaculture design -- it can turn people off the idea of sustainability by
looking bad and offending general social values. However, 'untidiness' and
'attractiveness' are very subjective concepts -- the art of design is,
often, about changing ideas of what counts as 'attractive' -- for instance,
perceiving close-cut bare lawn as barren, boring, outmoded and bad -- and
the fluffy colourful profusion of the 'potagers' currently in vogue this
side of the Atlantic, or a forest garden, as the right context for a house
to sit in. 

For the rest of the Wendell Berry extract, on single issue movements -- too
superficial to be useful; too general to grapple with. A movement is always
an evolving process, not a 'thing' -- working in an organisation that
'owns' and organises a campaign is, precisely, about monitoring how it is
developing out there, and planning ways to try to influence the debate,
coverage, and relevant concrete action. But most of any 'movement' is out
there in the wider world, not controlled by any formal organisation. That
is, anyone can call or describe as whatever they want it to be, and blame
or praise it on that basis, without any necessary grounding in reality --
or often, based on just one example or incident they've come in contact with. 

Nor, I'd suggest, are movements ever single-issue. A campaign or
organisation can be single-issue. Movements are the taking up of an issue
by a wider and diffuse constituency -- which means that any one issue gets
bound up into a complex of issues making up a take on the world and
people's identities within it. 'Environmentalism', for instance, is more an
identification with a complex of values about the desirable relationship
between people and nature than a single arguement.
 
Thanks for posting a thought-proviking passage, Emily.

Judith


At 10:45 06/05/00 -0700, you wrote:
>   Berry isn't a permaculturist exactly, but the following might interest
you:
> from FOOD AND WATER JOURNAL (VT) Fall, 1998
>""""""&""  
>""" becomes violent.  they often become too specialized, as if finally they
>cannot help taking refuge in the pinhole vision of the institutional
>intellectuals.  They almost always fail to be radical enough, dealing
>finally in effects rather than causes.  Or if they deal with single issues
>or single solutions, as if to assure themselves that they will not be
>radical enough.     And so I must declare my dissatisfaction with movements
>to promote soil conservation or clean water or clean air or wilderness
>preservation or sustainable agriculture or community health or the welfare
>of children.  Worthy as these and other goals may be, they cannot be
>achieved alone.  They cannot be responsibly advocated alone.  I am
>dissatisfied with such efforts because they are too specialized, they are
>not comprehensive enough, they are not radical enough, they virtually
>predict their own failure by implying that we can remedy or control effects
>while leaving causes in place.    Ultimately, I think, they are insincere;
>they propose that the trouble is caused by other people; they would like to
>change policy but not behavior.
>&""""""""""""""""""""""""  The use of such words now requires the most
>exacting control of context and the use immediately of illustrative examples.
>"""""   (&1/2 page article.  Your local library should be able to find the
>address for FOOD AND WATER JOURNALif you wish to get a reprint of this
>article in full)   
Judith Hanna
jehanna@gn.apc.org
15 Jansons Rd, Tottenham, London N15 4JU