permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

As for implementing what's learned in a course, Jude Hobbs and I just
finished teaching an urban PDC over a number of weekends (I know Jude has
her own stories to tell about this course, too). What was unusual here was
that participants were all drawn from one low-income neighborhood in Eugene,
Oregon (the Whiteaker, which is where the anarchist "black blocs" of WTO and
other protests came from). A group of radical ag people, "Food Not Lawns,"
got a big grant from the city of Eugene that covered the course's expenses
(which I consider a miracle of organizing) so Jude and I could be paid,
while keeping the tuition for the 72 hour course at $40 (that's forty, not a
typo). Some people couldn't afford even that, so they did trades.

It felt different from anything I'd ever taught. Since all the participants
were from the same neighborhood, many of them knew each other (which has its
good and bad points; one romance broke up just before the course). We did
hands-on projects at nearby houses, helped with a children's garden theater
show in a local park, worked in a community garden, and did the design
project at participants' homes, one of which was a housing co-op with over
20 residents. The course was upstairs from an organic food store and next to
a restaurant, so our constant snack and coffee purchases went right into the
local economy. The worst part for me was avoiding the heroin needles while
we were weeding the store's yard. Another high-point was the loud,
falling-down drunk but very bright woman visitor during an outdoor demo. One
day a local man saw us all walk down the street with shovels and he yelled,
"I don't know what you're doing, but I'm really glad to see you do it!"

The invisible structures part of the course we also did differently from
usual. Jude and one of the participants worked out a visioning exercise to
plan for the short- and long-term future of the neighborhood, and that
really helped draw the course together. We had a local community activist,
Tom Atlee, in to lead a discussion. We also worked a lot on concrete
problems of the neighborhood: single parenting, transient visitors,
designing local sustainable businesses.

The key element was the grant, which made it possible to draw students from
a single neighborhood. There is, at least in the US, a tremendous amount of
grant money available for low-income projects, and this is an avenue well
worth pursuing. Obviously, we don't know about the long-term effects of the
course in Whiteaker, but the potential is tremendous, with all those new
permies and their projects clustered in a small neighborhood.

Toby