permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

 S.K. Harrison at skh23ca@yahoo.com wrote:

> I'm concerned that this conversation has gone way
> off-topic. 

I'm sure some people feel it has (they've probably learned to delete any
posts with "Out of Control" in the heading), but I've had a feeling the
thread was going to swing back into direct relationship with Pc any time
now. So let me take a stab at relating part of this conversation to
permaculture. Then I'll feel safe to go freewheeling again and se where else
the thread goes.

The genius of permaculture is its recognition that good design--of gardens,
buildings, communities, or just about anything--is not about the pieces of
the design, but how those pieces are interconnected: the functional
relationships ("relatings"). This is also just about the most difficult part
of permaculture to grasp deeply: I remember when I finally got it, and it's
a joy to see people suddenly get it.

A big part of the difficulty in grasping Pc is that our culture focuses on
objects--that's where the part of the thread about nouns and reification
(treating the non-material as a thing) comes in. Even when we recognize the
primacy of a process instead of a thing that's affected by that process, our
language naturally converts that process into a thing. Then the process
stops being a "relating" and becomes a static subject (e.g., we talk about
the importance of insectary plants when we really mean the relationship
between insects and plants and our needs). Permaculture fights this trend. A
good example is the way designers avoid a cookie-cutter approach ("every
design needs an herb spiral"--not!) and insist on observing and assessing a
site at length before suggesting solutions.

Permaculture is an attempt to examine the processes that keep natural
systems functioning, to extract the important principles behind those
processes, and then apply those principles to create consciously designed,
sustainable human systems. But a lot of important details can get lost in
translating natural processes to our landscapes. Also, we must make many
assumptions about what relationships are important in an ecosystem (and thus
must be included) and what can be safely ignored. So it's critical to
understand what our assumptions are: what we consider important aspects of
natural processes, why we choose those and not others, what we can be sure
of, what we really don't know but think we know, and whether we're mistaking
our simplified model of a process for the process itself. These difficulties
start to explain why this tool using animal, who has been building things
for roughly a million years, has only in the last few years started coming
up with a rational approach to design.

Fortunately a lot of really bright people have thought about all those
assumptions, and about how to think in terms of processes and relationships
rather than only things: Korsybski, Bateson, Maturana, a bunch of Buddhists,
and the others that John, Sean, Souscayrous, and others have listed.  How do
we know what we know? What filtering and mangling do we do to the things we
observe when they enter our consciousness? What am I leaving out of my
design because of my assumptions about what's important and about what I
know? So I think it's necessary to look at these subjects, or we run the
risk of just plugging various technical bits into our designs without
assessing whether they are appropriate for the culture, the client, or the
land--or whether they are just "things" we like because of our personal
prejudices. (I just heard of a novice designer who went to a ranch and told
the client "well, first you've got to get rid of all your horses, 'cuz
owning horses is wrong." Needless to say, the conversation was over and the
client thinks permaculture is stupid.)

For those of you who are wondering why we're on this thread (are there any
still out there?), does any of this help?

Toby
_____________________________________________
For a look at my new book on ecological gardening,
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, visit
http://www.chelseagreen.com/Garden/GaiasGarden.htm