permaculture

["souscayrous" <souscayrous@wanadoo.fr>]

Why do we rush to adopt the reductive numerism of scientific agriculture?
Corporate 'Profit and Loss' were the unkind parents to the Green Revolution,
their sickly child.  Wasn't this the spur to permaculture, the creation of a
ledger so diverse that yield could never again be the absolute accounting?
If permaculture now seeks legitimacy from that which it sought to counter,
in the words of another attempted revolution, 'It is no longer part of the
solution, but part of the problem'.

I had always assumed that permaculture was a force for change, its
sustainability, ultimately, changing public policy, land use, and social
values.  I look at our newly discovered desire to quantify yield as a
failure of nerve.  Twenty years is too short, we have hardly begun.  Must we
really counter every accusation levelled at us?  There is a gravity so
profound in the simplicity of sustainability that I am confused by the
succession of threads on this list that seek other justifications, yield
being just the latest incarnation of this insecurity.  Cultural change is a
complex process for agriculture and for society, we must remember that time
is the arbiter of our success and western scientific agriculture's failure.
We must be patient for the relationships between farmers, researchers,
suppliers, workers, unions, processors, retailers, consultants, consumers,
and policymakers to eventually shift and bring about the changes in policy,
economics, and society towards which we are all working.

Scientific research is the paradigm of evaluation in our society and indeed
we are vulnerable to its conclusions, *but*, we must not forget that
scientific practices are also culturally constructed and our efforts must be
channelled into changing the parameters by which success is calibrated.  If
permaculture responds to the charge of yield, it tallies its own failure.
In sustainable agriculture, in permanent agriculture, to concentrate on
yield is to capitulate, to cede and not seed the economics of change.



Souscayrous