permaculture

[PacificEdge <pacedge@magna.com.au>]

On Wednesday, November 6, 2002, at 09:16  PM, <permed@nor.com.au> wrote:

> Russ wrote:
> > I know that, when I used to teach PDCs, the notion expressed in Mark's
> > piece about "what the land wants to be", which suggests that the land
> > is not only conscious but has desires, would have been viewed with
> > very little credibility by most students.
> Depends on context - how it's said - could simply be another way of
> "Listening to the Land" - this BTW is the title of a manual for 
> community
> environmental monitoring used by Regional Organisation of Councils 
> around
> Australia written by Terry White (initial editor of Permaculture
> International Journal). I don't think anyone using this manual baulks at
> the title thinking it implies the land can talk and chatter.....

> and what about the Gaia hypothesis - that the Earth is a living being 
> in it's
> own right

My understanding of what James Lovelock, the developer of the Gaia 
hypothesis, said was not that the Earth is a living entity but that it 
behaves as though it is a living entity. In a similar sense, the 
human-like robot developed by Honda behaves in some respects as though 
it is a person, however it is only a simulation, a synthetic, and should 
not be mistaken for a human.

Lovelock referred to the process of self-regulation exhibited by the 
Earth... the ability to adjust to change and to maintain the conditions 
for life to thrive... which, if I recall, Lovelock implied was a state 
of dynamic imbalance (if my recollection of this is correct, then it's 
so much for the environmentalist's notion of the 'balance of nature'... 
another mythology bandied about so much that it became accepted truth).

The Macmillan Dictionary of the Environment says of the Gaia 
hypothesis: "... on any planet supporting life the living organisms 
respond to environmental conditions and in doing so modify the 
environment, making it more hospitable to themselves. On Earth, the 
biota regulate the global climate and drive the biogeochemical cycle". 
Collins Dictionary of Environmental Science says: "... the theory views 
the Earth as a single complex organism which is both self-regulating and 
self-organising. Biotic elements attempt to moderate their local 
environment and bring about an optimal chemical and physical environment 
for all life forms... Lovelock's theory has received only qualified 
support in scientific circles but has been gaining limited 
respectability as further research uncovers evidence of links operating 
between physical systems and the environment in the way the Gaia 
hypothesis suggests".

None of these definitions says the Earth is a living organism. Collins 
says the hypothesis "views the Earth as a single complex organism... ", 
which is not the same thing as saying it is alive or is a conscious 
entity. Lovelock's hypothesis dates from 1979 but is it possible that 
the more recent insights provided through complexity science can now 
describe Lovelock's ideas in terms of the properties of complex 
systems - dynamism, self-organising and self-regulating systems, 
interaction giving rise to emergent properties (properties not present 
in any individual components but which 'emerge' when the individual 
components are placed in such a configuration that they interact and 
there interactions are optimised and maximised)? I am not attempting to 
invalidate the Gaia hypotheses but, like other concepts common in 
permaculture, should not newer research be taken into account? After 
all, in this case, are they not saying in different words what Lovelock 
came to realise over 30 years ago?

Lovelock, at the time he developed his hypothesis (again, if I recall 
correctly) was working with NASA on the early Mars missions. He realised 
that the Martian atmosphere was unlike the Earth's in that it not 
exhibit the characteristics that indicated the presence of planetary 
life. The space probe sent by that programme confirmed that Mars was 
inhospitable to life, although recent research suggests that there could 
be lifeforms within the rocks, just as there is on Earth, however the 
quantity nof that life is insufficient to modify the Martian atmosphere. 
Confirmation of this will have to await further, more ambitious robot 
spacecraft or crewed missions to Mars.


> I think that 'listening' to "what the land wants to be" is a valid
> approach, an essential tool in design and a true art which engages both
> intuition and intellectual process.

I do not deny that subjective criteria have a place in assessing the 
potential for landuse or that people can enact their spiritual beliefs 
within the context of landuse planning. My concern is simply what some 
correspondents on this thread have stated - that the promulgation of 
particular spiritual outlook during design courses can alienate some and 
turn others off. At their core, spiritual beliefs are not verifiable in 
the sense that their central premis can be demonstrated. This does not 
invalidate them of course and spiritual beliefs continue to provide a 
necessary function in the lives of many people.

In a design course what could be done would be to describe the role of 
subjective spiritual approaches in regard to landuse as found in various 
religions in a way reminiscent of the way material is presented in uni 
courses in 'comparative religion'. It comes down to telling students 
about what is essentially faith as distinct to what can be verified. 
Believe it or not, I do have some time for spiritual attitudes but I 
find it a bit difficult to have a factual discussion about them because 
you are constantly blocked as you come up against the reality that there 
is little by way of hard facts that you can pin down.

While I am familiar with the notion of what Robyn describes as 
"listening to the land" I find the term somewhat wooly and difficult to 
define, to pin down. It has been bandied about by environmentalists and 
indigenous lobbyists and is a nice sounding concept. But what does it 
mean? Perhaps it has meaning in specific instances which the user of the 
term might then go on to describe so that a concrete meaning becomes 
appended to it. While working as a journalist reporting environmental 
affairs for an industry newsletter I found it necessary to explore and 
question the precise meaning of utterances such as this because they are 
used by lobbyists and sound like a good idea, but the audience walks 
away with little concrete in their head as to the meaning.
> IMO there's too much of a spiritual cringe in pc, the bagging of
> biodynamics etc. Yet strangely it was through my pc teaching that the
> pagan within was awakened - largely from teaching the stuff on patterns
> in nature and human culture

It's interesting how we interpret this stuff. While it has led Robyn to  
the awakening of the pagan it has led me to want to learn more about 
complexity theory because that seems to be the field where the study of 
interconnected phenomena is presently located. The contemplation of 
existence, of nature, from this perspective leads me to amazement that 
energy and matter can combine to produce such outcomes. What others 
interpret as spiritual perhaps can be equally well interpreted as 
emergent properties developing from the interaction of their parts and 
as self-organising systems increasing their complexity and capacity for 
further self-organisation to produce even more incredible emergent 
properties. Maybe, at that level, the spiritual and complex become 
nothing more than different interpretations of the same thing and, as we 
know from the Zen parable of the man pointing at the moon, it is not the 
interpretations that matter but rather the thing they point at.

> Science is it's own religion with a blind faith vested only and
> exclusively in the repeatable and easily quantifiable and has astutely
> ignored the variable or whatever doesn't fit it's conceptual, rational
> box at a given point in time

Too true. And spiritual/ esoteric beliefs are also blind faith seated in 
the unverifiable and undemonstrable and have been known on more than one 
occasion to ignore variables and what doesn't fit.

> - it has only been with the emergemce of
> chaos thinking that some scientists have embraced the 'unknown'.

As a subset of complexity science, chaos theory explains certain 
phenomena, however a lot of science, particularly 'pure science' delving 
into the fundamentals of matter and energy, does embrace the 'unknown' 
and attempts to come to know it. In so doing science parallels the 
spiritual approach to understanding existence. Much in chaos theory is 
not so much 'unknown' but known and unexplained.

> Intuition plays a big role in design though it cannot be measured
> scientifically. The original PDC Handbook (1985) written by Bill M,
> Andrew Jeeves and Reny Slay included in "design process" a section on
> experiential - intuition, visualisation, zazen, and other techniques to
> tap into the unmeasurable, unquantifiable qualities of the site/land,
> mainly perceived by activating 'right brain' faculties. It's an
> impoverished design that doesn't acknowledge Sense of Place which
> inherently includes opening one's self to Spirit of Place.

Maybe this is what we try to get students in our organic gardening 
classes to do on their practical sessions - to walk or sit quietly in 
the garden to get a feel for the ambience of the place, for what they 
perceive consciously or unconsciously. We call it 'psychological space' 
though, rather than 'spirit of place' as the former is more 
comprehensible and less confronting to some and more approachable to 
those with a background in the sciences or logical experience.

...........................
Russ Grayson
PacificEdge Media/ Australian Community Foods/ Australian Community 
Gardens Network
pacedge@magna.com.au
Phone/ fax: 02 9588 6931
PO Box 446 Kogarah NSW 2217 Australia
www.communityfoods.com.au
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