permaculture

["John Schinnerer" <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

I like what you say here Georg.  I also associate the word 'regenerative'
with these concepts, and to me it is more dynamic and more descriptive
than 'sustainable', which has already been thoroughly co-opted and pretty
much rendered meaningless anyhow.

'Sustainability' can (has) become a 'thing' and implies no action of
itself, while being manipulated to serve clearly unsustainable ends.

'Regenerative' IMO implies action, doing, and can't so readily become a
noun, a 'thing' to manipulate.

> if we stay with reproductive work rather than productive work, we have
> zero growth

'Zero growth' is an absolute no-no in dominant economic fairy tales. 
'Zero net growth' might help some grok it, since the constraining systems
are cyclical, growth and decay, birth and death, etc.

Of course we'll get cyclical growth/death anyhow, larger systems will kick
in eventually and up the decay to balance the (over)growth.

The cycles, for our species and lots of others, *could* be much more
gentle than we're setting them up to be, though... :-o

> In its core pc is about subsistence

I agree.  Unfortunately, 'subsistence' is defined by dominant (endless
growth) culture as the worst possible situation - 'mere subsistence',
'bare subsistence', etc. - when was the last time (outside this and
similar vanues) that anyone has heard the word used in a positive context?
 'Subsistence' farmers are to be pitied, 'subsistence' cultures are to be
pitied and given aid and brought into the 'modern world' and out of that
deplorable state.

Yeah, there needs to be (and is) 'surplus', but only within the cycles and
limits and subsystems.  From outside 'the biggest system' there isn't any
- it all flows around and feeds something somewhere and isn't 'surplus'
any more.  PC says what's important is *distribution* of surplus - so it
goes to feed something else and eventually comes back, directly or
indirectly.

Not the same as simply creating surplus for it's own sake.  We've got
*that* down already (except it's not really 'surplus').

Numerous people over the years have pointed out that the only "input" to
the global ecosystem is solar energy (and tons and tons of space dust too,
btw) - everything else cycles around inside the blue marble, driven by
solar energy (that'll run down too, but not for quite a while, no worries
just now... ;-)



John Schinnerer, MA
-------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Cultural & Ecological Designing
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net