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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Major histocompatibility complex

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  • From: "Michael E. Peter" <mpeter1@austin.rr.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Major histocompatibility complex
  • Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 20:54:46 -0600

At 03:47 PM 3/20/2003 -0800, you wrote:

This takes me to a politically incorrect place: Perhaps indigenous cultures are like early successionary species (hmm, like weeds), exploiting resources via a limited array of methods (hunter-gathering, digging-stick agriculture) while industrial cultures have evolved a diverse array of specialties (smelting, drilling, military logistics, accounting, etc.) for exploiting resources unused by the earlier inhabitants. I don't much like where this takes us, as it creates a justification for the idea of calling some cultures "primitive,"  but then, that's only when we view them through the lens of technology or ability to exploit certain resources. If we change the criteria to, say, plant knowledge, intact families, or integration of spirit into culture, then western culture is the primitive one. But this successional viewpoint does explain why western culture is colonizing most of the planet. We're more effective at turning everything into a "resource" and using it to fuel our cultural expansion, regardless of the consequences, crowding out the early occupants.

My point then, is that thinking of the spread of certain cultures as "weediness" is not as good an analogy as succession and aggressive resource exploitation. Westerners convert the whole planet into their habitat, but weeds are limited to bare soil.

I'm happy to have this idea battered down, refined, or amended; it leaves me a little depressed.

Toby

I wouldn't be too depressed. An established ecosystem has its checks and balances, but when you
introduce an exotic species, with no natural checks or controls, it can rapidly out-compete and
overrun those plants or cultures that are in balance. Especially when the invaders have a large body
of resources from which to pull from their point of origin. Most exotics can't continually ship over
their own nutrients and pollinators from their home environment when they move into a new system.

But western culture can.

Stick a westerner, or western cultural unit, into a new environment, like a rain forest or outback,
and they only survive by the graces of the indigenous culture. But allow that unit to dip into
resources from back home, and they can decimate the indigenous culture. It's not what I would
call natural at all; it's an aberration, and why we need things like permaculture, activism, email
lists to discuss these things, and authors like Daniel Quinn and yourself, to point out where and
how the natural order went astray.


Mike



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