permaculture

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

Aloha,

>> Perhaps my real question was "should we" instead of "would we."  Should
>> we be concerned with environmental factors that are truly not our fault
>> (such as oil being released from the bottom of the ocean).

As with all questions in PC, the answer starts with "it depends..." ;-)

What are the consequences of this oil leaking vs. what we spill?  Someone
already mentiond that our surface spills have a much greater consequence
for surface- and shore- and tidal-dwellers.

At least as important IMO is how people are *using* this fact.  Is it
being used to justify we humans continuing to spill oil hither and
thither? "Hey, oil spills, it's a natural process!  Stop worrying!" Anyone
heard that general form of justification in other contexts?  Global
climate perturbations and GMOs come to mind...

L.L.:
> Yes, absolutely. We may need to be involved, especially as
> permaculturists, in terraforming
> out own planet, i.e. repair damage we humans have done directly or
> indirectly, and damage cause by natural occurences,i.e.,
> oil leakage from the ocean bottom.

If it's been leaking for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, what's the
damage?

I think that it will be easy for us to go straight to pathological levels
of hubris (yet again) in assuming that we do, or ever can, understand
complexities of natural systems well enough to safely mess around with
"natural occurences" in such large contexts.

Sometimes the results may be no more harmful than what happens anyway -
the bulldozing and aerial bombing to try and stop lava flows in Hawai'i
years ago comes to mind.  Didn't stop the flows, of course, but didn't do
any more damage than the flow would have anyhow (except for fossil energy
burned in the absurdly silly attempt).

Sometimes the results will be catastrophic in ways we'll never imagine
until they happen.  Call it God or Goddess, call it Mother Nature, call it
systemic complexity, call it the Universal Mysteries, call it chaos
theory, whatever story we tell - there are plenty of examples of
unpredicted and upredictable consequences strewn through human history -
especially recent industrial-age history.

I suspect that these consequences are more the result of that hubris than
of any particular technology or ideology.  Until we act based on how
little we know, we'll keep making the kinds of mistakes we have made when
we forget, ignore or deny how little we know.

> The advance in scientific knowledge should accompany legions of people
> involved in efforts of all sorts to
> preserve and sustain our living environment;

"Scientific knowledge" was the basis for the fire supression method of
"preserving and sustaining" public lands forests in the USA.  Then along
came the longer-term consequences..."scientific knowledge" is the basis
for those claiming GMOs are safe - and also for those claiming it's
dangerous foolishness - and for dire consequences for fisheries worldwide,
and forests, and air, and water, and so on.

There's that hubris again - "the 'scientific knowledge' we used to have
wasn't good enough, sure, but *now* we've really got it figured out!"  How
many times has that come around in the history of scientific knowldege?  I
don't know, I'm outta fingers and toes...

"Preservation" is a tricky term, too - some folks wanted to stop the
natural succession of meadows filling in in Yosemite Valley, and dredge
the sediments so Mirror Lake wouldn't become Mirror Meadow.  Who here
would support that in the name of "preservation" - raise your mouse...?

I'm not advocating analysis paralysis or "doing nothing" (though sometimes
I find the adage "don't just do something, sit there!!" very useful).  I'm
advocating a high degree of mindfulness of how little we know and what
scales of intervention are 'safe enough' for us to mess with.

So in that sense I agree with Lawrence about the "legions of people
involved in all sorts of efforts" - localized, human-scale efforts based
on lots and lots of local assessment, assessment, assessment.



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