Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - [permaculture] Leaping octaves.

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Marsha Hanzi <mhanzi@yahoo.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Leaping octaves.
  • Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 09:31:41 -0700 (PDT)

A regular udnerlying thread here( which appears again in the recent archives from this list.) is how to get Permaculture strategies into largescale?  How to make the  octave leap from individual backyards to thousands?
 
Some say large-scale urgent necessity will bring about the change.  This was indeed true two years ago in Brazil, when sudden drought dried up the hydroelectric systems, and the government said: "Either you cut down 20% of your consumption or we will have blackouts"-- and they did! The country cut down its consumption by 20%-- and it stays down, even now that the supply has been more or less re-established.  They created new habits which carry on even when the need has gone ( apparently you need a month of repeated action to create a new habit...)
 
But there are strategies also.  Our institute has set up a drylands agroforestry program which today reaches some 1,000 farmer families using the strategies in Roland Bunch´s book (? I think that´s his name- don´have the copy here..)"Two Ears of Corn". Really works, with very good cost-benefit here, but it is still an expensive program, and gives us a lot of hedaches to keep it floating. But it has managed to get into the kind of scale we need to talk about...
 
But my big inspiration and enigma is Gandhi- he didn´t mobilize 1,000 people- he moved hundreds of thousands! How did he manage to do that? One of the most inspiring programs today is "Self-Employed Women´s Association"(SEWA) in Ahmedabad, which counts on 350,000 members,  based on Gandhian principles, but with an extremely efficient strategy of sending spearhead teams into villages to teach specific strategies.. To me they are the masters of strategy and we could learn a lot from them- should we intend to go largescale..(they have an excellent homepage: www.sewa.org...)
 
 
Or the creativity of Greenpeace-- symbolic acts as strategies.
 
Or maybe the role of  Permaculture is to occupy the niche of backyard and local  parojects, and others will occupy the larger niches, social and political?  Could be, since a major theme of Permaculture is personal power( and responsability), based, as Mollison says, on the efforts of millions of amateurs set loose to fix the world.  Scale by summing many small individual parts?  We just don´t know what this sum is...That´s part of the frustartion of "throwing the seeds to the wind" (which basically is what happens in a Permaculture course as we often lose sight of the people and don´t have comprehensive feedback on where things have gone from there...)
 
Marsha
www.permacultura-bahia.org.br
 
 


Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!


Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page