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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Leaping octaves.

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  • From: Russ Grayson <pacedge@magna.com.au>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Leaping octaves.
  • Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 13:20:00 +1000

On Tuesday, June 17, 2003, at 02:31 AM, Marsha Hanzi wrote:

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? 

Interesting thoughts Marsha. Here in Australia that is a good description of what has happened. The larger niches of broadacre farming has been occupied by the organic farming industry and by conventional farmers practicing what has become known as 'sustainable agriculture'. Permaculture, as a food production system, is relegated to home and community gardens.

I think, though, that vacating the larger social and political niches sells permaculture short. As you suggest, these have been occupied by national and community-based lobby groups, yet they lack any substantial participation by people bringing a permaculture perspective. The result is the perpetuation of the conventional 'green' perspective which, in some cases, might be the way forward, in others less so.

I have proposed permaculture participation in local government. Some time ago, someone responded that permaculture might do better to adopt an approach of inexperience and 'naievity' to local government, however my limited interaction with this level of government discounts this approach. The people would simply be written off in terms of 'dreamers' or similar.

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. 

The notion of lots of amateurs is good, but cooperation multiplies 'personal power' whether that is in the form of the lobbies mentioned above or in some other way.

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...)

For the most part, permaculture has no capacity to monitor and evaluate what students of PDCs do. It is true that when people go back home from courses most are lost sight of. Some, however, stay in contact and you get some idea of what it is that they do. And as for the rest... well, who knows? This is a efficiency of the overly-decentralist structure of permaculture (that brings other benefits).

...Russ Grayson





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