permaculture

[Russ Grayson <pacedge@magna.com.au>]

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