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  • From: "Gaden@ziplip.com" <Gaden@ziplip.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Viridian Principles
  • Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 19:14:48 -0700 (PDT)

It is a bit quiet at the moment so I'll be a little self-indulgent here.
Somebody asked recently about how useful the internet really was to us
personally, given that it is also heavily dependant on a petrocarbon economy.

Information. Personally I find it a very useful tool for tracking down
obscure caches of information and ideas that other, in the non-cyber world,
would be very difficult to access. No matter how obscure the thought, someone
somewhere in the world has probably set up a web page about it.

Networking. Connecting people with people is another obvious strength of
internet. This goes beyond just waving (or rudely gesturing!) to the
neighbors over the cyberfence. It taps into the memetic potential of
dialogue. (Ideas as transmissible microorganisms.) The flow of ideas and
concepts from one to another.

This can start of new directions in the flow of personal thoughts, often in a
way that doesn't directly relate to the actual conversation itself. (I keep
meaning to post my "Wwoofers - Memetic Agents of Change" essay)

Thinking. I also enjoy it as a thinking tool. Free association of thoughts
and ideas through absurd leaps of creative intuition. No-one there to
criticize your weird juxtaposing of apparent dissimilar concepts.
Cyber-wandering through a forest of web pages from one link to another.
Ability to instantly query & search an unfamiliar term.

Ofcourse one needs to learn good navigation skills, filing and saving any
interesting tidbits found along the way for future digestion. Easy to become
lost and overwhelmed in the data detritus. It can also be very
time-consuming. Easy to forget that at some point the reading needs to become
the doing. Otherwise, why bother, life just becomes another recycled TV soap
opera.

Anyway, the above paragraphs started out life as a brief (sic!) intro to the
following. In chasing up on Scott's mention of "The Martins", I travelled
through realms of 'hard science fiction', ecotaurs and ended up with the
following cyber-artist community - Viridian Movement. I thought some of the
stated Viridian Principles may be of interest to some here. Web address at
the end.

Gaiden



"Avoid the Timeless, Embrace Decay"

Platonic visions of absolute reality, and Christian visions of eternity, are
very unhealthy for bipedal mammals in a biosphere. Nothing physical is
eternal.It's very bad design to create some device which quickly ceases to
function, while its useless components persist around us, ugly and dangerous.
Entropy deserves our respect and attention.

"Planned Evanescence"

"Planned Obsolescence" means that a product will be driven off the market,
within a known time-frame, by some purported improvement. The Viridian
principle of "Planned Evanescence" extends this practice by demanding that
the product and all its physical traces should
gracefully disintegrate and vanish entirely.


"The Future is History -- Be When You Are"

It's easy to get transfixed by romantic ideas of historical inevitability:
glamorous marches of progress, or gruesome congenital declines. But your own
epoch is your own problem.


"Superstition Isn't Inspiration"

A tarot deck can trigger strong feelings of creative insight, but it doesn't
convey higher wisdom. Like horoscopes and ouija boards, it uses suggestion
to allow you to tell yourself a story that you already know. Don't mistake
mystic wish-fulfillment and the promptings of your unconscious for objective
evidence.


"Viridian Inactivism"

Activism is an attention hog, and very time and energy intensive. A better
approach is to find the things you are doing that intensify the problem, and
just cease doing them.


"The Biological Isn't Logical"

But the living world was not designed by a teleological, rationalist,
reductionist process. The living world grew irrationally through
non-systematic, genetic exploration of niche possibilities, pruned back by
natural selection and occasional massive disasters. So if you're building
distributed networks, learn from crabgrass.


"Walk Through the Walls of Knowledge Guilds"

The boundaries that separate art, science, medicine, literature, computation,
engineering, and design and craft generally are not divinely ordained. The
most galling of these boundaries are socially generated entities meant to
protect the power-interests of knowledge guilds. Quantum physics isn't opera.
But there exists a sensibility that can serenely ignore intellectual turf
war, and comprehend both physics and opera.

http://www.viridiandesign.org/principles.html





> -----Original Message-----
> From: permaculture-request@lists.ibiblio.org
> [mailto:permaculture-request@lists.ibiblio.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2003, 9:04 AM
> To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: permaculture Digest, Vol 5, Issue 76
>
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> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. I think it's called "The Martians (Gaden@ziplip.com)
> 2. RE: I think it's called "The Martians (Scott Hitchins)
> 3. www.permaculture.biz update (Darren J. Doherty)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 22:15:44 -0700 (PDT)
> From: "Gaden@ziplip.com" <Gaden@ziplip.com>
> Subject: [permaculture] I think it's called "The Martians
> To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
> Message-ID: <FUFTFTFYGMOJJQHRCIKHELAKKNALIOEKKMNQB1CP@ziplip.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> Re: Scott Hitchins - "I think it's called "The Martians"
>
> Thanks Scott, but no, it's not. The actual titles of the three books in
> correct sequence is "Red Mars", "Green Mars",and "Blue Mars". The titles
> reflect different stages in the terraforming of Mars humanity's evolving
> relationship with it.
>
> Development of the planet is mirrored in the changing political
> relationships
> externally (with Earth) and internally. Ecopolitically parties on Mars
> disagree about the manner and degree of the planet's terraforming. This
> ranges
> the full spectrum from those who think it should be untouched to those who
> wish to turn it into a corporate industrial/military extension of Earth.
>
> Amongst the political/economic framework is discussion of many radical (and
> actual) technological approaches to ecosystem management, energy sources,
> self-sufficient dome environments etc. Though SF, issues raised are quite
> contemporary. As I said before, damn good read for enlightened permies.
>
> Gaiden
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 15:40:30 +1000
> From: "Scott Hitchins" <ScottH@wcig.org.au>
> Subject: RE: [permaculture] I think it's called "The Martians
> To: <Gaden@ziplip.com>, "permaculture"
> <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
> Message-ID:
> <0CE053FFB698944491E89127E0289761068F84@apps02.wcig.org.au>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> I've read the three books (A couple of times )."The Martians" is a fourth
> book
> by the same author that has additional short stories, policies and other
> documents written by the colonists which seem to have a bit of a permie
> influence.
> -Scott
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gaden@ziplip.com [mailto:Gaden@ziplip.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, 25 June 2003 3:16 PM
> To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: [permaculture] I think it's called "The Martians
>
>
> Re: Scott Hitchins - "I think it's called "The Martians"
>
> Thanks Scott, but no, it's not. The actual titles of the three books in
> correct sequence is "Red Mars", "Green Mars",and "Blue Mars". The titles
> reflect different stages in the terraforming of Mars humanity's evolving
> relationship with it.
>
> Development of the planet is mirrored in the changing political
> relationships
> externally (with Earth) and internally. Ecopolitically parties on Mars
> disagree about the manner and degree of the planet's terraforming. This
> ranges
> the full spectrum from those who think it should be untouched to those who
> wish to turn it into a corporate industrial/military extension of Earth.
>
> Amongst the political/economic framework is discussion of many radical (and
> actual) technological approaches to ecosystem management, energy sources,
> self-sufficient dome environments etc. Though SF, issues raised are quite
> contemporary. As I said before, damn good read for enlightened permies.
>
> Gaiden
> _______________________________________________
> permaculture mailing list
> permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 01:40:00 +1000
> From: "Darren J. Doherty" <darren@permaculture.biz>
> Subject: [permaculture] www.permaculture.biz update
> To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>, "permaculture-oceania"
> <permaculture-oceania@lists.cat.org.au>
> Message-ID: <000201c33b30$0b9b4520$3225fea9@darren>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
>
> Hello People,
>
> Just an invitation to visit our site as I have updated it in the
> following sections. The imagery pages have around 500 annotated photos
> to check out from projects I've designed and developed over the years -
> plus some others work as well. As we travel near older sites then we
> drop in and take some updated images and note progress:
>
> www.permaculture.biz/trees - Acacia mearnsii/dealbata forestry
> management update/archive (before and after imagery updates
> www.permaculture.biz/buildings
> www.permaculture.biz/water
>
> We have added an interesting new section as well -
> go to :
> www.permaculture.biz/onlineprojects
> with weekly updates of progress or as notable developments occur. We are
> looking forward to developing this section as I believe transparent live
> working design and system establishment information would be interesting
> to a wide range of practitioners out there.
>
> Good Looking,
>
> Cheers,
>
> Yours and Growing,
>
> Darren J. Doherty
> Applied Diploma of Permaculture Design, (Education, Site Design, System
> Establishment & Implementation) Permaculture Institute (1995)
> Permaculture Design Certificate, Permaculture Institute (1993, 1995,
> 2001)
> Whole Farm Planning Certificate (Train the Trainer), University of
> Melbourne (1995)
> principal consultant permaculture.biz
>
>
>
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