permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

On Monday,  John Schinnerer wrote:

> I would like to see growth of local activists, teachers, implementers and
> (minimally formal) organizations 

I agree that a critical focus for development of Pc people and organizations is regional and local; I'll bet, for example, an article in your local paper on someone's Pc project is going to get more people in your town doing Pc than some feature in Time Magazine. About the only sort of national body I'd like to see is primarily for teaching: for networking with other teachers, avoiding competition between courses, keeping current on new techniques, keeping the curriculum growing, finding venues and mentors for new teachers, etc. Beyond teaching, I'm not sure how much use there is for a national body other than public relations--which is a consideration. National orgs do have a tendency to go pathological, and safeguards (rotating board? I dunno) have to be built in.

For me, a big issue is that Pc in the US has existed for about 20 years yet it has had virtually no impact on anything beyond a few individual's lives. It is an insignificant force, as Michael Kramer's article pointed out (and whom I'm paraphrasing here a bit). Perhaps the traditional "grassroots, no organization, no leadership, no coherent voice" course it has followed will succeed in somehow spreading beyond a handful of counterculture types; perhaps the few schools and businesses that know about it will change their generally scoffing attitude toward it, but I'm not much on the theory that doing more of the same thing will suddenly give you a different result. Compared to many organizations with, to me, a much less important and useful message, Pc has been spectacularly unsuccessful in attracting adherents.

A note on hierarchy: I realize that hierarchies have a bad reputation these days, but they are a natural pattern of organization that functions extremely well (as in: molecule, cell, tissue, organ, organism, population). As Ken Wilbur and Arthur Koestler have pointed out, we've been exposed to a lot of hierarchies that are pathological, where one of the levels (holons, in Koestler's use) has decided that it is the most important and that the others are subservient and not autonomous. Instead hierarchies can be healthy ways of organizing complex systems to achieve necessary goals. Even distributed networks have nodes and standard routines.  I suspect that if people in Pc do not develop a functional, healthy hierarchy for directing their energy, we're just going to flounder around with a lot of really cool backyard gardens and no real impact.   

Toby
_____________________________________________
For a look at my book on ecological gardening,
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, visit
http://www.chelseagreen.com/Garden/GaiasGarden.htm