permaculture

["RIA SWIFT" <Riaswift@msn.com>]

Well put. Thank you, Ria

----- Original Message -----

From: John Schinnerer

To: permaculture

Sent: Monday, October 27, 2003 5:33 PM

Subject: [permaculture] City Repair Project, and leadership

Aloha,

This past friday PM I saw Mark Lakeman's presentation on the City Repair
Project that started in Portland (OR, USA) a number of years ago (Toby wrote
about it for the Activist a while back).

If you haven't seen their presentation(s) and have any opportunity to do so at
any time, **Just Do It!** (take that, Nike... ;-). They're starting a tour of
some Northeast USA and Canada locations today or thereabouts (schedule on
their site, cityrepair.org).

Excellent, excellent, excellent!  If you're organizing/scheduling courses,
they'd be a *fantastic* guest gig - for the urban stuff, sure, but they go
well beyond that systemically speaking.

AND - it offers a living breathing example (quite a few of them now, actually)
of how a self-organizing group of culturally conditioned human beings can get
outside some of their conditioning and design and manifest what they want in
their "village" - despite the heirarchical "leaders" who won't allow it, etc.
etc.

The neighborhood residents become the collective "leaders."  And their example
is being recognized and sought out by all manner of people who maybe thought
it couldn't be done (at least not by them) and now see that it can.

I think we're *social* animals.  I doubt we're primarily *herd* animals.  Of
course we can choose to be sheep, but we can also choose lots of other roles -
they're all stories we tell ourselves about who we are (and what we can/can't
do).  Change the lived story, change the consequences.

I'm not interested in training future leaders in the current sense of the
phrase.  It looks suspiciously like passive yearning that someone else will
fix the mess I think I'm in.  Like any addiction - the pattern of "I'll feel
better/everything will be fine if I just have one more drink/fix/sex
act/relationship/sports car/giant TV/new leader."

I am interested in inviting people to recognize their own abilities of
self-leadership - to be their own leaders and collaborate with others doing
likewise.  Who's going to want to follow some "tin-horn despot" (foreign or
domestic ;-) then?  Too few people to matter.

The problem is the solution, says Permaculture.  If the problem right now is
that *too few people to matter* are taking action to replace pathological
"leadership" with healthier systems, then the solution is for more people to
take action to create healthier systems - systems where *too few people to
matter* are taking action to create pathological "leadership."


John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Cultural & Ecological Designing
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net
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