permaculture

["Robert Waldrop" <rmwj@soonernet.com>]

A reminder about what is at stake in the present
situation. Among other things I do, I moderate the
runningonempty2@yahoogroups.com discussion group,
which presently has 3,158 members and has been
discussing for 4 going on 5 years the consequences
of the peak in world oil consumption.  If you have
some questions about what those consequences could
be, I suggest that folks visit the website
http://www.dieoff.com , whose hypothesis is that a
vast die-off of the human species will happen as a
result of the interaction with peak oil
production, toxic human political structures,
climate change, and destruction/loss of
traditional ways and manners of living.  Some of
us hope that there could be a managed devolution,
in which chaotic violence and mass death and the
consequent poisoning of the earth's biosphere
could be avoided, or at least, minimized.

I am here because I believe that permaculture is
an essential aspect of the managed devolution/soft
landing alternative.

ROE2 is a fully moderated list, that is to say,
every message is read by a moderator before being
sent to the group.  We also have quirky rules like
requiring that messages be signed with a real name
and geographic location.   People sometimes don't
like the moderation criteria, but cyperspace being
what it is, it is easy to create a new group.
Thus, roe2 has given birth to many other related
groups, some of them with a regional identity,
some with a tactical/strategic identity, some with
philosophical or religious identities.  I am glad
this is happening, because the more people that
are in the conversation, and the more
conversations there are, the more likely it is
that a more complete answer will emerge.

No one cyberspace discussion group needs to meet
all people's needs, nor does it necessarily need
to try.  ROE2 wandered along for years in the 500
subscriber range, and then last year as the price
of oil began to increase, so did our
subscribership.  We briefly discussed limiting the
number of participants but there wasn't any real
energy for that, so we've just continued to grow.
I have wondered if we could manage with that large
of a conversation, but on the whole things have
gone well.  Traffic is very high, 50 or 60
messages/day. I have to reject the occasional
cannibal recipe and actively intervene when
threads start to self-destruct.  One of the
challenges is how the many different world views
present among the subscribers interact.

In my life's story I spent 16 years as an activist
in the libertarian movement.  Over time it seemed
to me that that organization, which had a lot of
interesting ideas and energy in the 1970s, became
more focused on internal issues and purity of the
national platform.  Winning or losing began to be
defined in terms of purity of political position.
Many groups on the left and in the environmental
movement have done something similar.  It's a
primary reason I left.  I would like to warn the
permaculture movement against heading down that
path.  One thing I like about permaculture is its
decentralized approach.  If there is a
permaculture pope, it seems to me that that is a
matter of tradition, not juridical authority.  To
become a designer, (as I understand it), you find
a teacher you can understand and you study -- a
curriculum that is part "universal" to the
movement and part "particular" to the teaching
lineage you link up with.

I think that this system essentially works.  Even
those of us who haven't managed to link with a
particular lineage can still find our way, and
that's good too.

The day is soon coming when permaculture could
mean the difference between a "soft landing" for
this planet and a chaotic, violent, mass death
dieoff of both the human species and many many
other of our fellow travelers upon this planet,
this is very likely imho to cause irreparable harm
to the biosphere.  We dodged the nuclear war
bullet during the Cold War, but it is still in the
guns, and there are more guns with more nuclear
bullets and they are all cocked and ready to go.
The die-off of the human species has already
started, we see it in the rising number of failed
states, the wars for resources, and here at home
in the US, the shifting of resources from human
needs to military power.  I am the founder of a
Catholic Worker house, the lines at our monthly
grocery distributions are longer than ever, and
this is true all over the country.  There are more
homeless people and more hungry people, right here
in the US of A.  Already!  And oil hasn't even hit
$100/barrel yet. Meanwhile in Korea, the first
nation to drop out of the international oil
marketplace, perhaps 2 million people have died of
starvation and it is estimated that 90% of their
farm machinery is rusting in sheds and fields.
There has been a massive shift of workers from
cities to rural areas, but their agricultural
production is still falling.  And now they claim
to have nuclear weapons.

I just want to remind everybody of the stakes in
this conversation.

If I have any voice here, I say let a thousand
listservs like this one bloom and proliferate.
That won't take anything away from this
conversation, but instead, this conversation will
be richer and more valuable because it exists as a
nexus and a generative space.  An edge zone, after
all, is characterized by many different, even
disparate elements, that somehow manage to
interact.  But if the edge tries to be the forest,
or the savannah, then it is no longer by
definition the edge, but instead it has become
something else.  Permaculture, whatever it may be,
is not a monoculture. That's another truth I've
learned.

And it is about energy cycling, right?  In the
context of the various high stakes, I am getting a
bit worried about the tendency to cycle energy
into internecine permaculture "wars".  That's not
generative.  It is like creating compost and then
wrapping it up in ten layers of black plastic and
sending it to the city dump to be buried with
millions of other bags of black plastic. Our
civilization is in the initial stages of a
collapse and devolution.  There is nothing that
can head that off, but we can, by seemingly small
actions now, have a lot of influence later as the
devolution accelerates and runs the risk of
becoming dysergistic rather than synergistic.

The Design for Catastrophe issue of the
Permaculture Activist magazine was well timed.

Robert Waldrop, Oklahoma City
www.bettertimesinfo.org

PS.  Thanks to those who answered by earlier
question about the design process.  I will be
looking up some of these references and probably
have some more questions later.