permaculture

[Martin Naylor <martinwnaylor@yahoo.com.au>]

too true their culture is a failure now,[although it was succesfull for 
199,800 thousand years till we invaded and started the rape of the land]
 exactly the same as our culture is a total failure now

Marimike6@cs.com wrote:
Graham writes "The more I see this header 'Re: [permaculture] Educating the 
ignorant' the more deeply disturbed I feel by it. The more I look into myself 
the more I realise how deeply ignorant and uneducated I am."

I can understand the feeling. But then how should we characterise a culture, 
such as the rural culture of South Africa, that fails to afford its members 
the opportunity to prosper within their environment? Is it not legitimate to 
say 
that the culture has failed its members? After all, the people under 
discussion are not being held up as members of a valid and satisfying way of 
life. 
They are poor, uneducated, unhealthy and have many atavistic cultural traits 
that 
from everything I've read and from what our informant here seems to be 
saying, just do not help them toward personal fulfillment, wealth or 
happiness. They 
live, for instance, in fear of one another and have one of the world's 
highest violent crime rates.

And if we assert that, is it not legit to say that for so long as they fail 
to find a way out of their dilemma, they are "ignorant" in the sense of 
lacking 
a solution to their many problems? More specifically, are they not continuing 
to be hungry and poor as they continue to degrade their environment?

I think it's a valid, although unflattering, approach. I think the culture 
being described can usefully be defined as a "problem" in that doing so 
admits 
the possibility of a "solution", But I'm open to argument.

Michael
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