permaculture

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

just to hold up the voice of freedom, which like love as always existed, and 
which is the fundemental thing that the human race has to dig, then and only 
then will it be able to repair all it's relationships, it is this inner 
change that has to happen, to move forward 
their willl be a celabration to honour Dr Albert Hoffmann 100th birthday
www.LSD.info  
don't underestimate the power of thought, even though it is limited
i personaly don't recomend children under 18 taking drugs both legal and 
illegal, 

"Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net> wrote:



You can't count the apples in a seed; ten years of Co-Evolution 
Quarterly - seminar with Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey, Gary Snyder, Paul 
Hawken - Whole Earth Review, Autumn, 1986
new! Save a personal copy of this article and quickly find it again with 
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YOU CAN'T COUNT THE APPLES IN A SEED

On April 12 of this year, 1,500 people filled the Marin Civic Auditorium 
in San Rafael, California, "to jointly piss on the grave of the 
CoEvolution Quarterly," as host/moderator Steward Brand put it. "We can 
do this with a certain amount of glee," he pointed out, "because the 
corpse has been born again in a book, News That Stayed News [see page 
143], and in the form of a magazine called Whole Earth Review." On hand 
for the celebration were Ken Kesey (novelist and Merry Prankster), Gary 
Snyder (Pulitzer Prize-winning poet), and Paul Hawken (economist and 
author of The Next Economy), all familiar friends to Whole Earth 
readers. What followed was a lively interchange between the four 
panelists. Here's a portion of the onstage conversation.

KEN KESEY: One thing I want to talk about tonight is what I see as a 
growing fascism in the United States, and who we are and how we can 
combat it. A lot of people don't know what fascism is. They misuse the 
word and all they can think of is Mussolini and "kill the Jews." Fascism 
goes back to the old Roman word of fasci, which means sticks bound by a 
cord so they all work together: Usually it's big business, big church, 
and big governments. So when you see Reagan talking with Falwell about 
the lavor movement, that, by its nature, is fascism. The real weapon 
against fascism is individualism and tribal cohesiveness and families 
and communities.

The fascist consciousness wants Baptists coast to coast, so when the 
Bhagwan is up there with his Rajneeshpuram, everybody is pissed at him; 
but I got up there and said, look, whether you're pissed at him or not, 
it's a healthy thing to have him there. As long as we can still have 
guys like the Bhagwan come and take over a town and create that much 
fuss up in Oregon, it says something about the openness of that culture. 
When we wipe out the Bhagwan and those guys, fascism will take over.
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STEWARD BRAND: Paul, you're the apostle of individualism around here. 
What does the businessman do for civilization?

PAUL HAWKEN: Damn little, usually. He brings up the rear and charges for 
it. But I disagree with Ken. I see what's happening with the Congress 
and Reagan and big business as a sunset effect, of a generation that's 
leaving power, and also leaving the earth as well.

There's a lot of talk about the Boomers, the "b-word" you know, but 
we'll talk about them for a minute because there's eighty million of us. 
Most of those eighty million are nesting. They're buying homes. They're 
trying to figure out where they want to stay. They want to stop moving 
around. A lot of them are having kids, thinking about schools, school 
boards, jobs, about income, about a whole bunch of things. They've 
become real quiet. In that quietude we have this last stand, if you 
will, of a world view as typified by Ronald Reagan. It's a re-run, just 
like watching late-night television.

That's she politics that we have right now. It isn't nascent, it isn't 
something that's going to take over the country. It's not a trend where 
you can draw a straight line and say, oh my God, where are we going to 
be in five years? I think in five to ten years from now a whole 'nother 
generation will come to power that's going to be very, very different 
than these people who are fascists. And I agree with the definition, but 
I see them as disintegrating. I don't see them as having power in the 
true sense of the word, which is to implement reasoned intention. I 
haven't seen that kind of activity for six, seven years.

KK: I used to think that way, too. I thought we were going to change the 
world. I don't think so anymore. I don't even think we're going to 
change the United States anymore. Most people are just pretty much 
exactly like they were 20 years ago. Stewart and I are balder, but we 
pretty much think about the same things. We've learned a few things on 
how to keep from gettin' into trouble.

But I no longer think that we're going to win. I believe we are the 
losers. I believe that we're a very select group of losers and we have 
to understand that. I knew I wasn't going to be electred student body 
president. Or the most popular kid in college.

I wanted to be powerful. That was more important to me than influencing 
enormous numbers of people. I wanted to influence the correct number of 
people. I think this correct number of people is getting smaller and 
more elite and tougher. But I don't expect all of a sudden to have the 
bad guys die off and a bunch of good ones take over, because they're 
training bad guys just as fast and harder than we're training the good guys.

PH: That's the problem with the 60s world view -- that there's an us and 
a them. The problem was that it was too easy to be right in the 60s. It 
was so easy, with the war, with the environment, with the politics that 
existed at that time. I'm not talking about changing the world. All I 
said is that there's another group of leaders coming up, and I think 
they're different. Different is different. And the idea of taking what's 
out there right now and going, oh my God, it's going to hell in a 
handbasket, and throwing up your arms and saying we're a select bunch of 
losers, is self-reinforcing.

KK: I'm not throwing up my arms about it, but I'm not running around San 
Francisco trying to turn everybody else onto acid either.

PH: Well, 'cause it didn't work.

KK: It's because it'll never work. It's because there ...

PH: So what are you trying now that's working?

KK: We're trying to get the marijuana law passed up there [in Oregon]. 
We slipped the bottle bill in on 'em, and they've been trying to get it 
out. If it came to a vote now, they'd vote it down, just like they're 
going to vote in handguns. Look how many people go to see Rambo. There's 
going to be more and more and more of those people and there's going to 
be a tougher and tougher little crew over here, just the way it's always 
been. There's always this little crew of ornery, mean son of a guns who 
are snapping at the big part of society and society's trying to kill 'em.

We won't win, but we will keep them from killing us. And when you don't 
think there's a them and an us, spend a few nights in the county jail. 
You'll find there's a them and an us and they're stronger than ever and 
just as mean as Attila the Hun.

GARY SNYDER: Well, you know, I can go to the Mother's Day Scotch Broom 
Breakfast in the North San Juan Volunteer Fire Hall every year (it's 
called Scotch Broom Breakfast because the Scotch broom is all in bloom 
right then), and sit right next to the county sheriff and have a good 
chat with him and his deputy and he knows me by name and I know him by 
name. Every year. Been doin' it for seven or eight years now. You've 
probably been doing the same thing. It's been a lot of fun for me, 
discovering that what was really radical sometimes seems extraordinarily 
conservative.

Now I'll say something about environmentalism. Not a one of the world's 
current problems was caused by radical environmentalists -- regardless 
of what anybody says in the newspapers. But one of the most radical 
programs of the anarchist branch of the ecology movement is the 
bioregional proposal that nobody should move -- that they should all 
stay where they are and live there the rest of their lives. In other 
words, the idea is to become like a normal human being over the last 
40,000 years and have a place. But when you do something like that, you 
wonder if you're on the far right or on the far left, because then what 
you're suggesting to people is that they go to school board meetings, 
and join the garden club, and take responsibility for what goes on in 
their community. And is that old or new? I don't know. But it sure does 
improve the quality of life.

KK: I was at an auction a few days ago up in Oregon. The loggers went 
into our oldest stand of trees in Oregon -- a cathedral of trees that we 
have up there -- some of the trees 900 years old. There's been a big 
court battle to preserve these trees for a long time. They went in on 
Easter and they cut those trees down, because there was a one-day lapse 
between the injunction and the thing that was coming up on Monday. They 
got 'em. They cut 'em down. And so we went to a big auction to raise 
money to kind of fight this, and there at this auction were maybe 150 
people. And as I looked out there at those people, they're many of the 
same people that I know, and you can rely on them. And they are not the 
majority. They are in the very strong and reliable minority. They're the 
people like this guy Lloyd Marbett who is just one guy who has almost 
single-handedly kept nuclear power out of Oregon. If he'd left it up to 
the population of Oregon, we'd have had nuclear power plants on the 
Columbia on our side of the river. This one guy just kept at 'em and 
kept at 'em and kept filing injunctions and protesting and then he would 
get on top of one of the towers, and over the last ten years, this guy 
has made enemies out of everybody except the good guys, who know that 
he's out there, and that as long as old Lloyd Marett is out there, he's 
more powerful than a thousand people, just by being there and doing it.

SB: I want to try on us a question that Kevin Kelly came up with. We 
might as well take the ten years that CoEvolution survived and look at 
ourselves and ask: what serious things have we changed our minds about? 
A question like that may take a little bit of thought, so I'll go first.

In a way it responds to something you said somewhere in the press, 
Kesey, which I appreciated. I guess this was probably in relation to 
Governor Brown, who I worked for part-time for a couple of years. You 
said, "Brand recognizes power and cleaves to it." And it's accurate. It 
still is. I go around finding people who do stuff and participate in 
some way -- pick up a few things, sometimes leave off a few things.

So I've been around various kinds of leaders. And I've been drawn to, 
and I'm interested in how we're all drawn to, charismatic leaders -- 
people who have such a sense of story going on that they're somehow 
driving forward, and the plot is this great, engrossing, interesting 
thing, and we get drawn into the plot as charactrs. And it's an enormous 
relief to be a character in a plot larger than oneself. It's not 
necessarily someone else's plot. It's just that you participate in 
something that's big and self-organizing.

Somebody usually assigns himself the job as the author of this plot that 
we're in together -- running the state of California in a interesting 
new way, or doing something weird with a bus and seeing what that would 
do to the culture, or working with some people back at M.I.T. who are 
somewhat charismatically looking to change the nature of media. And I 
see some interesting problems that develop. I tried and tried to get a 
good reporter inside the Rajneesh situation to see what was being played 
out there. And none of us were close enough to Jim Jones to see what was 
being played out there. Some rather marvelous, quite Greek, tragedy 
seems to go on around charisma.

I've come to still be enormously attentive to and supportive of 
charismatic individuals, but a lot of the forms of the application of 
charisma strike me so that I get very wary, and I try to help other 
people be wary. And Isay things like "Charisma is theft." The operation 
of charisma and the kind of situation where you're a character in 
somebody else's story -- you lose something. And it may be real hard to 
find it again when you fall out of that story. I changed my mind on that 
one.

KK: The most profound thing that's happened to me, in all my life, was 
my son Jed's death, by far. And it really put all my spiritual beliefs 
to the test. You can throw the Ching on it, you can consult the New 
Testament. But when it comes right down to it, I got to talking about 
death and asking friends, what happens when you die? All of them kind of 
know this thing about this white light out there and you go toward the 
white light. We've all read that stuff.

And I say, well what else? I don't know. God takes care of that. Like 
the government. What If a government isn't going to take care of heaven 
for us? What it we've got to begin to build it from this side of the 
river -- that you can't wait until you get over on the other side of the 
river to build your heaven?

Now you check back with the Egyptians or any of the Indians, even my 
grandma -- you ask 'em, what's heaven look like? They've all got a 
pretty clear idea. You know, there's pearly gates up there, or if you're 
an Indian you go to the big rock there where the coyotes left three 
droppings, go west forty paces. Everybody had a pretty clear idea of 
where you went. And right now, you'll find that not many people are in 
agreement about where ou go. A lot of people say you just go back into 
the big puddle. Well, I ain't goin' for that. I know what I was promised 
in Sunday school, and I want it. And I'm not gonna rest until I get it. 
And it's made me rethink a lot of tribal ritual and start thinking, not 
just in terms of community or family or civilization, but in terms of 
the tribe. And, in reading the Joseph Campbell book called The Way of 
Animal Powers, all through his literature he studies what people think 
and how they deal with their dead. Each little community, each area, had 
a different place you went to and they had a different idea. What I 
begin to think is maybe it's not really that important what it looks 
like -- just that there is an agreement amongst the people in the tribe 
as to what's going to happen.

But without that kind of movement of your will past the barrier of your 
own life into the future, I think that we end up stuck in just the life 
part of our existence, instead of thinking "I am going to continue to 
live after my death," and putting some kind of will forward out there, 
where i think relates to the ecology. I believe it relates to how we 
want the world to continue after we are gone.

There's a lot of feeling in the young people -- these are the 22-, 
23-year-old people I know that, when you talk to them about what's in 
the future, about the only thing they're sure of is the bomb. They don't 
see the pearly gates yawning and opening for them. They see the bomb up 
there, waiting. For us to try to go on with that is going to be very 
difficult for a civilization, as we know it to last -- a large 
civilization. I believe it's going to come down to smaller and smaller 
communities that exist inside of this large civilization, like little 
funguses spreading up inside of a big fungus, and that gradually they'll 
get bigger and then maybe they'll get too large and cumbersome, like any 
big government, and other stuff will spring up inside of them.

As I travel around the world, I see people I really envy. I envy a lot 
of the Inuits and Upiks up north, because they still have a clear idea 
of a cosmology, of their own mythic cosmology, while our mythic 
cosmology goes back to Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Rolling 
Stones. That's about as big as it gets for us. And that just isn't 
enough, you know, to carry into the dark.

I really think that what one of the things that we're all involved in 
doing is to extend ourselves beyond our own lives. The building of this 
-- I don't believe that we can expect the people that flocked to Rambo 
to do it. It's just not in 'em. Call it elite if you want, but I'm no 
longer gonna wait for 'em. I'm going to build my own mythology, my own 
heaven, and try to get my people to go to it.

GS: Well I don't know if I've changed my mind. I think I might have 
gotten a little more skillful. Certainly eliminated a few gross errors, 
reduced and almost entirely discarded any simple-minded notions of us 
and them. Discarded any notions of winning or losing, but finding myself 
on the same planet. It's not the New Age. It's the same old age. But 
it's as good as any age to be in.

I found myself not long ago testifying at a meeting on forest practices 
for the next fifty years in the Sierra Nevada, at the Supervisor's 
Chambers in Nevada County, saying, "The U.S. Forest Service is obligated 
by its mandating legislation to practice sustained yield. Sustained 
yield means that you will be maintaining a high quality forest with all 
of its wildlife and its basic watershed intact forever. However, what 
you are proposing to do will be good for perhaps no more than 250 years, 
and entry into the forest for clear-cutting on a cycle of once every 80 
years is not sustained yield."

I said, "Look, we're going to be here at least a thousand years and we 
want to have a forest that we can continue to work with as the basis of 
our economy for at least a thousand years. That's very conservative 
suggestion." A couple of the county supervisors looked at me with wide 
and surprised eyes and said, "What do you mean, we're going to be here a 
thousand years?"

And that is the problem, that there is a quality of the mind in this 
culture and in this country that cannot yet grasp the point that we are 
here. And it may be that we go on trips, to space colonies even. But 
we're also going to be here. And our children and our grandchildren and 
our great-grandchildren will be here, and that soil and those deer and 
those trees can be here for them, too. That is, for me, the pearly gates 
that I want to construct a path to, down the spirit road, and leave 
little piles of tobacco along the way for them to start out with at 
least, so they'll get there.

I don't care if that's in a supernatural or a natural world -- it's all 
one to me. But to make that possibility -- to make it just a possibility 
seems to me no more than a minimal human obligation. It's not a big 
political deal. It's not even a big spiritual deal. But it is part of 
the fun of being alive in your own time to sweep a little bit of the 
path for the little ones who need a little sense of where to go. And for 
some odd reason, we live in a culture that gives nobody a sense of where 
they might want to go.

So, I guess I am saying I am unashamedly on the same path I was twenty 
years ago, but I hope a little better.

PH: The mythology that, in a sense, undergirded my willingness to go 
into the world of commerce was a very simple one: it was a biological 
idiom. My feeling was that the soil could not change. I was brought up 
on a farm and I have seen what has happened, particularly to California. 
I'm a fifth-generation Californian and have seen the San Joaquin Valley 
sink 28 feet and become saline. I remember as a child in the Valley the 
cacophony of noise of frogs and crickets outside my screen window. You'd 
go outside and things would fly in your face. And now when I go to where 
my grandpa's farm was, it's stony silent. There's no sound at all except 
the semitractor trailers down the road, loading fruit at the cannery all 
night long. So the purpose for starting the Erwhon natural food business 
was a very simple one, which is that I didn't think that most people 
intended to destroy the land, but it was happening. And my sense was 
that if there was a business -- and not just one, because we created 
probably fifty different businesses while we were in business at Erewhon 
-- that allowed people to make a choice that was informed, that was 
conscious, that was interesting, that wasn't laden with a lot of 
ideology, but full of richness and taste and texture and life itself, 
that slowly, one by one, families, and sometimes even communities, would 
make the interesting choice.

For my boat across the river Styx, or whatever river we're going to 

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