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  • From: "Jara" <jara@otenet.gr>
  • To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Better the devil you know
  • Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 09:15:34 +0300

Dear Toby,

Some bloody good points here.

It's about applying principles where you live. If
we limit Pc to those wanting to live off the land, then in a society where
not even most farmers--about 1% of the population--are living off their own
land, Pc would be irrelevant, ignored. . What do I teach? Working
with what you have, whole-systems thinking, and awareness of the
consequences of your actions. I want people to figure out their own
solutions, not think their only choice is to be farmers. That journey is going to be monumentally
difficult--it has never been done. I am fairly optimistic, but I'm trying to
encourage people to improve the places they live rather than have urbanites
fantasize about rural homesteads.> Permaculture is about starting at your doorstep right now, not about dreaming that someday you will move to the country, start a community, and
then be sustainable. That's what I try to teach.


The question many people ask is what can I do. When faced with the bewildering mess that we are in the second question is often where do I start. You have answered both questions succinctly - DO WHAT YOU CAN, HERE, NOW !!

Let's not idealize the past. Local? Pacific NW Chinook used Mexican
obsidian. And many practices of earlier cultures were unsustainable. Like
logging and grazing North Africa's forests into desert, and depleting soil,
trees, and water at Chaco Canyon, or shitting upstream of neighbors almost
everywhere. Other cultures just didn't have the population levels to make
their destructive effects immediately obvious, but many died of ecological
collapse.

Quite right. As Alvin Toffler the futurist says - Many proponents of the 'back to the land' philosophy idealize some dreamy past utopia that existed somewhere, once upon a time. Life in the agrarian rural past and before in the hunter gatherer era was SHORT, CRUEL, HARD, DIRTY , BRUTAL, INEFFICICIENT, and OFTEN HIGHLY DESTRUCTIVE.


To be sustainable, we can't go back to the old ways, but must
combine a little old and much new.

Quite right - Gandhi with satellites ;-)

If we don't fix the places we live now, why would we expect not to repeat
the same mistakes somewhere else? That's been our pattern. The existing
socio-economic framework, bad as it is, has the advantage of being known and
moderately functional, so the odds of success are greater if we transform it
rather than abandon it (which is impossible, anyway) for something we don't
know how to do.


Abondoning it is also a total waste of all the embedded resources and energy in that socio-economic framework.


Old communities were not intentional (some religious communities excepted).
You lived in a village because you were born there. There was no intention
or shared vision, and little social justice. Villages had oppression,
oligarchy, feuds, (Tolstoy refers to "the idiocy of village life,") and all
the other problems that have been with us forever. Although I support, and
work with, intentional communities, the ugly reality is that the majority
fail within a couple of years. Knowing how they fail is easily as important
as learning from successful ones.

I can bear witness to this having grown up in a small English village. Even now English village life is far from being anything close to 'intentional'. Greek village life is even worse !!!!!!


Community living is supremely difficult. Plus, you need 100+ people to have
a sufficient skill set for even partial self-reliance. How many 100-person
intentional communities are there in the world? And 100 is still not enough
people to support a bicycle factory. Where do the rubber and alloy come
from? I'm not saying "no one should try to start a rural community," I'm
saying, peak oilers, get real. People who think the easy answer is to
traipse off to the woods and live happily with friends, let alone with other
frightened, paranoid survivalists, are delusional. Even moderate
self-reliance is hard work. Total self-reliance at any but a stone-age
standard of living is impossible. I like my iPod and think we are smart
enough to have a sustainable culture in which they can exist, and that means
large, sophisticated networks. That's why cities evolved--large groups of
people are a good way to create a culture.

Having also tried this I tend to agree that it just don't work - Have you ever met anyone let alone a group of 100 people that you get on well enough with to share a common vision and work towards it ??????

(Broken record here: rural life requires more inputs than urban; check the
laws of physics.) Re store-bought: Raising your own chickens is great, but
perhaps even more powerful is buying organic chicken at the natural food
store. The growers and stores thrive, and eventually Tyson and Safeway
notice (as they do now) that they have competition, and they change. A
home-grown chicken is rarely an option for city dwellers (2/3 of humanity)
but more importantly, may not have the transformative social effect that
supporting good business does.

Once again you are spot on here - I have attempted to be self-sufficient on my 8 acres of natural edible forest garden !!! - It is bloody hard work without the help of either loads of friends and/or loads of cash. You have to be really popular and have loadsa money to be self-sufficient in my experience so far !!! Interdependence is the way to go I feel. Do what you can do here and now and give as much away as you can.


Andrew.




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