permaculture

[Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

Patrick McKown wrote:
> It almost sounds like 'permaculture' is some kind of 'silver bullet'? Some 
> fundamental bottom of
> the 'pyramid' foundation that permeates ideas and economies into some kind of 
> 'harmonization'. So
> how would a society such as here in the US look based on what you are saying 
> here, how would it
> change for the better and how would people be living their purpose in their 
> lives?
>   

Since I believe that the purpose of human life is to aid Lovelock's Gaia 
in maintaining homeostasis in the biosphere, permaculture is the 
practice of Right Action.  I think that the US will, if it doesn't 
collapse entirely, look a lot like Europe, with car-free, 
small-footprint vertical villages embedded in intensively cultivated 
crop lands.  We're running a race with ignorance and death, though, so a 
lot can happen.  A key piece is to replace people on the land so that 
they can "just say no" to free market capitalist foolishness.  That 
ability to say "no" (to being forced into becoming Labor) was what drove 
these capitalists to separate us from power over our own economic 
lives.  As a result, we live profoundly diminished lives of economic 
bondage to free market capitalists.  We work for them or we starve, by 
strategic design.  It's not just us in the US, though.  It's global.  
This is economic globalization in a nutshell: separating people from 
power over their own economic lives.  Permaculture is a human-scale 
conceptual tool to put people back on the land in a sustainable manner 
which embraces the community of "the land and all its critters," which I 
call Sacred Family.  The point, though, is regaining the power to "just 
say no."  In psychology, this is the most basic personal boundary.  We 
save the world by saving ourselves because we are rightfully a part of 
the land's community.  Plato said that the meaning of human life is 
found in relations.  That profound sadness we feel when there is no 
"good reason" is, I think, the existential wound we carry from being 
forcibly removed from relations with the land, relations humans need to 
actualize in order to be happy.  We actualize relations with the land by 
working the land.   That's why it feels so good to get our hands in the 
dirt, I think.  Jeffersonian democracy was a vision of a country of 
independent farmers who could say no.  I think we're headed that way, if 
we have time enough left to heal enough trauma wounds to comprehend, and 
honor, Sacred Family.  Free market capitalism prevails because it is an 
ideology of strategic trauma.  The main purpose, I believe, of the 
Republicans allowing 9/11 to occur was as a Pearl Harbor event to 
maintain free market capitalism by administering a large dose of 
strategic trauma and taking our eyes off the prize of self-governance.  
If they didn't allow it to happen, why were there three war games at the 
same time that took the air defense jets away from NYC, so that the 
closest jets available to scramble were an hour away?  We haven't yet 
learned to heal faster than free market capitalism traumatizes us but 
we're in the process.   Free market capitalism is the frat rat who 
doesn't own the ideological latitude to honor the ethical differences 
between date rape and consensual sexual relations.  Consensual sexual 
relations is another way of working the land, a way of visioning Sacred 
Family.   Working the land is lovemaking.

Tommy  Tolson