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  • From: Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] The Fed
  • Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 13:08:13 -0500

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




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