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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] BodyPolictic-Political Humor-Congress Votes to Outsource Presidency!

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  • From: Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] BodyPolictic-Political Humor-Congress Votes to Outsource Presidency!
  • Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2007 23:01:12 -0500

Graham wrote:
lets keep the internatrional permaculture forum focussed on positive solutions and ways forward to abundant living in post energy descent futures and what we can do thats positive and practical now...

Cheers Graham www.spiralseed.co.uk
This is a profoundly political statement favoring an arbitrarily privileged viewpoint, as far as I can tell. It comes from someone of remarkable stature,
an authority figure, if you will. This is a statement of "how it should be," asking for no support, a simple, authoritarian declaration, the forte of white men. How, pray tell, does a positive solution come about without a decision-making process? Yes, we are in energy descent, but saying so is another political statement.
Who decides what is "positive and practical now" for the members of this listserv? How is consensus gathered in the Permaculture community in general and on this
listserv in particular? Who rules this listserv? Who may speak freely? Anyone? No one?
I am not a farmer and I am not white in more than skin color. I look white until you look close but I'm not white. I have a Permaculture design certificate and I do
Permaculture designs when they show up to be done. Even when I live on the land, I am not a farmer. Am I subject to farmer rules on this listserv? Like it or leave it?
Is that the rule here, too?

I do not own a positive view of the future. Two out of three people now living are not ecologically supported in a world without cheap oil. It is going to get very ugly very
quickly, and insisting upon a positive viewpoint is not going to change that. The likelihood is that two thirds of the humans now living will die off within the next fifty years. I can not
begin to make that appear positive. Global warming is a one hundred year old issue. The warning was issued one hundred years ago and we haven't done anything about it yet.
Peak Oil was predicted in something like 1957 and few outside the oil business (I'm third generation oilfield) still, in 2007, even know what Peak Oil means.
Leonard Cohen sang, "I have seen your future and man, it's murder." That's consistent with what I know.
Thinking we can build out our designs and make them work and live out our lives in relative peace while the rest of the world falls apart does not strike me as realistic at all, and
if I have to adopt an attitude based on the illusion that it is realistic in order to be on a Permaculture listserv, I find that prospect bizarre as hell.

Are there any adults in charge here? Or has Permaculture morphed into a New Age quasi-theology? We can think the future away? Oscar Wilde, I think, said "If you tell them
the truth, make them laugh or they'll kill you." I have neither the desire nor the inclination to make you laugh.

Tommy Tolson
Austin, TX




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