permaculture

[Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

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