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  • From: "Robert Waldrop" <bwaldrop@cox.net>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] 2030
  • Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 22:55:26 -0500

Food is fundamental to life. Without food, we die. I think that growing your own food is the most powerful political action one can do this year. It is accessible to nearly everyone. That's why my motto is, [INSERT monocle in left eye] "Virst, ve start vith ze FOOD. Bwahahahahahahahaha."

Thus, "gardening discussion," is in fact a very powerful political discussion. Exchanging ideas and etc about food production is essential to "clarification of thought".

Food production is also universal. It cuts across all dividing barriers of race, class, religion, and ordinary partisan politics. For example, in the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, we have fundamentalist Baptists and lesbian Wiccans. Not to mention the Catholics and Unitarians and atheists and Buddhists and the occasional lawyer or two (actually we have several). We even have a state senator.

If we decided there was a partisan politically correct requirement to our membership, we would probably only have two members and he and I wouldn't be talking together. Instead, we leave all of our baggage at the door and come together around a table of fellowship that is loaded with locally produced foods. The table was even made in the neighborhood. That, I think, is a very powerful political statement. most of these people wouldn't even be talking with each other, much less working together so effectively, if this hadn't come along. It is a testimony to the power of food to unite, to weave new connections, and to challenge the powers that be at a place where the have no defense whatsoever. And if you've read your Sun Tzu, you know that his advice is to "hasten quickly and attack where you are not expected."

We don't lack for issues to divide us these days. We're finding in Oklahoma that food can be a tie that binds us together in bonds of community that are almost lost in the partisan divisiveness of modern life.

We haven't set a date for our next workshop, but it will probably be in May 2008. It will be in conjunction with one of the delivery dates of the food coop. Those who attended the 2007 workshop were unanimous in their opinion that being there for Delivery Day was one of the most powerful aspects of the presentation. It really has to be seen to be believed.

One of the things that I have learned in 3 years is something of the extent of the challenge of creating a local food system. we are 3-1/2 years into this, and our monthly gross sales are at $40,000, which is a lot, but that is just for about 400 households. And the state of Oklahoma has a million plus households. That's a lot of scaling up. We constantly run out of items as it is now. Locally produced vegetables are in constant short supply. That's why I've started another cooperative organizing effort to organize worker owned cooperatives to grow vegetables on urban plots for direct sale to the public and also through the coop.

Bob Waldrop, OKC
www.oklahomafood.coop
----- Original Message ----- From: "Tommy Tolson" <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2007 4:43 PM
Subject: Re: [permaculture] 2030


Robert Waldrop wrote:

I think that it is highly unlikely that you are
aware of everything that permaculturists are doing
in the world, so this statement seems more like "I
am More Green Than Thou" rhetoric" than rational,
informed discussion. It is personally satisfying,
no doubt, but does nothing to build community.


Thanks for your response. I'm running a race with ignorance and death,
not with you or anyone else on this list. I know what I know and it's
just one very small part of the collective knowledge.
I'm responding to posts on this list that say, outright or not, that
politics is off-topic on-list, rather than to the sum total of all the
work permaculturalists do in the world. This seems to me a gardening list.
I don't find "Greener than thou" in any way satisfying. I read about
your class in starting a food co-op too late to attend but think that's
the sort of thing that needs to be done on a large scale now to have the
infrastructure in place when the oil spigot turns off and industrial
agriculture collapses. When are you doing it again? Earth, and
probably nature, will survive humans, but extinction is so needless, if
we apply Permaculture principles to liberate ourselves and the remains
of planetary life from the dark forces of dominion.

Smiles.
Tommy Tolson
Austin, TX
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