permaculture

[Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

Andrew French wrote:
> Tommy, I find your comments to be interesting but a bit long-winded. Is a
> listserv a place to lay out your manifesto?
Manifesto?  I confess that I was avoiding the page today, writing posts 
to listservs rather than fiction.

> But I think
> you should consider writing an article or something, because your ideas are
> valid, but all over the place.
I don't write linear prose, usually.  That's why I write fiction.

> This is why I think theoretical idealistic
> political talk has no place on a listserv that is suppose to be the number
> one listserv for permaculture. Dig it.
>   
Where is its place, in your opinion?
> "Spawned by the Inquisition which eliminated Europe's shamans and
> matriarchs, who knew better, the Industrial Age was humanity's gravest
> error." Really, dude?
>   
What, then, has life on Earth hanging by a thread? 
> I almost agree with you, but of course without the Industrial Age we
> probably wouldn't be using computers to communicate.
Before the Industrial Age, we didn't need computers to communicate.  We 
had social support systems that nearly everyone understood how to use.
We had a tradition of making sure people didn't fall through the 
cracks.  No one starved unless there was famine and everyone was starving. 
>  Just a hunch. Also,
> it's not exactly the Industrial Age itself that is too blame, it is the
> society that creates such an age.
>   
Have you read /The Great Transformation/, by Karl Polanyi?  I think he 
agrees with you.  English society, controlled by the money class who 
brought down the Crown, created the Industrial Age through a series of 
political measures that closed the commons, forced the people off the 
land, and forced them to either go to the poor house or work in the 
factories to avoid starving to death. 


> Except that I don't understand what wounds you're
> talking about, and how they would allow permaculture to correct the
> Industrial Age.
>   
I spoke of the wounded volitional potential, the part of the human 
personality that is our choicemaker.  Some call it the will.  It's that, 
and more.  It's what allows us to gather available information and make 
a valid choice about our next act.   It gathers information from the 
mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, and social potentials, processes 
it (when it's functioning properly), and produces a valid choice.  The 
healed volitional potential enables us to create systems of societal 
transformation that are now defeated by the elites' ability to divide 
and conquer before critical social mass occurs in our social movements.  
The healed volition is not susceptible to sophistry.
> I like the whole thrust of your piece, there, but it's overall tone is
> somewhat loopy. Am I wrong? If I am, that's cool, just tell me why.
>   
It's completely loopy, looping around and around the political places of 
Permaculture.  It's an appeal to the nobility we are each not only 
capable of but need to bloom into to fulfill our true destinies in this 
form.  Nobility requires the ability to generate choices from within 
ourselves.  Part of Permaculture is educational.  What is taught is a 
political decision.  I would teach logic, ethics, and rhetoric foremost, 
as soon as children have reached the proper point of moral maturity.  We 
need good logic skills, strong ethics, and the ability to communicate in 
order to realize our nobility.

Thanks for responding.

Tommy Tolson
Austin, TX