permaculture

["Healing Hawk" <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

The Buddhist koan goes: how does man live without killing?  The only answer
I have heard of is becoming a detritovore, and living off dead stuff, as
crabs and vultures do.
That seems to violate every cultural norm of food I can think of.  I'm not
going to cook with wood so I doubt I'm going to eat dead critters I find.
Maybe cook something with a solar oven.  Sushi doesn't do it for me.  But I
can see fallen fruit, vegetables, nuts, berries, etc.  Gatherer/hunter
sounds better and better, to me.  

Nature is a higher life form, a metaphysically ultimate lifeform,
independent of human abstractions and expectations.  It preceded us and,
most scientists seem to hold, will succeed us.  I'm not so certain.  Has
another species been able to cause global climate change in something on the
order of three centuries?  According to my values, it is not acceptable to
harm nature.  I'm not certain what is allowed and what isn't, but Andy
Fisher, in _Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life_
maintains that after we reclaim our own "self guidance by an inner source"
we are enabled to bear the pain of technological dominance of nature and to
then undertake the social actions that will reclaim nature as the garden in
which we can transcend our present economized and technologized reality.
After that, the parameters of life become more clear, I suspect.  The fact
seems to be that we in the US are embedded in a culture with a three hundred
year history of waging war on nature and that has had to have effects on our
psyches, individual and collective.  Ecopsychology says we need to heal from
that.  I think that's probably correct, from my experience of feeling the
loneliness of the old-growth trees in Hendy Grove.  

"Thou shall not kill," the Commandment said.  I've surely violated that
commandment.  I've done it so much that I can't do it anymore unless it's a
survival issue.  A Sun Dance chief told me at the Utah Naraya (the Shoshone
Ghost Dance) in 2001 that my country had no honor and I needed to forgive
myself for being betrayed into waging a resource war.  The Pentagon Papers
said it was about oil, tin, and rubber.  Mobil wanted to drill in the South
China Sea in 1959.  When Bill Clinton normalized relations with Vietnam,
ExxonMobil started drilling operations.  After killing for that, my lifetime
dosage is used up.  I can't "just do it" anymore.  

The easy acceptance of regular killing lies beyond my capacity.  I can't
attend that many funerals.  That's the difference between me and you, a
profound difference.  I have not ever heard any lifeform tell me it was okay
to kill them.  They wanted to live on, to live happily, the way nature meant
for them to live.  I would probably kill another human who is trying to kill
me or someone I love, but I don't know if I will survive it.  I suspect it
may be just me.  

That's the best response I can manage now.  I hope it contains what you
wanted to know.  If not, keep writing, and I'll keep responding.

Tommy Tolson
Austin, TX
 

-----Original Message-----
From: permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Kate Halstead
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 7:44 PM
To: 'permaculture'
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Apology

Obviously I don't understand this whole concept...how does one live/eat
without killing or taking something that belongs to another? [I don't think
humans have the corner on that dilemma.] Or are trees a higher life-form
than all other entities on the planet and therefore more deserving of a
'don't touch' status than, say a beet or a blueberry bush?

I too, have listened to trees, other plants, and animals but they've always
told me that if I ask respectfully for permission before taking
fruit/wood/nuts from the tree, netting the fish, breaking the egg, or
cutting the head of broccoli, (and permission is granted), the
taking/killing becomes part of the cycle of life...and also means I must
give something to the planet in return. I've never heard them say I could
not touch them in any way to benefit my being or that of those around me.

I've also heard a tree sigh with great relief after we cut another one down
that had been blown against it in a storm and threatened to take down it and
a number of other trees with the next good blow. I'm convinced the tree
being cut knew that it was being sacrificed for the greater good of the
other trees nearby and therefore granted us permission to take it down and
put it to another use.

Kate

-----Original Message-----
From: permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Healing Hawk
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 12:58 PM
To: 'permaculture'
Subject: [permaculture] Apology

I humbly apologize for my clumsiness.  I was hurtful and that's wrong.

 

I come from an ecospiritual place that recognizes the sacredness of trees.
In a class at New College in 2001, I learned to listen to a seven hundred
year old valley oak on the bank of Spring Lake, a man-made flood control
lake.  The tree was dying, it told me, but I couldn't grasp why.  We spent a
weekend in Hendy Grove, and I heard the six or eight old-growth redwoods
tell me of their loneliness for their forest.  On the Laguna de Santa Rosa,
another ancient valley oak told me that its roots never got dry.  I didn't
know what that meant until I read an account of why the valley oaks on the
Laguna were dying.  Their roots need to dry out for most of the year, which
they did until the Santa Rosa sewer plant began spraying treated water on
the land where the valley oaks stood.  The valley oaks were dying so the
humans in Santa Rosa could shit in the drinking water, flush, and think no
more about it.  After grad school and getting divorced, I went to Spring
Lake to see that old valley oak.  It was gone - nothing but a stump.  The
stump did not speak to me.  

 

That's what came up for me over the wood burning.  Another way humans have
subjugated nature to human use, I thought.  Well, I guess I didn't think
much.  I just felt anger, more anger than the presenting situation
warranted, perhaps, and I started writing before remembering that each human
on this listserve is also a sacred being.  

 

I don't give a damn about facts and figures.  I want to step off of nature's
throat.  Richard Heinberg, as brilliant a person as I've ever met and my
primary teacher at New College in 2001 (but not for the tree class - that
was one of the classes in the Environmental Arts and Education
concentration), used the word detritovore (sp?) to describe a way of living
with nature that did no harm.  His book, A New Covenant with Nature, amazed
me, before The Party's Over, in 2002.  I took Richard's "Energy" class but I
don't recall ever talking about wood burning.  I'm horrified to learn that
wood burning is such a good thing.  

 

I don't go out and harvest a human limb when I'm hungry.  To me, trees are
sacred living beings, so woodlot management is something else, to me.  I
remind myself of a right-to-lifer at an abortion clinic.  It's not pleasant
to glimpse myself as an intolerant bigot.  But I would not be tolerated for
harvesting humans when I'm hungry (why do we tolerate the military
industrial complex doing it?).  I personally would do that before I would
cut a tree.  I'm not going to do either, of course.  But there's where
Permaculture and I diverge.  It's an edge.  Hmm.  

 

Tommy Tolson

Austin, TX        

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