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  • From: "healinghawk" <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: "'permaculture'" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] politics and permies
  • Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2007 19:46:42 -0600

Fuller was right. But someone has to keep existing reality from destroying
the resiliency that allows for new models. I've said it before, and I'll
say it again: New College of California teaches the Five-Fold Path of
Healing, Consciousness Change, Resistance, Alternatives, and Building
Community. I received my Permaculture design certificate after the first
Earth Activist Training in Sonoma County, CA in 2001, taught by Penny
Livingston and Starhawk, with guest appearances by local wise folk.

The current global struggle concerns re-visioning the concept someone named
"reality." Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme say that humans are now leaving the
Industrial Age and entering the Ecological Age. Ecology did not enter the
consideration until recently. However, ecological reality remains
controversial only in the minds of power holders in the tattered, morally
bankrupt remnants of the Industrial Age who own and control most of the
lawyers, guns, and money.

Ecology talk led inevitably to "descent," i.e., leaving a false paradigm of
infinite abundance provided by someone/thing other than nature for an
ecologically supported paradigm of living within ecosystemic carrying
capacity. Abundance lost its ethereal quality, taking on new meaning
measured in resilience, defined as the distance from a threshold. Crossing
that threshold ushers in a new regime where the old rules no longer work and
the current order may no longer enjoy ecological support.

Politics, at its essential level, concerns itself with who in a given
organization gets what, if anything, of the common wealth. What we now
witness is an unprecedented assault on the common wealth. Called
privatization, the process converts the common wealth into private property,
denying access to all but the holders of fancy papers drawn up in the
offices of lawyers. Karl Polanyi documented privatization's genesis in _The
Great Transformation_. He predicted the destruction of human society by the
"free market."

No one listened. In Australia, we see where this goes. A free market
government has been thrown out and an ecologically conscious government has
taken over. The US is poised to do the same thing in 2008, if the 2008
election is, unlike the last two, nearly fair. Permaculture is, in the
final analysis (I think), a way for humans to learn how to leave the cycle
of death and join the cycle of life. Politics is how, after critical mass
exists, that wisdom is lived out in reality.

Tommy Tolson
Austin, TX





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