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  • From: "Scott Pittman" <scott@permaculture.org>
  • To: "'permaculture'" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] politics and permies
  • Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2007 16:10:26 -0700

I don't know what email you read Stella but if it was mine you did a fine
job of misinterpreting it in your response. So I will take it point by point
for you....


-----Original Message-----


Stella Wrote:
given what ONE Ghandi was able to do, or one Martin Luther King, in
terms of social change .. I think we should seriously ask ourselves
why, with so many permaculturists loose ... we haven´t re-designed
society yet.

Scott wrote:
Because the conditions that obtained during both Ghandi and King's time were
different than ours. Just as the work of Ghandi and King was accomplished
over many many years, so too our permaculture "re-design" will and is taking
time.


Stella wrote:
it´s only a revolutionary system of design if some revolution actually
happens.

Scott wrote:
There has never been a revolution that happened overnight. Karl Marx wrote
his tome many years prior to the Cuban revolution, and that revolution is
still revealing itself - unfolding over time.

Perhaps it is only when one thinks of revolution as the overthrow of a
government and way of thinking that the act is valid; to my mind we are in
the midst of a major change that I would call revolutionary in terms of its
long term impact, and permaculture is certainly in the forefront of that
movement.

Stella wrote:
evaluations are not necessarily excercises in one upmanship, nor
put-downs of anyone.
Maybe they are just evaluations. They can be used to improve the
design, instead of dismissing the people who aren´t feeling served by
the design as emotional, backward or not seeing the 'real' reality
(i.e. yours).

Scott wrote:
Your previous email did not present this as an evaluation but as a profound
fact - I disagreed with it as a factual statement. And does evaluation in
your lexicon read as opinion? I certainly didn't take Lucy's statement as a
put down but a sweeping generalization of third world versus first world
perception of permaculture. While this is great for dramatic effect in
front of an audience it does not necessarily lead to any profound
understanding or action. I don't recall mentioning anything about a design
being emotional or backward, just that I saw things differently. You seem
to be hell bent on putting meaning to my words that aren't mine so they must
be yours or at least triggered something that really got you going.


Stella wrote:
And I really hope we're well beyond the attitudes that if feelings are
involved the people having them must be irrational, or what they say
isn´t ALSO 'real'. In this case the very opposite is very likely
true: centuries of brutal colonization doesn´t make you just angry, it
also makes you very perceptive of the subtleties of the workings of the
system that has your people enslaved.

Scott wrote:
It feels as if this is at the heart of your concerns - that I am somehow
dissing emotional or feeling statements as invalid. That is your projection
on my words and perhaps you should reread them. I'm saying that it may feel
that way but it isn't necessarily so! The whole bit about brutal
colonization, and slavery is another dramatic ploy to carry your argument
and doesn't do you justice. If you think about it we are all colonized, we
all are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and we all have to
save ourselves from our historic past no one gets a free pass.

Stella says:
Maybe we should just listen.
It would be very strange if the opressed and those benefiting from the
opression actually agreed on 'realities'.

Scott says:
This is an incredible materialistic rhetorical statement that tries to
induce guilt in lieu of any thing substantive to say. It would have been
more honest to call me the oppressor and that I should agree on the
oppressed view of reality. I am not and I consider that the reality of
Lucy's statement is as I stated it in my original email.

To try to use emotional and rhetorical language and imagery to put down an
opinion that you do not share is demeaning to honest dialog.

Scott Pittman
Director
Permaculture Institute
www.permaculture.org











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