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  • From: "Healing Hawk" <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: "'permaculture'" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] what is "politics" exactly...?
  • Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2007 22:15:20 -0600

Actual process of where we stand under the "free market" is documented in
Karl Polanyi's wonderful (but rather tough to read) book, _The Great
Transformation_. He documents how the people of England became "Labor"
against their will and how the US Constitution was written to create the
world's only market society, with citizens who have no power over their own
economic lives (p. 234).

When we wake (or perhaps "if" we wake) from the ecologically disconnected
consumer trance, we discover economic tyranny aided and abetted by a federal
politics designed to protect that tyranny. No one advocates freeing the
people. When he began talking about it, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was
assassinated. No one's talked about it since.

Liberation would mean a return to our natural selves. Some of us are no
longer "Labor," but all of us produce money somehow. How many of us produce
money by choice? If money were not an issue, what would you be doing that
you aren't doing now? Can't we support ourselves without having to play the
money game? Just about the sole motive for the Indian Wars was to force
Native tribes into the money economy. Black Elk talks about this in _Black
Elk Speaks_.

When we join the liberation conversation, we find that it is literally
millennia old. We had to be forced to become farmers in the so-called
"Agricultural Revolution," like we had to be forced to become "Labor" in the
"Industrial Revolution." Liberation means not being forced. Liberation
means being asked, and being heard if we say "no."

To me, liberation is inspiring. Paulo Friere says, in _Pedagogy of the
Oppressed_, that a process of praxis results in liberation. Action,
reflection, action, until liberation occurs. Politics has six aspects: the
volitional, the social, the mental, the physical, the emotional, and the
spiritual. No one that I know of talks about all of these aspects. It
seems like the question, "What is a Permaculture politics?" is more serious
than it appeared at first. Does anyone know of anyone who talks about a
holistic politics?

Tommy Tolson
Austin, TX


-----Original Message-----
From: permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Paul Cereghino
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 11:35 PM
To: permaculture
Subject: Re: [permaculture] what is "politics" exactly...?



Permaculture design (even as applied to politics) should focus on
analysis of actual processes and phenomena. Flows, source, sink,
etc... If natural systems are are the source of inspiration for
ecological design, what is the source of inspiration for political design.


Paul Cereghino





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