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  • From: Graham <grahamburnett@blueyonder.co.uk>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Kim S Robinson, Terraforming Earth & Permaculture
  • Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2007 02:43:58 +0000

can you ask him why Red Mars (which seems to be required reading in UK permaculture circles these days) gets so flippin boring round about page 400????

Keith Johnson wrote:
Excellent interview with Kim Stanley Robinson at http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/

I intend to publish an interview with him in the Activist. *What kinds of questions would you have for him?* (Seriously, I need some good questions if this is going to be a decent interview.) For example, What should permaculturists be doing to eliminate the hierarchy between rich and poor?

Does anybody have a way to contact him? He lives in Davis Ca. (BTW, I'm following up a lead that may result in contact...stay tuned.)

".*..if you think of yourself as terraforming Earth, and if you
think about sustainability, then you can start thinking about
/permaculture/ and what permaculture really means. It's not just
sustainable agriculture, but a name for a certain type of history.
Because the word /sustainability/ is now code for: let's make
capitalism work over the long haul, without ever getting rid of the
hierarchy between rich and poor and without establishing social
justice.*

/Sustainable development/, as well: that's a term that's been
contaminated. It doesn't even mean /sustainable/ anymore. It means:
let us continue to do what we're doing, but somehow get away with
it. By some magic waving of the hands, or some techno silver bullet,
suddenly we can make it all right to continue in all our current
habits. And yet it's not just that our habits are destructive,
they're not even satisfying to the people who get to play in them.
So there's a stupidity involved, at the cultural level."

*BLDGBLOG*: In other words, your lifestyle may now be carbon neutral
-- but was it really any good in the first place?

*Robinson*: Right. Especially if it's been encoding, or essentially
legitimizing, a grotesque hierarchy of social injustice of the most
damaging kind. And the tendency for capitalism to want to overlook
that -- to wave its hands and say: well, it's a system in which
eventually everyone gets to prosper, you know, the rising tide
floats all boats, blah blah -- well, this is just not true.

We should take the political and aesthetic baggage out of the term
/utopia/. I've been working all my career to try to redefine utopia
in more positive terms -- in more dynamic terms. People tend to
think of utopia as a perfect end-stage, which is, by definition,
impossible and maybe even bad for us. And so *maybe it's better to
use a word like /permaculture/, which not only includes /permanent/
but also /permutation/. Permaculture suggests a certain kind of
obvious human goal, which is that future generations will have at
least as good a place to live as what we have now.*

It's almost as if a science fiction writer's job is to represent the
unborn humanity that will inherit this place -- you're speaking
/from/ the future and /for/ the future. And you try to speak for
them by envisioning scenarios that show them either doing things
better or doing things worse -- but you're also alerting the
generations alive right now that these people have a voice in history.

The future needs to be taken into account by the current system,
which regularly steals from it in order to pad our ridiculous
current lifestyle. *

BLDGBLOG*: When it actually comes to designing the future, what will
permaculture look like? Where will its structures and ideas come from?

*Robinson*: Well, at the end of the 1960s and through the 70s, what
we thought -- and this is particularly true in architecture and
design terms -- was: OK, given these new possibilities for new and
different ways of being, how do we /design/ it? What happens in
architecture? What happens in urban design?

As a result of these questions there came into being a big body of
utopian design literature that's now mostly obsolete and out of
print, which had no notion that the Reagan-Thatcher
counter-revolution was going to hit. Books like /Progress As If
Survival Mattered/, /Small Is Beautiful/, /Muddling Toward
Frugality/, /The Integral Urban House/, /Design for the Real World/,
/A Pattern Language/, and so on. I had a whole shelf of those books.
Their tech is now mostly obsolete, superceded by more sophisticated
tech, but the ideas behind them, and the idea of appropriate
technology and alternative design: that needs to come back big time.
And I think it is.

This is one of the reasons I've been talking about climate change,
and the possibility of /abrupt/ climate change, as potentially a
good thing -- in that it forces us to confront problems that we were
going to sweep under the carpet for hundreds of years. Now,
suddenly, these problems are in our face and we have to deal. *And
part of dealing is going to be /design/.*

I don't think people fully comprehend what a gigantic difference
their infrastructure makes, or what it feels like to live in a city
with public transport, like Paris, compared to one of the big
autopias like southern California. The feel of existence is
completely different. And of course the carbon burn is also
different -- and the sense that everybody's in the same boat
together. This partly accounts for the difference between urban
voters and rural voters: rural voters -- or out-in-the-country
voters -- can imagine that they're somehow independent, and that
they don't rely on other people. Meanwhile, their entire tech is
built elsewhere. It's a fantasy, and a bad one as it leads to a
false assessment of the real situation.

Read the whole interview at
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/


--
Graham Burnett

Integrated Design for Local Environmental Resources

www.spiralseed.co.uk

www.grahamburnett.net






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