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  • From: "rafter t. sass" <liberationecology@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Cc: stella@mcn.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Answers from Starhawk
  • Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2007 06:54:49 -0500

Hey Starhawk (and Pc world)

It sounds like you are doing great work.

The information about New Orleans is helpful - I love to see people in the permaculture movement (and plain ol' folks too) responding to a call put out by people in need.

The harder part comes when there is no explicit, accessible call to respond to. What do we do then? How do we relate our work to the larger society?

I propose that - if want to make a movement that is socially regenerative, as well as ecologically - then we need to systematically seek out leadership, accountability, influence, and direction, from other communities. Not just any other communities, but (1) those with which we are interconnected in concrete ways - which actually, at this point in history, means everyone, and (2) that are marked by having less power and freedom than our home community. And then, *in the context of that leadership,* to channel resources to that community.

I'm not so concerned with process within groups, and within communities. There is plenty of great work being done on that front, and I'm glad for it. I'm concerned with this larger notion of process - that between, rather than within, communities.

If we accept the ideas here...
let me just say that for me, now, the ideal is not always ‘flat’ power, but
rather, power that is fairly earned and accountable—earned by commitment and
by taking on and fulfilling responsibilities, earned by making mistakes,
admitting them and learning from them, and at times, earned in the more
traditional ways by study, acquiring skills and experience. That’s the kind
of power we attempt to embody, model and teach in our EAT courses.

...and we also acknowledge that our communities are all part of a larger system, that we participate in, that allocates resources disproportionately to some groups, and away from others, for reasons that have NOTHING to do with "fairly earned and acceptable," (and we do all acknowledge this, permies, don't we?)...

...then I propose that - if we are looking to regenerate our social system as well as ecosystems - then we need start *practicing democracy.* In a democracy (the way I think of it) folks who have more power, have it because they've been empowered to act in the interest of - and more importantly - BY the folks with less.

We have all been subject to some very profound socialization to seek leadership from those who already have power - often meaning ourselves - and to do everything BUT seek out leadership from folks who have less power than us. But this is just exactly what it will take to reverse the terrible trajectory of our global system - that of an ever-increasing gap between the most and the least powerful, grinding away for 1000s of years. Since our relative power and wealth depends directly on the relative powerlessness and poverty of other communities, asking those communities how we should be using all these resources would be a great way to practice "Fair Share."

We can have a permaculture movement that does this. We already do it, when we can, when we aren't too distracted, when we are particularly inspired, or when there is a call to respond to. What we by and large DON'T do is make it a regular part of the practice and teaching of permaculture. Let's make it part of how we do things. This, more than anything, is the permaculture movement I want to be a part of.

Unashamed plug: If anyone wants me, or a collaborator, to come and teach a unit on this, particularly in a Pc course, or to train a trainer, that can almost certainly be arranged.

Happy Year's End to All,
rafter t. sass
The Liberation Ecology Project
liberationecology.org
518-567-7407



On Dec 15, 2007, at 12:21 AM, Starhawk wrote:
HI Rafter, your questions were forwarded to me, and I’m delighted to have
this opportunity to sound off on one of my favorite subjects— power! I’m not
on the listserve where this came up, although perhaps I should be, so I’d
appreciate your forwarding this answer to the list. And thanks, Keith, for
forwarding our appeal.



Just to clarify, Earth Activist Training is an educational program. We
teach permaculture design certificate courses with a special emphasis on
organizing and activism, and a grounding in earth based spirituality. The
projects and programs listed below are examples of things our graduates have
done or are doing—they are not all sponsored by us nor controlled by us.
And there’s a wide variety of ways those projects came about. For example,
in New Orleans, a local resident named Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther,
who lives in an area of the city that didn’t flood, put out a call for
activists to come down and help organize after the hurricane, and quite a
number of EAT graduates did. Four or five of them remained for a year or
more, lending help in many areas from general organizing to bioremediation
to trauma support, as needed. Their direction came from the larger
community that was there, the needs of returning residents, and the
collective process of the activists with Common Ground Relief, the
organization that formed.



Other graduates have gone back to their home communities, in Brazil, South
India, the Phillipines, etc. to work on projects there. Their
accountability is to their own communities and goals, and that’s where
direction and leadership comes from.



As far as EAT itself is concerned, myself and our coordinator, Eileen Rose,
make many of the overall organizational decisions after consulting with the
other core teachers. But she and I are the only ongoing staff, and the
other teachers, frankly, don’t want to be bothered with questions like,
“Should the website background be green or blue?”



We feel accountable, first, to our communities, the people we live with and
near, the activist communities and the global and local permaculture
communities. We have good relations and strong connections with the other
major teachers and groups in our area, and coteach with many of them or
guest teach at each others’ courses. We also feel accountable to our
students—to share with them tools and knowledge in an empowering, clear, and
useful way, to help them further their own goals and become more effective
earth healers and organizers, and to give them the grounding in permaculture
that the international community expects from those who earn a design
certificate.



Beyond that, we have a commitment to make these tools available to those who
have the least access to money and power in the larger society. It’s easy
to say that, but not always easy to do. We attempt to keep our courses
accessible to those without money by offering scholarships and work trade,
for example. In practice, the scholarships mostly go to activists who
generally come from more privileged backgrounds but have chosen to devote
themselves to service and social change rather than jobs and money. The
kids from the inner city, like Bayview Hunters Point, are not going to come
take a two week course in Cazadero, even with a scholarship. It’s just too
far out of their zone of familiarity, and many of them have kids of their
own and can’t take two weeks away from work or families. It’s taken us
time, but we have found many ways to support that community in their green
aspirations—by providing knowledge and contacts to key people, by sharing
skills and teaching workshops in the community garden, by developing a
course in a different format, on weekends, oriented to working people and
bringing it into the neighborhood, and most of all, by years of relationship
building, which in my experience is ultimately the only way it can be done.



I also have many years of experience working in groups and organizations
with ideals of what I prefer to call shared power. They range from feminist
collectives going back to the sixties and seventies to groups that define
themselves as anarchists, to spiritual groups and living collectives. I’ve
thought a lot about this issue, and written two books, Dreaming the Dark and
Truth or Dare, Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery that reflect
different stages of my journey with power.



There’s a model of shared power we drew from those early feminist days and
from direct action groups, where all decisions are made by consensus, in
small groups, affinity groups or working groups, and then by representatives
in spokescouncils, and where the ideal was no top-down leadership at all.
I’ve seen that model work phenomenally well to empower people in situations
where everyone was taking equal or comparable risks together.



But I’ve also experienced the difficulties groups get into when they attempt
to transpose that model into other situations, where real differentials of
skill or experience of commitment exist, or where groups continue over long
periods of time. I could write a book about the issues that develop in
those situations—I may well write a book about it, but in order to avoid
writing that book at this moment in this post which is already overly long,
let me just say that for me, now, the ideal is not always ‘flat’ power, but
rather, power that is fairly earned and accountable—earned by commitment and
by taking on and fulfilling responsibilities, earned by making mistakes,
admitting them and learning from them, and at times, earned in the more
traditional ways by study, acquiring skills and experience. That’s the kind
of power we attempt to embody, model and teach in our EAT courses.



I hope this answers your questions, and thanks for opening up this always
fascinating topic, Do cc me if this discussion carries on, or let me know
how to get on the listserve if that makes sense,
Starhawk>
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: rafter t. sass <liberationecology@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 12, 2007 7:40 AM
Subject: Open response to fundraising appeal
To: info@earthactivisttraining.org, earthactivisttraining@gmail.com


Dear Eaters,

Keith Johnson recently forwarded your fundraising letter to the
international permaculture listserve at ibiblio. It's a good letter,
and it looks like you are doing some great work. I posted a response
to that appeal on the listserve, with some questions for you, and for
us as a movement. I realized that it would be worthwhile to share that
posting with y'all more directly. It's copied in below, with a couple
edits and additions for clarity.

Hope this finds you well,

rafter t. sass
The Liberation Ecology Project
liberationecology.org
518-567-7407

--------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------
-------------------
Because there is an appeal for support here, I'll ask of Starhawk,
and her projects, the same question I try and teach all of my
students to ask, of any project that they consider supporting, or
creating, or identifying with...

Where is the leadership for these projects coming from?

The question isn't about internal democratic process (though that is
a worthwhile question) it's about external relationships, between the
project and larger communities. Who initiates? Who decides? Who
shapes the objectives of the project?

We live in a social system where resources flow in one direction,
from the many to the few, and control flows in the opposite
direction, cascading outwards from the few onto the many. In such a
system, inequality will always increase over the long duration - even if
the folks with power are doing progressive, sustainable, humanitarian work.

To reverse that pattern and begin to flatten power differences,
projects and communities can systematically seek out control from
those groups with *less* power and freedom than they. And I mean here
all those aspects of "control" that are worth seeking:
leadership, influence, direction, and accountability.

This isn't easy to do. It goes against some very deep implicit and explicit
social norms all around. It takes time and energy. So it is only worth doing
if you are actually interested in flattening power differences, i.e.
with fostering social
health. I do find myself sometimes supporting projects that don't do
this - but I
don't consider those projects directly relevant for the *social* well-being
of our society.

What I do hope is that we can begin to ask this question of all the
projects that we encounter - where is the leadership coming from? I
hope that in this way, by learning to look for the flow of control in
the same way that we look for the flow of energy, we can create a
permaculture movement that is, on balance, relevant for creating a
truly healthy, democratic society. I don't think we are there yet,
particularly not in Europe and the US.

So to Starhawk and Penny and the others at EAT, and to all of us who
seek to use
permaculture to transform our world: where are we looking for
leadership? To whom are we accountable?

This is not a rhetorical or trick question. I really don't
imagine I know what Starhawk's answer would be - or will be, if she
reads this, if she answers. If it seems like I'm singling EAT out for
special attention, it's because I'm responding to an appeal for support
that makes no mention of what - for me - is becoming the primary
question.

all the best,
rafter t. sass
The Liberation Ecology Project
liberationecology.org
518-567-7407



My friend and colleague Starhawk recently sent out this appeal for
support that I think you will find worth reading.
Keith

Dear friends,

Many years ago, I wrote a book called /The Fifth Sacred Thing,/ that
envisioned a transformed, diverse and green San Francisco in a world
divided by war and ecological collapse. I go back to that story a lot,
these days, as both the worst and some of the best aspects of it seem to
be coming true.

That San Francisco of the future is a place where streams flow freely
through garden streets lined with fruit trees, where celebrations and
rituals honor a multiplicity of cultures, where humans have learned to
heal and live in harmony with nature.

Now, I spend a lot of my time not just writing about that vision, but
trying to make it a reality by teaching the skills of ecological design.
In 2002, together with Penny Livingston-Stark, I began teaching Earth
Activist Trainings, because I saw so many enthusiastic, deeply committed
people on fire with the desire to change the world, but often without a
clear sense of what the solutions are.

Over the last six years, Earth Activist Trainings have loosed hundreds
of fired-up permie potentizers onto the world, seeding communities
across the globe with the skills and knowledge of regenerative design.
Here's just a few of the things they've done:

Disaster Relief and Bioremediation:

In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, EAT alumni became core
organizers of the grassroots Common Ground Relief efforts, ran the
trauma support and counseling program at the clinic, and started a
bioremediaiton project to clean toxins from soil using microorganisms,
plants and fungi.

Sustainable Development in the Third World:

Rainwater catchment in Bolivia, a model permaculture farm in Brazil,
community development and tsunami relief in south Indian fishing
villages, sustainability programs in the rural Phillipines, women's
programs in a permaculture institute in the West Bank of Palestine.

Urban Permaculture;

Rejuvenating a community garden in the Bayview, the poorest area of San
Francisco; living and working in the L.A. Ecohouse, growing food in the
projects of Miami, transforming intersections into gathering places in
Portland; model backyard gardens and community power-down programs in
Iowa City; youth programs in poverty stricken downtown Detroit.

And much, much more than we can fit on this page. You know as well as I
do that the world is at a crucial turning point right now. Finally, the
general public gets it that climate change is happening and the waters
are rising around us. But we still haven't begun to make changes on the
scale and with the speed that's needed. The media is full of green news
and the stores are full of green products, but we can't buy our way out
of looming ecological collapse. No one technology or technique can
save us.

That's where we come in. There's a pressing need to train people in the
art of designing flows, links and connections, creating systems that
meet human needs while healing and regenerating the environment around
us. And that's just what we do.

Please help us continue this work. We have three residential courses
planned for 2008, an Urban Permaculture course over a series of six
weekends, a new Youth Course, and a Sustainable Skills Tour with our
newly built EAT bus.

To do all this, we need your help. EAT has had generous funding which
has allowed us, in turn, to be generous with financial aid. For each of
our courses we've provided ten to twenty thousand dollars of work trade
and scholarships, which in turn makes it possible for activists and
low-income students to attend. But that funding is now at the end of its
cycle, and we need help from new sources to continue being able to say
'yes', not 'no', to those who want this training.

Many of you are out there, right now, doing your regenerative activism
on a daily basis. (Thanks!) And you may not have a lot of financial
wealth to share. But, please, think about the value of Earth Activist
Training. And think about how desperately we need more activists of this
caliber. Then, give whatever you can. The results of even a small pledge
of $10/month will be exponentially effective in the big picture. Because
every dollar you donate will help train more passionate, intelligent
people to cleanse the soil, heal the water, share their skills, and
restore the balance – in countless and priceless ways.

Please consider a donation right now of:

$1700 (provides one full scholarship for a two week course.)

$800 (subsidizes one work trader)

$100 - $250 (provides some hands-on supplies for a course)

Just to be clear, we welcome donations of every size and kind. Large.
Small. One-time. Quarterly. Annual. Sporadic. We gratefully accept it
all. *Make a monthly pledge for exponential impact. Join the EAT
Mycelium Fund Monthly Giving Circle.
*
And now we invite you to choose the way you will contribute to this most
necessary educational endeavor.

Donate online at http://earthactivisttraining.org/donate.html
<http://earthactivisttraining.org/donate.html>

or send checks to

Earth Activist Training
POB 251
Sierraville CA 96126

Thanks! Your generosity is a crucial part of the solution.

Starhawk

Earth Actiist Trainings

www.earthactivisttraining.org
www.starhawk.org

P.S. Don't worry—I haven't stopped writing. In fact, my holiday gift to
you is an expanded, updated vision of San Francisco of /The Fifth Sacred
Thing/. It's too long to send, but you can find it at www.starhawk.org/
<http://www.starhawk.org/> . Look on the left sidebar for "Latest
Essay".






rafter t. sass
The Liberation Ecology Project
liberationecology.org
518-567-7407






  • [permaculture] Answers from Starhawk, rafter t. sass, 12/25/2007

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