Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Conservatism revisited, and another try

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Conservatism revisited, and another try
  • Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 09:02:42 -0800 (PST)

Internet access today is worse than usual with a thunderstorm
brewing overhead. I don’t know if this made it to the list and how.´
So here it is again, just in case.

Lawrence,

Internet connection in my part of the woods (literally) is precarious
at best. I’ll just use the archives for a while to communicate with
you (that’s a page with text only that downloads pretty easily), until
I can figure out how to do all this unflagging and where.

>Where were you living at that time Dieter and how old were you
>then? Were you in North Korea or China then :-)) Hard to imagine
>such a scenario, that of you being in direct contact with Maoists,
>in Germany or Portugal. Were you living in East Germany then?

I sometimes forget that what is living memory to me is only known
from history books to many of you. One of the battle cries of those
days was “trust nobody on the other side of 30.” Now we are twice
that age. Yes, time passes quickly, like in dream.

Those smoke filled rooms I talked about where in Frankfurt (West
Germany, any Maoists in East Germany would have been in prison)
and London, but they could just as well have been in Paris or a few
dozen other European cities at the time. If you look at news footage
from those days, I’m sure you won’t have to look long to find pictures
of young bright students parading through the streets of Europe
wagging that little red book, at a time anybody who had an open
mind could have known about the horrors committed in it’s name in
China and Tibet. And such one-sided ignorance of the bright and
brilliant is by no means uncommon either. Take Voltaire, that brilliant
mind of French Enlightenment, he believed until nearly his death that
the political system of China presented an enlightened system of
government to be emulated by the countries of Europe, when some
of the more brutal practices of that regime would have left the worst
tyrants flabbergast.

_We_ were all young man and women of good intentions with
the best of all Worlds in mind, many of us still are, even though not
that young anymore. Some were Maoists, some Trotskyites, some
just Marxists, socialists, hippies, pacifists, freaks, dropouts, you
name it. The last time I saw Che Guevarra portraits carried through
the streets was as recent as 10 years ago in Lisbon. To the Maoists
all others were no better than lackeys of the bourgeoisie.
It is difficult to give all that context in a short email without
exhausting people’s attention. That may be why my comments,
taken out of context, raised a bit of a passion. So let me spell it
out to avoid misunderstandings: I’m NOT a “conservative”,
never have been, never will be. I’m NOT defending the ills
of present day consumerism or corporate culture (the political
left in Europe has internalized the critique of consumerism for
at least 40 years, and what is new about “peak oil“ is that present
day reserves are calculated to be far superior to those estimated
by the Club of Rome nearly 30 years ago). I have always been
critical of the establishment, but that doesn’t mean I have to buy
wholesale into alternative ideologies. If I can point out the problems
of present day society, why should I have to keep numb about a very
obvious one-sidedness of many of the alternatives presented?
Do we do permaculture, in particular, or sustainable forms of
living, in general, a service by glossing over apparent contradictions
or bias that lead to discussions out of touch with any reality?
I should think not. In fact a critical discussion is the only way of
assuring that solutions have a chance of changing things for the
better.

I remember one incident in the early days of the Green party in
Germany, perhaps 20 or more years ago. At the time it was just
a loose movement reuniting all types of people, almost, but not
quite as loose as permaculture is now. A local group of the newly
formed party, probably constituted by progressive psychoanalysts
or the like, decided to hold a meeting for paedophiles. The party
leaders managed to block the move in the last moment. A green
party seen to be championing the cause of paedophiles wouldn’t
have stood much chance in an election. Now, just to avoid any
further misunderstanding, this doesn’t mean that I accuse people
here of being paedophiles or Chinese red guards, does it? I’m
trying to point out a type of radical thinking that can destroy a
movement even though in its internal logic it has the best of
intentions.

Lastly, my cultural background and experience probably differs
largely from that of most on this list. But a different perspective,
if we are willing to admit it, can sometimes be useful to get a more
complete picture of a situation.

Cheers, Dieter


---------------------------------
Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it
now.
>From toby@patternliteracy.com Mon Feb 18 17:12:12 2008
Return-Path: <toby@patternliteracy.com>
X-Original-To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
Delivered-To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
Received: by lists.ibiblio.org (Postfix, from userid 3002)
id 2D9E34C029; Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:12:12 -0500 (EST)
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.3 (2007-08-08) on malecky
X-Spam-Level:
X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.0 required=5.0 tests=none autolearn=disabled
version=3.2.3
Received: from mtiwmhc13.worldnet.att.net (mtiwmhc13.worldnet.att.net
[204.127.131.117])
by lists.ibiblio.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D08E14C026
for <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>;
Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:12:07 -0500 (EST)
Received: from toby-hemenways-powerbook59.local
(h-67-101-4-244.sttnwaho.dynamic.covad.net[67.101.4.244])
by worldnet.att.net (mtiwmhc13) with ESMTP
id <2008021822120611300k7ruve>; Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:12:07 +0000
Message-ID: <47BA02B5.3050202@patternliteracy.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:12:05 -0800
From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (Macintosh/20071031)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
References: <d65.202d347f.34e6efec@cs.com> <47B59EB7.2020302@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <47B59EB7.2020302@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [permaculture] conservatism/food
X-BeenThere: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.9
Precedence: list
Reply-To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
List-Id: permaculture <permaculture.lists.ibiblio.org>
List-Unsubscribe: <http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture>,
<mailto:permaculture-request@lists.ibiblio.org?subject=unsubscribe>
List-Archive: <https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/permaculture>
List-Post: <mailto:permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
List-Help: <mailto:sympa@lists.ibiblio.org?subject=HELP>
List-Subscribe: <http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture>,
<mailto:permaculture-request@lists.ibiblio.org?subject=subscribe>
X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:12:12 -0000


Harmon Seaver wrote:
> By 2015, China alone will need 100% of the world's oil supply. But so
> will India.
But that's based on a straight-line projection that China's growth will
continue to increase at 8% a year. Expensive oil will quench--is already
quenching--their growth in a hurry. Straight-line projections are always
wrong. They'll get about the same share they are getting now.
> We are going to see a
> situation in the US where if you aren't growing your own food, you won't
> have any.
I disagree. The US produces 4000 calories of food per capita per day,
and uses only 10% of its oil consumption to grow, ship, process, and
cook all that food. That means we can use 5% of today's oil supply to
provide a basic 2000 calorie diet in the silly, inefficient way we
currently do it. I think we'll cut back hugely on all the stupid things
we do with oil and wind up using the 30-50% of all energy consumption
that was traditionally used for food production before oil.

Also, food is a low-emergy process, as HT Odum has documented. Running a
bank or a fire department is far more complex than even our current
wasteful way of growing food.

Researchers at Cornell showed that all the calories necessary to feed
the 225,000 people in Rochester NY could be grown within 16 miles of the
city on currently available land. We'll go back to locally grown food,
suburban market gardens on all those 1/4-acre backyards farmed by people
who have lost their commuter jobs. We've got plenty of land to grow all
our food.

P.H. Ainsworth, in a great book called "Agriculture: A New Approach"
(Lawrence, you'd love it) cited research showing that in 1800 one
British farmer could feed 50 people. So the argument that it takes oil
to feed a lot of people is oil-company propaganda.

We'll lose high emergy systems like banking, electricity, medicine, etc,
long before we'll lose a system that can be done by anyone, with simple
tools. Food will be the last system to fail.

I've got refs for all those numbers if anyone wants them.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com







Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page