permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

Marjory wrote:
> The absolute best thing you can do for your community is to quit 
> teaching until you have implemented a design that provides at least half 
> of your food and income needs, and all of your shelter and water needs.  
Guess I better stop teaching, then. So should most of us.

Pardon my continuing curmudgeonliness, but formulas like that are not 
permaculture--they are blanket prescriptions done without assessment of 
individual needs or resources. Nothing in permaculture suggests that you 
need to grow food yourself. Instead, we need to make sure that our food 
needs are taken care of in a sustainable, ethical manner, and there are 
many ways to do that. Same with shelter, water, and all the invisible 
needs too. A permaculturist always has multiple ways of meeting 
important functions. If someone is a great builder and a lousy gardener, 
it would be foolish for them to beat their head against the wall trying 
to grow food. They'd quickly abandon the whole effort, saying 
"permaculture doesn't work for me!" Or they could build wonderful 
shelter for others and trade or use the income to pay for local, healthy 
food.

Permaculture is not about taking care of your own needs by yourself. 
It's about creating relationships among the parts of a community so that 
the community meets its needs in a sustainable way. And that community 
can be a household, a village, a bioregion, or planet.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com