permaculture

[David Glober <david.glober@yahoo.com>]

Greetings,

I'm part of a local community group reviewing a design that's been
proposed that would include bioswales for stormwater filtration - not
exactly the same thing as swales we put in for rainwater capture and
growing trees - in an area that's already been designated for open space,
shoreline preservation and recreation.

Would any one know if this could prove to be an example of stacking
functions and multiple use, or is this something that is mutually
exclusive?

David Glober ~ San Francisco
Recent Permaculture Design Cert Grad
david.glober@yahoo.com

---



      
>From scott@permaculture.org  Thu Oct 30 14:51:47 2008
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Subject: Re: [permaculture] Trends in America
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In my mind this conversation is were the rubber hits the road in terms of
sustainability.  It is not sustainable for one percent of the population to
control 50% of the wealth or for 5% to control 70%.  The same is true of
land resource.  

 

In my youth (some 50 years ago) a 40 acre farm was sufficient to raise a
family send them to college, pay the doctor, and have an occasional outing.
Today that same landscape takes 1200 acres and that is still mortgaged to
the hilt. 

 

The 40 acres would still be sufficient if it were diversified, didn't use
commercial inputs, and used livestock rather than tractors. The labor hours
of the farm family would remain the same.  How did 30 family farms get
replaced by one 1200 acre farm in so short a time?  I think it was the
grinding wheels of Capitalism that replaced community supported agriculture
with commodity/debt driven agriculture. We now live in a trickle down world
economy.

 

What we are faced with as permaculturalists is to help invent the new
economic paradigm that replaces greed with neighborliness and "care of
people".  The transition from the existing system to the system of the near
future is going to be one of painfully realizing our proper place in the
world (a small one according to Bill Mollison), and repairing the damage
done since the industrial revolution, an amazingly short time given the
extent of our rapaciousness.

 

I suggest reading Gar Alperovitz's new book Unjust Deserts which does a good
job of describing the historical devolution of social and economic justice,
with some heartening news of existing solutions that give a glimpse of how
it might be in the future.  A lot of this is already in the Design Course -
Co-ops, Credit Unions, worker owned enterprises, land trusts and etc.

 

There is such an immediate knee jerk response to socialism, and communism
that one is forced to invent new words to describe a future system but the
root of both words - Socialism and communism should be a hint in the right
direction.

If one looks closely at the ethics of permaculture and the implications of
their implementation it might give pause to diehard capitalists or ownership
uber alles.

   

 

Scott Pittman

Director

Permaculture Institute

www.permaculture.org

 

-----Original Message-----
From: permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of kris kaul
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 9:50 AM
To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Trends in America

 

Toby,

 

I'm not sure this was the lesson you had to take home, although I am in
sympathy with it.  It's just that I remember from reading about
commonly-held property in the past that such systems were made to work well
through having individual responsibilities and, more importantly, individual
accountability.  Members would monitor each other's use of the resource (of
water, for instance, or a community woodlot).  So in that sense, the labels
on the mugs were functioning at least as much due to their ability to assign
individual accountability as actual ownership - if someone found a mug
sitting on a shelf, they'd know exactly who left it there!

 

Kris

 

--- On Wed, 10/29/08, permaculture-request@lists.ibiblio.org
<permaculture-request@lists.ibiblio.org> wrote:

 

Message: 9

Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:45:35 -0700

From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>

Subject: Re: [permaculture] Trends in America

To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>

Message-ID: <49092DDF.9070104@patternliteracy.com>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

 

A story I may have told before: On opening day of a PDC, the venue was 

kind enough to put out mugs, each with a participant's name on it. They 

asked that each person be responsible for rinsing and putting away their 

own mug. The system worked beautifully; the classroom stayed free of 

scattered mugs; each was back in the rack at the end of the day. Then, 

come our mid-class day off, the mugs were put through an industrial 

sterilizer and the labels were removed. They went back to the classroom 

unlabeled. Within a few days, mugs were everywhere--under chairs, on 

shelves, left outside, many full of molding tea leaves, and another 

couple of dozen mugs had been commandeered from elsewhere since no one 

could find a clean mug and it was easier to grab another from the stash. 

Soon almost every mug the place had was in our classroom, dirty and 

haphazardly stuck anywhere.

 

I was pretty surprised, since the participants seemed like decent folks. 

The lesson I took home was twofold: private ownership is one way to 

encourage responsibility toward resources, and, a culture that is used 

to private ownership is liable to behave irresponsibly toward resources 

held in common.

 

Toby

http://patternliteracy.com

 

 

 

      

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