permaculture

[Douglas Woodard <dwoodard@becon.org>]

Some other decentralized human systems are science, Islam and the early 
Irish church. They work or worked. Science and to a degree permaculture 
have the advantage of reality-testing. They're messy, but that's life.

I ran across a somewhat relevant quote from an American political scientist:

"Dememocracy is like a raft that never sinks, but then your feet are 
always in the water."

Doug Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada



Robert Waldrop wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "David Travis" <djtravis@hotmail.com>
> > Perhaps if permaculture had started out as being 
> > more >centralized and democratic (as opposed to 
> > decentralized and >autocratic a la Mollison), it 
> > would have developed the sort of >infrastructure 
> > needed to move beyond demo sites and a handful 
> >  >of NGO projects, but who can say?
>
> The present way that permaculture is "organized" 
> mimics natural systems.  Nature is not 
> centralized, nor does it work via a democratic 
> process.  Centralization promotes bureaucracy and 
> renders the organization vulnerable to leadership 
> mistakes.  Permaculture is not an organization, 
> but it certainly is an organism, or rather, a 
> collection of organisms.

[snip]