permaculture

[<fdnokes@hotmail.com>]

People took these books and tried to make a religion of them.

That does not change the fact that they are about human intelligence.  
The way to read them is not to think who wrote this and can I believe it, 
rather to take it under the advisement of your own intelligence.

As Seth points out, much of the intellect is inherently oriented toward the 
social.
Somehow, I have evolved with a little more insulation to this aspect than 
most, I suppose.
I cannot subscribe to a culture that is a 'respecter of persons'.
Such a culture is inherently bigoted.
Thinking something is right or wrong because of who said it is just not using 
our own natural intelligence.

Frances
>From mtriplett@bctonline.com  Mon Dec 14 13:30:42 2009
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From: "Mitch Triplett" <mtriplett@bctonline.com>
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Subject: Re: [permaculture] work - was  the gardener's shadow...
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Thanks Lee.  All excellent points.  To try to be more clear...

My post wasn't directed at you personally.  It was more about the frequency
with which I hear/read the 'design to recline' maxim vs. something like
'make plans to use your hands'.

It's been fairly obvious over the past weeks that many folks' posts are
biased toward their particular way of practicing Pc.  Nothing wrong with
that.  As an aside, we're just getting started with the establishment phase
- we don't have livestock (perhaps someday), we won't have children to home
school, we haven't installed irrigation (again, perhaps someday)...  These
were just examples off the top of my head.

We are trying to design a labor:produce ratio that will continue to favor
the latter more and more (to a point) because I know full well that what I'm
doing now is absolutely not sustainable in the long run.  And the further we
can tip that ratio toward the produce side of the scale, the better off our
successors will be too.  After four years of living here, I just don't see
any other way of getting us to where we want to be without an enormous
amount of sweat.  I can't imagine the insane amount of work anyone involved
in economic-Pc, legal-Pc, etc. must be doing to get their voices heard.
Yikes.

I watch the wildlife that grace our property as often as I can.  The 6 deer
that commute past our house every 2-3 days spend much of their waking lives
working to stay live, either foraging or fleeing.  They work hard.  We work
hard.  Fortunately, we're all on the same team.

Like the deer, we play too.  Sometimes not as often as we'd like, but for
the most part enough to keep us from feeling like we're indentured to the
property - more like a calling than servitude.  If the best fertilizers are
footprints and shadows, we should strive to cast them often.  The deer are
great role models.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

Mitch Triplett
Tri-Pearl Family Forest
Member - CCFFA/OSWA & OTFS
Associate Member - FSC

-----Original Message-----
From: permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Lee Flier
Sent: Monday, December 14, 2009 9:13 AM
To: permaculture
Subject: Re: [permaculture] work - was the gardener's shadow...

Well Mitch, I suppose this speaks once again to the value of having an
actual PDC as opposed to taking a few bits out of contexts where they
might be easily misinterpreted. :P  Never were the comments I quoted
meant to imply that a permaculture site isn't a lot of work.  I quoted
them simply to address Frances' specific concerns about remembering to
slow down and reflect and observe what is happening in the garden.  It
was meant simply to illustrate how the supposedly hard-nosed Bill
Mollison does communicate this point without invoking any specific
spiritual doctrine.

As far as your point about attrition - no doubt there are some people
who underestimate how much work is involved with a pc site, but I think
the same is true of pretty much anything.  Anyone can become
romantically enamored with the idea of learning to play a musical
instrument, or becoming a fireman or an airline pilot or a nurse, and
once they find out how much work is involved there's always a high rate
of attrition, which weeds out those who are serious.  C'est la vie.

But there are a lot of folks who never even develop an interest in
gardening in the first place *because* they associate it with
backbreaking drudgery, and I think this is just as important a barrier
to overcome (if not more so) as the idea that gardening isn't much
work.  Just to bring up an example that's fresh in my mind, I've been
helping my town to establish a community garden, and we proposed to do
it on city owned property.  We got a lot of pushback from our city
attorney who was, we thought, rather overly concerned about personal
injury.  By talking to him a bit I learned that he had grown up on a
farm, and that growing food to him was equated with heavy machinery and
hard labor, and most of the folks he'd grown up with had sustained some
serious injury at some point.  Our Mayor is also an old country boy, and
still maintains a garden of his own, but he just lost a nephew this past
weekend in a horrific accident involving farm machinery.

So I had to take a lot of pains to explain that growing vegetables does
not need to be done this way, that we would be using mostly hand tools
and implementing techniques such as no-till that were gentle on the body
and soul and could be done by all ages.  The point of a "community"
garden, I had to stress repeatedly, was not just to grow food but to
build community, which all of the participating neighbors have made clear.

In light of the huge barriers we need to overcome in terms of changing
people's attitudes toward growing their own food and the way it's
conventionally done, I think I'd rather err on the side of laziness. :D

I also think that your post is somewhat biased toward the particular way
you practice permaculture - not that I have a problem with that, but of
course there are many ways to practice permaculture and they don't
*have* to involve livestock, or home schooling, or brush clearing, or
some of the other things you do.  A project isn't sustainable if you
can't sustain it, to state the obvious. :D  So part of the design
process needs to be deciding what you can reasonably handle, including
with advancing age.  And of course, many people who practice
permaculture don't garden at all - they may be involved with invisible
structures such as re-thinking economics or law or manufacturing
processes.  Permaculture principles can be practiced in any field, and
what may look like "attrition" from the outside may actually be
deceptive.  They may in fact be applying permaculture principles in
their daily lives in ways that are not obvious on the surface.

Last but not least, if you design for it properly and put in the work of
establishing it, you can in fact have a permaculture garden that doesn't
require constant maintenance.  My home garden is a very "lazy" garden,
and although I probably couldn't disappear for a month, I have
disappeared for at least a week to 10 days and come back to find
everything doing fine.  Of course it took work and careful decision
making to design it properly and build up the soil, but just saying.
:)   Depending how you designed it, too, if you have mostly mature fruit
and nut trees and other perennials, you certainly could go away for a
month.  So the amount of work involved in a site really just depends
what you want to do (and of course, if we're talking perennials, at what
stage of maturity your site is), and the question of how much work
you're prepared to do on an ongoing basis should factor into your
design.  One also shouldn't be shy about bartering for or hiring help,
or swapping resources.  Toby Hemenway has an excellent article on his
website about the myth of self-sufficiency.  Sustainability and self
sufficiency are not the same thing, and one needn't provide everything
for oneself to have a sustainable system - as mentioned, it's not
sustainable if you can't sustain it. :D  People working together can
create a sustainable system, though.  Maybe going away for that month's
holiday involves having a neighbor looking after your garden, and that's
OK too.

Mitch Triplett wrote:
> Phrases like this make my neck hair stand on end.  I understand that part
of
> what many of us are trying to do is create, encourage, etc.
self-sustaining
> systems, but if we're really going to be integral components of these
> systems we're going to have to work.  Especially if you're starting with a
> clean (or in our case cracked) palate.
>
> I've seen the "intervenor becomes the recliner" sentiment pop up
> occasionally on this and other lists and I'm always left wondering a) if
> people new to Pc realize what they're getting themselves into when they
> start down this path, b) what kind of attrition there is because folks got
> into it thinking they'd be able to plant a couple trees then spend their
> lives lying in a shaded hammock and c) if the lack of realization and rate
> of attrition is avoidable by being more honest about the commitments
(time,
> labor, money) involved in establishing goals & objectives, then doing the
> work to get there.
>
> Clearing brush and planting trees is work.  Double-digging is work.
Hoeing
> dirt mulch in a dryland garden is work.  Designing a forest garden is
work.
> Installing irrigation is work.  Caring for livestock is work.  Harvesting
is
> work.  Processing and preserving is work.  Home-schooling children is
work.
> Participating in a (good) PDC is probably work.
>
> I'm not at all implying that it's drudgery.  I work my tail off and then I
> rest and then I go back to work (sadly, the rest periods are longer than
> they were 20 years ago, but that's life).  And I love what I do because
I'm
> working toward something I feel is worth working toward.  But a month's
> holiday?!  That's hilarious.
>
>
> Mitch Triplett
> Tri-Pearl Family Forest
> Member - CCFFA/OSWA & OTFS
> Associate Member - FSC
>

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