permaculture

[gavinraders@gmail.com]

Beautiful. Thank you Rafter. Great to see this conversation come around full 
circle, but even more so, to hear the next generation of leaders in this 
movement coming into their own, finding their eloquent powerful voices, and 
raising the critical questions that need to be raised if we are ever going to 
move permaculture beyond what it has been. Here's to succession, evolution, 
and dialectical engagement within our movement.
Thats all I have time for now. But i take your words with me in the 
day-to-day work and struggle. Hope to reconnect soon Rafter!

Gavin Raders
Co-Founder, Planting Justice
www.plantingjustice.org
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone, powered by CREDO Mobile.

-----Original Message-----
From: rafter sass <rafter@liberationecology.org>
Sender: permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:55:39 
To: Northeastern Permaculture 
(List)<northeasternpermaculture@lists.riseup.net>; 
<permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Reply-To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [permaculture] Designing a Movement (was: Ethics of whatever)


Many heartfelt thanks  to the folks who have been able to engage with the 
challenges of this conversation without descending into
name-calling and other juvenilia. 

...


Kevin Skvorak has Problems. 

Two of them, for the purposes of this conversation. ;)

One of them is a Personal Problem - he seems to have contracted the modern 
anarchist's allergy to leadership. The symptoms include putting critique 
before curiosity. 
I hope he works on this. I think he would be even more effective in raising 
critical topics and questions if he did.

The other is NOT a Personal Problem. It's another kind of problem altogether 
- a Movement Problem. 

He wants to be a part of a movement that practices an engaged and ongoing 
dialogue about its own ethics and strategy - and the actually-existing 
Permaculture movement can't really be described this way. Not quite - not yet.

What's standing in the way?
Well, a lot of the movement leadership seems to have contracted the classic 
leader's malaise of allergy to critique. 
Juvenile defensiveness, on the part of our teachers and public faces, is a 
problem that is going to do us real harm, as a movement - if it isn't 
mitigated. 
Or maybe we all just need to get really good at gentle, soothing, critique, 
so that we don't insult or frighten them when we have hard questions to ask. 
;)
(And yes - I definitely respond better to that, too!)

And if that weren't enough, a lot of folks in the movement - along with most 
everybody else in the world - don't have a great toolbox when it comes to 
thinking about design and strategy at different scales. What does it even 
mean to build a movement - or design one? We aren't well prepared to answer. 
And we, of all movements, might want to think hard about the question.

I don't claim to know the answer, but I DO know that it requires more and 
different tools than the ones we use to transform an individual, or 
regenerate a landscape,
or organize a project, etc. etc.

Individual, project, community, movement, world...
The principles I use to guide my behavior and my relationships are related, 
but distinct, from the ones that I bring to creating strategy for the 
projects I work on. 
The criteria I use to design my projects are related, but distinct from the 
ones I use to understand and work with my community. 
And the tools I use to engage and enliven my community are related, but 
distinct from the ones that I use to build and strategize my movement.

So for me, arguments that we should go anywhere and teach Pc to anyone, for 
anyone, because Pc  is automagically transformative, are wrongheaded.
A good PDC might actually be able to transform anyone that takes it - but 
that doesn't mean that teaching that class is good for the movement.
As Annie Pollock points out, greenwashing is real, and we are already dealing 
with the challenges of the Permaculture label being applied to all kinds of 
things we don't
want to be associated with. 

We could go and teach a PDC at a whites-only Afrikaaner "ecovillage" like 
Orania, and maybe it would have a profound impact on the people who took it. 
But (1) most of us would be, shall we say, reluctant? for Pc to be seen as a 
tool for building a racially pure Volkstaat, and (2) the Oranians already 
identify with Permaculture, so I guess an ecological holistic worldview WON'T 
necessarily guide someone out of an oppressive, ethnocentric social vison.

Teaching Pc for, and to, white nationalists, would be bad for the movement. 

(For more evidence that fascism and ecology can survive in the same brain, 
look into Rudolph Steiner's theories on race. Or even more frightening, 
search Stormfront.org for entries on Permaculture. Note: the point here is to 
debunk oversimplified models of change, and magical thinking about 
Permaculture education - not to compare the National Guard project to white 
supremacy.)

And vice versa: what's bad for the individual or project can be good for the 
movement. The lynching of civil rights movement workers James Chaney, Andrew 
Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in 1964, was a horrific tragedy for them, 
their friends, and families - and a historic watershed for the civil rights 
movement. 

The point of these case studies is to say: we may not know how to design a 
movement, but 
it ain't entirely like designing a PDC.

We are called, by our commitments, ethics, and desires, to figure it out. 
With each other. 

OK, I'm actually supposed to be packing and moving right now, so I'm going to 
cut this off.
What are we doing to do with this movement of ours?


all love, respect, and hard questions,
rafter



rafter sass
Liberation Ecology Project
liberationecology.org
518-567-7407
skype: raughter







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