permaculture

[steve read <permaculturefr@free.fr>]

This business of racists, fascists, fundamentalists or whatever would 
seem to me to be a sensitive issue worth discussing.

As PmC continues to spread around the globe and PmC designers and 
teachers spread further from their socio-cultural bases , they/it/me are 
going to be dealing with more and more 'edges' where the liberal, 
democratic values that seem to be those most widely held by those who 
are active in this PmC 'movement' are not accepted or even rejected.

As nature seems to point the way with dynamically stable systems based 
on inter-connected diversity, it would seem interesting to copy this. A 
diversity of human cultures living in abundance and interconnected.

It would seem a reality that christian fundamentalist or muslim 
fundamentalist or fascist or rascist groups wanting to build 
self-sustainable communties will or have already discovered the 
efficiency of PmC in helping them do this. That I might feel that they 
don't conform to my take on PmC ethics would I imagine worry them little.

However perhaps I must accept that if I want a diversity of human 
cultures then there will surely be ones which I really wouldn't want to 
be involved with, but others may. It may even be that they, pushing at 
an edge, might be the ones who evolve a really wonderful way of living 
and organising themselves.

Those of us living in the heartlands of liberal majority rule democracy 
may have a tendancy to see this as the best way to be, I personally 
don't and here in France the adoption by the 'PmC movement' of consensus 
as its modus operandi seems a long way from the ballot box of the 
existing status quo which a couple of years ago gave us yet another 
'machine' man who's only aim seems to be tending the vested interest of 
the existing puerarchy.

A group of us are working to see how we could redesign the current EU 
political administrative system, as I have mentioned before. A flatland 
of autonomous local communities, connected together by webs of 
interdependance seeming both to conform to natures' model and also to 
the principle of responsibilty as expounded by Mollison.

Questions rest however about what to do with for example a white 
supremasist community that becomes expansive at the expense of its 
neighbours or a fundamentalist religious community that outbreeds the 
carrying capacity of its bioregion.

Steve Read