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  • From: Andrew McSwain <aeromax.way@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Designing a Movement
  • Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2010 10:17:10 +0430

"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."

Excellent. Very well said there, Mr. Read. What you said harks almost
exactly with one of the most important lessons of ishmael. We wouldnt want a
desperate group of half-starved neo-nazis invading a permaculture food
forest paradise, potentially raping and killing everyone, just to make an
out to make room for their trend of exponential growth of the necessity to
consume more food -- negatively exponential degredation of local life
support system. I know that this example is a bit extreme, far out, and
probably unlikely. It's just meant to be figurative.

On a larger scale this is already what happened with the colonization of the
americas.. especially in the southern continent. (Read Open Veins of Latin
America-- The chapter starting on page 38 A FLOOD OF TEARS AND BLOOD:AND YET
THE POPE SAID INDIANS HAD SOULS ---
http://vencentral.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/open-veins-of-latin-america-1997.pdf
)


For this reason, it makes a lot more sense to teach these guys permacultre,
to learn the principles of right living inherent in permaculture-- which if
applied in their entirety might, by their nature, regulate the radical
growth that we are experiencing these days with our current system.

It doesn't make much sense for us "right minded leftist liberals" to
regulate our growth whilst the white supremecists and the what-have yous
continue to reproduce like rabbits and outnumber us 40 to 1 because of their
ignorance to our "right-minded" beliefs and principles.

We live in a closed system. We have to remember that. We also have to
remember that tolerance, but not necessarily acceptance, is the key.


Exactly which of these principles, techniques, and viewpoints of
permaculture are they that could:

A) help to form the network that steve talked about even amongst the groups
whose beliefs we feel a little more than uneasy about

B) help to regulate the growth of the other groups, who otherwise would be
on the same vertical consumption and growth curve as the rest of the world.

C) What principles, techniques, and viewpoints in permaculture could be help
to create a more just society amongst these unjust groups.... are these
principles, techniques, and viewpoints inseperable from the lessons of
permaculture. That means, could they seperate these ethics from permaculture
and use permaculture to perpetuate their unjust system?

If so, what's wrong with that? Will that give them some sort of undeserved
persuasive or control (brute force) oriented power? .. it seems that the
latter, at least would be to the contrary.

Andrew McSwain

On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 9:35 PM, steve read <permaculturefr@free.fr> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
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--
Andrew Edwin McSwain
055(11)6785-1176 (São Paulo)
01(501)681-0439 (United States)




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