permaculture

[Ben Martin Horst <ben.martinhorst@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 8:41 PM, Toby Hemenway 
<toby@patternliteracy.com>wrote:

>
> But almost any movement comes with its own political framework and can
> usually be placed in a fairly small region of the political spectrum. If we
> look at permaculture as a movement, it's in the quite left-wing,
> Earth-worshipping, hippie-descended, middle and upper middle class, etc,
> etc, region, with a modest number of outliers included. A narrow slice. Who
> else would even be arguing about working with the army?
>
>
This has certainly been my experience with permaculture ... but then again,
I'm living in the US Pacific Northwest. Does this generalization hold true
globally -- for example, in India, Brazil, or Uganda? My suspicion -- and it
is only that, a suspicion -- is that permaculture in the global picture is
more widely distributed among the poor and lower middle classes and fairly
middle of the road in the classic conservative-to-liberal spectrum (which is
to say, somewhat to the left of the US mainstream). I'd love to hear these
suspicions either confirmed or denied by those with direct experience.

The point of this line of thinking is this: all of us on this list are
privileged enough to have access to computers and the internet, and are thus
representative of a global minority. When we talk about the permaculture
"community" or "movement," I think we're often talking about those of us who
can participate in conversations like this one. But I'd wager that we're
completely missing the experience of permaculturists from the majority of
the world. Despite -- or because of -- the fact that we've got
fancy-schmancy electronics, we may have much more to learn from those
permaculturists in the Global South than they have to learn from us.

-Ben