permaculture

[Cory Brennan <cory8570@yahoo.com>]

Diversity is key to sustainability. For that reason alone, we should not try 
to keep this movement too "exclusive" or control it too much. Which brings up 
another subject - how can we reach out to groups less served by permaculture 
in places like the US?  Many of us have projects in underserved/oppressed 
communities. We make a point to offer scholarships to interested people in 
high poverty communities in our urban courses. What are others doing along 
these lines? 

Best, Cory

--- On Mon, 8/16/10, Ben Martin Horst <ben.martinhorst@gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Ben Martin Horst <ben.martinhorst@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [permaculture] Movement thinking (was Designing a Movement)
> To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
> Date: Monday, August 16, 2010, 11:11 PM
> 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
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