permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [SANET-MG] What the heck is permaculture?
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:15:37 -0400
From: Rafter Sass Ferguson <fergusn2@ILLINOIS.EDU>
To: SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU

There is a lot of confusion - and high emotion - about permaculture.

From the inside, it looks like a crucial part of making a sustainable 
world, and getting out of this
mess we are in. From the outside - especially to farmers - it looks like 
it might be a cult or a ponzi
scheme.

This confusion is partly caused by the fact that the most common point 
of access to permaculture
is a course that is usually 2 weeks along and kind of expensive. (That 
doesn't mean that the
teachers or organizers are getting rich - just that it's difficult and 
expensive to run a course. It's
pretty crappy as a ponzi scheme!)

Partly, the confusion is caused by the fact that 'permaculture' actually 
refers to bunch of stuff: a
philosophy about human-environment relations, a global movement & 
network, a design
framework, a loose set of practices, and a conversation about those 
practices. There is VERY little
concrete documentation or research about the whole phenomenon.

These things - the legitimate difficulty of explaining pc succinctly, 
the cost of courses, the lack of
hard documentation, and the we-are-saving-the-world disposition of pc 
practitioners - combine
to make pc look like a cult or a scam for some folks.

As pc teacher and designer - and a research agroecologist - I think 
that's pretty understandable. I
work with farmers as consultant and researcher, and I *trust* their 
skepticism. It's a difficulty that
we all face, as a movement. It's not all that different from the 
difficulties faced by sustainable
agriculture generally.

We pc-ists need to respond to these challenges strategically - because I 
DO believe that
permaculture, for all its challenges, has some extremely important 
resources to offer the global
shift toward sustainability. The responses that I try and advocate for 
(and educate for) within the
movement, are:
1. Humility, rather than evangelical fervor - in general, and especially 
when dealing with farmers.
2. Building and connecting with institutions to lower student tuition, 
substituting with other
sources of funding. (Holistic Management is doing a good job at this - 
in the northeast at least.)
3. More and better documentation and research!

In an effort to put my money where my mouth is, and pitch in, I'm 
beginning a multi-year research
project to ask some hard questions about permaculture - extent, social 
impacts, ecological
impacts, and relationship with contemporary debates in ecology, 
agroecology, and political
ecology. This will make up my PhD research here at University of 
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign -
and probably a good deal more.

I'm interested in hearing what people think are the important and 
difficult questions to ask about
permaculture. What do we need to know? What are we afraid to find out? ;)

Best,
Rafter