permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

The irony here is that I dislike the title that Chelsea Green imposed on my 
book, against my wishes, and of my agent, who said "why are you trying to 
kill Toby's book?" I still get comments from people about "I avoided your 
book like the plague because I thought it would be New Age Drivel, but it's 
not." (The point of the book was to reach a broader audience; we in the choir 
get the title.) So I wonder how many sales I've lost from that. We argued, 
back in 2001, that having two words in the title, Gaia and permaculture, that 
no one had ever heard, was a bad idea. But--that's water over the dam. The 
book eventually did well once word got out.

Actually, the best laugh I got was when I was introduced to a large audience, 
by someone who had clearly not had time to read the blurb they were to 
deliver, as "The author of the best-selling book, "Gays Gardening."

At any rate, Lovelock is a crank, but his earlier work is still good (he told 
NASA not to bother with expensive toys to look for life on Mars, since the 
gases in the atmosphere were at equilibrium, and a planet with life will be 
out of equilibrium. But they did it any way--gotta justify your big 
budget--and the results were "inconclusive.")

I digress again. The original "Gaia Hypothesis" was unfortunately taken to 
mean that the Earth is an organism, and it wasn't well presented. Lovelock 
retitled it "Gaia Theory" a while back and mustered a lot more evidence that 
the atmosphere and oceans act as self-regulating systems, and that's been 
pretty well accepted. I definitely agree that there are many feedback loops 
that keep those systems in homeostasis, and it's been a fruitful line of 
work. I do think it's been abused, just as quantum physics and other science 
has, to make fascinating but unscientific speculations about earth 
consciousness and so forth, and we should be sticking to the data to keep 
Lovelock's reputation from being ruined even further. But in my 
non-scientific moments I consider the Earth to be alive, too. At least we 
should be treating it that way.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com


On Jan 13, 2012, at 1:18 PM, John D'hondt wrote:

> 
> Two aspects here , James Lovelock I have heard advocate more pollution to 
> stop global warming, more nuclear powerplants for the same reason and more 
> gmo to feed the world better. I am sorry but that makes everything else 
> Lovelock has to say or as ever said suspect imo.
> Secondly, In the last few years a number of theories have come up such as 
> for instance that it is possible to measure a sort of heart beat of Gaia 
> (periodicity about 11 hours), that it is possible that the planet has been 
> expanding just as our days are getting constantly longer and that it is 
> possible that our sun is much farther gone than was thought before. In 
> short...there are many unknowns here and possibly even unknown unknowns. 
> Fiving the planet a name, "Gaia", can help give the impression that we know 
> more than we actually do. I only know that I don't know enough.
> john
> 
> 
> Do you hold Lovelock's Gaia concept, and the theories of other advocates
> of this view of our Earth's geo-electro-bio systems,
> as still accurate and useful?
> 
> I do and have wholeheartedly embraced the Gaia Concept. It was very
> perceptive of Toby to include Gaia in the title of his famous book;
> it opens many doors for inquiry as does permaculture itself. As Mollison
> said: "The only limit to possibilities for a permaculture design is the
> imagination of the designer".
> 
> Other food for thought:
> 
> preternatural:
> 
> From Wikipedia:
> "The preternatural or praeternatural is that which appears outside or
> beyond (Latin præter) the natural. In contrast to the supernatural,
> preternatural phenomena are presumed to have rational explanations that
> are, as of yet, unknown.
> 
> The term is often used to distinguish from the divine (supernatural)
> while maintaining a distinction from known and understood nature in any
> given culture and time period. For instance, in the Abrahamic religions,
> the angels, both holy and fallen, are endowed with preternatural powers.
> Their intellect, speed, and other characteristics are explained to be
> beyond the capabilities of humans, but still limited or finite."
> 
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