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  • From: Steve Bonney <steve@sustainableearth.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] One Straw Guiding Questions
  • Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:25:55 -0500

On 1/17/2012 10:12 AM, Daniel Jager wrote:
...Of the people who come in touch with Fukuoka's ideas: There is quite a large group of people that think that Fukuoka's Natural Farming is a lazy man's way of growing food. There is another large group of people who read his work and reject it for being 'faith'-based agriculture with no 'practical' value. Then, unfortunately, there is a much smaller group of people that seem to grasp his core ideas, but like with all other dynamic things in Life, the essential ideas are quickly turned into 'a METHOD', a 'system', a trodden path, a static approach. So they equate Fukuoka's 'method' to 'no pruning', or 'no tilling', or 'seedballs', or 'rice/barley double cropping'. And then there is a very small minority of people who do not need any outside authority or 'method', but cultivate the Earth on the authority of their own awareness. Ask your participants this: To which group do they wish to belong?

Daniel, I embrace your explanation of Fukuoka's agriculture. I even like your categorizations; however, there are several semantical problems in this section. Even the industrialists farm within their own awareness. So that begs for the categorization of "awareness," which I envision as a very long list of paradigms. For me, it is not a simple process of knowing whether my awareness is any more right or wrong than anyone else's. Although I have been immersed in nature for most of my 70+ years, I still do not know how to interpret what I am seeing. I have been studying ecology for 50 years and I still don't know much. Human activity always creates disturbances in nature and the natural timelines for repair are usually too long for humans to observe before we create more disturbances in ecosystems.

Authority is a worrisome word since I deem that most -- if not all -- of it is rooted in arrogance and power (maybe that's redundant). Therefore, I reject authority. Information must be systematized in order for it to be communicated and so it usually arrives as some sort of a method. I have problems with information that is packaged in human arrogance (and often greed) as _the_ way instead of _a_ way of conducting human activities. I am a junkie for information that moves me to a higher plane of spiritual awareness within the context of nature. For me, that requires my responsibility to incorporate information into that spiritual awareness that moves me away from anthropocentricity.

Steve Bonney
Field and Forest Eco-farm
Indiana USA




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