permaculture

[Steve Bonney <steve@sustainableearth.net>]

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