Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Brief comments on Natural Farming

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Brief comments on Natural Farming
  • Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2012 14:15:13 -0700 (PDT)

> They are part of one another, inextricably linked as I see
> it. NF could be considered subjective while permaculture is
> objective. Permaculture seeks to design and implement systems
> that emulate Nature and become natural or NF in their most
> basic elements. NF gives direction to those designs and installation
> of them. Permaculture does not just "seek to emulate Nature"
> is seeks to be nature, harmonious with on site and off site ecosystems,
> a dynamic process, continually changing and self-stabilizing
> (sustainable, regenerative). Permaculture leads to NF and NF provides
> timeless and essential design criteria, not to mention inspiration.

Larry, these are words and concepts too. The question is what does it all
mean in the reality beyond the concepts? By "emulating nature" you already
take the first conceptual step that separates you from nature - there is
nature and there is you who emulates nature, who controls nature, who designs
nature, ... If there were any philosophy to be extracted from NF (which there
isn’t), than we could perhaps say that “the NFer IS nature, the NFer does not
emulate nature”. Thus, there is the duality of you and nature versus the
ideal of the “unity with nature” of the NFer. It doesn’t matter whether this
ideal can be reached or not, since everything in life (and nature) is
process. There is no end and no beginning. There is constant change.
Ultimately, the ideal too needs to be forgotten and only nature remains. Of
course, a Permi can arrive at the same thought processes, methods etc. as an
NFer, but does she? How do things look in praxis?
If I listen to a newcomer to gardening or farming who presents her
computer-drawn Permaculture “designs” of her ideal garden or farm, I usually
have to stop myself from saying anything, because I know that by imposing
“our design” on nature we deprive ourselves of the things that only nature
can teach us. Of course, we are humans, we need to plan for tomorrow, we
need to make designs; that is “our nature”. Thus, how do I plan without
making plans? Likewise, we can endlessly make word constructions such as
“method-less method” and the like; which sound intriguing at first, but tend
to exhaust themselves in meaningless word games. The art is in the doing.

Modern man is like a forlorn child. We have lost our traditions, the customs
of our communities that have fragmented and the wisdom of the ancients. The
traditional farmer didn’t need to design his farm with a row of pear trees
here, some plum trees at a prescribed distance and the chicken scoop or fish
pond at a certain place behind the farm house. All these things and much
more were given by tradition. The contemporary city dropout needs to learn
all of this again and artificially create his own traditions. But with all
the design features, the avalanche of websites to be studied and the numerous
practical problems any newcomer will face, it is all too easy to forget the
other thing.

The bottom line is that the NF philosopher, if she were to exist, does not
believe in progress, does not believe it science, does not believe that
humans can improve on nature or that humans can even “know” nature like an
object to be studied. That is a hard one to swallow for any Westerner, but
swallow it we must, or there will be no NF.





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page