permaculture

[Ben Martin Horst <ben.martinhorst@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 8:55 AM, Toby Hemenway 
<toby@patternliteracy.com>wrote:

>
> Instead of a crash campaign to increase yields for the "inevitable"
> billions, let's have a crash campaign to educate women all over the
> world--the biggest factor in reducing birth rate--and find some Gates-like
> billionaire to hand out birth control for the whole planet.


The only problem with a campaign of this sort is that it's inevitably very
top-down: an education campaign financed and led by Westerners is going to
be viewed in many (most?) places as an extension of colonialist and
neocolonialist practices, and quite legitimately so (I certainly don't
trust that the program of some billionaire to match my own best interests,
let alone those of billions around the globe). You've identified the major
contributor to population growth (systemic oppression of women), but it
seems to me that the challenge is not how to develop a global program to
educate women, but how to develop global networks to support grassroots
women's groups who are claiming their own power -- via education or
otherwise. Will this involve contribution from foreigners? Sure, but it has
to be at the invitation of local groups.

Historically speaking, a major factor contributing to population growth is
the need for cheap labor to maintain low-output agricultural systems in
peasant economies. Historically, as states have industrialized, their
birthrates have dropped, too: children become more of an expense than an
economic asset. Of course, industry obviously has its own problems (the US
and Europe has a much greater ecological footprint per capita than the rest
of the world, because of industry's heavy use of resources). Permaculture
offers the opportunity for societies to move from high-labor,
low-nutrition, grain-based agriculture to low-labor, high-nutrition,
ecologically restorative systems. That is, permaculture allows the same
decline in birthrates that industrialization does, without the profound
ecological disruptions that industrialization causes, and with at least a
degree of the affluence that industrialization can allow.

Permaculture -- "revolution disguised as gardening" -- thus has the
potential to facilitate women's empowerment on a global scale, without
triggering as much of the patriarchal backlash that many other efforts have
triggered over the past couple of decades. Permaculture can provide a means
for women to provide nutrition for their families, as well as a source of
income that they control, but on its surface, it hardly seems threatening
to traditional agrarian and pastoral family systems.

To me, then, the real question is how we train, equip, and fund
permaculture teachers to train a new generation of permaculturists around
the world ... more importantly, how do we ensure that permaculture
trainings are available in local languages, by people preferably from the
local community, ideally with a ratio of male to female participants
matching local demographics? I'm sure that some of this is happening
already, but not as visibly as those permaculture trainings and projects in
the more affluent, computerized world.

How might we contribute to the scaling up of global permaculture education?

-Ben