permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

Ben, thanks for this. Excellent. It also offers an answer to Georg's question 
about why the poor have more kids than the rich, and what a potential 
solution could be.

A mix of top-down and grassroots can be effective. When I was in Indonesia in 
the 1980s, they had instituted a very much top-down (from Sukarno and 
Suharto) education program around birth control and population. I ran into 
countless men and women who said "I come from a big family, and now I see how 
harmful that is, and we are only having 2 children." But it was run by 
village leaders and healers, and local teachers, and got local buy-in.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com


On Nov 23, 2012, at 12:22 PM, Ben Martin Horst wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> permaculture mailing list
> permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
> subscribe/unsubscribe|user config|list info:
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture
> message archives:  https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/permaculture/
> Google message archive search:
> site: lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/permaculture [searchstring]
> Avant Geared  http://www.avantgeared.com