permaculture

["Scott Pittman" <scott@permaculture.org>]

Wow! Getting dismissed by two dyed in the wool free enterprise capitalists
in one night, what a thrill.

Anyone with a few billion, million, or hundred thousand "laying around" is
not following an ethical life purpose.  Those sums are either from
extraction from the earth or underpaid labor which takes care of the first
two ethics.  And the excess "laying around" is a pollutant in the sense it
is not doing its duty to benefit the earth and people.

I know there are always those who argue that what is done with the money is
what makes it ethical or not but first one has to deal with how one received
it.  Look at Bill Gates who has built a name for himself as an A.I.D.s
warrior with his dividends from his investments in Monsanto.  Or his
flogging GMO's in Africa with a non-profit he built with the help of the
Rockefeller brothers who robbed their oil billions from Latin America.  It
is always good to ask the prior question before declaring that accumulated
wealth is ethically neutral.

Hopefully this is what the occupy movement is all about.  There is not a 2%
without the 98% contribution of mindless labor.  How do we learn to
distinguish prosperous from wealth.  One talks about meeting ones needs
(including joy, health, meaningful work, community, etc) the other means
hoarding and is greed based, the outcome of a fearful avoidance of being
left out.

This is not about attacking "others of us for taking money in exchange for
the priceless value that Permaculture offers" but about having a hyper
inflated idea of what our worth is for carrying this knowledge around.  I
don't give a fig if someone makes a living using Permaculture to arrive at
good design decisions for clients what I do have a problem with is when the
knowledge is flawed.  There are a lot of unconscious Permaculture "snake
oil" salesmen out there who missed some of the critical parts of their
Permaculture training. If you get the ethics wrong then everything that
follows is bound to be wrong. 

How do you "ethically" design billionaires into a Permaculture system? 
I would love to hear a response to this question. We are talking about a
design system aren't we??



“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. 
On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” 
~Arundhati Roy

-----Original Message-----
From: permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Cory Brennan
Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2012 3:43 PM
To: permaculture
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Toward Financial Permaculture: New Farms in
theOldSystem

Paul, 

I am with you on this one. I cannot fathom why some of us attack other of us
for taking money in exchange for the priceless value that permaculture
offers, and then wondering why we aren't getting anywhere. A billion dollars
might be enough, if permaculturists controlled it, to save the planet. So
why would we feel we need to avoid money? It's an energy that is considered
by most people to be "the" most legitimate exchange medium that there is.
While we educate and remind people about what real value and real wealth
actually is, and what other choices they have, it would be nothing but
helpful for us to control whatever medium of exchange allows us to
regenerate environments, or at least check the harm, to as great a degree as
possible.  We could spend our time and energy arguing and cutting each other
over petty stuff, or we could stay focused and work together on the bigger
needs and picture - how this planet is doing as an organism, and how
cultures
 are doing, as patterns. 

I agree that surplus in the system only becomes pollution if it isn't used
to feed the system. It isn't the billion dollars that is polluting. It is
when it is used to harm or stifle the feeding process that it becomes
polluting. This is a really important distinction that seems to get
overlooked by too many people and they start avoiding energy instead of
capturing, storing and channeling it, which is the second principle of
permaculture. I consider anybody who tries to tell me what I shouldn't be
doing with money to be operating unconsciously and not using basic
permaculture design principles - they have obviously not bothered to observe
(the first principle) what I am actually doing with it, or to assess the
true value of the output (yield - third principle) that I am getting from
that. Those individuals usually do not accept feedback about their judgments
either, a violation of yet another permaculture principle. I think it is
safe to say that they
 are pseudo permaculturists, and are using permaculture to run their own
agenda, whatever it is. 
 
Koreen Brennan

www.growpermaculture.com
www.facebook.com/growpermaculturenow
www.meetup.com/sustainable-urban-agriculture-coalition


________________________________
 From: paul wheaton <paul@richsoil.com>
To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org> 
Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2012 4:01 PM
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Toward Financial Permaculture: New Farms in the
OldSystem
 
Yesterday we recorded a podcast review of Geoff Lawton's Introduction
to Permaculture DVD.  In the beginning was a bit about the ethics.
And I had to wonder:  where are there examples of people doing
permaculture, but because of the lack of ethics, things didn't turn
out.  Things were bad.   The person is still calling it permaculture,
but it is now awful due to the lack of ethics.

So then that situation can have "care of the earth; care of the
people; return of surplus to the first two" and everything becomes
right as rain.

I have yet to fathom even one realistic scenario.

I do see people using the three ethics (and mostly, twisted
variations) as a weapon to get other people to comply with ...
whatever.  But in those scenarios, my impression has been that the bad
guys are the ones screaming the ethics, while the decent folks are
being screamed at.

Granted, there are bad guys out there doing bad things.  And most of
the worst have never ever heard of permaculture.  And I feel like a
bit of ethics could help the situation.   But I doubt I will ever get
a chance to talk about ethics with them.

As for billionaires:  I guess I'm in a weird position where it doesn't
bother me that somebody has a billion dollars lying around.  What
bothers me is if a person got a billion dollars through unethical
behavior.   I usually think of John Stewart.  I doubt he has a billion
dollars - but he is far closer to a billion dollars than I am.  I
don't see him as a bad person.  I see that he did a cool thing and got
a lot of money for it.

I suppose there are many schools of thought around the permaculture
ethics.  And around the billionaires thing.   I suppose it is possible
that I am even the only person that is keen on permaculture that feels
this way on these two topics.  I am grateful for the opportunity to
express my position.
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