permaculture

[Robert Waldrop <bwaldrop1952@att.net>]

"Surplus" is not just a rhetorical construct, it is a reality. There is a 
surplus in this world as it exists now, in our human ecologies, and one of 
the 
graphic's at Rafter's site illustrates it really well, showing the amount of 
wealth controlled by each quintile of world population. It looks like a 
cocktail 
glass, with the top 20% controlling 82% of the planetary wealth, while the 
other 
80% get 18%.  


And it's being reinvested, but most of it isn't invested in any ways any of 
us 
would agree with. So maybe rather than reinvest, we ought to decentralize the 
surplus.  


That's where invisible structures come into play. It's not an accident that 
the 
20% have the 82%, that's the way the system is designed to work. Our rules 
favor 
centralization of wealth. 


I think that problem starts with the limitation on the liability of 
corporations. The evidence of history seems clear to me about that. It's a 
bad 
idea to let people with capital carry on business operations where they 
aren't 
actually personally liable for their actions. It's like whiskey, teenagers, 
and 
cars. 


I think this is a good conversation.

Bob Waldrop
Oklahoma City




________________________________
From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Mon, December 31, 2012 1:13:45 AM
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Toward Financial Permaculture: New Farms in the 
OldSystem

If we must have a soundbite, then "reinvest the surplus" offers much more 
direction, in a way that suggests beneficial connections, than "redistribute 
surplus." Redistributing doesn't suggest focus or relationship. It could be 
simply a random throwing around, or a concentration where it won't do much 
good. 
Reinvestment suggests that it goes to support the systems that it came from: 
people and earth. "Return" is pretty good, too. 


Paul, to me it is the ethics that distinguishes permaculture from all the 
other 
groovy design methods that humans have used to loot, bomb, torture, and 
enslave. 
Is a prison with a green roof permaculture? No. So let's reverse the 
question: 
if a hip design with guilds and sheetmulch harms people and the earth, and 
concentrates wealth, can it be called permaculture? No. That's why the ethics 
matter. It's that simple, and that obvious. Just as the principles insure 
that 
we are designing a whole system, the ethics guide us to design a moral 
system, 
something likely to do good and not harm. Without  principles and ethics, 
it's 
not permaculture. It's just a bunch of cool techniques, and we use cool 
techniques to do shitty things all