permaculture

[Jason Gerhardt <jasongerhardt@gmail.com>]

Toby,
Thanks for sharing your thinking on this. It has helped clarity in my own
thought process, and I share your perspective, except you articulate it
better than I.

I will agree to play nice:-) You are right; in the end Paul and I will keep
doing our own work from different perspectives and both making change for
the better. I am very comfortable with that.

-- 
Jason Gerhardt
Designer and Educator

From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Toward Financial Permaculture: New Farms in
theOldSystem
To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Date: Tuesday, January 1, 2013, 12:16 PM

Scott Pittman wrote:

> Don't know what to tell you Paul, my grandmother would say "that boy
would
> argue with a fence post!"

I don't even think the fence post is necessary. Thanks for that wonderful
Texas-ism, Scott.

Jason and Paul, you boys play nice, now. Blame the frickin' internet and
its infinite capacity to sustain misunderstandings! You're both doing
awesome stuff. Paul, I've seen Jason in action, and I'd definitely give him
the title Duke (or Prince, even) of Colorado permaculture (I think Jerome
Osentowski's got the kingship sewn up for now).

Paul, thanks for this clarification:

> So then I encounter a farmer that loves his herbicides.  And I wish to
> persuade him about a quarter pound of stuff that would guide him away
> from the herbicides.  He is starting to beleive me and is starting to
> see a path where might stop using the herbicides ...  mostly because
> his net income would improve ....   and then somebody jumps in and
> says "you don't get to use the quarter of a pound of stuff, until you
> eat all of the infinite pounds."

That helps me see where you are coming from (I was pretty sure neither one
of us was an idiot). I do occasionally see zealots who say you have to
drink all the Kool-Aid or you can't have any, but they are pretty rare.
Your focus is on getting people to take any step in the right direction,
and you're good at that, and I'm with you there. My main focus tho, because
of the way my mind works, is to crank out fully trained permaculture
thinkers and actors. So we're looking at different parts of the elephant
(or I'm trying to train the whole elephant and you're trying to get him to
lift his foot off of your bike).

So you're right in that we need to meet people where they are. In your
(other, useful) terminology, you are trying to get the pesticide-using
farmer to move from level 9 to level 8 (with Mollison et al being at level
1), or even just to level 8.9999. So you don't even need to use the word
permaculture, let alone mention the ethics. And I'm looking for people who
want to end up at level 3 or 2, no matter what level they're at now. So
they need to know how to use to guide their decision-making: how does their
action increase earthcare, how does it do peoplecare, and how do they
design for the surplus that it will create? But, yeah, like Jason says, all
that farmer needs to know is a little soil science, not the ethics. When
he's ready to practice permaculture design, they we can hit him with the
ethics, as there will be a niche for it in his mind by then.

I think Koreen and Jason are right in that permaculture is well used as an
adjective. It's a process, not a thing. The ethics and principles guide the
process, and keep us from using cookie-cutter solutions, which is what
happens if you think it is a thing.

Sepp's adoption of the word "permaculture" for his work is something I've
wondered about. I know he didn't use permaculture design to create his
place; he did it out of his innate skill in observation and understanding
natural systems. Because of that it ended up looking much like a
permaculture design. I suspect that when he encountered permaculture, he
made a shrewd decision--and boy, is he shrewd. Rather than reinvent and try
to market his work as "Holzerism" or whatever, starting from scratch, he
saw that it made much more sense to use his work to jump high up into the
permaculture hierarchy, and was able to immediately become one of the most
highly regarded permaculturists. I don't mean that as a criticism or
opportunism (in a negative sense), but it worked out very well for him. His
site seems more "permaculture in hindsight" than permaculture design, if I
can quibble. And I doubt if he mentions the ethics, or even the principles.

Congrats to us all for surviving another end of the world prophecy. Happy
2013.

Toby