permaculture

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

This is my reply to a long and tedious discussion with and about Vladimir
Davidzon of Regenerative Leadership Institute.


"....we are all on the same team".  
This couldn't be further from the truth and is akin to saying we are all
Americans to justify participation in war!  

If you look at the language of VD it is obvious that he holds dear the
Corporate model of growth and enrichment.  His solutions are also corporate,
which is to go to litigation to resolve differences.  His choice of the
Better Business Bureau as the ultimate authority of what is excellent, good,
or bad is also part of the corporate mindset, and by the way the BBB is also
funded like the Chamber of Commerce by corporations.  

The many teachers and promulgators of the permaculture that I respect and
who have been teaching over 20 years are decidedly not of the corporate
mindset.  These same corporations who have stolen our electoral process,
that pay less than poverty wages, who loot the environment in order to meet
their bottom line and pay their stockholders and CEO's unconscionable wages.

I personally think that lurking behind all of the social and ecological ills
of this planet lies the belief system that has been foisted off on all of us
that greed is good, and that the top one percent of the population will
"eventually" let trickle down the crumbs from their table to the floor of
impoverished.  If one reads "Sacred Economics" by Charles Eisenstein it
becomes obvious that we are basically in a serf relationship to the
corporate state.

This corporate mindset has crept into the permaculture scene through the
misguided teachings of Mollison, Lawton, and others that one becomes a
teacher/designer after a two week class known as the Permaculture Design
Course.  Anyone who thinks clearly would realize that this is not true nor
could it possible be true.  How could one finish a two week course and then
design a water shed to mediate flooding and top soil loss??  But some will
try armed with a piece of paper that says they know how to design.  Teaching
is perhaps worse since it emboldens people to think that since they are now
PDC graduates they know enough to teach other to design and teach and the
dysfunction is geometrically increased.  

Permaculture is about way more than most of the topics of this discussion -
swales, soils, gardening and etc.  Mostly permaculture is about "designing"
our way out of a systematic loss of our natural resources, social justice,
and human dignity.  Part of that design process is to understand the tools
or various techniques such as swaling.  How can anyone glorify a system that
has diminished the cultural and natural systems to a tipping point from
which we may not be able to recover?  Mainstream is not Main Street and to
clamor for mainstream as a goal of permaculture is to diminish the very core
of permaculture thought.  Mainstream is the the flash and shiney that is
offered every day on millions of TV screens seducing us away from life and
asking that we sacrifice our lives to mindless labor for a new I-phone or
whatever the latest mainstream cultural app is.

So we are not all on the same team and when we try to accommodate those with
views that are diametrically opposed to our belief system we are
compromising our beliefs and our future.  We desperately need to enter a new
paradigm and through permaculture design we have that opportunity", but if
we drag the mistakes and beliefs of the old paradigm into the world we hope
to create we plant the seeds of its eventual collapse.  Just as the
Renaissance was infected with the misguided beliefs of the Medieval period
which were manifest in the witch burnings and inquisitions of later periods.

Permaculture has always been about prosperity but not about creating
monetary or material wealth.  In fact the third ethic is not about
accumulation but of distribution to enrich the total system.  If most of our
language is about how to game the system to gain advantage then we are
probable in the wrong system.

Scott Pittman

"To change something build a new model that makes the existing model
obsolete"  Buckminster Fuller