permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 12:57 PM, Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
wrote:

> I realize that Lion’s post is 15 years old, but it’s instructive in that
> he makes the same mistake that so many others still make: he thinks
> permaculture is a set of techniques rather than a design system. Hence his
> tirade that he was exposed to some of the techniques before Mollison wrote
> about them, thus there is nothing new in permaculture. If you can’t make
> the paradigm shift to whole systems thinking, you won’t get what
> permaculture is. You’ll get stuck at sheet mulching or selling tomatoes,
> like Lion did.
>
> And the claim that permaculture is a pyramid scheme to sell PDCs is an old
> and false one too. I wrote up something about that in another forum, so
> I’ll reprint it here, in case any of you want ammunition the next time
> someone makes that claim.
>

Thanks for posting this, Toby. I followed Lion in the Sanet_MG mailing list
for years. There was a net gain to be had from reading his posts. He often
unnecessarily added to the good, the iconoclastic, nothing was sacred other
than his own writings. During that era there were so few who wrote
extensively about natural agriculture and what Lion refused to call
permaculture. I am sure Sal, also in sanet, read all of Lions posts. I
probably have an archive of many of them online. The PC design post came
from a sanet archive of his posts in his own website which I found,
downloaded and rared for upload to my biointensive farming Google site for
public download. He was definitely on our side, probably all his life, but
was "confused" about the permaculture part. This was probably a facet of
his modus operandi that required tilting at windmills.
It is fascinating to think of permaculture as a design discipline and I
appreciate your emphasizing this. I like to think of seeing our world
through the lens of permaculture with design followup that is limited only
by the imagination of the designer. This concept is relatively new and
fascinating. I also like to dredge the very best of the beginnings of the
natural agriculture movement and put that in the context of permaculture,
important to do so as their origins happened during the same era, an era
that started in the 1950's, earlier if you want to count the literature of
those times and the Rural Movement.

><  for those interested in the microbiology of food cropping with
aquaponics the recent reposts of Elaine Ingham's articles in the Compost
Tea list are very useful to the practitioner with equipment to put her
advice to work.
LL


-- 
Lawrence F. London
lfljvenaura@gmail.com
https://sites.google.com/site/avantgeared/