permaculture

["scrooge McDuck" <declan@planetmail.net>]

Yes, Toby's contributions are always valued.

I've been keeping my own counsel on this topic, because I hold non standard views on sexual matters. I view the "New Morality" as the "Old Immorality," and try to live by Bible principles. In today's Westerm or 'modern' world, moral standards are unwelcome in the main, both sexes can act like sexual predators and virginity is about as highly valued as acne. It's a disadvantage of youth, to be cast off as part of maturing. The reported behaviour of Bill Mollison was certainly unhelpful, and a very bad example of leadership. But where couples meet varies. I certainly wouldn't try to limit it to the false 'night life' scene.

 

Before my illness, for 15 years I was an elder in my faith and policed our high moral standards. We investigated cases as a committee of 3, and acted judicially, issuing counsel, reproofs, public reproofs, or even expelling members. We have a common belief system, a final authority whose word was accepted as law, scriptural commands vetoes and examples, detailed written instructions for processing casers, regular updates to published material, with all hairs split exactly and finely and we investigated and implemented those standards for sexual issues in our congregation. Accusations of child abuse have to be reported to head office, and were not to be kept local. We would act under instruction in those cases. This whole area is part of the regular teaching programme at our meetings. We need all of this support to police the standards properly.

 

You guys are predominantly highly principled but low in religious values, and you have none of the above support. Frankly, for a headless movement like Permaculture without even a central respected authority to call the shots, imho you haven't a hope of implementing a meaningful control.  I wish you luck and advise you to give up now. Think of this: How do you handle a complaint where a girl alleges compulsion or unfair abuse of position in a sexual encounter where alcohol was involved, the male Permaculture teacher denies it  and claims everything was consensual; you investigate, and their accounts differ; it's a swearing match. She transpires to be a poor but sincere witness and gets upset; He is more confident and adamantly denies it, but is found innaccurate or untruthful in some circumstantial details. There is a conflict of evidence, and  there are no witnesses.

 If you can't figure out a way of handling the above instance, and how to implement that worldwide when the powers that be might be in a different land, I advise again: the 'Stubbs Gazette' approach is all you can reasonably do. You absolutely have no idea how dispiriting, depressing, and personally draining handling these cases can be. Someone who handles one certainly won't want to handle another. One  useful thing would be to encourage men on a PDC to report predatorial sexual activity by PDC Teachers/lecturers. If a guy is preening himself in front of the women, other men can spot it a mile off.  Banning  one-on-one encounters is another option, but I have no idea how you would implement any of those.

 

Regards

 

Declan Moriarty

Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2016 at 12:09 AM
From: "Lawrence London" <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>

On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 5:39 PM, Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
wrote:

> I would very much like to see a safe, non-accusatory, open discussion of
> this issue, in which specific cases were brought up, especially by those
> involved in them, and where there is an unprejudiced evaluation of what
> kind of harm has been done in the permaculture community by real cases of
> behavior.


The proposal I made for a turn key system utilizing a forum and website
would give you exactly what you need and provide complete privacy. If you
want me to repost thai I will. If you want me to create these resources for
you I will, for free but prefer some remuneration if at all posible, but
definitely for free just get it done and maintained.

Thanks for your contributions to this list, Toby, they are very much
appreciated.

Let me know if I can help further.