permaculture

[Andrew Millison <amillison@gmail.com>]

Really fascinating and mostly silenced topic. Declan's 'scenario' is a
great thing to look at and think about.

There is no capacity for the Permaculture movement to actually police
anything. I've seen it tried, have participated in attempts, and witnessed
and experienced failure.

If someone alleges sexual assault, or the more fuzzy lines of an unfair
abuse of power where alcohol is involved, the judgement of the situation
ultimately differs back to the laws of the land. As soon as these
situations are brought out of the bubble of a Permaculture course or
gathering, it's the police, lawyers and judges who interpret and decide the
facts. I don't see any capacity within the Permaculture movement to address
sexual harassment in any sort of consistent or universally adopted fashion.
There's too much anarchy in the movement for that.

As an extreme example, I've seen a group of hippies in a town try to
respond to the molestation of one person's child by another member of the
community without involving the police. I have looked back on that
situation many many times over the last 15 years and have regretted not
advocating for involving the law from the very beginning. These were not
"Permies", but I'm just giving an extreme example of where I've seen
unstructured community intervention fail, where people were reluctant to
involve the law when it was beyond our capacity to deal with. If there were
any serious claims of sexual harassment in a course or event that I was
involved in, I would very quickly differ the situation to Johnny Law and
not attempt to manage a situation I am not qualified to.

I would love to see a community be able to handle these situations without
involving the law and follow through long term to reach conclusions,
exercise judgement, heal and punish people, and remedy situations. I just
don't see the Permaculture movement as having the capacity for that.

Sincerely,
Andrew Millison

On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 8:14 AM, scrooge McDuck <declan@planetmail.net>
wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
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>


-- 
Andrew Millison
(541) 752-9118
www.permacultureintl.com
www.permaculturerising.com