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  • From: Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe@silcom.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Nate Downey writes/Death is the father of duty The progenitor of permaculture, Bill Mollison died on September 24 at the age of 88,
  • Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2016 20:17:55 -0800

Death is the father of duty
The progenitor of permaculture, Bill Mollison, who died on September 24 at
the age of 88, avoided the spiritual arena with a healthy passion.
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/life/home/death-is-the-father-of-duty/article_24638814-826d-5e01-9aa9-bdd2967bd2ea.html

<http://www.santafenewmexican.com/life/home/death-is-the-father-of-duty/article_24638814-826d-5e01-9aa9-bdd2967bd2ea.html>

Without mercy, he would brashly challenge any and all claims as to the
existence of the paranormal. “Aye, fairy worship!” he’d protest with a snort
and a hyperbolic roll of his wide eyes.

Ironically, it may be time to put Mollison in prophetic terms. Okay, I know.
Some of you may not be ready. He hasn’t been gone long, but please make your
sobbing snappy. Time is short. Resource depletion, species extinction,
climate change. Pick your pollution. Like it or not. We must quickly
cultivate Mollison’s legacy. What the Hell? Why not aim high?
Like any paradigm-shifting bloke, Mollison was a profound thinker and a
charismatic communicator. I’ve been blessed to see him in action several
times, and in 1992 I was fortunate to have him as lead teacher of a
permaculture design course at Santa Fe’s Apache Creek Ranch. I’ve had many
effective teachers in my life — professionals, who blew minds on regular
bases. He tops them all.

Mollison was to teaching as Jerry Garcia was to playing guitar — talented,
original, exceedingly interesting and often amusing, poignant and profound.
Both would go noodling off on saucy, seemingly irrelevant and half-brewed
tangents. But if a patient listener gave the chow fun time enough to boil, a
slippery new world would spiral into a dreamy bite of rhizomatous wisdom.
Delivered with a plucky faith in life’s mercurial tempo and a preternatural
ability to slow down and soften up, each master regularly provided his
sagacious goods with an intense and enduring shock.

But Mollison was more than an entertaining teacher who made you giggle and
grow, greater than a soulful sage who made you weep and love.
His prophetic side becomes apparent when one considers the content of his
message. Like all prophesy, it’s morally significant, directly connected to
the workings of the universe, and able to predict the future. Some call it
mystical, religious, or transcendent. In permaculture, we use a set of
self-evident ethics founded on the concept of moral responsibility, and we
study predictable patterns in nature as we apply universal, science-based
principles to our work.

Permaculture’s moral significance is best understood in comparison to the
term “sustainability.” Both words were coined in 1972, but as synonyms go
it’s critical to note that they differ almost as much as they resemble each
other. Sustainability describes a condition, real or imagined, but it’s an
end unto itself with no known means to attain its goal. Conversely,
permaculture provides a detailed and comprehensive road map toward the
sustainable Promised Land. The word itself comes complete with a built-in
plan for real-world success, which is essentially this: Mimic the patterns
and principles of nature whenever you affect your environment, and
efficiencies will occur, yields will increase, local biodiversity levels will
begin to rebound, and you will be on the road to a sustainable future.

Like sustainability, permaculture can refer to a goal, but the latter is also
a moral plea, a cultural movement, a motivational philosophy, a system of
design, a set of practical techniques, a wide-spectrum of authentic examples
based on the same biologically based creed, and much, much more. I tend to
think of permaculture as a school of thought and action — in sharp contrast
to the vague and easy to co-opt term sustainability. This linguistic
distinction is helpful to understand when you are trying to comprehend the
internal power and universal life-forces embedded in the more-complex term.

To confirm the oracular nature of permaculture qua prophesy, let’s work our
way back from 1972. In cooperation with Mollison’s student at the University
of Tasmania, David Holmgren, the two ecologists developed a practical
philosophy that provided the keys to human survival. As a portmanteau of
permanent, agriculture, and culture, permaculture unveiled the importance of
creating locally based food and energy systems in order to maintain some
semblance of human civilization given our planet’s limited resources. In
sharp contrast to the post-World War II soil-depleting systems of
industrialized food production, permaculture was a sibylline call to action
to which our culture has responded but has not yet fully embraced.

In 1978, Mollison and Holmgren published Permaculture One. After that,
Holmgren mostly stayed home to create an Australian oasis. As living proof
that permaculture works, he’s the movement’s well-grounded and much-loved
mother figure. Tune in next time for my sainthood argument. (Well, no.
Don’t—I’m in deep enough, I’d assume.)

Meanwhile Mollison spent many decades exhorting the ways, means, and benefits
of permaculture. By the beginning of the 1980s, he’d taught in five
continents. By the end of the decade, Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual was
published, and permaculture designers, permaculture teachers, and even
teachers of permaculture teachers suddenly had a formidable textbook, a
580-page eco-bible to which they could refer and through which they could
sound reasonably intelligent and mostly believable.

Conceived in one of the most remote corners of western civilization, the idea
first swept swiftly into the fringes of alternative society. Decades later,
even the New York Times, Le Monde and Aljazeera America are reporting about
it. In the Guardian’s obituary on Mollison, which has close to 10,000 shares
and God knows how many views, the 195-year-old international news outlet
claimed that permaculture has three million practitioners and that the
movement has spread to more than 140 countries.

One apostle, Robyn Francis of Djanbung Gardens, has taught 143 permaculture
design courses since 1985. Last month she graduated over 40 more permaculture
designers in China. The movement is growing. But what’s next?

In macabre situations like the death of a beloved guru, permies might look to
the second of Mollison’s five design principles, “The problem is the
solution.” Of course, the “problem” of Mollison’s mortality is a “solution”
to the problem of looming cultural demise. Fortunately, given his current
physical state, we don’t have a rotting-body problem. With Mollison’s death,
we have a duty to disseminate a growing body of knowledge across the globe
and down the street. It’s an opportunity to spread the word, so please do.

In the great tradition of ecology-based morality, which includes the work of
Aldo Leopold, Masanobu Fukuoka, and Rachel Carson, Mollison recognized the
dilemmas that human beings would be facing today. He found the solution and
spent the rest of his life sharing it with others. May we continue his work
and move it into contemporary mainstream society. And may he decay into glory
and rise up through the trunks of the trees planted by those who’ve learned
that we are all creators now.

Nate Downey is the author of Harvest the Rain (Sunstone Press, 2010) and the
president of Santa Fe Permaculture, Inc. You can contact him through his new
company website, www.permadesign.com <http://www.permadesign.com/>.
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  • [permaculture] Nate Downey writes/Death is the father of duty The progenitor of permaculture, Bill Mollison died on September 24 at the age of 88,, Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, 11/07/2016

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