This is a recent letter that I sent to other Permaculture Practitioners during our communications on where certification, etc, will go in the future. Your comments?
Greetings All,
Thank you for all of your communications. I am in the middle of a very active teaching and consulting year. I have been mulling over these e-mails between this and that.
Ecologically sound and economically viable, a central paradigmatic idea, central to Permaculture. How do we make this real? And how do we reach down into the belly of the beast and teach the beast to eat local, so to speak? These two questions are central to my thinking. I refer to the mainstream when I refer to the beast’s belly. Let’s face it, in some sense the overshoot of this “culture” is overshot to the extreme. We, as a pioneer species, must act and root ourselves not only in the choir’s orchestra pit, but in the wastes and constraints perpetrated by those who “dumb us down”, and we have to do this within the veils that cover the eyes of the industrial monoculturalist, imperialists.
After all, are we not yet another throwaway product spewed out of the machine? But, haven’t we made strides to recycle, reintegrate, reincorporate ourselves into what’s left of the forests and prairies?
So what is it that makes life economically viable? What resource do we gather in order to make this real, and hopefully by default, we affect significantly the resource we gather from? How do we find a path that widens out from the constraints we encounter?
What I propose is that we configure a Permaculture Trade Association that is driven by a set of standards that reflect our cherished ethics, principles and methodologies. We need this to open and enter the door. We need to permeate the many “powers that be” with this essential design science that we all hold so dear. How do we overturn urban livestock laws so that we can keep a few hens in the backyard? How do we that are in the know manage storm water? Do we whisk it away to the sea or design the infrastructure that would percolate it slowly into the soil matrix? How do we afford ourselves the funding to recirculate the world’s money piles so that it is fluid, flexible, life-giving, healing?
As the world of the climate changers and global warmers escalates there are “business opportunities” abounding for all of us. We have the ethical base as practitioners to know what to do with “money”, do we not?
A trade association: I approach the university. I see the need to teach Permaculture there. They wish to know, “where is the authority here, the association of practiced individuals that can back you up?” We need this ticket to get in the door. Once we are in, across the threshold, Permaculture will change someone, and that someone may very well be the CEO of some “insignificant” corporation like Monsanto. We may very well become the GMO that triggers the self-reorganization of the corporation. Or the disintegration for that matter.
We have got to float the Permaculture canoe into the rapids of the mainstream, and the way we get there is through the mainstream. We have the keys. The question remains: what doors are we willing to open? What threshold are we willing to cross?
I have been given the gift and the ability to share it and I am 57 years old and I will be dead soon enough. So, I can sleep when I’m dead. In the interim each second is before us in each second and the only cure for ongoing collapse is to collapse into it and go where no Permaculture practitioner has gone before. After all, who is holding the strings, and who will have the courage to cut them with a grafting knife? We are an “industry” in the making and we need licensure procedures. How can we change the “law” without them?
If we organize we can become a powerful force in this world. This glorious Permaculture system is not limited by fractious or dogmatic, isolated or fundamentalist segments of the population. It crosses all borders, all fragmented and synthetic, political borders, all bioregions. It is truly “Holistic”. It will take us into the thirty-story apartment building and out on to the farthest plane. Permaculture is growing by leaps and bounds, and as we know, the yields are unlimited. We need a face for the populace. This movement has got wings. Let’s get rid of the “DDT” so that we can soar together.
Wayne Weiseman