Let me dukkha round to your place
I haven’t had many conversations about Permaculture in quite some time now. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on there.
For the 15 years it’s been since I studied at the Permaforest Trust, I’ve had regular opportunities to talk about the experience.
The inevitable questions begin with “What’s it about?” and “Isn’t that all about making compost?”
Let me offer just one definitive quote from the late Bill Mollison:
Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system
For me, it was a response to seeing the modern world differently.
From Green Crash:
My daughter Carina commented on my reading list one day. The book titles were ‘The Long Emergency’, ‘Twilight in the Desert’ and ‘Collapse’. I think she could see a clear trend here that didn’t sound positive.
Of course, none of what I was captivated by was really News in any sense. It had just begun to mean something different to me. I looked at my air travel patterns and was horrified by the energy waste.
My ‘old self’ from page 2 had become a despicable plunderer of resources. The money I had in the bank became a source of enslavement to other people, as banks lent my savings ten times over to others.
Any provision I’d made for my children’s future turned to dust before my eyes. Nobody around me was interested. I had to try and close my mouth about everything that was important to me. Something had to change.
Indeed. Things changed, for me at least. As certain parts of this trip, my attitudes would resemble the current Extinction Rebellion.
In the last 24 months, my Herd membership get’s an entirely new cadence as many of my ‘permies’ have taken up new perspectives and ESG becomes the unfortunate TLA for a narrative around Sustainability.
I’m listening to Eddy Vedder’s voice wolf-crying at me as a solid sleep has processed my viewing of Into the Wild last night. This morning, these thought want to find their way into the cloudy-verse. I’m thinking of Alexander Supertramp’s demise in Magic Bus and what it signifies for me on Herd membership.
You only just arrived here 5 minutes ago
In the first few days at the Permaforest Trust, the founder Tim posited a thought similar to the following:
“If you only just arrived here, I’d ask you to take a little time before you criticise our Systems. We’ve been developing them over decades. You may think you have a ‘better way’ to organise our meal preparation, for example. I’d ask you to keep your suggestion-box entries to yourself for a while.”
I don’t think I did a great job of putting that thought into practice, but the thoughts resonated with me then and the return to me regularly. In what’s often listed as the primary Permaculture Principle, we should Observe and Interact within our living environment.
Today, the emphasis is on Observe. In fact, I might restate it as “Observe. Observe. Observe. Maybe interact. Eventually.”
Yes, I’m pushing 60 now and I would say something like that. Whilst the permaculture training came in my early 40s, the depth of patience I seem to exhibit these days looks very different. These days, I’m happy to contemplate and quote Valentine Michael Smith’s Martian wisdom, Waiting Is
Green Anxiety
Having lived through at least 10 years of what I’d call Green Anxiety, I now see something similar around me in the Headlines and Streams of ‘Main’. If I had a time machine and could bring forward my 44 year old self, I’d have been right in the face of every Growth Deluded Cornicopian. I would have projected my own Anxiety through a filter of Righteous Indignation into the faces of the White Privileged world that gave birth to me.
I’m trying to think a bit more like a grandparent these days. It occurred to me at some point that humans can’t see past 2 generations into the future.
I can tell a story about parenting and realising that we can’t Eat Money. There’s a version of that thought which is for grandchildren. The version about great, great, great, great grandchildren rarely gets a gig.
And there’s are good reasons for that. Good, solid, Daylight Thinking reasons maybe similar to “there’s only so much you can do” or “3 generations from gutter to gutter” and various other sophistry that essentially shrugs it’s shoulders at Long Term Anything.
I think some of these deluded thoughts in myself need airing out. Let me say as clearly as I can… this writing is about what’s going on for me. I don’t know what’s going on for you. I can’t read your mind.
In fact, none of us can read minds. Why do I feel like I live in a time of Mind Readers?
Paying the Bills
Allow me to juxtapose a couple of Bills. Don’t worry, there is a point to my choice here. Please come along for a thought experiment and some Observations.
The Gates Institutional Narrative
Apologies Eric Weinstein, I couldn’t resist. For many decades, I considered Microsoft the Evil Empire of the computer industry. That’s a pretty dated thought, as Apple and Google seem to be doing a pretty good impression of Evil Empires.
We used to refer to Bill Gates as ‘Bill’, in the pseudo familiar way that also made Jobs into Steve. For me, Bill ran Microsloth, which was the most annoying software company in the world to me. I would say, things have changed a good deal at Microsoft, but let me leave that for another day.
Bill made a few quid and then, according to one narrative, became Foundationally involved in the amelioration of large scale health problems.
God only knows how this works within minutiae of Bill’s life. I don’t know him. I’ve never met him. Like you, dear reader, he appears to be a separate-self expression of life on earth. I can’t read his mind.
I don’t know if he’s a great example of philanthropy or an evil genius intent in ‘culling’ the human Herd. For now, I’ll give the Gate’s Institutional Narrative a benefit of the doubt. I’m tending to do a lot of that these days… admitting that I can’t actually know what’s going on in someone elses head.
Just now and then, people pay me the same courtesy. I would say, it seems far from a universal Thing (admitting that Mind Reading is not available to most/any of us).
No need for me to explore the Mintpress take in Bill Gates’ intentions. You can find that anywhere. Whether we have a cure for malaria or a devious plot to thin the ‘Herd’, our existence is primarily Impermanent. I guess Bill might not have swallowed that one yet.
It’s a hard pill to swallow for members of the WEIRD world. From Dr Al Bartlett’s “solutions are the problem” through Lao-Tzu, there is a strong potential of unintended consequences that track our best efforts to be Permanent.
There is a Me from 15 years ago that had the Hubris to want to tell the world What to do. At some points, I even felt that I was in charge of my own life and destiny.
I can’t imagine a job interview or loan application where I’d get to say “None of us really are in charge of our own lives” and get hired or my loan approved.
We get a lifetime of conditioning to suggest that we can work along the edges of Good and Bad and somehow take responsibility/credo for good outcomes, while projecting Blame onto others when things don’t work out.
It’s occurred to me that a good deal of my moralist/ethical conditioning would suggest that we get a free pass from judgement if we ‘have no choice in the matter’.
Did you choose to be born in the 20th or 21st century? Did you choose your parents? Did you choose to be a Skeptic (who I could be abrading with these words), or did that just Kinda Happen?
The Pandemic has melted an old part of me that used to love to ‘throw mud’ at leadership. Because it could include humour. Because it divided my fellow travellers into tribes of Goodies and Baddies. Because it ‘made me feel a little bit better’ as I grabbed for some moral high-ground.
For me, I’m going to try bring this paradoxical axiom more into my Daylight thinking.
If you accept nothing and want to change everything, you might find that nothing changes. If you accept everything and change nothing, you might find that everything changes.
Listening to Changing Opinion is a way for me to experience a busy, daylight, WEIRD version of above axiom.
Duck Bill
I never had a chance to meet Bill Mollision face to face. My friend and permie teacher Tim agreed with my guesstimate of Bill Mollision’s character - “Like Frank Burke, but with a formal eduction.” Tim nods and effectively says “Hell Yeah”.
My impression is that Bill M. was a character - all at once spiky, inspiring, funny, charismatic and Dangerous. I say Dangerous because he did several lifetimes worth of questioning the Status Quo in a way that Establishment folks would have struggled to argue with.
That kind of giant personality often comes with a dark side. I won’t say too much, as it’s all hearsay anyway. And Bill has gone to the Clearing at the End of the Path, so we shan’t speak Ill of him.
How would this paragraph from the Permaculture Designer’s manual wash with the 2021 Green Party (let alone the sinestro)
“The tragic reality is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them. We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.”
For me, Bill inspired us (my fellow students at the Permaforest Trust) to coin the expression we put the Cult into Permaculture
Make no mistake - if Mollision and Holmgren were Good and Bad Cop, we’d have little trouble picking up the language associations. For me, I’m grateful to have stood in a forest while listening to audio of Bill teaching Permaculture One. It was a transcendant experience.
Let me recommend you read David Holmgren’s The Apology: from baby boomers to the handicapped generations if you’d like a glimpse into a pre-pandemic Permie perspective (ppPp) of the state of the world.
Yes, the Permaculture germ is designed to travel. It can self-seed like paspalum and breed like Tilapia.
Well, it used to. I’m not quite sure now. With the edifice of Sars2 playing out, I’m not sure that we need that much help with the reversal of Globalism or the Shrinking of the Frankenstein 21st century global economy.
I might just be Kinda Happening.
From the Couch of Long Terms
Am I advocating that we sit back on the couch and just Let it Happen? Yes and No. Like Bill M, I’d encourage any younger person who is wanting to be adventurous to take a few risks and make a few mistakes. Life will tend to ‘sort you out’, for Better or Worse.
Do Wolves and Bears have better or worse? Are we much of an improvement on chimpanzees when it comes to Culture?
I have felt the sense that having kids and grandkids makes it Essential that I try my best to let them survive and thrive. My father would be interested in the Burke surname existing into the future.
Would I choose to limit the resources available to my grandkids for a more sustainable world?
Or did I learn how to put the Sus into Sustainability? Am I only interested in my Selfish Gene’s survival? To what end? The heat death of the universe will arrive as the entropy that Life slows down speeds up. Well, that’s in this part of the Multiverse anyway.
My apologies if this writing became lecture-ish. Don’t let me over-egg my existentialism. It’s just a reflection.
“And their came into Egypt a Pharaoh who did not know”
That’s a quote from Martin Sheen’s Carl Fox, the father of Budd Fox in Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street. It turns out, it’s not a bit of ancient wisdom. As I understand it, it’s a constructed affective aphorism.
Probably most of what I might say has that same aspect.
The word, my friends is Nevertheless. The world is screwed up, but Nevertheless. I am collection of $15 dollars worth of chemicals who has more cells in his gut biome that the rest of the Ben Suit I’m walking around in.
I have indeed, got No Idea. Have you?
