[Chapter_Fourteen] Permaculture and Justice

Fri Jan 21 12:32:04 PST 2011

I am frustrated since i seem to be unable to steer the direction in the way i would like it to go: To discuss the potential danger of replicating injustices, copying them from our existing society/culture to a world of permaculture.  I was trying to get that point across by painting a picture of an extreme future scenario that caricatured this for illustration.  This isn't what i think the future will look like.  It's what i fear the future might look like if we aren't careful.  Could someone let me know how they understand what i just wrote?  I want to make sure that i articulate what i want to discuss... 

(And to clarify:  I wasn't suggesting that all middle class folks are white but rather that i've noticed that most permaculture people are white and middle class and that that might be a problem...)

Rachel

On Jan 21, 2011, at 12:05 PM, Chris G wrote:

> Hi all - one thing i find fascinating in these discussions is how we construct both past and future utopias based on *extremely* subjective variables. perhaps it's the difficulty in imagining anything outside of a context for which we have experience.which leads me to contemplate exactly what the "goal" of much of our work is. taking even just Rachel and Harshal's messages as examples (both of which resonate with me and i don't mean any disrespect in analyzing them) of assumptions:
> 
> - all middle class are white
> having spent most of my life in the cities of montreal and toronto, two extremely multicultural cities, the ethnic profile of the middle class has changed tremendously from the 1960's to today. demographically, that shift will only increase over time. at least in urban areas, i imagine the generalizing of middle-class as "white" is a projection that will likely be less and less accurate in our lifetimes.
> 
> - white middle class are the only people with access to backyards
> again, i see the opposite trend, where people of my generation, no matter the ethnic background, are buying up gaggles of condos on the periphery of inner cities - none of these have backyards. in fact the areas i see that do have gardens in cities i'm familiar with are the older run down neighbourhoods where there is often a large population of recent immigrants. i'm not even going to take new cookie-cutter subdivisions into account because it's my assumption that anyone who wants to live in a suburb is probably not trying to save the planet thru permaculture. rather, i see networks like this are probably a better reflection of people's interest in issues of permaculture and social justice.
> 
> - when civilization collapses small groups of urban elite will be able to sustain their urban gardens peacefully
> this just makes me start to imagine all kinds of horrible scenarios (ie. Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"). If anything in history has been proven, it's that in the wake of civil collapse, things get brutal, nasty, and life becomes survival through the threat and act of physical violence. It's also pretty safe to assume that the uncontrolled fires, pollution from destroyed industry, and lack of clean water and waste removal will make any kind of urban farming impossible.
> 
> - before the industrial era, everyone lived in small tribal societies who produced a minimal impact on the landbases they relied on
> i can't even begin to go into why this is a historical perspective which bears no resemblance to reality. past human cultures have been as varied and complex as one could ever imagine. 
> 
> - when civilization collapses, we can go back to living like these small tribal societies once did
> i'm afraid that we will have polluted our landbases and altered climate to such an extent that it would be impossible to support anything close to present day population numbers on the untainted resources which still exist, no matter what structures we put in place.
> 
> sorry, that all sounds pretty nihilistic - and - i'm curious what motivates us (me?) to do this work, and what, really, is the expectation and/or outcome that we're working towards?
> 
> thanks y'all, and thank-you for caring enough to explore these issues.
> 
>     - chris galanis
> 
> 
> --- On Fri, 1/21/11, chapter_fourteen-beforebefore.net-request at lists.beforebefore.net <chapter_fourteen-beforebefore.net-request at lists.beforebefore.net> wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 23:11:28 -0800
> From: "Rachel A. Buddeberg" <rachel at rabe.org>
> To: "Chapter Fourteen: Where abundant food and human cultures
>     intersect"    <chapter_fourteen-beforebefore.net at lists.beforebefore.net>
> Subject: Re: [Chapter_Fourteen] Permaculture and Justice
> Message-ID: <7E3286A0-3F61-4FB5-A14F-6270CA452AB3 at rabe.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> Reading your thoughts about offering yoga, reflexology etc and calling it permaculture, i realize that i might not have made my concerns as clear as i could have.  So, let me try again.   I am not trying to suggest that we call, say, a fight for equal pay permaculture.  The questions i would like to raise are more along the lines of asking if we are excluding someone if we offer workshops at a certain place, a certain time, in a certain way.  Or to put it more generally: Can we really practice permaculture within the ethical guidelines if we do not also address the issues of justice?   It is not an attempt to "water down" permaculture or include everything under the umbrella.  It is taking a look at how and where we practice permaculture and seeing if that meets the fair share criteria.  For example, can we really ignore the fact that mostly white middle-class people have access to backyards?  As i wrote before: I am worried that if we do not address all the interlinked issue
> s, we might end up with recreating the same problems all over again just in a different context... 
> 
> Let me try to formulate the image that i have in mind when i have these concerns.  Travel with me into the future, please.  It's post peak-oil.  The oil-supported economy has collapsed.  There is desolation in a lot of the country.  Yet, there is bounty in a few places.  San Francisco (except Bayview/Hunters Point), for example, has an abundance of food growing thanks to the hard work of the people who had the time, money, and energy to prepare.  Those people are almost all white and well educated.  Because transportation happens via foot, not much food can be shared long distance.  The food cannot be brought to places where there is hunger.  And nobody had thought to help those places prepare.  And those places happen to be in areas populated by less educated, mostly non-white people.  Is this how we want the future to look like? 
> 
> Rachel
> 
> [...]

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