[Chapter_Fourteen] Permaculture and Justice

Fri Jan 21 15:01:33 PST 2011

Thanks for your follow-up and clarification, Harshal!  It helps me understand where i need to clarify where i am coming from! The challenge of email is that we cannot clarify what we typed when someone looks puzzled ;-). 

And  i agree that this is a great discussion even if it meandered off my intended path to other important questions/issues/ideas... I hope it will continue (in any direction, really, though i'd love input on the question i've raised because i am pondering them...)! 

I fear that it is indeed to simplistic to assume that injustices will simply wither away when we move to a permaculture.  I think we need to actively ensure that they disappear.  Maybe it will help if we focus on one of the questions i raised... 

I asked:  How can we use permaculture principles to ensure just distribution of resources in a world where almost everything is distributed unjustly? 

What exactly did i mean?  Well, go to the Financial District in San Francisco, for example.  What do you see?  You see people in rags who are homeless.  And then you see people paying $20 or more dollars per day just to park their SUV close to the office.  That's unequal distribution.  Can we use permaculture principles to change this?  Obviously, it violates "fair share." But is that enough?  If you've taken a Muni bus lately, you've probably heard their appeals to fair share.  As if someone who didn't pay will all the sudden pay because they realize they haven't contributed their fair share… That's my fear: An appeal to "fair share" isn't enough. People aren't just going to give up their SUVs so that someone else can simply live.  So, what more can permaculture offer here?  

Rachel

On Jan 21, 2011, at 1:48 PM, Harshal Deshmukh wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I guess i must have misunderstood what you have been trying to get this discussion focused on, but i'm having a hard time understanding what you are getting at when you say we replicate injustices from our existing society to the world of permaculture. I assumed that if we kept the principals of permaculture in mind and follow those we would not have these issues/injustices? or is that too simplistic point of view? i'm not sure... 
> 
> as for as my statement about small tribal societies.. yes i understand that human beings had far more varied and complex cultures than just tribal villages, but they all collapsed or died out when they used up more resources than they could regenerate. 
> my point was that somehow the surviving members will be forced to adapt to what is left behind after we have degraded the landbase. maybe not in the numbers we have now.
> but this isnt what Rachel wanted to discuss in the first place i think and i totally misunderstood her comments. so sorry about that :)
> 
> thank you for this platform for this great discussion
> 
> Harshal
> 
> On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 12:32 PM, Rachel A. Buddeberg <rachel at rabe.org> wrote:
> 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
>> 
>> [...]
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> chapter_fourteen-beforebefore.net mailing list
> chapter_fourteen-beforebefore.net at lists.beforebefore.net
> http://lists.beforebefore.net/listinfo.cgi/chapter_fourteen-beforebefore.net
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> chapter_fourteen-beforebefore.net mailing list
> chapter_fourteen-beforebefore.net at lists.beforebefore.net
> http://lists.beforebefore.net/listinfo.cgi/chapter_fourteen-beforebefore.net

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.beforebefore.net/pipermail/chapter_fourteen-beforebefore.net/attachments/20110121/c11bd80b/attachment-0004.htm>