I have been learning about Permaculture last week. It's interesting that even the spell check does not recognize the word.
In so doing I have had the biggest flash of my life. Maybe we are on the edge of the kind of momentous shift that we experienced in the Middle Ages?
First a quick look at how I understand Permaculture and hence now see our world in opposition to it. Then I want to share my ahas with you and see if you see them too?
First of all a few pictures that I think illustrate our modern view of the doctrine that is holding us back.
A plowed field. It's normal. It's how we farm. It's how we garden. It's how I think we do everything. It may be why we need so much Fossil Fuel energy.
It is the symbol of our approach to nature and to each other. That we are the masters of nature. We get our food by beating back nature to the wall and then - because nature is such a formidable opponent - we expend vast amounts of energy to keep nature under control. Our system demands that we use all this energy. We have designed a system that forces us to work against nature.
For the most unnatural landscape of all is cleared ground. All of nature is designed to fill the space. All our efforts therefore have to be put in to hold nature back. We fill the space with one crop. This never occurs in nature. So Nature piles on full force to add diversity to this monoculture. We work full out to keep her back.
One of the ways we fight back is that have to use big machines and so we need vast fields. So we need vast sums of money to do this.
We do this with all parts of life. We drive miles to work and back. We design homes and offices to depend on external energy to heat and cool. We have a food system that moves food 3,000 miles to our table and so on. It's all about lazy design.
We even have schools and healthcare that is lazy. We take the child out of their society and exclude them from life to teach them about life? We think that disease is a mass of separate things rather than a weakness in the society and in the immune system.
Everything can be fixed with money, application of external energy or a chemical. All are designed like a swimming pool!
This swimming pool illustrates our doctrine maybe more clearly. It is a miracle of the use of money, energy and chemicals to defeat nature. All pool owners know though that if you leave your pool for even a few days, this pristine pool quickly becomes filled with nature. Because of the sterile design, most of what fills in is not very nice.
Keeping a pool this pristine is expensive. Everything we do in this design is expensive.
So now 2 hints of another way.
This is a forest garden. Looks like a weed filled jungle. But actually this is a complete ecosystem that can produce as much food per acre as the big field. This is a radical re-thinking of the relationships we think of as normal in food. It is all about working with the power of nature. In temperate climates, nature wants to have forests. The food grower works to set up an ecosystem of many supporting layers and birds and insects that all work together to create health.
Not only does this offer equivalent yields but takes almost no work and no external inputs. Nature does nearly all the work.
Nothing in this design is expensive. In fact as each year passes, the operation of the "farm" gets cheaper and requires less and less labour.
Here is a swimming pool that has been designed on the same principles. If designed to work with nature, Nature becomes your pool service. Not a chemical in sight! No scum on the way and if you have the right surrounding environment with the right birds and insects then no mossies either. As each year passes this pool gets easier to run and gets more attractive.
I could go on and on. But do you see where I am going?
We laugh at the medieval world - how could they be so stupid and bigoted and blind?.
In the medieval world we all knew that the Earth was the centre of the universe. We all accepted that our life was only a preparation for the after life and that our only way to heaven was via the permission of the church. We all accepted that the church had the right to defend to the death these ideas.
The Renaissance was the discovery that new tools could prove that the Earth was not the centre of the universe and that the relationships between the bodies in the universe could be known and that these relationships, light, gravity etc, could help us build a better world on Earth.
The Reformation also told us that the Pope was not the only gateway to salvation. That we could find this ourselves. In fact, the seed of the consumer world to come, the saved could be seen on Earth by the evidence of their success.
The new revolution in media - the printing press - enabled these heresies to reach the people. Before then the mass media had been controlled by the church.
So today do we not also accept as normal a doctrine that our grandchildren will laugh at?
We believe that man is outside nature and in fact should rule it. Our ego is in the centre of the universe. We not only deny nature but our own nature. We think that we are rational beings. We think that we are not social primates.
I think that a new Reformation could and should put nature back in the centre where she in truth resides.
The new science will set out to discover the wonders of all her relationships and this knowledge will inform our new era. We will discover her rules and we will apply those rules to how we design and live in our world.
We will see how "stupid" we too have been. Our St Augustines - Frederick Taylor, Henry Ford, JP Morgan and Calvin.
We have taken the Protestant ethic of "Knowing them by their works" to mean that our salvation and happiness is evidenced by the material goods that we have.
We believe that all the ways we have to get to "Heaven" are mediated by agents of the church - our schools and accreditation - companies making stuff etc. We cannot learn amongst ourselves. We cannot have a living without jobs. We cannot live a healing life and so on. We are helpless without the Church.
This is 85 Broad Street - the Vatican of our time. It is the head office of Goldman Sachs - the fount of Popes of our official religion. That the man with the most stuff and hence access to the most credit is saved.
Credit is the Indulgences of our time. Credit is the pass to all things. Only the new church can give us the credit to enable us to do anything in the consumer world we live in. We cannot grow food. We cannot have shelter. We cannot raise our kids. We cannot work for pay. We cannot build a enterprise without the Indulgence of Credit.
The state, like the Kings of the Medieval time, are also in the thrall of this "Church". The Church as we are seeing is exempt from justice. The temporal king can be excommunicated as he was in medieval times. He can have his credit cut off.
Put this way does not our world view seem as odd as it was back in the medieval times? Is it not based in an unreal doctrine as well?
This is reality - nature working as a system.
This is our printing pess.
And just as the printing press, the pamphlet, the Bible in the vernacular made the reformation possible, so I think the web and permaculture will lower the costs of everything so as the de-establish the New All Powerful Church.
But the heart of the matter is food. 10,000 years ago, we settled. We placed claims on land, on things and on people. We now stand at the end of this long experiment in "Civilization"
How we get our food is the most important shaping influence on how humans interact with the world and with each other.
The failure of credit and the loss of cheap oil will force us into either a dark age or a new world.
The new world could be based on this new Renaissance and this new Reformation.
If we learned how to work with nature and if we learned about our own nature - what could we achieve?
