[Scpg] "Biological democracy" and permaculture: recipe for survival?

[LBUZZELL at aol.com]

    COMMON SENSE AND SURVIVAL, By  William Kotke   
(http://carolynbaker.net/site/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=616&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=1#)     
Tuesday, 29 July 2008    

  


The graph line of the global population  explosion now goes upward almost 
vertically. The graph line of reserves of  resources that fund that explosion 
falls precipitously. The point at which  population crosses the food production 
line is the point of the beginning  of the coming mass die-off of human 
population.  
Since Babylon, the type of human culture that  we live in has featured an 
emperor or surrogate who is surrounded by a  handful of wealthy 
militarist/financiers. These people own and rule the  realm. This class has historically gained 
their power and wealth by  feeding off the people and by growth/conquest. 
This class has always urged  growth as the means to increase their power and 
wealth. There were always  new fertile lands to conquer and peoples to enslave. 
The configuration of  the culture of empire which we call civilization, has not 
changed in six  thousand years. Today in the U.S.A. less than one per cent of 
the  population has more than three quarters of the wealth. Certainly they 
have  enough wealth to buy and run the government and have a land ownership  
pattern that rivals the land barons of Guatamala.  
This culture has increased its population by  running a net deficit of the 
fertility of the earth. The soils, forests,  fish stocks, pure water and 
over-grazed and desertified landscapes have  been sacrificed to the god of growth. 
Now there are no more fertile lands  to conquer and exploit, but the population 
continues to grow and the  fossil fuel production reaches peak and begins to 
decline. The culture  that has no vision of the future and no purpose other 
than material  consumption hits the wall.  
In the past few centuries the elites have  gained a new method of 
growth/conquest. The lever of Science/technology  has been used to further their power. 
Through the creation of  industrialism, we now live in a manufactured 
environment. We civilized  people have created machines and been conditioned by the 
machine world  until we begin to act in a machine-like manner. Powerless, we are  
thoroughly dependent upon the machine for our food and shelter survival.  
Alienated and atomized, we move around trying to fit into a niche in order  to 
obtain survival. The pressure to move to a job breaks nuclear families  apart 
and certainly precludes the existence of extended families. We have  become 
interchangeable ciphers in the industrial machine. We have been  culturally 
conditioned from birth to have great regard for non-living  manufactured items and 
have been alienated from living things. We have  more regard for the dead wood 
of a church than for a living forest.  
Today, when we look at the numbers and look  back at those millions of acres 
of exhausted and eroded soils, common  sense tells us that this is the end. 
The Patriarchs of empire have  committed us to a fundamental biological error. 
Any organism that wantonly  kills that which feeds it will not endure very 
long. The culture of empire  does not have a political problem; it has a 
biological problem. It lives  in a bubble of self-created definitions and has a 
dysfunctional  relationship with the life of the earth. One might say that if the 
humans  can't keep the planet alive, they certainly can't live here.  
For several million years our successful  ancestors maintained adaptation to 
the ecological energy flows of the  earth. Now, humans have become so 
biologically maladapted that we are in  the third mass species die-off, the last one 
being the dinosaurs.  
It's just common sense that we throw out the  whole of the culture of 
civilization. If even a small part of the human  species is to endure, we must return 
to foundational principles.  
The millenniums-old project of the imperial  elites to control every thing in 
front of them and indeed, wishfully, the  universe, has failed.  
THE SHIFT  
The human species is seriously out of balance  with the natural world. The 
obvious answer to this is for the species to  regain balance with the natural 
world. Simple common sense morality would  say that first we need a society that 
agrees that each of us is alive and  not a bio-robot and that each of our 
lives have intrinsic value. We shift  from a war/competition - death focus to a 
principle that all life has  value. Life is the growth system. Consuming living 
ecologies in order to  amass piles of baubles is ultimately not a growth 
system.  
Common sense morality would say that we  humans should aid the living earth 
and that the simple morality would be  that we humans aid in the complete 
ecological restoration of the earth  back to its climax condition. This is the 
least that we could do given the  grievous damage that has occurred. Of course 
this is also the pathway  toward our survival.  
A modern human normally enters the world in  an austere hospital, possibly 
experiencing birth trauma. The child is  baby-sat by a TV and then later turned 
over to a mass education  institution for further conditioning. After 
graduating they get to work in  a cubicle until they retire and die.  
In a culture in which the growth of life is  the paramount focus, the 
pregnant mother would become a center of  community energy. Recent scholarship has 
shown us how important it is for  both mother and baby to receive soothing and 
comforting energies. Great  community energy would also be focused on the 
children. Just like all the  other species around us, the "growing" of children 
would be a central  activity. In a Life culture we would assume that the society 
would be  formed in such a way as to encourage every possible talent of each  
individual. As we symbolically move out of the patriarchal/intellectual to  
the feminine/feeling mode the social dialog changes. The successful  growing of 
life of all kinds requires a feeling for it and some  application of the 
intellect. We would begin to follow perceptions and  conclusions brought to us by 
our feelings rather than conclusions derived  solely from intellection.  
HUMANS ON THE CUTTING EDGE   
It's just common sense. If humans want to  live on this planet they will have 
to restore the life of the earth. This  seems like a tall order but the 
imminent death of billions is also a large  event.  
Answers have come bubbling up out of our mass  intuition. For decades skills 
have been building in the practice of  Permaculture so that seed communities 
can restore ecosystems, build soil  fertility and produce more food per acre 
than the industrial system.  Hand-made houses with solar advantages built from 
local materials are  scattered around the planet. There are examples of 
hand-made houses with  solar advantages that can heat and cool themselves without 
outside energy.  The world-wide move to ecovillages is well under way with Russia 
alone  having now over eight hundred.   
Bill Mollison, one of the co-originators of  Permaculture says that, "Without 
permanent agriculture there is no  possibility of a stable social order." The 
intuitively forming ideal is  extended families occupying their own private 
permaculture design with a  number of these families occupying a watershed. A 
number of watersheds  constitute a bioregion. This is a natural 
social/political framework in  which the needs of the earth are re-presented in human society 
because the  humans are advocating for the life and gaining survival from 
that life. We  might call this biological democracy.  
Human/earth centered, rather than object  centered, this new movement 
promises to become the next human culture.  Human social institutions tend to form 
around food survival systems and be  resonant with the morals and purpose of 
those different activities to gain  food; we would expect the new culture to do 
the same. When some or all of  the seed communities make it through the 
apocalypse, they will be the  ancestors.  
Many flail about trying to save the dying  beast of empire by recycling their 
tin cans or inventing free energy  machines but it is just common sense that 
if we want to aid the life of  our great, great grandchildren we will ignore 
the dying beast and put our  living energies into the new way of life.  
By Wm. H. Kőtke, author of  the underground classic book: THE FINAL EMPIRE: 
The Collapse of  Civilization and the Seed of the Future which can be viewed 
at: _http://www.thefinalempirebook.com/_ (http://www.thefinalempirebook.com/) .  
and Garden Planet: The Present Phase Change of the Human Species.  seen at: 
_http://carolynbaker.net/site/Local%20Settings/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/OLK1
A6/www.gardenplanetbook.com_ 
(http://carolynbaker.net/site/Local%20Settings/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/OLK1A6/www.gardenplanetbook.com)   .  Telephone 
orders at 1-888-280-7715 or at bookstores  everywhere.  




**************Get fantasy football with free live scoring. Sign up for 
FanHouse Fantasy Football today.      
(http://www.fanhouse.com/fantasyaffair?ncid=aolspr00050000000020)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.permaculture-guilds.org/pipermail/southern-california-permaculture/attachments/20080729/dfd0de71/attachment.html>