Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Reflections on July 4


 I don't like fireworks. Nor do I watch football, or get drunk at barbecues, or fly the flag. So many, quite obviously, might accuse me of being "unamerican" or "unpatriotic." But bear with me.

When astronaut Edgar Mitchell flew to the moon on Apollo 14 in 1971, he, like all the other astronauts, was a loyal, patriotic American, who was proud to pose with our flag on the barren, sun-baked lunar surface.  But the experience of standing there and looking back at our shimmering blue planet fundamentally transformed him. As he later said,

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

At that moment, Mitchell became--and remained--a Gaian, whose first and fundamental loyalty was to the living Earth and to all her creatures. When he looked back at that miraculous blue orb floating in the sky, he saw no national boundaries--only landforms, oceans, and clouds, all interconnected. And he realized at that moment that what we call "nations" are just mental formations--imaginary constructs conjured in our collective consciousness by our inherent tribal instincts, common to chimpanzees, gorillas, and all other social animals.  But Gaia--the living Earth--was real and visible. And it is all that ultimately matters--ever.

And so today, if people ask me the tribal question, "What are you?" my immediate answer is "I'm a Gaian--and so are you."  For "Gaian" is the only identity label I know that is entirely inclusive, and that draws no boundaries whatsoever between "us" and "them"--the boundaries that are conjured into being by our innate tribal loyalties--whether as nations, religions, political parties, pro sports fans, or whatever--but that can be transcended, as with Edgar Mitchell, by the awakening of a deeper insight into who we really are. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."  And this "inescapable network of mutuality" is exactly what Edgar Mitchell looked up and saw from the moon. And it became his highest and first loyalty.

So what does all this have to do with the Fourth of July? Is this not just another tribal holiday to celebrate our "Americanness"--our "independence" from Britain, our colonial "mother country"?

Well--yes and no. It is all of that, but something more. Something sacred. And that sacredness inheres in the iconic paragraph that opens the document whose signing we actually celebrate on this day:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed..."

Let us begin by laying aside some of the ideological baggage that has recently afflicted our reading of these lines. We know, for example, that in 18th Century usage, "all men" was a synonym for "all people"--though we also know that this was a solidly and unquestioningly patriarchal culture, for whom "men" were the only people who really mattered.

And let us also lay aside our knowledge that the man who drafted these immortal words, Thomas Jefferson, was a lifelong slaveholder who was raised in and fully participated in an intergenerational crime against humanity, a morally bankrupt socioeconomic institution that denied full humanity to people based on their skin color and African ancestry, in order to enslave them and their descendents for life, thereby inflicting incalculable social and psychological damage on them, even a century and a half after they were emancipated by force.

But to judge Jefferson's words by his own life, actions, and cultural biases is a classic example of an Ad Hominem fallacy--confusing the writer himself with the words he has written. People are complex, and fully capable of self-contradiction between what they espouse and what they practice. And as Hamlet says, "use every man after his deserts [i.e. what he deserves] and who shall scape whipping?"

So let's, again, forget about Jefferson himself for a moment, and even forget about the historical contexts of America's growing schism with the British crown and parliament, and look at the deeper, sacred meaning of these words. One way of doing this is to juxtapose this passage with the other sacred utterance I quoted above:

"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

Not to belabor this, but these two passages cohere completely. If we take Dr. King's immortal words as the major premise, we arrive at the Declaration's opening thesis statement as a logically necessary consequence. This can be put in the form of a theoretical enthymeme:  IF we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, where whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly, THEN it follows necessarily that all men [i.e. all human beings, male or female, all inclusive] are created equal [in the sense that]they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights [i.e. rights that no one can take away without just cause and due process] that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

 

Note, again, that—slaveholder though he was, Jefferson wrote “all men”—not “all white men” (though he very much could have, given the acculturated prejudice of his peers). Nor did he write “all Americans.”  It is for this reason that the major premise of the Declaration is fully compatible with the Dharma—with the timeless truth reflected so clearly in Dr. King’s words: “an inescapable network of mutuality”—and with the insight of Edgar Mitchell as he beheld our living and vibrant planet from the dead and desolate moon.  

And this is why I still celebrate the Fourth of July—not with noisy fireworks, but with quiet contemplation, renewing my vow to realize the vision reflected in these words: to work toward a world where because we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality where whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly, it follows necessarily that all of us have equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that our governments are legitimate only if they “secure these rights” by consent of the governed.  Happy In(ter)dependence Day!

 





Sunday, June 27, 2021

Helplessly Hoping

 The climate crisis has come home to us, here in the Willamette Valley. A scorching, attenuated heat wave due to a giant "heat dome" or high pressure zone has driven the temperature higher than all historical records for the entire Northwest and beyond, and it is likely to persist throughout the week, with high temperatures approaching 115 degrees F.  The effects on agriculture for this region are likely to be catastrophic, to say nothing of the plight of the homeless and of all who lack, or cannot afford, air conditioning. Meanwhile, devastating hurricanes are already brewing in the Caribbean and South Pacific, and this year's wildfire season has already started.  And it's still only June.

As my wife and I take refuge from the heat in our air-conditioned house, I watch my carefully tended garden start to wilt, and I step out for brief intervals to gather as many greens, blueberries and gooseberries as I can before they shrivel. A hummingbird flutters gratefully around our well-watered hanging fuchsias on our shaded northern patio, while songbirds stock up on protein at our feeder as if it were autumn or winter.  

Meanwhile, I am fighting off an attack of despair for our planet that is as bad as any I remember.  Prior to this, I have always taken a certain pride in my ability to balance realism with hope. Realism, that is, about the perilous state of our planet and its intractable roots in our dominant "economic growth" ideology that requires a maximizing, money-driven economy that is parasitizing our planet--and hope--whether the latter goes under the name of Permaculture, the Gaia Movement, or simply "spontaneous remission of the Cancer of the Earth" through an unpredictable, self-replicating meme that somehow awakens us, all at once, to the fact that nature (Gaia) is a living system whose complex self-sustaining dynamics we all depend on, rather than a "resource" we can plunder at will for all our toys.

But now it's too late.  We failed. And as our increasingly erratic and chaotic global climate crosses one tipping point after another, the whole idea of "the future" has become a bad joke. Whatever is bad today--like this blistering heat wave--will be worse tomorrow, as we collectively and helplessly endure an incremental apocalypse, an irreversible global die-off.  So how do we live without hope?

Hope is one of the three theological virtues of Christian theology, along with Faith and Charity; it became so, no doubt, because it seems an indispensable component of mental and emotional health and well-being. And in the past, it was always possible--if not for people themselves, then on behalf of their children and grandchildren. The chattel slave, the political prisoner, the starving peasant farmer, the desperate soldier on the battlefield, the rape victim after a Viking massacre, could always cling to hope that the future might be better than the present; that even if they died a horrible death, their children and grandchildren would live on to see a brighter day, somewhere else, full of promise for their children and grandchildren. Such hope has always been our birthright, and has always been empowering and sustaining for us.  How can we live any sort of meaningful lives if we are deprived of all hope? If the Future has been cancelled.

I think back to that hummingbird I saw this morning, feeding on the lifegiving nectar of our well-watered fuchsia.  Unlike us, the hummingbird has no language with which to torture itself with speculation about the "future," even though it and its kind are doomed, like all the rest of us, to premature extinction. Instead, it simply focuses on the present moment: the delicious, energy-packed nectar it has found to sustain it through the torrid days to come.  How can we learn from the hummingbird, blest and cursed as we are by the language that allows us to study trends and imagine "the future"?

I have no good answer for this, other than the usual: breathe, observe, let go. The Buddha instructs us, quite specifically, to let go of craving--of wishing things were other than they are--as the key to achieving (or more accurately, returing repeatedly to) equanimity. That that is, is, whether we like it or not. Or as Lao Tzu puts it, "The ten thousand things rise and fall, while the Self watches their return/They grow and flourish, and then return to the source..."

  But this is only half of the solution he offers.  The other half, of course, is letting go of attachment to "me" by taking care of others, empathizing with them and striving to bring comfort if they suffer, and rejoicing with them when they are happy. Hence the "four immeasurables" or four useful attitudes to cultivate: benevolence, compassion, joy, and equanimity.

Nothing else matters, even (or especially) in a dying, hopeless world.

Saturday, June 19, 2021

Can Permaculture Save Us?

 As everyone who is honest knows, we've passed the tipping point in climate change, and our planet today is in a slow, but gradually accelerating and irreversible downward spiral toward...what?  Societal breakdown? The collapse of civilization? Or the collapse of the biosphere as we know it? Chaos? Mass murder and suicide?  Random, murderous violence and tribal warfare for resources--or simply against the "other," however defined? Extinction? Whatever happens from now on, it will not be pleasant. It may well be terrifying, crazy-making, horrific, nauseating, ghastly...you get the picture. No hope--the living may well envy the dead...or eat them.

In such a dying world, is there any hope--for anything? And if not, how do we live?  Why not just terminate ourselves first, safely and painlessly?

When afflicted with these dark thoughts, which can only become more frequent as time goes on, I first take refuge in what Buddhists call "the five remembrances:"

1. I am of the nature to get sick; there is no way I can avoid getting sick.

2. I am of the nature to grow old; there is no way I can avoid growing old.

3. I am of the nature to die; there is no way I can avoid dying.

4. I am of the nature to lose everything I cherish; there is no way to avoid losing everything.

5. My actions are my only true possessions. By these alone shall I live, no matter what happens.

This practice--embracing impermanence--is very therapeutic, I find, for overcoming my recurrent dread about the future. One can adapt these remembrances by expanding the "I" to include "my family, my community, my country, and Gaia"--which are all simply more expanded versions of the self. And all are impermanent; all are of the nature to get sick, grow old, die, and lose everything they value. Even our sacred and beautiful living planet will eventually end up--sooner or later--like Mars or Venus...nothing but desolate rocks and sand.

And now, having dispensed with dread of the future by embracing impermanence and returning to our breath in the present moment, what should we do?

Grow gardens, grow community, and grow awareness.

And this is where the principles of Permaculture can come to our rescue--not as a whole planet, nor as a nation, state, or city--but as individuals working with each other to adapt skillfully, for as long as possible, to accelerating change in climate and breakdown of the larger social order. By the study and practice of Permaculture, we can progressively unplug from Glomart--from the vast, commercial, utterly unsustainable consumer-based infrastructure that now supports our lives--and regenerate community from the ground up through the passionate practice of Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share, of design in accordance with nature, and of relocalization of commerce.  And the more contiguous Gaian communities there are, practicing these principles, the longer we can ward off--and even mitigate--the encroaching chaos, despair, and madness all around us. So that if we have any future at all, it will be a Gaian future.  And if not, at least we can build, for ourselves and those we know and love, a Gaian Present Moment, embracing our impermanence with quiet joy as we learn, teach, heal, and create...

"and when I fall, let me fall, like a leaf, without regret..."

So be it.

Tuesday, June 15, 2021

Mollison's Permaculture Principles: Attitude

 “When you are thwarted, it is your own attitude that is out of order” –Meister Eckhart

“The Problem is the Solution” –Bill Mollison

What does Bill Mollison, the father of Permaculture, have in common with Meister Eckhart, a medieval German theologian and visionary? The answer is quite simple: they both understood that attitude is everything; that “problems,” however intractable they may seem, exist only in the mind—in wishing things were other than they are. But with a change in perspective, and a dose of creative inspiration, any given “problem” can become an opportunity.

For this reason, many of Mollison’s most profound teachings deal with adaptive vs. maladaptive attitudes toward the natural world, the real world in which we find ourselves, governed by both the laws of physics and the principles of ecology. So here they are (as summarized by Brett Prichard):

https://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/?p=59

 

And here again are the immensely useful “mind maps” that Pritchard has created to illustrate each of these six principles of adaptation to the real world:

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/13_NATURAL_FORCES.pdf

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/14_YIELD.pdf

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/15_COOPERATION.pdf

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/16_POSITIVITY.pdf

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/17_PROXIMITY.pdf

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/18_DEMONSTRATION.pdf

 

And that’s all. I hope you have enjoyed, downloaded, and started to study Brett Pritchard’s  superb and accessible summary of Bill Mollison’s luminous teachings on Permaculture. It is a Gaian curriculum, par excellence, and as with any pyramidal chart, you can, as you wish, start at the top (Ethics) or at the foundation (Attitudes) in mastering the basic principles of Permaculture.

Sunday, June 13, 2021

Mollison's Permaculture Principles: Design with Nature

 I know of three very brief (adjective + noun) but accurate definitions of Permaculture: 

(1) Ethical Design

(2) Energy Audit

(3) Applied Ecology

While the first and third tier of the Mollisonian Permaculture Pyramid created by his student, Brett Pritchard, address ethics, energy, and design, the fourth tier, consisting of five cards, addresses principles from nature, or applied ecology. Here they are:

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/?p=57

And here, as always, are the five associated "mind maps" that Pritchard has created, drawing on Mollison's Permaculture Designer's Manual and relating it to the insights of later Permaculture teachers, starting with his protege David Holmgren:

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/8_BIOLOGICAL_RESOURCE_USE.pdf

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/9_DIVERSITY.pdf

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/10_EDGE.pdf

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/11_INTENSIFICATION.pdf

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/12_ACCELERATE_SUCCESSION.pdf

The remarkable thing to me is how virtually all later ramifications and developments of Permaculture theory and practice since this time are so clearly rooted in Mollison's insights.  To take one example, the first principle here, of preferring biological to nonbiological resources, has been beautifully elaborated by Toby Hemenway, Andrew Millison,  and others in their distinction between degenerative, generative, and regenerative investments. Here is Andrew's instructional presentation on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2S27NHIdEE&list=PLNdMkGYdEqOCvZ7qcgS3efKm26exq5E3K&index=19

In essence, Permaculture offers us a blueprint for shifting our culture from a parasitic to a symbiotic relationship to our biological support system, Gaia.





 


Friday, June 11, 2021

Mollison's Permaculture Principles: Functional Design

 

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/?p=55

After he lays out the fundamental Permaculture principles of Gaian Ethics (Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share) and instructs us on the properties and best uses of Energy, Bill Mollison (through Brett Pritchard's excellent digest of his principles) then turns to the basics of design that is both energy efficient and ethically responsible: Stability, Multifunctionality, Mutual Support, and Relative Location. These cards are self-explanatory, so I feel no need to comment further on them.

Here are the Pritchard's Mind Maps that go along with these (all derived, as always, from Mollison's magnum opus, the Permaculture Designer's Manual):

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/4_STABILITY.pdf

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/5_MULTIFUNCTIONALITY.pdf

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/6_SUPPORT.pdf

http://www.permaculturefundamentals.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/7_RELATIVE_LOCATION.pdf



Wednesday, June 9, 2021

Mollison's Permaculture Principles: Ethics and Energy

 Can anyone name a course you took in high school or college that combined subject matter from both ethics and physics?  I didn't think so. 


There is an obvious reason for this. From the time of the ancient Greeks, our western European (and now global) civilization has drawn a firm conceptual boundary between "the sciences" (the study of how things work) and "the humanities" (the study of what things mean, of what we value as humans living in society).  So no math, physics, or chemistry curriculum, nor any of the applied professional fields based on this curriculum, such as mechanics, engineering, or design, has anything at all to say about ethics.

I bring this up because one of the most transformative--even subversive-- aspects of Bill Mollison's Permaculture concept, and the worldwide grassroots movement that it has spawned, is that it conjoins both ethics and engineering. This is truly revolutionary.

Accordingly in Brett Pritchard's "pyramid" synthesizing Mollison's core ideas that I have been sharing, the top tiers set forth core ethics for living together on a finite, living planet (Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share), and elaborate these, as we have seen, into Ethics on natural systems and on resource management. These lead necessarily (not arbitrarily) to his three principles regarding Energy, a concept which is at the very foundation of physics. Here they are: Principles of Energy Inputs, Energy Cycling, and Energy Efficiency.


...and here are Pritchard's "mind maps" providing a practical illustration of these principles:




In short, when Mollison created a new frame of reference that embraces both ethics and energy management, he  left Western Industrial Civilization behind and spawned a new Gaian culture--one that could, in theory, save the planet!

Mollison's Permaculture Principles: A concise summary

A friend of mine, Carmen Gonzalez, has graciously shared with me a set of 21 "cards" (or posters) created by Brett Pritchard, a student of Bill Mollison in Australia. These comprise an excellent summary of Bill Mollison's luminous teachings, so I've decided to post each of them in order for your enjoyment and commentary. The first two posted below are (1) an overview of the principles, arrayed in pyramid fashion; (2) Card # 1: The three core ethics upon which permaculture is based: Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share. 

permaculture principles pyramid.jpg
permaculture ethics 1.jpg

My Comments: These three core ethics--Care of the Earth, Care of People, and Redistributing the Surplus (Fair Share)--are foundational to Permaculture; they are the equivalent, for the movement that Bill Mollison initiated, as the Ten Commandments for Judaism, the Great Commandment for Christianity, the Five Pillars of Islam, or the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. But unlike any of these others, these are Gaian ethics--there is no "us" vs. "them" involved, nothing one has to believe or profess; they are based entirely on a clear scientific understanding of reality, coupled with a basic ethical sense of responsibility for our fellow living beings, human and otherwise.

Another way of thinking about this ethical foundation is that it derives logically and inevitably from the universal Dharma, as beautifully articulated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr:  "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

This insight, likewise, is not something you have to "believe." It is something that any clear-minded person would recognize as an accurate statement about reality, whether physical, biological, social, or spiritual.

In short, once we recognize that we are a part of, not apart from, our interconnected living planet, it follows necessarily that we must predicate all of our decisions on what is best for our biological support system, and what is best for our own fellow humans.  In pairing "care of the Earth" with "care of people," Bill Mollison cut right through the false "man vs. nature" dichotomy shared by both rapacious industrialists and some fanatical environmentalists. If we don't take care of our living planet, we cannot take care of each other--and vice versa.

The third ethic has often engendered controversy among permaculturists, some of whom were afraid, evidently, that "fair share" sounded too much like a socialist agenda for redistributing the wealth. So some have proposed alternatives, like "Reinvest the Surplus" or "Future Care."  I beg to differ.

As I see it, "Fair Share" is the indispensable self-replicating element in Permaculture; it refers to both reinvesting and redistributing our surplus yields into both caring for the Earth and caring for people.

In this respect, as in all others, Bill Mollison's aim was to emulate nature (or Gaia) by recycling and reinvesting our surplus yield for the further propagation of life and health--just as the topsoil biota do for plants by fixing nitrogen, as plants do for animals by providing nourishment, and even as top predators do by leaving the remnants of their kill for vultures, smaller scavengers, insects, and microbes. 

Bill Mollison, David Holmgren, Toby Hemenway, and all other Permaculture luminaries converge in emphasizing the primacy of these three core ethics in the practice of Permaculture--the practice of healing Gaia from the ground up.

The top card, with the core ethics, is followed by two additional cards, consisting of ethical principles derived from these core ethics, which pertain, specifically, to natural systems and resource management.
 

Brett Pritchard, the Australian student of Mollison's who designed these cards, has also provided a useful and imaginative set of "mind maps" to illustrate each of the principles in these cards. Here are the mind maps that illustrate the three core ethics of Permaculture and their derivatives: