Help locating 'The Charter of the Forest'

Hello Permie Writers and Readers!
I was scrolling down bookmarked-article memory lane and realized a cherished link is no longer available.
Has anyone heard of this and know where I might dig to maybe find what I am looking for?

4.8.20: Pale Rust and an Albino Hawk – The Charter of the Forest
This is the link I was so sad to discover was now dead.
https://www.thecharteroftheforest.com/4-8-20-pale-rust-and-an-albino-hawk/
It was a bizarre and beautiful story. I hoped to read it again.

I searched google a few ways and was able to locate this reference which makes me think it may be described in Bill Mollison's book Permaculture a designers manual.
"The Charter of the Forest makes extended use of permaculture ideals and techniques such as forest ... a b "4.8.20: Pale Rust and an Albino Hawk".

Is anyone familiar with either the reference or the story I am looking for?
Many many thanks,
Sharon

I think this is what you're looking for


Scene: A hollow in the Forest-Garden surrounding the Monastery.  It has been atypically humid, but without rainfall.



Asce: You could’ve acted sooner, Daisy.

Daisy: I took every action when I thought it was appropriate.

Asce: You’re either lying to me now or you were lying to yourself when you decided what was “appropriate.”  Should I go through the log?

Daisy: …

Asce: Well here we go then:

Dec 31: Mei has made the Biology Cell aware that down the ridge in the garden she tends, she has started to notice a strange “discoloration,” a hardly noticeable rash that appears on leaves and eventually seems to eat through them, on a variety of different crops.  It most closely resembles fungal Rust, but is unlike typical strains of Rust, both in its coloration and its ability to infect multiple species at once.  

Jan 7: The Biology Cell, after a dissection and analysis of some of the infected tissue, has determined that it is an as-yet unidentified fungal infection and called it “Pale Rust,” for its light green tinge that blends into the infected leaf, making detection more difficult.

Jan 11:  In a further differentiation from regular Rust, infected crops have begun to die.

Jan 20: Other nearby parts of the Forest Garden began to notice the same “rash.”  Including your own garden, Daisy.  But what did you do?

Jan. 23: Today, Mei has begun to purge any infected plants she came across.  She is opening up the edges of the garden so the wind would move through more freely, possibly breaking some of the humidity.  On the uninfected plants, she is pruning the newest growth which would have been most susceptible to the Pale Rust. What did you do, Daisy?

Jan 30: The Biology Cell has declared its consensus that the entire Forest Garden was under threat from Pale Rust-

Daisy: Ok, ok, stop.  Stop with the log.  

Asce: This was months ago, Daisy.  It only got worse and more obvious.  Why didn’t you act until so much of the crop was already unsalvageable?

Daisy: I took a risk.

Asce: For nothing.

Daisy: If I assumed the rust was going to reach my garden, I would have had to tear apart the walls and hedges for airflow to keep it at bay.  I would have had to break the symmetry in the lines of plots if I had torn out all the new growth. The whole aesthetic would have been ruined.  Rather than definitely ruin it by tearing it up, I assumed there was a chance that it wouldn’t be ruined by the rust. At least with that assumption there was a chance it would have worked out.

Win some, lose some.

Asce: Do you intend to die tomorrow?

Daisy: What?

Asce: Do you intend to die tomorrow?

Daisy: Of course not.

Asce: Then why do you live as if you do?  Our lives depend on the Forest Garden… especially on these inner plots.  Life is precious- we all feel our own lives as such: that’s what it means to be alive.  To live is to love one’s life- And if one is self-aware, to love the lives of others. And if one is to preserve those lives, then one must live in infinite time.

Daisy: You’re losing me.

Asce: We don’t know when we may die.  And one can respond to that toward one of two poles.  Perhaps one will live each day as if it is one’s whole life. And so all is ever-new, and thus all is a bliss… or a horror.  

Maybe you take this former choice to justify your willing shortsightedness- but to take the conclusion that one should live without sight to the future because one may die is to INTEND to die.  It is to value pleasure and terror both above life, to quantify life in those terms when in truth life is beyond any talk of value not only because life is one of our most innate loves, but because human beings are self justifying…  To neglect the love of life itself and to reject the self-justification of being a human being is not to live at all.  



On the other hand, one can choose to live in infinite time.



It’s true that what we do now will never happen again.  But it will forever have repercussions in infinite time- the whole future hinges on this moment.  Every moment is responsible for infinite time, and every moment is the culmination of processes that, from the human perspective, might as well be infinite.  And so one must be prepared for…

Daisy: …

Asce: …Do you remember, when you were little, we were up near the crest of the Wall, and we saw that hawk?

Daisy: There are plenty of Hawks around here, mom.

Asce: You know the one I mean.

Daisy: The white one?

Asce: Yes.  White Hawks don’t live around here- it was albino, remember?

Daisy: It was leucistic, not albino.  

Asce: It was albino- don’t you remember its red eyes?

Daisy: It couldn’t have been albino.  I don’t remember it well… because I was so young, but it couldn’t have been a true albino.  Without pigment in its eyes, its sight would have suffered, and a hawk lives and dies by its eyesight.  It wouldn’t have made it to adulthood for us to see it. And if it didn’t die for lack of vision, it would have died of disease, or brittle feathers, or even sunburn.  Statistically, it just couldn’t have been.

Asce: Statistically?  Who are you to say what is statistically impossible?

Daisy: I just said, with all those factors lined up against it-

Asce: Did you account for every knowable factor?  It’s age, its genetic makeup and constitution outside its albinism, the relative abundance of food on this mountain, its compensatory behaviors, care from the monastics… if you know all there is to know about that hawk, why can’t you remember if it had red eyes?

And what about the unknowable factors?  What are we as homo sapiens just incapable of accounting for?  If you want to speak statistically, you’d better make the impossible case that there aren’t any factors beyond the potential for observation.  

No one can speak statistically beyond the minutest games.  It’s a field built entirely on confirmation bias. That’s why real science exists.  Where statistics rejects what is, and instead favors what is convenient, real science is that which is built from actually acknowledging what is, regardless of how rare or common it may be, and testing one’s narrative of how it came to be.

One must live in infinite time, where statistics has no meaning, and therefore cannot deaden your consciousness of reality.  In infinite time, nothing is likely- there is only that there is. There are albino hawks. There are wildfires. There are outbreaks of new diseases that can upend life as we know it.  Your garden is susceptible to all these things in infinite time, Daisy.  

There will always be that which is unknowable, but we won’t know it when it comes anyway.  The very least one must do is be prepared to spot the Albino Hawks.

That means you don’t ignore the blatant warnings, and you don’t build walls and hedges that will stagnate the air and make your crops susceptible to disease on the best of days.

Daisy: I couldn’t take it apart. I love this garden too much to take it apart. I couldn’t take down that hedge because then the symmetry with the stone wall on the monastery side would be ruined.  People always compliment that when they come here.

Asce: If you love this garden, why didn’t you act to save it?  Why didn’t you tear down the hedges and the walls? Why didn’t you prune the vulnerable growth and take proper care of that which was beyond your capacity to save?  A capacity which itself was far below what it could have been had you been mindful and vigilant to begin with.

Daisy: I…

Asce: Your aesthetic.  You loved your aesthetic above your garden itself.

Daisy: YOU’RE the one who always argues for the primacy of beauty.  I love this garden… I love what I’ve DONE with it! All the work, all the time I’ve spent, how can you say so easily that I should just throw away all that work, even if it does risk it all?  What is my time worth?

Asce: Worth, primacy, levels, rankings, can’t you think in any other terms?  Look at what’s REAL.

I’ve never argued for the PRIMACY of ANYTHING outside of mercy, which itself is the abdication of power, the rejection of primacy.  If there is a conflict in values, the problem is in YOU, not in the values, so long as they are true and human values. The problem is either that they AREN’T human values, and you have had them inculcated into you by your society, or else and possibly as well the problem is that your means of thinking is damaged by notions of hierarchy.  A conflict of values is ALWAYS a systemic and HIERARCHICAL problem. If you try to rank your values, then of COURSE the system will collapse, for the strength of each is situational. But all values can be harmonized, so long as they are real, human values. From the most destructive of them, like valor and security, which can be purged through catharsis, to the most beautiful, like love and wisdom which all people seek by nature, all values can be addressed and harmonized if you abandon the urge to rank them rather than construct a whole which addresses each of them- a whole born of the prime virtue, mercy, which is self apparent to all who recognize that they themselves should not be dominated by others.  If one possesses the means to violence, which is a form of domination, then one must give it up. If one possesses the means to beauty, then one must serve the people with it, not ask the people to serve the beauty.  

You grew a beautiful garden, Daisy.  But it wasn’t beautiful on its own terms.  It was the perimeter, the hedges, the walls you built around it that gave it its beauty- and those walls are what cut it off from the wind, suffocating it in moisture and fungus.  And the REASON you felt the need to augment the garden with dressings rather than to tap into its own beauty and help it to achieve apotheosis is because you sought to feed your ego rather than your neighbor.  You traded the wellbeing of your garden for the illusion of rank, for praise which lasted as long and fed you as deeply as the wind it was uttered upon.  

We have the resources here at the monastery to feed ourselves and others countless times over.  Our actions have the capacity to affect others, and so by definition we are responsible for their wellbeing- to act in their interests.  And Beauty is in another’s interest, Daisy, when it is the beauty channeled through the Earth- the aesthetic of the act of life: born of and inspiring mercy, just as the Earth is born from uncounted mercies of ratio and time and channels them to us.  

Daisy:  I say you’re a hypocrite.  Your katakuri garden isn’t being used to its full potential.  There are more calories to be had in potatoes. You lecture me, but you waste your own space too.

Asce: … at very least the katakuri can one day ACHIEVE the abundance of another crop, if we’re careful how we breed it.  It is not built and left to entropy, like a hedge or wall of stone. It has its own inborn potential. It is grown in our spare time, at the very edge of the Forest Garden’s reach.  This garden here is the occupation of your time which you contribute to the monastery, Daisy. If you see equivalence in the two, then your gaze reaches far into a future that I don’t see.  And let me assuage your concern by saying that if the katakuri hasn’t reached a stage of productivity to justify its existence if the Forest Garden should ever overtake it, then we’ll dig it up.  

Daisy: Don’t gamble-trade with me.  It doesn’t become you.

Asce:  The burden is on me to justify my interference in your garden, my expression of authority as your mother.  And I think I can meet that burden of justification when I say that, because of the crop failure here, in the center of production, the monastery may need to dip into the reserve stock this year or at very least repurpose some other land for staple-growth to make up for this loss next year.

If you have an equally dire justification for your excoriation of my garden, planted on my own time and in an unreached space, let me hear it.

Daisy: By your own pronouncement, in infinite time we’ll need that space.

Asce: That is not necessarily the case.  When you chose this place for your garden, you chose one of the most productive and necessary plots.  It is near to the monastery, and the soil is fertile. And, this season, you squandered it.  

The katakuri garden is only a burden in infinite time if we are an infinitely growing population.  And we are not. We are human beings, not rabbits- and we have that much control at least.  

bacteria, fungi, and viruses are incapable of such knowledge of their own responsibility.  In infinite time, they are an infinite threat. We as humans can conceive of our responsibility not to populate for the sake of populating, no matter what dehumanizing drivel you read from Malthus and other classists.  

Daisy: I think you give people too much credit for rationality.

Asce:  Are you the only rational person then?  People only become animals when driven to be so- by monsters.  But we’ve had that conversation.

My garden has my self in it, yes.  But I do not choose to manifest my self in opposition to the garden’s well being, but through it.  The katakuri are beautiful themselves, and I need only aid them to manifest my self through their beauty.

Daisy: To think, my own mother, a servant to dirt.

Asce: I am servant to none.  I simply recognize that my self exists by virtue of the selves of others.  And it is mine to make only insofar as the earth provides me with the means to make it.

Oh thank you Chris! That was a much faster resolution than i expected or hoped.

Could you tell me what this story.is from?  Who wrote it?  Is there more where this came from?  

The writing style, the unusualness, the ideas… all very much interest me.  

Thank you again 🍎🍎🍎🍎🍎🍎