posted 7 years ago
Hi Hazel!
I thought you deserved at least one reply. Yours is an interesting project. I would suggest that your post belongs in the Intentional Community sub-forum, rather than in Permaculture Singles, given that you are looking for people interested in your project, rather than for people interested in you personally.
Social Permaculture is certainly an interesting idea, though I suspect that few, if any, groups of folks have enough experience with it to say whether it will be any more successful than any of the other experiments in alternative social relations. I lived, for a number of years, in an intentional community in Staten Island (Ganas), which is (or perhaps was) based (loosely) on Marxian economics, and the idea that an individual could change how they respond to conflict by a deep understanding of the sources of their response. (People's responses to conflicts are rarely based in a rational desire to resolve them.) That community, after experiencing some rather wrenching changes, has been in a long (as in YEARS long) discussion on how to proceed from where they are. I can tell you, community is not an easy project.
And, then, there is the whole question of whether it matters at all, anyway, other than as an opportunity for certain individuals to pursue what they may consider to be a life of excellence and love, in the face of the significant possibility of Near Term Human Extinction (see Guy McPherson't web log, "Nature Bats Last"). My own feeling is that one more source of "Advancded Permaculture Skills...workshops." is a bit more than needed. My hope (and it is a meager hope indeed) is to find some folks whose tolerance for difference is sufficient that they might live in enough proximity to serve each other in need while leaving each other otherwise alone.
In any event, I wish you the best,
Gordon
Just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should.