Diversity is certain death for Permaculture Community

Diversity is certain death for Permaculture Community

He's not talking about what most people would consider diversity.

From just the first dozen minutes or so, he's essentially likening his experience in the military, which was a functioning multicultural community, in essence, with failed community in a permacultural context.

I don't know why he's phrased it the way he has, because his message is more along the lines of, "Gee, I wish everyone was on the same permacultural page as I am."

The problem I see is where he's on page, say, thirty-one, and I am on page three-sixty-one. Or vice versa, but you get the point.

If the scope of my system and planning is radically different from his conception of what could be, my logic could be batshit insanity by comparison, simply because he lacks the conceptual permacultural building blocks to see as far. It all goes back to the Wheaton Eco-scale argument. A level two is much better than zero, and four is way better, but the logic of a six or an eight might seem very strange to a four, and incomprehensibly crazy to a two.

He's essentially saying that dealing with other ways of doing causes drama, and that drama isn't worth the benefits of working in community.

I think that the reason his military experience was effective in getting individuals from different backgrounds to accomplish shared goals is because they went through the same training and were taught to think in the same way.

He's essentially talking about a monocrop of thought. All it takes is a problem out-of-the-box enough for their training to not apply, and that's one crop that won't survive to harvest.

What he's saying is worse than wrongly discriminating against people based on ethnicity, gender, or background, in my opinion, although not malicious, from what I can tell.

I think what he's getting at is that he'd like a permacultural melting pot. I don't agree.

I think that respect for the individual is all the socio-cultural lubrication we need; if things get sticky, apply liberal, even gratuitous quantities of respect for the individual and find out where the disagreement lies, and what the reasons for it are. Sussing out these issues often leads to the solution of many other interrelated sticking points.

I don't think it's a good idea to militarise permacultural training, or dogmaticise it. That involves the punishment of "wrong" ideas. If you can't do so with reason and respect, you're only creating more problems with adherence to code and punishments.

-CK

hi Chris,

He's not talking about what most people would consider diversity.

From just the first dozen minutes or so, he's essentially likening his experience in the military, which was a functioning multicultural community, in essence, with failed community in a permacultural context.

I don't know why he's phrased it the way he has, because his message is more along the lines of, "Gee, I wish everyone was on the same permacultural page as I am."

The problem I see is where he's on page, say, thirty-one, and I am on page three-sixty-one. Or vice versa, but you get the point.

welcome to the ulcer factory
you are correct in saying that he isn't talking about the same "diversity" as most people think
what many people think is good is to have as many different types as possible for "diversity"
but planting Bradford pears, asiatic bittersweet, garlic mustard,  and multiflora rose or introducing emerald ash borer   to your food forest is problematic
because they do not share the same values or follow the same rules (cooperation) as those plants you normally want in your food forest

one could use a food forest as an analogy for a permaculture community
selective diversity working toward a common goal

If you want a "permaculture community" or any other community, there needs to be common goals or you don't have a community
it's not  what level the person is on, his/her color , ethnic background, or sexual preference,  
but what direction he/she wants to go, do they want to work with the community or against it
(the point Clint was making about Paul's podcasts)

It is also something the governments of Sweden, Germany and other European countries should have asked.............

Thanks, Duane, though I have, in the past, pretty much lived here.

So what we're talking about is making sure the members of our "guilds" don't interfere with each other, at least, and aren't allelopathic, at worst.

I think what I liked least about his message was the feeling that he was advocating a type of social allelopathy as a model for the formation of community. The message is over-simplified.

I like the idea of community as different flavours of guilds, designed so members' wants, proclivities, and even weaknesses work together to strengthen the whole.

I think that the natural conflicts and divisions that result aren't signs of failure, but rather the precursor to a swarmlike reorganisation of an overlarge community into two or more separate entities that can continue to cooperate amicably on shared, large-scale regional projects.

These aren't death rattles, they're growing pains that allow the greater movement that is permaculture to expand without constraining any one individual unduly. All we need do is view community less as a static thing and more as an organism or hive that divides to procreate.

-CK