Dear Paul,
First I want to appreciate the work you do in permaculture, the gusto with which you present your thinking and your plain speaking. Permaculture bad boy or not (and I think not!), you do a tremendous amount of good for the cause and your enthusiastic advocacy is helping spread the word, far and wide. Good on you!
Here is my perspective on the sexism issue. I've done a fair bit of work on this myself over the years and have moved my thinking from a place of resistance and denial (what me? sexist?) to one in which I clearly recognize that, as a man raised in a sexist culture (UK), it is inevitable that I carry and deliver memes of sexism. I sincerely don't want to do this but these memes are often so subtle and so normalized in my own psyche and the psyche of my culture that acting on them is a kind of second nature.
A second part of my perspective is that this does not, repeat, does not make me a bad person. Indeed I understand that I am essentially a good, loving, intelligent and cooperative being and that whenever I act contrary to this essential character it is because I am acting from a place of my own unresolved and early hurts (I'm working on healing these and they have less and less power by the day).
Because of these understandings, that sexism is not inherent in me (or, in my view, any other men) and that I/we can recover our full humanity with some careful work, I am now (mostly!) grateful to hear from the women in my life just how they would like me to change in my attitudes and behaviors towards them. They know that I will make the effort not to be defensive and that I will take their feedback into account. This seems to make for better, more relaxed and close relationships all round.
On a bigger scale my perspective leads me to expect that our beloved permaculture movement, arising as it is mainly in cultures that are power skewed like crazy (in favor of white, English speaking, heterosexual ... men), will be infected by some of these mainstream out-of-whack memes. These things are virulently contagious and are virtually invisible. They are possibly less overt in permaculture than in other sub-cultures and most of us wish they weren't there but it is, in my view, a mistake to think that, because we don't want them to be there, they are not active.
I was in Cuba for the IPC last year. Pandora Thomas, a black woman permaculture designer from San Francisco, USA very gently let us know that we have a problem being attractive and relevant to her constituents. Her evidence is that, whenever she attends a Permaculture gathering of any sort she is, to use her phrase, 'one of very few chocolate drops in the box'. That's a potent observation and I think we'd do well to take active notice of this phenomena and get to work to see if we are showing up with unwanted, hidden patterns of racism that make us a little repulsive to non-white folks. It's quite likely ... and, to repeat myself, this does not make us bad persons in anyway.
Indeed, in my experience, facing up to the task of eliminating these dysfunctional patterns of oppression is a deeply humanizing, liberating and connecting process - something that will increase our maturity and congruence with our ethics.
It is also very practical - the promise is that all of us marginalized by the current dominant culture because of class, gender, race and sexuality can transcend our (mostly false) differences and willingly join together as allies to bring about the ecological and social transformation we are all so hungry for.
Anyway, enough already. It is one of my personal goals for the next few years in permaculture - to bring conscious awareness to the issues of human oppression and liberation up to the front so that our already extraordinary permcaulture capacities for earth repair can get the traction they deserve.
If you'd like to help with this work please write me at andylang49 at gmail dot com and I'll send you my Patrix (patriarchal matrix) papers with details of how you can get involved.
All the best.
