Opening the Dialog Door

OPENING THE DIALOG DOOR

"Is the permaculture experience affording us keen insights into what it is to embody authentic freedom?

"Some of you may be aware of Wendell Berry's "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer's Liberation Front", with its "Denounce the government: embrace the flag" rap. Much like his contemporary, Gary Snyder, Berry seems to have done more to tie a "sense of place" to the notion of sovereignty than most.
Indeed, in their attempts to remythologize this communion, these two poets resonate deeply with the endeavors of the visionary permaculture community whose MO is tied inexorably to the grounding presence of "landscape" or "sense of place.""

"This is no news to indigenous peoples, of course. Likewise, savvy cultural anthropologists have long noted that linguistic/cultural pockets or "tribes" or call them wot ya will, tend to be defined by the limits of that tribe's wisdom of the geographic area they inhabit. On that note, a quick para of academic fodder for ya:

"Muhlhausler (1996) suggests that the physical environment is an intrinsic part of traditional linguistic ecologies, in which no separation is felt to exist "between an external reality or environment on the one hand and the description of this reality or environment on the other"; "Life in a particular human environment is dependent on people's ability to talk about it," Muhlhausler (1995); Anthropologist Norman Tindale has stated: "Coincidences of tribal boundaries to local ecology are not uncommon and imply that a given group of people may achieve stability by becoming the most efficient users of a given area and understanding its potentialities"; As linguistic anthropologist Keith Basso (1996) puts it, "wisdom sits in places"; From this perspective, fostering the health and vigour of ecosystems is one and the same goal as fostering the health and vigor of human societies, their cultures and languages."

"Does this suggest that a "permacultural perspective/priority list" for our bioregion(al ecology) may be precisely one and the same thing as a "localized collective declaration of sovereignty"? Is the restoration of authentic freedom tied inexorably to the restoration of local ecologies? What might a collective declaration of sovereignty/local permie manifesto look like? Why do it? What might it mean?

"Perhaps a richer understanding of the relationship between local landscape and local cultures is key to making sense of the sovereignty puzzle; to annihilating the distinction between inner and outer freedoms - a fundamentally eschatological notion, as it happens. Freedom as a concept or potentiality, no matter how nobly worded, always tends toward disembodied abstraction, I find: "Here's a magnificent, high-minded notion on a piece of paper. We're all agreed, let's make the best of it." But what are the concrete individual and collective responsibilities associated with 'making liberty real"? What are freedom's foundation stones, where do we find them and where do they go? What are self-evident truths, here and now, where I stand, embodied?

What permaculture offers, surely, is a living realtime education in authentically _responsible_ action, by deeply rooting nobility of intent in intelligent co-relationship with our ground of being. And it's a path open to all, regardless of caste. As Anita Lange puts it: "The prolonged, earnest practice of tending growth and harvest finely tunes a particular quality of attention that enables intimacy with wisdom inherent in the land. With growing discernment we learn which of our human understandings are in accord with the cycles of nature; a decisive requisite to being fully at home." A sense of sovereignty, the actuality of freedom, grows from and blends with the land.

What, then, can permaculture teach us about repatterning the structures of life and freedom?

And so here's our start..

Comments

[john chris jones]

hello Nic,

Thank you for sending me these emerging pages before everything is decided...

...here are some reactions:

1. sovereignty:
This seems to me an enforced fiction giving particular people absolute rights over particular places. I thought that we were liberated from that idea in the eighteenth century so why go back to it? Each one can now connect with any place, via new media. I feel that this at last liberates us from the old idea of territory, necessary once, but now an impediment?

2. To associate wisdom with one place seems to me to make it partial, however genuine or direct local wisdom may seem.

3. Our awarenes can now be both local and global, as well as cosmic and ideal, not denying the validity of physical, telephonic, microscopic, astronomical, philosophical, religious or any such awareness. Direct, indirect, imaginative, rational, inward or outward... all such categories are in some way valid though, until integrated within individual minds, can seem to be in conflict, or incompatible.

4. I see only abstract language in these web pages so far and feel that unless more colloquial or poetic language appears amongst these abstract statements they will not cohere with each other or with what is absent. In the writing of Gary Snyder (or any other who speaks colloquially or writes poetically) the tones of voice and words and rhythms are as significant as is the literal meaning (is that the difference?).

As I write this I am conscious of the red background (reminiscent of royalty and of blood?) within which you put a white rectangle on which we are required to reply in (democratic?) typewriter font (which changes, when we click 'preview', into white type on red like that of your own statements)... This part of the internet, like any other, is a mobile sovereignty, or global place, for which, I think, we have yet to find appropriate forms and customs. May this citizen ship, and many other ships (or cities or zens?) discover what is needed, absent, fitting, to the new kind of people we are becoming as we inhabit and enact the world as we create it presently, and together.

good wishes

john chris jones

[Nick Routledge]

Thanks for your comments, John Chris.

My first impression of your words is that your response was colored by my failure to be clearer about what I was saying. I agree with what you write, and it took reading your words to see how my terminology may have suggested my hopes are somehow antithetical to your cares, as I read them here, and in your monthly musings you share with me and the world. These days, I write and think far less than I did, and garden more, and the burden of wrestling with linguistic distinctions on paper or in my head is one I choose to avoid wherever I can. I am aware I am less inclined to rhetoric everywhere, these days. The silence in the garden speaks volumes and that is where I would rather share with others, and be. Also, I must admit that the Big Issue of Sovereignty is actually one I have given almost no thought to, but as I read your response, I become aware that if I am to write on this topic, I have a responsibility to lift my focus from garden to the prosaic, and the energies of New Media. It has rained heavily these past few days and the soil is too wet to work and the plants do not need watering, and so it is easier to settle in front of the blue screen.

The word "sovereignty" seems so loaded, I sense. Perraps Cynthia's efforts to redefine our sense of the word would be better served by the counsel of Confucius: "If you get stuck," he said, "Rename things." Instead of saying "declaration of sovereignty" perhaps I might have said, instead: "covenant of people and earth" or, "declaration of interdependence" or, more particularly, "Invocation of Sanctuary."

As you're aware, I have been a houseless and landless mendicant for some years now, even as my trajectory has carried me progressively further and further into a deeper relationship with an ever smaller patch of landscape. These days, most of my life is spent in a garden. One garden. As the deep health seeks me, I find today, the words of Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger: "True freedom," he says, "lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is the use of the earth." I learn that Winstanley was a Lancastrian, the thought of which gladdens my heart, as I spent 10 formative years in that great northern county and so very many of my childhood friends remain there. I learn in Jim Corbett's "Goatwalking" that it was in Lancashire during the winter of 1648-49, while making is living tending cows on the common that Winstanley had a vision in which he was told to proclaim a simple message: Work together and eat bread together and neither give nor take hire. I read that during periods of stillness, Winstanley had become convinced that "every part of Creation should lend a mutual help of love in action to preserve the whole." Winstanley concluded that a new kind of human communtiy must therefore emerge. The new community could never grow from the violent overthrow of the powerful, since violence is the way and spirit of existing society and can only establish new rulers. He said:

"Therefore if the rich wil stil hold fast this propriety of "Mine and thine", let them labour their own Land with their own hands. And let the common-pople, that are the gatherings together of Isreal from under that bondage, and that say the earth is ours, not mine, let them labour together, and eat bread together upon the Commons, Mountains, and Hils...None can say, Their right is taken from them, for let the rich work alone by themselves, and let the poor work together by themselves; the rich in their inclosures, saying "This is mine"; The poor upon their Commons, saying "This is ours", the earth and fruits are common."

In the spring of 1649, Winstanley and the other Diggers moved out onto the Commons near Cobham and began planting, but they were soon dispersed or imprisoned. The movement lasted little more than a year.

For Winstanley, studying how "the whole creation is knit together into a one-nessed of life" is a form of communion, just as working together and eating bread together in ways that support the whole are also active communion. Aldo Leopold calls this conception of communion "ecological conscience."

In "the Land Ethic" Leopold observes that "There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to the land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations. The extension of ethics to this third element in the human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity." He goes onto say that "a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it." I don't care for the word ethic. I prefer the word "covenant". (Hannah Arendt: "The idea of covenant presupposes no-sovereignty and no-rule.")

Leopold believed that the land could be included in our ethical system by a simple extension of the same principles that led us to declare that human beings can no longer be owned as property. If we cease to live by conquest and become plain members and citizens of the land community, we give up any claims we have have, either privately or collectively, to possess and use the land as though it were an object. Even as land-as-object is the cornerstone of human economic and legal systems, of capitalism and of civilization, extending the morality of basic rights to include landscape has nothing to do, initially, with public or private ownership or with passing new statues. It has to do with a community practice that weaves the land's rights into the social fabric.

Perhaps this is what we are attempting at the permaculture gathering - exploring how enlarging our sense of Self to embody what Leopold refers to as an "ecological conscience" is central to the creation of sustainable communities and, what's more, exploring how such covenants to hallow the earth not only weave individuals together, but other communities, too. The wisdom of different places, as you might see it, john chris. (I wrote the briefest of snippets for the Eugene Zendo newsletter around the topic of communal hallowing in November of last year, at: www.eugenezendo.org/2003/november.pdf which dovetails with this theme.)

Permaculture is concerned with interweaving persons and groups into a communion, not with drawing organizational boundaries that segregate one kind of association from another. My experience is that it provides an active path for covenanting of individuals, peoples and earth. This, I sense, is the essence of what I was trying to express.

On a more personal note...This morning, as I took my daily gambol around the gardens of my neighborhood (they change day-by-day), I was pondering how this topic holds particular, concrete resonace for me. My experience is that annihilating the distinction between inner and outer freedom is an inevitable ontological entelechy, the inner and outer adventure one and the same. My own experience suggests we are called to co-create the rebirthing of Eden, here and now, in this very realm of existence, and that this endeavor is nothing other than the creation of Sanctuary in the most literal sense of the word. How we co-create Eden is nothing more complicated that exploring the roots of authentic health. As my own temporal efforts to explore the foundations of authentic health deepen, I'm looking ever more toward perennial food crops, toward putting down deeper roots. While I may well continue the "houseless" drift of the years, from garden to garden, walking is difficult for me these days. I broke my back last year: I can wander no more. If a covenanted way of life must have its home on earth somewhere and sometime, to be a way of life, now is the time it is right for my back and my planting strategies.

Ah, as I finish this note, the neighbor whose garden I share just now arrives at my door, with eggs to share from the chickens we keep. "Hello, Holly," I say, "I'm just writing about the Peaceable Kingdom or Queendom or call it wot ya will." "Oh," she says, "You mean our back yard? "Yes," I say. Yes, it is time.

[Toby Hemenway]

This thread brings to mind some thoughts I'd had about relationship with land after reading an article about a couple who are restoring a native oak savanna near Salem. I'll gloss over the fact that they are grubbing out native plants they don't want (hawthorn, poison oak, roses, and conifers) to make room for the native plants they do want (oaks, grasses, wildflowers), and the interesting issues that raises about the arbitrariness of their decisions.

The article pointed out that the savanna/prairie first showed up maybe 10,000 years ago, after the ice age, and it was probably the landscape that greeted the first humans on North America. It's a very productive landscape: lots of game, lots of browse and fodder, and you can see someone coming a long way off. Then about 4000 years ago, the climate began to get cooler and wetter, making the land more favorable for forest. By then people had learned to manipulate the landscape with fire, and were able to preserve this very utilitarian landscape--in effect, their ranches and farms--by burning.

Of course, savanna isn't useful to Euro-americans; we plowed it up and planted and grazed it. Now, however, some of us want to preserve or restore the old savanna. Not because it is useful, but precisely because it, unlike our own farms and ranches, is not useful to our culture and thus is endangered. So I'm struck by the irony that native people cultivated the savanna and then, when the climate no longer favored it, used technology to preserve its usefulness to humans, and now we eco types regard the savanna as some "true" landscape form that needs to be preserved, while we eschew those ugly farms and ranches. Maybe in 3000 years people will be restoring cornfields and ranches because endangered species (perhaps scrub jays and coyotes) can survive only in those environments.

This shows how malleable are ideas like "sense of place" and "sacred land." And I wonder if the idea of preserving land that is not useful is unique to our culture, or at any rate is a luxury that only a wealthy culture can afford.

Toby Hemenway
www.patternliteracy.com

[Cynthia]

Hi, all...

JCJ's first comment seems to touch on this "place" thing, as have Nick and Toby, so I'll add a couple of thoughts here:

JCJ snip: 1. sovereignty:
"This seems to me an enforced fiction giving particular people absolute rights over particular places. I thought that we were liberated from that idea in the eighteenth century so why go back to it? Each one can now connect with any place, via new media. I feel that this at last liberates us from the old idea of territory, necessary once, but now an impediment?"

I think that Barlow's "Declaration of Cyberspace" speaks to the notion of "geography-free sovereignty" quite strongly - http://remblogs.typepad.com/sovcit/2004/03/a_declaration_o.html

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

"We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear." --JPB

Contrasting commentary about this essay lies at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ludlow/crypto.intro.html and by exploring the "there" of cyberspace (is there a 'there' there?) I get a better idea of the contours of a sovereign's declaration.

Declarations of sovereignty happen constantly. What makes them stick? Why do some endure over time?

One thing that I think *might* make a difference is whether or not sovereignty is declared in a place one can actually live in, physically. If you need others to help you make that living, fine - you're grouped together as aligned sovereigns, and then you make your own collective sovereign declaration.

But it seems that the sovereignty would be moot (and certainly hollow) if one had to be fed, sheltered, or protected by a "foreign" someone else - making American Sovereignty an "enforced fiction" too, just as the Umatilla Confederated Tribes declared in their very specific description of the American failure to establish jurisdiction legitimately.

And so it seems that colonials and sovereigns may not be the same thing at all, and it seems that any sovereignty that includes a capacity for living - for livelihood - would be a function of time in and attention to a place.

Self-reliance and personal sovereignty seem to be tightly related. With this in mind, I'm curious about how sovereignty as an "enforced fiction" might square with the notion as Ward Churchill presents it in "Suppression of Indigenous Sovereignty in 20th Century United States" - http://remblogs.typepad.com/sovcit/2004/03/suppression_of_.html

compelling snip:

The subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination, and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights, is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations, and is an impediment to the promotion of world peace and cooperation.

* All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development.
* Inadequacy of political, economic, social, or educational preparedness should never serve as a pretext for delaying independence.
* All armed action or repressive measures of all kinds directed against dependent peoples shall cease in order to enable them to exercise peacefully and freely their right to complete independence, and the integrity of their national territory shall be respected.
* Immediate steps shall be taken, in Trust and Non-Self-Governing Territories or all other territories which have not yet attained independence, to transfer all powers to the peoples of those territories, without any conditions or reservations, in accordance with their freely-expressed will or desire, without any distinction as to race, creed or color, in order to enable them to enjoy complete independence and freedom.
* Any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

What do you think? Are sovereignty and self-determination the same thing? I don't know. Is sovereignty an enforced fiction? I suppose it could be - and it might even be a fiction that does damage. That's part of what I'm interested in exploring...

cabeal

[Milton Takei]

Those people seeking autonomy for a local community should realize that even if they have consensus on a given course of action, they won't necessarily be able to go ahead, because other communities might not agree. And these days, we need the cooperation of the entire planet to fight global warming. People just can't do whatever they want.

[Cynthia]

I agree that people don't do whatever they want, for a variety of reasons - and yet I'm still not convinced that we inherently can't.

But if we can put that aside for a moment, then I have to ask how does an individual deal with the multiplicity of voices - sovereigns, in effect - telling them what to do (if not directly standing in the way of doing what an individual determines must be done)?

What makes a person listen to some voices and not to others in the first place? Do we just bow to the worst whip and ignore the rest? What does a responsible person do when the voices are contradictory, or even just plain wrong? And let's start with the tangible voices who have enforcement at their disposal, governments or forceful people with guns or economic clout demanding material tribute, property and resource access, or civic allegiance, and keep media, church, etc. at the tail end of the line.

For example, there are numerous codes governing any person's activities in the actual territory occupied by the 0wners of Record, the city of Eugene, the county of Lane, the State of Oregon, the United States of America, the United Nations, and numerous other affinity groups and bureaucratic regulatory and enforcement agencies the US Citizen is a de facto signatory to. And these don't even begin to cover the TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge), nor the customs and laws, of the original peoples here. The plant and animal life-codes aren't even on the table.

Additionally, there are ethical and civil and moral and professional codes - some voluntary, and some one is simply conscripted into. There are historic codes, crafted from experience and custom. There are the laws of nature one cannot commute, including laws that shape our own internal psyche and suggest that any human being, to be healthy and whole, must have a life that reflects choices that person has made willingly, in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

And yet every lifetime is also now engaged in expending a large (and many would say increasing) amount of time, energy and real resources in order to deal with the ramifications of multiple ruling-code-conflicts. Most of us cannot even construct a complete list of all the codes we ostensibly live under - truly *under* - and we don't come even close to identifying all the rules that constrain us, much less actually conform to them.

Few, if any, of our rule sets contain our personal signature agreeing to be bound by them, and yet we can be punished for infractions at any time; we can be locked up and have our freedoms permanently altered or taken away, even if the rules are spurious or unfair. What are we supposed to do to practically deal with these conflicts in a single lifetime? Where is the "opt out" clause?

Ultimately, the rules we appear under contract to live by seem very far removed from any sort of mature or informed choice at all and, in fact, we seem to spend much of our time scrambling about and adapting to the *consequences* of rules and rule-conflicts - until new rules are made (with their own cascade of consequence).

Even with groups of folk who seek "autonomy for a community", the fundamental unit of community - in this case, the person - has no standing unless that standing is developed and agreed to by all in the community.

From what I've been able to gather, the concept of "sovereignty" is that standing - an original standing of 'personhood' that honors cognition *and* a biological presence in a body on this planet. If such an idea were continuously fleshed out as the eco-system reacts to human civilization and societies evolve, couldn't a strong definition of sovereignty be a precursor to bringing some order to this rat's nest of rules and codes each of us seems to be born into, and destined to add to over time?

Finally, is *any* sovereignty conversation only about our little individual will pitted against the mightiest collection of larger wills that stands against ours? Can sovereignty mean more than that?

pax,

[Cynthia]

The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command."
~ JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee

[Nick Routledge]

Herewith a copy of a recent email exchange between john chris and myself, reproduced with permission.

--

dear Nick,

Having read your email, and your reply on the website, I realise that I was thinking too much of the old meaning of sovereignty and had not grasped your ideas about good use of land without ownership etc. Apologies for what I now see was too narrow a response. No wonder you were uneasy.

I can't get the sovereignty dialog to open so I cannot respond to your response. Nor can I get www.eugenezendo to open at the moment. Perhaps these will will open later...

I did not know what you wrote about the works of Winstanley and Aldo Leopold - What you say reminds me of the work of Luther Burbank and also of George Stapledon, both pioneers of plant breeding and of teachers of new attitudes to the land. I wonder if you know of them? Here are website addresses and brief pieces from the web:

http://www.who2.com/lutherburbank.html
LUTHER BURBANK * Botanist / Inventor
Luther is regarded as the father of modern plant breeding. Beginning in 1870 he developed more than 800 new strains of fruits, vegetables, flowers and grasses; his ideas in general, and many of his hybrids in particular, were important to the revolution in agriculture and food production in the 20th century. One of his earliest creations was the Burbank potato, a blight-resistant crop which was heavily planted in Ireland.

http://www.erica.demon.co.uk/EH/EH510.html
Sir George Stapledon (1882-1960) and the Landscape of Britain, R.J. Moore-Colyer

Environment and History 5(1999): 221-236

This article is concerned with some aspects of the career of Sir George Stapledon, pioneer ecologist, geneticist and agricultural improver. In reviewing some of Stapledon's writings on the regeneration of rural Britain during the inter-war years it places his work within the social and cultural context of the time. Stapledon's suspicions of inductive science and reductionist economics, his concern with holism, 'spiritual values' and 'the nature of things' and his emphasis upon breadth of vision and the cultivation of the imagination was in stark contrast to many scientists of the day. However debatable the effects upon the 'natural' environment may have been, Stapledon's remarkable achievements in upland agricultural improvement were largely responsible for the retention of the social, cultural and economic infrastructure of the hills and uplands of today's Britain.

I was born and brought up alongside Stapledon's plant breeding station in Aberystwyth and my father often spoke of his work and also that of Nansen, Gandhi, Burbank and other such pioneers. He also spoke well of traditional Jewish education in which, he told me, each person was taught a manual trade so that, wherever they went in the world, they could always get work.

good wishes

john chris

--

I'm made very curious indeed, by this remark, john chris. It is most timely. Yes, I'm helping orchestrate one other session at the gathering, and this is around the topic of "bioregional seed stewardship." This session is, we hope, where plant breeders, gardeners and farmers, will be sharing their salient concerns around the plants which hold up the dietary foundations of our corner of Eden. It just so happens that our bioregion is home to one of the more visionary concentrations of plant breeders in the West.

I'm familiar with the reputation of Luther Burbank, but am curious to know what about these two men suggested the connection for you. Did you know that Paramahansa Yoganada's absolutely splendid book, "Autobiography of a Yogi" was dedicated to Luther Burbank?

n

[Zeratulss]

24% of Americans believe that the Internet is able for a time to replace them with a loved one. For obvious reasons, such sentiments particularly prevalent among residents of the United States alone. Both men and women can replace the beloved, beloved trips to the World Network. However, the willingness to such transactions vary among followers of different ideologies: conservatives frowned relate to this idea, and the "progressive-minded" on the contrary, Nerkarat it.

Study company Zogby International also showed that every fourth resident of the United States have their own representation in the web-site or internet-stranichka. Creating internet-dvoynikov most passionate about young people (18-24 years of age) - 78% of them have personal Web page. In doing so, 68% of those surveyed said that the World Wide Web, they do not appear in its original capacity, their virtual overnight seriously different from the real.

Only 11% of Americans would agree implantable microchip in his brain, which would provide them with direct contact with the Internet. But the situation is changing, in the case of children. Almost every fifth resident of the United States would agree to equip their child safety device which would allow him to track the movement in space on the Internet.

10% of U.S. stated that the Internet brings them to God. " In turn, 6% are convinced that because of the existence of the World Wide Web God away from them.

And how you feel? Sorry bad English.