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Sustainable Whatcom, A Permaculture Approach to County and Regional Planning by Michael Pilarski, Cascadia Weekly, 1/20/10 (Large pdf, beginning page 8)
Real Communities are Self-Organizing by Dimitry Orlov, ClubOrlov
Secret Handshakes by John Michael Greer, the Archdruid Report
Gram and Me: Community in Time and Space by Sharon Astyk, Causabon's Book
Sustainable Whatcom, A Permaculture Approach to County and Regional Planning by Michael Pilarski, Cascadia Weekly, 1/20/10 (Large pdf, beginning page 8)
APPLYING PERMACULTURE design to cities, counties and regions is a fascinating topic that I always discuss at my permaculture design courses. However, when I sat down to write this article I realized I can only lay my hands on a number of case studies. Permaculture design at the
regional level is still in its infancy, nonetheless I believe it holds a lot of promise for today’s crisis ridden world. This article also touches briefly on decentralized economic and governance systems. It was written with Whatcom County in mind, but has broader relevance. This is just a taste of what permaculture is and how it is being applied around the world.
Most people, when they hear the word “permaculture,” think of food gardens, sheet mulching or backyard food forests. But permaculture is so much more than this. Permaculture is integrated system design of the natural environment (gardens, farms, forests, wild areas); the human-built environment (buildings, energy systems, transportation, waste management) as well as economic and social systems. Permaculture design is most commonly applied at the garden, homestead or farm scale, however permaculture design can be applied at any scale—to any size of property or region. In this case we will take a look at how permaculture would approach designing all of Whatcom County. This necessitates looking at things from the micro to macro level, from single yard designs, to blocks, neighborhoods, small towns, the city of Bellingham, rural settled areas, farmland, forests, foothills and whole watersheds... [I highly recommend attending Pilarski's all day class on 1/25, "Permaculture Design Applied to Whatcom County." This class, co-sponsored by Transition Whatcom will help prepare you for any and all Transition work. Contact
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
for more info and see the event listing at Transition Whatcom here: http://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/events/permaculture-design-applied-to - DM] Real Communities are Self-Organizing by Dimitry Orlov, ClubOrlov
John Michael Greer, Sharon Astyk and Rob Hopkins have made some interesting points on the topic of community, and I wish to join the fray. In all of my experience, communities — of people and animals — form instantaneously and rather effortlessly, based on a commonality of interests and needs. What takes a lot of work is not organizing communities, but preventing them from organizing — through the use of truncheons and tear gas, or evictions and mass imprisonment, or, more recently, more subtle and ultimately more successful techniques of the consumerist political economy... Secret Handshakes by John Michael Greer, the Archdruid Report Last week’s Archdruid Report post on the costs of community called up an interesting simulacrum of community in one corner of the peak oil blogosphere, as Sharon Astyk, Rob Hopkins, and Dmitry Orlov all joined in the conversation with blog posts in response. This didn’t exactly come as an unbearable surprise; the role of community in the deindustrial world of the imminent future has been a hot-button issue in the peak oil scene since before there was a peak oil scene, and a fair percentage of the posts here that have fielded more than the usual flurry of comments have been on that confused and contested subject. Still, it interests me that so much of the discussion, as so often happens, went on as though history has nothing to teach us. One example out of many, and by no means the worst, is Astyk’s suggestion that the reason community has fallen apart in recent decades is that so many people work so hard, and are too tired to get involved. This echoes a common plaint, but the fact remains that a century ago most Americans worked 50, 60, or more hours a week as a matter of course, and most of those hours were spent at hard physical labor. Somehow that didn’t keep a dizzying array of community groups from flourishing to an extent I think few people remember today... Gram and Me: Community in Time and Space by Sharon Astyk, Causabon's Book
I serve on a committee at my synagogue that brings in speakers every year for a series of talks and special meals. It is a small comittee, and before I joined, the average age of the participants was probably close to 70. The former chair is a formidable and funny woman in her early 90s, who has been a member of our shul since the 40s and who remembers everything. There are two older couples in their 60s, a woman in her 60s, myself at 37 and a friend of mine in his early 40s who just joined, pressed into it by desperate pleas for help and by the fact that it is impossible to deny Sadie, the woman in her 90s, anything...I was thinking about this as I read the next of John Michael Greer's pieces on community "Secret Handshakes" which includes an account of his attempt to revitalize and participate in one piece of our aging community infrastructure, the local Freemasons. I found it a compelling story, and I'm glad he's telling the story of the fraternal organizations, which do provide a model and structure on which we might build. Indeed, some of the story he's telling tracks my own family history both good and bad...
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