David and I will co-present a workshop at the beginning of the first Permaculture Voices conference, to be held in Temecula, CA. He’s the Meaningful Makeover content guy; we’re both pedagogues, and I fancy myself the interpreter.
In our hour-long workshop, participants will be guided through a set of considerations for charting their course through the offerings of this incredible collection of luminaries full of unapologetic hope. The considerations blend learning theory and permaculture principles. We’re designing the workshop to have immediate application for participants in the here and now of the conference in order to root a scaffold for self-directed, lifelong learning that can be taken home for daily use and applied to any experience, anywhere.
“We can’t go it alone for very long” (Weisman, p. 269)
Facing “the Three Scary Numbers” of global warming isn’t easy. If you take in the ramifications of that terrifying math seriously (and don’t choose denial as a coping mechanism), you’re likely to wind up in the camp of Guy McPherson and the Doomers. Guy is the most vocal advocate of it being too late to do anything meaningful to salvage life on earth due to the amount of self-reinforcing feedback loops already in motion. If you do take the scary numbers seriously (as Guy, Bill McKibben, and many others have and do), you’re almost guaranteed to experience emotional shock or even trauma. For me, the fog from that “poison” of realization (as it was metaphorically described by a friend) lasted fifteen months; it’s only in retrospect that I can perceive how wounded I was by recognizing near term human extinction. Coming out of the fog meant, for me, gaining clarity on my values and my skills.Permanent Culture = Permaculture
I recently snapped this photo of my 1993 Volvo’s odometer to share with the mechanic I bought it from last year. Paul told me the record for a Volvo from his shop was 509,000 miles, and he had heard of a guy who supposedly drove his for over three million miles! Personally I wouldn’t want to spend that many hours in the seat of a car! But this got me thinking about durability and resilience supported by maintenance: a web of social and physical factors interwoven with environmental conditions. Permanent implies fixed, unchanging, absolute—but culture is adaptive, adaptable, evolutionary. Putting them together is not exclusively about food, central as food is to survival. This is why I’m thrilled to be working with David on the necessary care of people ethical dimension of generating (and re-generating) collectively-oriented communities for planetary maintenance and survival.Follow #permavoices on Twitter and contribute to the Permaculture Voices conference dialogue.