"David Hare-Scott" wrote in message
...

I agree about the mindset. But we are embedded in a largely free
enterprise
society in which you have to be commercially viable to keep going.
Mollison's
philosophy is such that he would remake much of society, its values and
motives not merely how we get our food.

but wouldn't most of us, if we could? :-) in reality of course, societies
remake themselves as they go (seeing as how benign dictators are so very
thin on the ground ;-)

Although he does give a nod to
"legality, people, culture, trade and commerce" as a component in creating
a
design. So perhaps he does accept that commerce and making a dollar is
not
altogether evil. The question is how do you do it in a society whose
agriculture is based on permaculture?

well, i'm fabulously iffy about permaculture - not because of the
permaculture itself, which is fine, but because of all the dippy twits who
do everything badly & then walk away because it hasn't worked. also, it's
quite a quiet movement (like organics in general, biodynamics, etc) so i
believe you would find there's a great deal more going on than you
immediately realise. and yes, making a dollar isn't inherently evil
whatsoever. most of us cannot (for example) make shoes - we need money for
that. true self-sufficiency by one person or family is impossible. it
becomes possible within communities, though. permaculture farms most likely
just carry on in obscurity, we don't know that they are there, really, even
if we buy their products we can't see the farm & probably don't think about
it much.

I know of small scale operations where on a few acres a family is growing
enough to mainly feed themselves and sell some to make a dollar to buy
what
they cannot grow. This makes that family very happy, they have the
ability to
live in the way that they see it is proper to live.

see, i believe that sort of thing is really much more common than we think.
much of it can't be measured via "market forces" & other foolishness, so
it's not. things that can't be measured via capitalist economics tends not
to be counted statistically, so we cannot officially "know" about them.
(sigh).

However Mollison puts forward the idea that permaculture could/should
replace
broadacre farming altogether. This leads me to a problem. I cannot see
how
every family can have a few acres nor the will/ability to farm it. I
cannot
see how we can get away from at least some specialists who use their skill
to
get food from the land efficiently on a scale that permits the feeding of
the
non-farmers who produce other things. In the long run the choice is to do
it
sustainably or to starve when we have mined out the soil. So what replaces
broadacre?
\
truthfully, i'm not sure anything does "replace" it. you'll have noticed
that broadacre farming is changing itself, though. like you said, the
choices are rapidly becoming to either do it sustainably, or starve. perhaps
movements such as the permaculture movement have an obligation to cease
being slightly obscure & to get out there more, i'm not sure; but when you
consider things such as how mainstream organics has become (despite how
quiet it is), how the most ossified farming brains are coming to use nature
belts & windbreaks & things like that as part of their practice, i suppose
that broadacre (for grains, etc) will carry on, just a bit differently than
in the past.

you are dead right in that not everyone can have a bit of land, & truthfully
i doubt that everyone should (imagine if everyone had to travel the
distances many countryfolk do! it would be unsustainable). yet things such
as the current tendency for completely mainstream gardening magazines &
newspaper columns to encourage people to grow what they can in their yards
or balconies, etc, is a taste of where this is all going (in my hopelessly
optimistic view). sadly, the pace of progressive change can be positively
glacial, it seems to me.

one last tiny rant: one thing i would love to see, which i can't see
happening yet (but is probably going to have to happen very soon) is that
governments need to put their foot down re overconsumption. according to
statistics (tee hee) something like a third of westerners have an
anti-consumerist mentality & tend not to participate in rabid consumption.
governments think this is Bad & want people to consume until they drop (then
consume something else to get them back up again). the day that govts get
the brainwave that overconsumption itself is what is bad, things are going
to change very much for the better, for everyone, because they have the
power to legislate and we do not. in the meantime it is up to individuals to
buy local, to limit consumption of stuff they don't need, etc; but people
who do so find a lot of support with like minds (of which there are actually
many).

all these things are interrelated. thank you for reading my rant! :-)
kylie