About
What if we were born at this time because
we are the ones who can heal our species and create a new world?
The purpose of this site is to synthesize a sustainable vision of personhood we can take up. We need to keep what we like about our culture and walk away from what we don’t like. It is time to stop being victims of our culture and beliefs and start creating a world we would want to live in.
Permaculture principles can help us create a New American Dream that empowers us instead of imprisoning us. Instead of more laws and amendments we need new minds, new beliefs and new visions to get free of an out moded system of living that punishes us all.
What is permaculture?
Permaculture is an old idea with a new name. Permanent culture or permanent agriculture is an idea of sustainability synthesized in the 1950’s. Permaculture is a fancy word for keeping what you use on a daily basis close to by. By mimicking natural systems one can devise a permaculture system for any business or activity. Permaculture means intelligent, elegant use of all your resources and intelligence in a way that creates more than the sum of the parts without producing any harmful substances in the process. In a permaculture system nothing gets wasted or thrown away and it all works together just like nature always has.
“Making food a commodity to be owned was one of the greatest innovations of our culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key – and putting it there is the cornerstone of our economy- for if food wasn’t under lock and key who would work?”
~Daniel Quinn, from his book My Ishmael
Control Your Source
Since the industrial revolution we have gradually had control of our land and our food and our water taken away from us and put into the hands of a few wealthy corporate elite. Radical freedom is about being able to eat fresh locally grown food when we are hungry, and having the freedom to do what we like with our lives. Ou bodies are made of food so we should be connected to ourselves through our own power to pick and eat at leisure.
Bring back local control of resources
We should be allowed to have fresh food that is not controlled by industry and big business but by ourselves. This connectedness to our source is a powerful healer and it is our birthright as earthlings. We can heal most of our di-sease, and neurosis as well as ending stoop labor and mass farming by using the permaculture principles to grow safe edible food close to home with minimal amounts of labor and weeding.
Grow food not lawns
We can have organic fresh fruits and vegetables that are grown with a minimum of labor in every empty lot, every front and back yard and every wasted space where grass now sucks down our precious water and resources. We can grow local food year round in temperate zones and create green houses where giant shopping malls now take up space.
Get rid of the farm labor cast system
The economic system we have in place exploits people and animals cruelly all over the planet. This affects us at our core with every meal we eat and every object we use even if we don’t see it. We know the true cost of our food and goods even if we pretend not to and this hurts us and spoils every good thing we try to create. Much of the violence and sickness we face is the direct result of the hierarchy we have built. We need to make the connection between how we are living and the resulting unhappiness we experience.
The sustainable permaculture model takes away the need for unnecessary soil tilling and waste. It takes away the need to torture sentient beings; including factory and farm workers as well as factory farmed animals. A sustainable model eliminates the use of a cast system that makes some people the white-collar intellectuals and some people the blue collar farm laborers and illegal wetbacks. The food system we have created taxes human beings who work in it and the planet to its limits and creates an undertone of stress and hardship that is completely unnecessary.
Changing where we get our food will do away with the new “niggers” and many of the border problems we have in our world today. If we move toward a system where we all have the power to eat as much as we need wherever we are there will be no need for border control.
Get rid of meaningless jobs and useless stuff
Many people work long hours at meaningless jobs to produce more stuff to sooth unhappy people who work long hours at meaningless jobs. It makes no sense to be slaves to mediocrity when we have so much more potential.
The solution is not to return the toil of early farm life . Creating food and shelter does not need to be difficult. “Primitive” societies have always worked only a few hours a day and had more leisure than “modern” people. For a detailed discussion of the “original affluent society” see Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins.
With technology we can create a better life through intelligent use of permaculture and sustainable resources. With natural mixed forest gardens that are self sustaining we will need only a few hours a week to tend to our gardens and the rest of the time can be spent doing what we like. Wouldn’t you like to just walk away from your daily job and the rat race?
We live in a culture that is aching for meaning. We are touch starved and physically unhealthy. We spend most of our time relating to our stuff instead of to each other. Getting rid of much of the stuff we now own and buy seems like a radical idea. But is all that stuff really the cause of true happiness?
Human nature is not what we have been taught to believe…