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Re: All theory--principles...





Thanks to all for a most interesting analysis...

When I began working with Permaculture as a profession  nine years ago, it
quickly became clear to me that its basic premisses were not  clear ( a
"hodgepodge", as Toby says).  It led me to write a little booklet about
principles, strategies, and techniques in Permaculture because it was clear
that  these were not well thought out in the original literature.  People
come basically looking for techniques, but what we have to offer, really,
are principles which build a new, more sustainable  paradigm.

I came to understand that :
A principle is an underlying idea which  is the basis for our action.
Cooperation would be an important principle in Permaculture, for example...

A strategy is planning how to  do something within time and space.
Stacking, to me, is a  strategy, not a principle. Also multiple functions
for each element, and many of the other aspects today called "Permaculture
principles".  A principle is more basic.  (On analysing , I came up with
eight Permaculture principles, some of which are not explicit anywhere in
the literature, but implicit throughout . )

A technique is how to do something.  We have a lot of techniques available
in and out of Permaculture.  And we can create them on the spot if we get
our strategies clear.

Today I  always begin my PC courses with this explanation, and I think it
helps make things much clearer...

Marsha



----- Original Message -----
From: Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>
To: permaculture <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2000 11:27 AM
Subject: Re: All theory


> Myk wrote:
>
> > As a design system isn't it 'all theory'? [snip]
> >
> > To my mind 'data/examples/recipes/whatever' are examples of
permaculture's
> > application not permaculture . . .
>
> An interesting and useful distinction, Myk. I've been circling around what
> permaculture "is" for a while, in hopes of learning why Pc is so hard to
> define and characterize (and accept): where does it lie in an
epistemology?
> It's not a discipline, says Holmgren, but it informs disciplines. And I'd
> say it's not a science, like ecology, because it has a preferred outcome.
> The sciences claim to be "objective" searches for knowledge with no
> preferred outcome or defined endpoint (hence their claim to be value
> neutral, their pro-industrial consequences notwithstanding), while
> permaculture definitely has a preferred outcome--a sustainable
culture--and
> rejects certain paths or practices on ethical grounds, unlike the sciences
> (A-bombs and vivisection come to mind).
>
> So Pc can't be one of the sciences. Thus maybe, following on what Myk
says,
> Pc is more like science itself, which is a set of practices designed to
> arrive at a particular goal (for science the goal is an understanding of
the
> world), and which moves toward this goal via implementation through
various
> disciplines and technologies. This means Pc falls in the same category as
> math or science: a body of principles, postulates, and theories that help
> understand and model the natural world. The goal of math, science, and
> permaculture alike, we have to admit, is to manipulate our environment so
it
> will sustain us. Pc just seems to do a more conscious and long-term job at
> it.
>
> In this model, the applications of permaculture are analogous to
engineering
> and mechanics, which are the application of science. The "sciences" of
> permaculture are the subunits of the design course curriculum: soil,
water,
> earthworks, patterning, etc. By analogy, we'll develop more of them in
time,
> just the way science and math do (take *that*, copyrighted curriculum!).
>
> Analyzing permaculture this way--finding a niche for it in the systems of
> knowledge people have developed--might help sort out the hodgepodge of
> principles that Mollison, and now Holmgren, and others have come up with.
> I've always been bothered that ethical principles ("share the surplus")
are
> jumbled in with technical suggestions ("stack functions") and other
> categories of injunctions and guidelines, with little order and sense.
> Perhaps sorting the principles out the way math does--something analogous
to
> the difference between postulates, theorems, algorithms, etc--would put
them
> in a more orderly and usable form.
>
> Toby
>
>
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