Once a week myself and Boyd Lee from Transition Towns Bolton meet up to discuss ideas, workshops, permaculture, greedy Bankers and anything that can make life on earth more palatable for all flora and fauna. Yesterday was a frustrating day as we came to the conclusion that Permaculture provided us with all of the tools to live a civilized and harmonious human life on the planet in terms of a sound ecology and resilient resources. There was no other workable model that could respond to peak oil, and a general peak in lots of other resources. The frustrating thing was getting people into the idea of living ecologically sound lives, then we came up with the playful idea of retrofitting the mind as a way of getting people to look at different aspects of how they live. Once we actually get people consciously thinking about how they live, we are half way towards bringing about the Permanent culture that we so urgently need.
A starting point
Take a person, could be a man or women, and they really want to do as much as possible to help protect the environment, a starting point and starting actions can sometimes seem cumbersome and overwhelming to many, and the solutions put forward by the Government and media are fragmented and half baked. This is where retrofitting the mind comes into play, instead of thinking of fragmented actions that we can do to reduce our overall footprint, it is necessary to look at the big picture holistically, so therefore our starting point is our selves and the natural world.
For anyone who has never considered there place in the natural world, and have only considered their lives within the constructed human world of work, commerce and home there is another thing that we need to consider, and that is the world outside of our constructed confines, the natural world. It is only when we look, listen and think about what we see in this other world of nature that we can really begin to understand the separation that has occurred, between ourselves and nature, this in turn will show us what we need to do in terms of preserving and enhancing the ecology of the locale in which we live. Here are a few points that convince me of a disharmony between ourselves and our natural environment, I am sure there are many other examples of this separation, but I chose these particular points in relation to the predicament that we are in.
Separation between modern human beings and nature
Within natural systems animals and plants tend to largely live where there food supply is, they do this for the obvious reason of survival, even migratory species of animals know exactly where and what there food is, human beings live hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles away from their food supply and know very little about how it is grown and processed.
- Generally Animals do not urinate and defecate in their own drinking water as human beings do.
- No animal or plant is ever likely to pose a threat to destroy the planet and its vital eco-systems, we as human beings are destroying both the planet that we live on and every other being that lives upon it, including ourselves!
For a permanent culture
Thinking holistically is an important aspect of how we move ourselves towards a permanent and sustainable future culture. Some people might prefer to call this way of thinking ‘Getting back to nature’ but this isn’t a very precise and workable definition, where as thinking holistically is, because ‘wholes’ are how nature works. When we think holistically, we are not thinking just about ourselves in our own little bubble, we are thinking about a whole series of interactions, interplay and possibilities. The fragmented way of doing and seeing in the world has largely informed modern thinking and has been useful as a manipulative force to control and divide people for reasons of profit, social control, absurd racial beliefs, and a whole host of other ills that have gotten us into the present predicament that we are in. Thinking holistically is represented in ideas such as think ‘Global act local’ and it this flexible and powerful way of thinking that we need to move into an ecologically sound future, in some ways holistic thinking needs to become the mindset of the new times ahead, without this there will be a continuing division of the people, the division of knowledge, and the division of ourselves and the living entity called The Earth which nourishes us and sustains us.
Steve