FW: [Diggers350] RE: diggers and permaculture

Sat Nov 20 01:48:25 GMT 2010

Subject: RE: [Diggers350] RE: diggers and permaculture
Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2010 01:45:24 +0000

Personally in the digger vs. no-dig permaculture debate - I am no-dig pro -permaculture and anti-digger. 
I don't agree with the concept of being anti-ownership, since this only leads to idealistic communist thinking which has historically just proven to justify revolutionaries, who have caused more destruction and disruption to land ownership titles and have used their 'idealist' strategies in order to aim to represent the 'popular mass ideal' to their own advantage, and then placed themselves in positions of power at the top, once the pre-existing elite have been deposed. Communism which is anti-ownership for example led to more than 110 million deaths worldwide, as the intelligencia of society across Russia and China were either exiled, put into agriculturalist concentration camps to serve as slave labour or simply put to death as a threat to the 'communist' regime. 
Therefore I personally am really 'anti' communist, since I think deluded utopian fantasy concepts of the land belonging to everybody being claimed by political leaders who pretend to represent everyone else as an excuse to kill off the aristocracy or to have wars, are in fact really dangerous. 
The colonisation of the americas, could be described as a utopian communist anti-ownership of the indigenous population of America strategy and so also could the colonialist European models that described the 'rest of the world' as empty also be described as 'anti-ownership' since they evidently ignored the ownership of the rest of the planet throughout their colonialist regime. 
Therefore I think it's actually really dangerous for people from the UK to project their own personal historical -re-enactment theories onto global theories that might not necessarily be relevant to the rest of the world. 

So therefore I am most definitely pro-permaculture models which are based on working with indigenous knowledge, that mostly come from people who have lived on their own lands and territories for millenia, and therefore had the chance to collectively over time, to be able to develop a close connection with the land that they are actually inhabiting, and to therefore have a sense of 'ownership' and 'belonging' to the land actually goes both ways. They have a sense of greater responsibility to the land as a result of being tied by a sense of belonging to the land. 

Therefore I also think that the concept of being 'anti-ownership' even within the Land is Ours - seems to be a narrow definition of what 'The Land is Ours' is all about - since it should be about people being connected to the Land whatever chance they have and developing their own sense of ownership and belonging in order to develop their connection and responsibility and therefore develop their closeness and responsibility towards the land and natural resources that they own and occupy in their lives. 

To: diggers350 at yahoogroups.com
From: james36armstrong at hotmail.com
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2010 19:04:22 +0000
Subject: [Diggers350] RE: diggers and permaculture

Hello Julie,
Yes,  good point about the long term  aims which I share 
and I see the downside of ownership of land is exclusiveness and the further aim  to use  landlessness as a way of sytematically exploiting people, e.g. by colonialism, by  monopolising  house provision , and  by garnering private taxes on food from those of us who consume food- all of us!   Few know that the 197,000 who own nearly all Britain's bulk land have  worked the system so that the rest of us pay  our taxes  taxes via CAP  to the landowners. Quite a sophisticated coup. Best wishes, James  

Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2010 12:28:53 +0000
From: wearealldubsolution at yahoo.co.uk
Subject: diggers and permaculture
To: james36armstrong at hotmail.com

Hi James,

I get your point - however there are many "deep greens" (or bio-leftists as David Orton of greenweb.ca calls them) who would be uncomfortable with the idea of competing with other species.  You could say that it is competing with other species and using all as resources for our own that has comprehensively fecked the planet.  I've been teaching about Winstanley and co since the mid-seventies and certainly regard myself as a digger but am also in tune with ( and some interaction with) U.S. panthers ( far from middle class) HP Newton was clear about how corporate capital has destroyed the natural habitat which should be a commonwealth " for all of us to share".

There are certainly people advocating permaculture who care feck all about socialism or about urban folk and whose practices are more damaging than digging has ever been .
 But the real purpose of permacultural thinking is to concentrate on improving the long term biodiversity and fertility of the habitat rather than getting as much out of the land in the short term as possible.  The idea of owning a bit of land for "self-sufficent" survival is anyway crap as "noone should buy or sell the land for private gain".  That said, digging and ploughing in the modern context of factory farming and use of fertilisers is self-defeating.

Personally I do a lot of digging but not for agriculture ( which I do by mulching and bui8lding up soil).  I dig secret houses underground .  

I have written a book in which I advocate another kind of digging.  I argue that just as we need to develop wild life corridors so creatures can get from one conserved habitat to another, so we also need to dig ( virtual) underground tunnels to connect dissenting communities to share support, techniques and
 solidarity.

love and peas,
Julie

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