A reference post. From Toby Hemenway, Gaia’s Garden: The aim of permaculture is to design ecologically sound, economically prosperous human communities. It is guided by a set of ethics: caring for Earth, caring for people, and reinvesting the surplus that this care will create. From these ethics stem a set of design guidelines or principles, described in many places and in slightly varying forms. The list below is the version I use, compiled with the aid of many permaculture teachers and flowing from the work of Mollison, Holmgren, and their coauthors.

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A people in the throes of national prosperity, who breathe poisoned air, drink poisoned water, eat poisoned food, who take poisoned medicines to heal them of the poisons that they breathe, drink, and eat, such a people crave the further poison of official reassurance. It is not logical, but it is understandable, perhaps, that they adore their President who tells them that all is well, all is better than ever. The President reassures the farmer and his wife who have exhausted their farm to pay for it, and have exhausted themselves to pay for it, and not have not paid for it, and have gone bankrupt for the sake of the free market, foreign trade, and the prosperity of corporations; he consoles the Navajos, who have been exiled from their place of exile, because the poor land contained something required for the national prosperity, after all; he consoles the young woman dying of cancer caused by a substance used in the normal course of national prosperity to make red apples redder; he consoles the couple in the Kentucky coalfields, who sit watching TV in their mobile home on the mud of the floor of a mined-out stripmine; from his smile they understand that the fortunate have a right to their fortunes, that the unfortunate have a right to their misfortunes, and that these are equal rights.

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Sallie McFague, Blessed are the Consumers: Everything is interconnected. Philosopher Bruno Latour has imagined such a world. Its primary characteristic is that there is no “environment,” no external world that is our playfield. Rather, there is “one world,” a cosmos, a totality of things, all of which are “insiders,” members of the collective who have voice. Hence, “we must connect the question of the common world to the question of the common good.

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A reference post, to define what I mean by God. As to the ontological status of God, I’m undecided – or perhaps more precisely, indifferent. Paul Tillich, The Essential Tillich: God is the answer to the question implied in man’s finitude; he is the name for that which concerns man ultimately. This does not mean that first there is a being called God and then the demand that man should be concerned about him.

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No one needs me to recount the greatness of a living legend like Wendell Berry. I’ll limit myself to describing his impact on my life. I heard of him about twenty years ago through the newsletter/website Christian CounterCulture. The first book of his I read was What Are People For?. But let’s back up for a second. As with many people, my intellectual life began in college. Up to that point, my thoughts and opinions were merely echoes of the adults in my life.

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I have mentioned previously that I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian church — and I remained there until my brain completed development in my mid-twenties. It was a church that strongly emphasized separation from the “world” and enforced that separation by creating, as much as possible, a bubble around the members. We were constantly warned about the dangers of too much contact with people outside our church. And they were right!

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