"The Bullock brothers up on Orcas Island have always been great, you know, mixed system, marsh and hillside and there are many others, I'm sure. But for every Bullock brother, there are a hundred woo woos spinning around in circles."
- Bill Mollison, Permaculture Founder
"What permaculturists are doing is the most important activity that any group is doing on the planet. We don't know what details of a truly sustainable future are going to be like, but we need options, we need people experimenting in all kinds of ways and permaculturists are one of the critical gangs that are doing that."
- David Suzuki, International Environmental Advocate
Tokyo:
Here's another tremor....3rd or 4th one of the day.
Nowhere really safe i can go.
Breaking news, another hydrogen explosion at the nuclear power plant.
Interesting time to be alive.
I guess I just have to be ready to die at any time,
but that should really be a daily practice.
You never know when you'll die.
I remember a really old Vietnamese monk saying,
"if you don't know how to die, you don't know how to live."
almost ready...
"Why use up the forests which were centuries in the making and the mines which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of the hemp fields?" - Henry Ford
Freedom is Choice
Freedom is a quality of activity, not a condition that exists in a vaccum: it is a prize to be won daily, not a possesion that can be kept in the basement and taken out and polished up for parades. Freedom cannot be givin - the most you can hope is to free others from the forces that prevent them from finding it themselves. Real freedom has nothing to do with voting. Real freedom dosen't simply mean being able to choose between options, but actively participating in creating the options in the first place.
the burning bush
There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there. ~Albert Einstein
Voting in elections is an expression of our powerlessness: it is an admission that we can only approach the resources and capabilities of our own society through the mediation of the ruling caste. When we let them prefabricate our options for us, we relinquish controll of our communities to these polliticians in the same way that we have ceeded technology to engineers, health care to doctors, and controll of our living environments to city planners and private real estate developers. We end up living in a world that is alien to us, even though our labor has built it, for we have acted like sleepwalkers hypnotized by the monopoly our leaders and specialists hold on setting the possibilities.
who shall we ask permission to exist?
we don’t care what our detractors say, so long as they refuse to tell the truth. Tell us, Where do we apply for our temporary permit to speak freely?
Democracy is the most sustainable way to maintain the division between powerful and powerless- it gives significant incentives to the greatest possible number of people to defend that division.
No comments:
Post a Comment