This Wednesday, June 15, the Permaculture Guild of Santa Barbara will offer a free meeting featuring Wesley Roe of the Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, who will show a video on "Invisible Systems" and lead a discussion. We meet at 7 pm at the Watershed Resource Center at Arroyo Burro beach, 2981 Cliff Drive in Santa Barbara. The PGSB Steering Group will meet at 6 pm and all are welcome to attend that gathering as well.
BUT WHAT THE HECK ARE "INVISIBLE SYSTEMS"?
Many of us are familiar with how to apply the nature-based permaculture principles to outwardly "visible" designs and ecosystems like landscapes, water systems and buildings, but we're not so sure about what ecologically-designed "invisible systems" might be. In permaculture circles a lot of thought is now going into how to create healthy and sustainable invisible systems such as networks of people, local economies and legal and ethical structures. Some permaculturists are doing "social permaculture"** ("Care for the People") and even applying the permaculture principles to psychological and spiritual "inner landscapes."
Please join us on June 15th to learn about the critically important "Invisible Systems" and how we can redesign them to support life rather than destroy it.
Linda**From: http://www.thegardenattheendoftheworld.info/?p=443
Social Permaculture has its permaculture roots in Bill Mollison’s and David Holmgren’s permaculture bible, ‘Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual’, where they talk about visible and invisible structures:
.……….VISIBLE STRUCTURES ……….INVISIBLE STRUCTURES
……….Water systems……….……….…..Legal
……….Organic systems……….………... Finance
……….Infrastructure……….……….…....Trust
……….Structures……….……….………..Ethics
……….Landscape.
It’s the ‘invisible structures’ that [permaculturist] Rosemary Morrow has applied and adapted to her work in war torn countries for 25 years or more. It is in these devastated communities where a permaculturalist must begin at the beginning, simply because there is not a lot of the invisible social structures left after war and anarchy (if any) to hold up any physical or ecological building project. To re-build the visible structures the invisible structures must first be put in place. If not, then the project, no matter what it is or how big or small it is, will fail. The fact that international aid has failed in Afghanistan is largely due to this.In the developed world we tend to take the invisible structures for granted. They are hidden away in the foundations of our social construction but are a vital and necessary part of making society work and for cultures to grow and thrive within it, whilst being resilient to the effects of corruption. In war-torn countries social breakdown brings the lack of invisible structures to the surface like sepsis from a wound, displaying not only corruption but also chronic health and hygiene problems, malnutrition, high rates of maternal and child mortality, homelessness, lack of education, lack of skills, almost no jobs, violence, etc., etc.
In Rosemary’s ‘Earth Users Guide to Permaculture’, she explains that Social Permaculture ‘is all about how we live in our villages, towns and neighbourhoods’. Rosemary points out the importance of creating and sustaining ‘bioregional prosperity’ – the wealth of local bio-regions – which is, ‘measured by the increase in biological resources… the growth in plant and animal diversity, in community gardens, and in urban forests’. She explains that,
……….(the) three interwoven issues in a bioregion are:
……….……….control of land
……………….……the economic system
……….………………..and people’s livelihoods.
In Afghanistan, as we can see in the film, the poorest Afghanis have little or none of these things. Particularly the widows. They have no land and no skills to work with, and the bioregional and national economic systems are almost non existent; kept down by corruption at all levels of government, bureaucracy and international opportunists. With the confusion that the foreign invasion has brought – the confusion of ‘winning hearts and minds’ with bullets and bombs packed with depleted uranium and a thousand metal shards – the rich industrialised West has not helped one bit in re-establishing either the local or the national prosperity that Afghanistan once enjoyed.Social Permaculture is all about ‘care for people’, which is one of the three permaculture ethics (the other two being care for the earth and share of surplus, or fair share). Pioneering permaculture into a place, any place, is not just bringing sustainable design into a landscape but also into a culture. Driven by ‘care for people’, pioneering permaculturalists are careful not to impose their ideas and methods onto the local people. They wait till they are asked and then listen and observe, laying the ground for working together as equals, where there is little room for superiority, unwanted agendas and everything else that comes with these.
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