[Pil-pc-oceania] National PC Day and how we make - and don't make - decisions

[RussGrayson]

Hi John and others following this thread...

Bit of a long response to John's interesting and timely email...

On 2/4/08 6:35 AM, "Champagne" <brogopg at bigpond.net.au> wrote:

> Hi Jedd,
> 
> Your question about the purpose of a National PC can best be summed up
> in our principle - 'Integrate rather than Segregate'.The idea came out
> of a workshop at APC8 in Melbourne titled - ' business is not a dirty
> word'. We were brainstorming ways to promote PC and I suggested a
> national day to provide a greater impact. Many of us promote PC activity
> at our local level and the idea was we could value-add those individual
> efforts by focusing on one day. Similar to what the Solar House day does
> in October.
> 
> To pick up on Pennys thread, I'm also totally intrigued as to how
> decisions are made in this movement. There is no process, never has been
> and until due process if worked out, discussions such as this one end up
> resembling a dogs breakfast.

If discussions like this end up like a dog's breakfast, then it's because
getting permaculturists to make a big, coherent decision is akin to herding
cats. Always has been. Decisions seem to be made by groups of friends, by
local permaculture groups, and itiatives taken by motivated allies.

Could I suggest, though, that the deliberation that appears on this listserv
is actually a part of decision making though - as you more or less suggest
John - there exists no formal structure to turn the ideas, argument and
proposals of that conversation into decisions. Thus, it is an incomplete
decision making process.

I think the discussion that appears here is important, not least because it
complies with processes proposed by the permaculture co-originators that I
mentioned in my earlier email this morning about National P-Day, but because
deliberation in itself is a socially and politically healthy process. This
is because it is inclusive of all those who want to be included. It is messy
and time consuming, sure, but given that the alternative is the managerial
approach (ie. people making decisions for you and in your name) that plagues
society, I think it's the superior approach.

Regarding your statement above that "there is no process, never has been",
it is possible to reach decisions via email discussion. I have been in a
couple organisations that have done that. To put it oversimply, you define a
decision to be made (that in itself requires a conversation but it need not
be a long one, though it is an important one, so that we are all addressing
the same question). Then you set aside a period for its discussion and set a
deadline for making the decision. The decision can be voted on by all those
interested. Sometimes during the discussion phase a trend towards one of the
options emerges and, sometimes, what seems to be more or less consenses
becomes clear. Voting provides formal recognition of trends and consensus.

What is required at stages during the conversation around the decision is
the role of communicitor - someone who periodically summarises the arguments
without writing as a supporter of any of them. This is done so that the
thread can be readily picked up by newcomers and so that the argument around
the decision remains comprehensible.

For the P-Day discussion, for example, you could set aside two weeks to
define the decision to be made (ie. to define the terms of reference, the
scope or limitations of the discussion and decision... do we want a P-Day,
what should be included and how should it be organsied?).

At the end of that period a statement summarising the discussion would be
circulated and agreement sought that these were the right questions (by
voting or informal process). A period of, say, three or four weeks would
then be set aside for argument around the decision. That, too, would be
periodicaly summarised and a summary circualted prior to making the
decision. The decision could be voted upon. This is at basics an exercise in
deliberative democracy.

And here we run into a difficulty pecularly permaculture, and it has to do
with the herding of cats mentioned earlier in relation to dog's breakfasts.
It is this: there is such a diversity of opinion, political alliegance,
attitudes to stuff spiritual and of practice that many would feel unhappy
with whatever decision was to be made.
 
> It was interesting talking to Robin Clayfield about past convergences
> and how they never really were gatherings for the movement to reach
> agreement on anything.Rather, if anyone had a good idea and the energy
> to carry it through you simply announced it and everyone supported you
> and wished you good luck.

In this way they resembled ideas forums and people would be recruited to
ideas that they liked. The problem with making decisions revealed the
difficulty inherent in a decentralised movement of people bringing different
political and social ideas.

Part of the difficulty was that convergences were usually so jam-packed with
sessions that there was little free time for informal converstations or for
deliberating decisions. That requires time and perserverance.

In its earlier periods, permaculture really didn't have significant
decisions to make because the idea itself was growing and, taken as a whole,
was the focus for its practitioners. This is not to say there were not
controversies within permaculture that deserved greater time being out aside
for their exploration. Some people of the time described permaculture as
'anarchic' because of this breadth of opinion and the consequent difficult
in deciding on anything of great significance. At convergences, there was
discussion of the 'anarchic' versus 'centralised' approach to permaculture
decision making.
 
> Our lack of a clear structure cripples us as we emerge from 30 years of
> being a bottom-up movement toward a top-down approach able to have
> influence the national political decision makers.

This is not a feeling of yourself alone John. For some years, there have
been suggestions of a permaculture think tank that would research and
release papers on permaculture opinion. Others lobbied for a central office
type of structure to interface with the outer world.
> 
> Working through a merger between PIL and the model Sydney presented at
> APC9 to my mind is critical if what we want is to be effective at a
> national level. Otherwise, just continue to act within your bioregional
> framework at the local level.

First, we need clarity of how we would be effective at the national level
and what that would entail. As you hint at, what would be required is an
organisational structure substantially different than any hithertofore
existing within permaculture. As I see it at the moment, only Permaculture
International could morph into such an organisation.

The model presented at APC9, I felt, is presently beyond the capacity of
permaculture to implement.

As someone pointed out, the existing PIL structure, because of legal
requirements (as a company limited by guarantee), cannot have 'corporate' or
organisational members such as permaculure associations. Only individuals
can join PIL. Likewise, the proposed model could leave out permaculture
people unattached, and some are not intrested in being attached, to any
permaculture association. Similarly, we have the peculiar structure of
Permaculture Blue Mountains, an organisation without organisation that
consists of a register of people receiving a quarterly newsletter and coming
together on occasion as individuals interested in common topics. Nobody is
quite sure if they are an organisation in the real world or only in member's
heads.

I appreciate the work of those presenting the proposal at APC in seeking to
structure what may be unstructurable so at to make the permaculture movement
more effective. Some comments heard on the floor, however, suggested that
more than a few thought the proposed model a little too heirarchical and
that it would distance permaculturists from the decision making body.

As it is at present, people wanting to work with PIL join the organisation
and an existing committee or set up a task committee. I think it was Tim
Winton who said that this is a simple model that experience has proven to be
workable. My suspicion is that it might be all that pemaculture as a
movement can manage at the present time.

It would be good to read your ideas on a merger of the two models, John.
 
> Adam correctly identified the really big story in PC circles at the
> moment being the Transition Towns movement coming out of Europe.
> Whatever happened to the bioregional concept?

I first heard the term 'bioregional' from Bill Mollison. It became part of
permaculture, as I recall, in the late 1980s and we introduced it as a
geographic and intellectual framework for integrated local initiatives in
our urban PDC in the early 1990s.

Sometime in the late 1980s Peter Berg, from the Planet Drum Foundation in
San Francisco - a bioregional organisation and then-publisher of the
bioregional newspaper, Planet Drum Review - visited us at the Permaculture
Epicentre in Enmore and we went with him for dinner and discussion to
Lurline's Permaculture Café in Annandale. Bioregionalism became part of the
Great Synthesis that we call permaculture.

Just hanging here in the past a little longer, we once had a national
bioregional organisation. Calles AASC - the Australian Association of
Sustainable Communities - it was born during or close to 1984, well back in
permaculture's toddler years but with no significant input from
permaculture, as I recall. There was what I could describe as a 'national
office' - not an actual premises but a group that tied together what the
scattered bioregional groups did and thought, and pubished a print
newsletter.

AASC Sydney bioregion published a press clipping service reporting the bad
and the good news, called 'Evidently/Sustainability'. Sometime Sydney
journalist, editor, publisher and permaculturist (who attended the early IPC
in NZ), Steve Ward, was promnent in AASC activities. Steve is still in
Sydney, living with his family in Cronulla, conveniently close to the ocean
in which he likes to take long distance swims.

Like most such organisations (but not permaculture), AASC somehow and at
some time simply dissolved into the ideasphere. It was an organisation
before its time, for that time is now, as John points out in his reference
to Transition Towns.

I recall reading of bioregionalism in the works of Gary Sneider, a resident
of the Shasta Bioregion and described as occupying the intellectual
territories of 'ecology, bioregionalism, ethnopoetics, literature'
(http://www.gbn.com/PersonBioDisplayServlet.srv?pi=24735). An associate of
Jack Kerouac, Sneider appears as Japhy Ryder in Kerouac's wonderful,
life-loving novel (a novel based closely on reality), The Dharma Bums. Read
it.

Bioreginalism seems to have gone the same way as AASC by the late 1990s.
Looked at another way, it never completely disappear from the collective
permaculture mind and we could say that it morphed into the relocalisation
agenda, which, we know, is a process used in developing Transition Towns.

Relocalisation and Transition Towns are a more tangible thing within which
to enact the old bioregional agenda. Bioregionalism was always an
intgellectual construct, something of an abstraction except to those who
attempted to make it more concrete through local action, such as the AASC
crew. Transition Towns is a tangible concept, physical as  as intellectual -
you can think and talk about it at the same time as you do it.

Incidentally, Transition Towns and relocalisation are likely to get an
airing at this Sunday's Randwick Ecoliving Fair, given that two of the main
instigators of the idea - Tim Winton and Helena Norberg-Hodge - are to
appear (contact Randwick City Council for details).

Transition Towns and relocalisation, as I have said in earlier emails, I see
as the emerging 'market opporttunity' for permaculture. They well may be our
future.

> I'm very cautious about forming PC groups as an entity in themselves and would
> rather operate as a permaculturist integrating the principles at a community
> level to a whole lot of different groups going forward.
> 
>  SUSTAIN magazine is an example of an outcome using this approach.

It is also an example of what in the 1990s we would have called 'bioregional
media' but which nowadays we can call relocalisation.

On your comment about working through non-permaculture organisations John,
doing that brings us - and our permaculture ideas - to an audience wider
than we woud otherwise have beeen able to communicate with.

Thanks for your ideas.

...Russ Grayson
> 
> kind regards
> John
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