Best wishes to all those already in the arena and to those about to enter. Let the E & P’s guide us all.

Glen A.

For goodness sake this is a comment that is breathtaking in its naivety in my opinion and even moreso it is interesting that you have chosen to have your name withheld which is of course your right though I think that if you are prepared to shoot the gun the you should own up to pulling the trigger.

The strategy of Australia Felix Permaculture has been from 1993 to ‘….move Permaculture from being a marginal methodology to an unconscious practice…’ With that in mind we have worked with many corporations and institutions whom under this comment’s criteria would lower or even diminish our respect in the marketplace. Though of course perhaps this has already happened.

Slurring Ned and Eliza as ‘high living high flying space cadets’ is again throwing stones without understanding at all what their motivations are, or that as with any human part of the role Permaculture has is to change the paradigms of human society that across the entire planet is the reason why biodiversity is decreasing at such an alarming rate. Above all else it is just plain rude to say stuff like this, especially in a public forum on Permaculture where obviously there are a few guiding ethics to guide what I would hope is a new paradigm of behaviour and candour.

You don’t get that change by not having the conversation with everyone of those humans, rich or poor, and laying out the options available from a Permaculture perspective. In fact there is an unprecedented capacity now for some humans to make decisions on behalf of others that can effect not only millions of humans but also Gaia herself.

In the word’s of PRI’s own Geoff Lawton these decisions can be positively directed or negatively directed. Part of the important role and responsibility that I (and others) have developed in attracting a demographic that includes people like Ned and Eliza who are sharing the same table as single mothers, TV stars, mums and dads, self-funded retirees, farmers, indigenous horticulturalists etc, who are willing to commit their time and energy (and a lot of fossil energy too!) to doing a PDC is to commit them to working for the primary client (remember her?) and her occupants and do so as fairly and as equitably as is possible.

The PDC so far (we just finished day 5) has been particularly effective and we completed the 3rd design exercise today. In this those ‘name withheld’ slurred have been particularly keen participants and have done a great job as have all of the other people who’ve taken the trouble to come to Walkamin for this event. Very much looking forward to the rest of this rather unique event and then APC10 soon after.

So I would like to encourage the opportunity to engage with all rather than make armchair assessments of who to talk to and who to not talk to when these are human beings who still need clean air, nutrient dense food, good quality live water, efficient shelter and regenerative energy systems like the rest of us, and might just according to the family that were born to or their specific capacity to concentrate capital and funds can with orient these capacities toward enabling a more equitable outcome for Gaia and her occupants, and that above all else they have a responsibility to do so.

This is not a nouvelle noblesse oblige, rather a responsibility that all of us westerners have with all of our privileges over perhaps 3/4’s of the rest of humanity and indeed the diminishing biodiversity and mineral resources we are all complicit in exploiting.

All the best,

Darren