Introduction

Welcome, gentle reader! You have stumbled across my online repository for ideas, musings, philosophizing and theorizing. Over the coming months it is my intention to publish a grab bag of personal writings, musings, links, and hopefully conversation about social change, permaculture, and the human condition.

A little about myself is in order first, I suppose, that you may understand the context in which I write, and the assumptions I bring with me. I am a white male living in the great plains region of the United States, in a small-ish university town. I was born on the East Coast, the child of a working class immigrant and an upper middle class WASP, and moved to my current location in my early childhood. I was raised in the upper tier of the working class, with a lifestyle that was comfortable and well provided for, but far from luxurious by local standards. I graduated high school in 1999, attended university in-state and graduated with a degree in sociology.

During university, at the height of what was known as the Global Justice Movement, I became enamored with radical politics and social and environmental activism. After graduation, being the idealist I am, I chose to stay local and work on a series of half-baked grassroots projects rather than move onto graduate school like most of my classmates. This may well have been to my ultimate benefit, since I was able to avoid student loans entirely, along with the extremely weak job market for graduates in the social sciences. Nonetheless, things did not go as hoped, and nothing I worked on gained enduring traction for what in hindsight were obvious fundamental flaws, rooted in inexperience, rigid idealism, and rejection of any engagement with what I viewed, and in many ways still view, as a hopelessly corrupt system.

Several years later, no closer to success, I allowed myself to be talked into attending nursing school as a path to basic economic stability. I have worked as an LPN in a variety of environments for the past eight years, and currently seek to pursue my RN. In all that time, my interest in politics and social change has never diminished, but has deepened and systematized into a passion for permaculture and herbalism. In 2005 I began my studies in herbalism through the Dr. Christopher School of Natural Healing, and in 2010 I attended my first Permaculture Design Course under Scott Pittman. Since then I have continued my studies independently.

My current perspective thus encompasses Permaculture; the social sciences; the hard sciences of ecology and biology; a practical and experiential understanding of existing systems, in both their substantial successes and significant failures; the willingness of the radical to critically examine both the humanity and functionality of entrenched systems; commitment to a bottom-up approach to social change; philosophy and ethics; and an understanding of human health and well-being informed by the science-driven art of nursing, the holistic wisdom of traditional herbalism, and the pure sciences of sociology and ecology. It is the nexus of these diverse topics that will be the focus of this blog.

With this blog I am hoping to explore the application of permaculture and its principles to social organization, political and economic change, activism and social change, and human health and wellness. If you are unfamiliar with the three ethics and ten principles of permaculture design, they are well explained here <http://permacultureprinciples.com/principles/>. The ten principles are usually viewed as applied ecology, which they most certainly are. The application of these principles to land management is well understood, and has thus far been the primary focus of most permaculture education and permaculture projects. This is understandable and largely appropriate, for as many have pointed out already, a functioning ecology and a healthy land base is the foundation of all life including human civilization. Still, as a form of systems theory, the principles are equally applicable to human systems, both biological and social. Failure to apply these principles to social systems, I propose, has limited efforts to apply permaculture on a broad enough scale to enact the necessary changes that our times demand. Largely due to my own disappointing experiences, which in many ways parallel the large-scale failures experienced by the Left in the USA and elsewhere over recent decades, I have a strong interest in understanding why activist projects and social movements fail. It is said that we learn more through our failures than through our successes, and we on the Left, boy have we had our share of failures. It is time to learn from these failures, quickly, and find a way forward, or, to paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg, we face the prospect of a coming barbarism.

Future posts will likely take a meditative or narrative approach, rather than the more scholarly format I would prefer. Part of that is due to the way I naturally think. Part of that is simply due to a lack of time resources, largely a result of a demanding job with many 12-15 hour days. Posting will be sporadic at times. Perhaps weekly, perhaps several times a week if I stumble on relevant or interesting information. Sometimes likely less often than that. I am open to critique and to new information, and I look forward to dialoguing. Hostility and obvious trolling will not be tolerated, and will be removed without comment. That being said, please enjoy. I can't wait to get started!