‘When people and permaculture meet and work together, there is a synergy with nature that is lost in the world of money and the self’
Modern day civilisation is mono everything, fragmented and discordant, lives are lived with little in the way of any contact with the natural world other than that of usury or so called recreation. This Fragmentation suits Politicians and big business, it stops people forming alliances and bringing about situations where people can so ‘No’ on mass. There seems to be a prevailing but not directly spoken idea that we have mastered and tamed nature, and because of this we can subject the planet to anything we want to throw at it, because nature will not react against its master, what a lot a load of rubbish! We have not mastered or tamed nature, we have attacked and exploited nature and scarred the earth with our greedy excavations, but we are losing this backward and absurd battle, the soil loses its fertility due to our actions, the oil that has been the powerhouse of modern civilisation is running out and our weather systems are revolting against us. We have tried to act as if we exist In a world beyond nature, that we have somehow elevated above it all, only a fool would believe this and an even bigger fool to live by this, check what’s under your feet!
For those who realise the urgency of the situation and do not wish to live by this short term ‘slash and burn’ that modern civilisation rams down our throats we need look no further than altering our relationship with nature to uncover lasting and revolutionary change that can emancipate nature and ourselves from our own exploitation and destruction. A lasting Synergy can occur when we interact and work with nature, this synergy has the ability to solve all of our resource problems and to repair the damage we have done to our habitat and the habitat of others that we share the planet with. There can by no Synergy with an isolated humanity that believes that it exist in another world outside of nature, for without nature we are nothing. The fact that we are in some ways different from nature, also means that we are the same, nature’s ways and design are diverse. So how did we get to this separation of us and nature? Both monotheistic religion and science have certainly played their part here, from the religious end of things, anyone showing a deep respect and admiration for nature is usually labelled as being either pagan at best or devil worshippers at worst, I’m sure many of you will be aware that people who have used herbal preparations in the past were labelled as witches and many were tortured and burnt by the prevailing Christian culture.
And there has been a centuries ongoing effort to convert people who are seen as pagans, in the case of India, they have had both Christianity and Islam attempting to convert people away from nature based beliefs. Science has played its part by prostituting its skills and methodologies in creating this unsustainable, artificial and separate world that we now live in, don’t get me wrong, I am not being anti-science here, I am simply stating that the goal of science in understanding nature has become secondary to the profit motive. Capitalism and its blithe disregard for the natural world is the final cherry on this nasty cake, capitalism views nature in an total usury capacity, to the business man, nature is a cash generating resource that can dipped into at will.