Page 44 RAIN Spring 1986 Seeking Universal Design Principles Dan Hemenway is editor o/TheTlntemational Permaculture Species Yearbook (TIPSY). The 1986 edition, due out in May, includes articles on the global ecological crisis, thefarm debt, colony rabbit raising, cultivating hardy kiwis, wildfood plants, and a special section on wetlandspermaculture with articles by Bill Mollison, Bill McLarney, and Dan Hemenway. A resource section lists aljput 1,000 groups in dozens of countries workingfor sustainable lifestyles. TIPSY 1986 is availablefor $12.50from PO Box 202, Orange, MA 01364. Hemenway is also a cofounder ofThe Earth Regeneration and Reforestation Association (TERRA), which is sponsoring a regional corference on thefate oftheforests, locally and worldwide,for the weekend ofJune 20-22 at Slippery Rock College in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. TERRA is encouraging other organizations throughout the world to hold simultaneous conferences. For more information, contact Dan Hemenway at PO Box 202, Orange, MA 01364; 6171544-7810. Thefollowing article has been reprinted with permission from the 1984 edition o/The International Permaculture Seed Yearbook (now “.. .Species Yearbook”). A different version of this article appeared in Whole Earth Review, Fall 1985. by Dan Hemenway For about 10 years, I have struggled with a way to express a practical philosophy, or perhaps art is a better term, for living according to the principles of nature. During this period, the need to formulate and share such a philosophy has become pressing. Several impending catastrophes, including rapidly spreading desertification of continents, wholesale modification of the global climate, a runaway greenhouse effect, and nuclear war, threaten our Earth. Even without a marked cataclysmic event, we may destroy as many as a fifth of the remaining species of our planet by the turn of the century, with the extinction rate, the carbon dioxide buildup, and various other calamitous prospects increasing to the steep portion of an exponential growth curve. The starting point for taking responsibility to live in a way that heals and nurtures our environment must be love, love of the Earth. Without embracing this natural love, we can not attain the wisdom and understanding needed to heal the Earth, no matter how informed and clever and scientific we are able to be. It follows that if we love and respect the arrangements of land and weather and plants and animals which make up the Earth, then we wish to live within the bounds and patterns of these forces and beings. This has been done successfully by a variety of neolithic peoples, such as the Amerindians of the American Northeast. Such peoples accepted and participated in the abundance offered by nature. They did not attempt, as Western society has, to “multiply and subdue the earth.” For a variety of reasons, returning to a neolithic life-style, however desirable, is impossible at this time. No ecosystem on earth in which we can reasonably participate has been left intact. Native peoples from the tundra to the tropical rain forests now find the ecological bases for their ways of life in ruins. If we are to return to a natural way of life on Earth, we must first heal nature, heal the Earth herself. Nothing less
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