On Saturday, I went to the New England Resilience Gathering. This was a day conference on what people had been doing to promote sustainability in their local areas and what the next step might be. Much of what was being done was based on permaculture, a practice becoming more familiar to the Pagan community. Starhawk practices permaculture, (and she says why it matters to Pagans) as do a number of Heathens of my acquaintance. Permaculture fits neatly with Pagan values about the health of the land, and has the benefit of requiring intimate knowledge of one’s local landscape and community.

Permaculture

takes into account all the inputs and outputs of any system rather than creating externalities. Externalities are effects of any system that are not taken into account. For example, when a mining business does not count the cost of clean up when they extract something from the earth, that unaccounted cost is an externality. When we subsidize industries, we as consumers pay for the externalities.

One of the things I find especially mind blowing about permaculture is its ability to find unique and highly effective solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems; Problems that I have heard articulated over and over at Pagan gatherings. How can we not wreck the planet with 7 billion people on board, and more coming? How do we clean up the huge messes of industry? Permaculture, and its sister terms biodynamics and holistic management, are organic answers to these problems.

In my next couple posts, I’ll detail some of the amazing and wonderful things that can be accomplished with these principles.