Who are these people, and what's a Guild?
As we mentioned before we are a loose network, mostly friends and acquaintances, who have in common some interest and some training and experience (in varying degrees) in permaculture as an organized system for designing ecologically harmonious, and therefore sustainable, human habitations, gardens, and communities.
In what way are we a Guild?
According to wikipedia, a guild is “an association of craftspeople in a particular trade.” But it's hard to establish that kind of organization in a discipline that represents a way of thinking about how things go together rather than about how to craft relationships and connections.
But intensified competition is the opposite of what we're looking for in systems organized using permaculture principles. Scott Pittman described the concept in this way:
The idea is that every plant evolved with a collection of associates that provide for its needs ie minerals, fertility, pollination, protection, procreation and etc. This collection would be classified as a guild and would include other plants, animals, and micro flora and fauna. Over time most plants that have been domesticated have been stripped of their associates and have become dependant on us to maintain them in relative health.
It is obvious that many plants, say the apple, which evolved in the Caucasus had a very different guild in its native habitat than what would work in Mexico but the functional needs would remain the same and those needs could be met with analog species that are native to Mexico.
So to build a guild one needs to know what any given plant needs and then try to provide those needs on site. A partial list would be nitrogenous plants, birds for nitrogen, phosphate and seed dispersal, predator insects for insect control as well as plants to support those insects, bulbs to keep the soil open around the root zone, and etc.
So hopefully, this website will be a place where different people working with these ideas can come into proximity, forming connections that will create a community of people whose interactions can produce synergetic effects. Perhaps these effects will yield, over time, a community of practitioners with a working knowledge of principles, practice, and pedagogy.
In the meantime, we'd like to...
- Support the continuing education of our members in their efforts to become better designers.
- Initiate and carry out outreach programs designed to educate the general community about permaculture, sustainability, and overshoot. This would include networking and building strong relationships with other community and regional organizations who have similar ethics and goals.
- Create demonstration sites that embody permaculture design and ethical principles.
- Research sustainable technologies that can be designed and implemented at the local, community level.
- Establish a synergetic relationship between the guild's service-oriented activities and the commercial endeavors of the individual members as they relate to the Guild's goals.
If you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them. We don't have any power of creation - we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.
--Bill Mollison