Agroecology and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty ... - Yale University

interview: lec
139
all the cultural senses . ..architecture,medicine, everything. So, coming from that
background, it’s like, “How can we revive those things? How can we have our glorious
moments again?” And contrasting that richness of history and the past with today,
where Guatemala is one of the poorest countries in the region, in the Western hemisphere,
how can we bring this knowledge from the past to help improve the situation
of today?
That’s how I started getting involved in trying to apply those things, looking for
remaining knowledge that’s still there and trying to apply it in order for people to see
that it works. But traditional knowledge has eroded a lot throughout these 500 years
of colonization, and now with modern development it’s disappearing even more
rapidly, with the Green Revolution and new technologies. That’s taking all this local
knowledge away. So that’s also made me research and look for other alternatives....
Q: With permaculture, what kind of solution is there for people in Guatemala? How
do you see it, and how do the farmers that you work with see it? How does it meet
their concerns?
A: Well, the way I see permaculture is that it gives me the technical background to
support all the things I think could be done. Permaculture just comes to reaffirm and
make sense of what I consider to be local, traditional knowledge. For farmers, how do
they see permaculture? Well, on the one hand, it’s idealistic and radical – but it still
makes sense to them. But they cannot adopt it, and the reason they cannot adopt it is
that there are very basic issues that need to be addressed first . . . issues like land
ownership, like feeding your family, like curing your sickness. I think if you’re hungry,
you can never think about designing future well-being. If you’re not well right now,
you can’t think about the future. So that’s why farmers have been very slow in
adopting permaculture in their ways, but I think that eventually, once they have
overcome their basic needs, it will become more powerful, and they can adopt the
whole system or the whole philosophy.
Q: Do you want to say more about the aspects of permaculture you’ve been trying
to apply, or what permaculture means?
A: Well, permaculture literally means “permanent culture” or “permanent
agriculture,” inferring that if you don’t have a permanent food source, you cannot
have a permanent culture. If you don’t have food, you can’t write poetry, you can’t
write songs. You cannot be creative if you have an empty stomach.
Permaculture is not only about food – it’s a way of seeing things. It’s an applied
philosophy . . . and I think the principles and ethics of permaculture totally fit with
our philosophy, which is a philosophy of care of the earth, care of the people, and
equal distribution of surplus....
Technically speaking, permaculture is about design, but you design your environment
not only with new knowledge. Permaculture is based on traditional knowledge,
on what already has been done, on what already has worked and is working. We don’t
need to reinvent the wheel, so that’s where permaculture starts. And then secondly,
yale school of forestry & environmental studies