“The icon of the whole earth is the largest scale example we have of a self regulating ‘organism’ which is subject to feedback controls, like global warming. The proverb “the sins of the fathers are visited on the children of the seventh generation” reminds us that negative feedback is often slow to emerge.”
From a whole earth perspective, it may appear that the focus on exopermaculture is inappropriate. But that’s the point: Earth is most likely not “the largest scale example we have of a self-regulating organism which is subject to feedback controls.” In this case, the stated assumptions both define what’s real, (and worth doing), and betray the limits of that horizon.
Yet permaculture also considers the sun, as the fuel that makes all systems go. The sun’s relationship to earth is most likely also a “whole system” that we don’t understand. E.g. sunspots and solar flares: what is their effect on weather, plants, the soil? To my knowledge, we have yet to ask these questions, or to include such considerations into the science of permaculture.
Now let’s really bend our minds. Go further out—
The Galactic Center of this galaxy, according to Dr. Paul LaViolette, an astrophysicist, produces, on a cyclical basis, electromagnetic waves of varying intensities, which pulse through the galaxy and affect all the bodies within it. Such GC events have been correlated with ice ages on Earth.
Once in a great while, about every 26,000 years [this number coincides with the precession of the equinoxes. It is related? He wonders, too] the Sun ejects a superwave: “cosmic ray electrons, gamma waves, light waves, radio waves —across the whole spectrum — along with a gravity wave” that pulses out through the galaxy with the speed of light towards our solar system, “like a spherical shell traveling out from the center of the galaxy,” a “galactic storm” that, he claims, unlike short-lived gamma-ray bursts, could continue for hundreds or thousands of years.
When asked how the GC could do this, he has a theory that he calls “subquantum kinetics” . . . “the continuous creation of matter and energy, basically a violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics.”
(In an earlier post, I had wondered whether the supposedly fixed forever in place “laws” of thermodynamics, those that permaculture as well as normal science consider foundational) might be more like habits, operating in a certain level or dimension.
LaViolette: “We’re talking about a level that’s 10 orders of magnitude smaller than what they can observe in a laboratory.” Normal physics won’t accept this theory, because it teaches that “the basis of existence is structure. . . From their point of view, physics is a positivisitic science. They think they have to be able to observe, to actually say: ‘Well, there it is. I observe it.'”
Instead, he said, we need to imagine the universe as flux. “Where is this flux? Well, they can’t see it. You can’t see this flux because it’s at an etheric level. You postulate an ether as a substrate forming physical phenomena. . . . Think in systems concepts. Think of a system, and they speak of perturbing the system with an outside influence . . .”
Permaculture is also a systems-based approach to the garden. Everything is related. everything affects everything else. The whole is larger than the parts. Each part is a microcosm of the whole. But permaculture thinks in terms of Earth as its largest system, or perhaps adding to it Sun and Moon. But the whole solar system? The whole Galaxy?
LaViolette: Pulsing from the Center of the Galaxy on the order of a superwave that “creates a sort of shock-front around the solar system because the solar system has magnetic fields around it, and it creates what they call bow-shock around the heliopause. Heliopause is the name of the sort of protective sheath of magnetic fields around the solar system. . . .” And with this outside force hitting the solar system, “the whole energetics around the Earth changes.” [italics added]
In other words, even from a physics point of view, Earth needs to be viewed in its larger cosmic context, and to recognize that it changes and is changed in response to various forces perturbing the system in which it resides. And if the universe is fundamentally not structure, but flux, if various combinations of matter and energy arise out of the ether which itself exists in a higher frequency dimension than the dense material world we live in . . . then, then what?
What if we start to imagine that we are actors at the etheric level. That we can attune our sensitivity to vibrations at a much finer level than the usual. And that at this level we can change the atmosphere in a room, or the way things are done, the way laws work, how long, say it takes for a plant to grow. Or how big it can get. Or whether it will look like its parent, or mutate. This whole riff begins to resonate with shamanistic concepts like “shapeshifting,” or bodies appearing and disappearing, telemetry, teleportation, telepathy, even bi-location. . .
I have no idea, of course, whether LaViolette’s theories are correct. And I admit I’m way out of my league even talking about these concepts. But they certainly do stimulate! They do perturb the mind!
But the idea that the GC could be a source of enormous energy, dwarfing that of our Sun, kind of makes us stop and ponder the different frames that we use to understand life and work to promote life here on earth. The Earth may seem to be “self-regulating,” for the most part, and yet bow-waves affecting the heliopause (great phrase!) offer the kind of feedback that comes in from left-field — and, at the speed of light, with no warning.
However, says, LaViolette: “There would be only one way I could see that you could have warning. If, let’s say, a thypothesis, that there were civilizations in the galaxy, there was intelligent life and they recognized the importance of knowing when these were coming and set up outposts at different points that were able to relay a signal that was superluminal — in other words, that would travel faster than the speed of light — to get the warning here, so we’d know exactly when the next one was going to arrive. That’s possible.”