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Rezensionen (1)
28. Mai 2019
Untamed Unmasking of Permaculture
While Tao points to native people wild tending and the notion that nativity is not a fixed state to promote permaculture, (pgs. 148-50) native people are connected members of native habitats, something permaculturists cannot replicate. Natural biocommunities emerge and transform their characteristics, relationships and ranges, on their own terms. For permaculturists to attempt to co-opt wild tending is the epitome of supremacy. A more respectful and cautious approach would be for permaculture to focus on native food plants supporting members of local native ecosystems, encouraging increased resilience to disruption of introduced invasives. Incorporating invading colonizing plants reflects an invading colonizing ethos where colonizer preferences take precedence over habitat needs. Permaculture reasoning exposes domination culture and power positioning used to willfully ignore or justify human supremacist control over others.
Tao’s book is swimming in human supremacy bias with faulty oversimplified reasoning. Tao brews an impassioned tincture of logical and illogical thinking and proposals based on valid and invalid criticisms. She makes claims of an invasive species’ benefits while neglecting to mention more significant massive detriments. She bases colonial misbalanced ‘biodiversity’ on indigenous people’s wild tending practices without seeing the difference. A fallacious book like this can be dangerous for indigenous species if accepted by well-intended people who could do better with fuller understanding on how to assist an injured place to return its health.
It’s one thing for Tao to critique restoration ecology, it’s another thing to dismiss and replace it with reckless abandon. For example, coevolution is dismissed if it explains species’ community interconnectedness, and why some introduced species can wreak ecological havoc, but is given credence when convenient in backing her ideal. Yes, species shift their ranges, but it’s on their own terms, usually slowly, sometimes quickly and rarely with enough aggressiveness to destabilize resilient diverse communities. Yes there are natural mass changes such as volcanoes where waves of species colonize the space in succession. But Tao seems to not be aware of the difference when invasive, colonizing, overpopulated, domesticated humans are the ones shuffling species about, out of and into various habitats, at a spiraling rate outpacing co-adaptation dynamics.