A Journey

Discernable Pattern, March, 2008

I've been thinking a lot about how I got here, and why the permaculture ideas seem so familiar.  I was listening to this podcast between Paul Wheaton and Geoff Lawton.  In it they talked about the counter-culture movement of the 1960s-70s and how that made a difference to them.  It made a difference to me, too.  I was at Texas Christian University from 1968-72, and it was an exciting time.  There was a mix of students as usual, from partiers, to the very serious.  I always think of TCU at that time as being a mix of the offspring of rich cattlemen and oilmen, and the children of ministers or people who had ministerial ambitions who were there on scholarship.  Of course there were others there on scholarships, too.  I was there on scholarship, myself.  I hung out with a bunch of liberal arts students and we were always discussing big ideas, the future of society, societal ills, etc.  It was a time of ferment.

I didn't get a degree from TCU, but I consider that time as my true college years.  I moved from Fort Worth to Miami, Florida, where I got degrees in biology and chemistry and a minor in physics.  Then I moved to St. Louis, Missouri where my family had landed.  I worked briefly in a medical research lab, then worked for the federal government as a programmer/cartographer for 32 years.  I discovered the Open Source Software movement and was entranced.  More counter-culture.

Open Source Software is written by programmers to fulfill their own passions, rather than as an assignment by an employer. One mantra is "information wants to be free".  The open source software movement developed the concept of CopyLeft which prevents the freely available work of programmers (and now others) from being snapped up and put under copyright and made private.

I also discovered fractals in 1985 via a seminal article in Scientific American that a friend handed me.  I wrote software that made fractal images, used fractals as test cases in various image processing and hardware manipulations and got to attend a class on fractals in California.  I developed a deep appreciation for patterns in nature and it is a wonder that I didn't break my neck walking around searching for self-similarity in tree branches and fractal patterns in clouds.  Fractals and chaos theory involve, among other things, phenomena which are determined but not predictable. Determined, but not predictable. As humans, we don't much like that.  I think it makes us feel out of control.  There are deep patterns that we can't easily discern, which are sometimes outside our ability to discern at all, other than in general terms. It's quite humbling.

My work was in a research lab, so we got to work with a lot of new technology like Google Earth and Sketchup. I worked for a mapping agency, so I looked at a lot of landforms and things like contours are very familiar. I wrote a couple of extensions to Sketchup and an Android app. I did a lot of things, actually, which suited my generalist personality.  I love multidisciplinary approaches.  In my opinion, it's the only way to begin to get a grasp on how the world works.  Reductionist science has its place; certainly it illuminates the working of parts of the whole. But it's a mistake that we could ever get to complete understanding by reductionist methods.  Of course, I believe that we can never get to complete understanding, anyway, but we can certainly develop better and better working models.

I tend to have serial obsessions.  From 2002-2008 it was fractal art.  Before and after that it was family history.  Now it is permaculture which seems to me to encompass and build on a lifetime of eclectic interests.  In a way I have always been interested in permaculture, though not under that name.  I spent hours as a child just looking at the natural world. I still can do that.