Order/Wilderness...a poem by Max Mills, Garden Intern 2014

Order/Wilderness
...it's all about aesthetics...
-whose aesthetics though?
The society of dualities that you admit is destructive,
a culture of order, control, domination.
...a culture of domestication.
A culture that lives off hierarchies
-patriarchy
-white supremecy,
a culture where colonialism is necessary.
Of people.
As well as plants.
Where “weeds” are eradicated arbitrarily in place of imported (domesticated) “food”

Permaculture:
an ethics centered design approach to horticulture,
plant cultivation
NOT
(destructive, colonial)
-field cultivation

can it work?
...liberate us from the mindset of control, and domination,
with its “food forests”
mimicking the edges of forests recreating the biodiversity of “natural” forests
-but with imported (domesticated) “food”...
re-wild the domesticated?
Which comes first?
A new generational aesthetic paradigm
(one where beauty is “chaotic” “wild”...
where the linguistic concept of “wild” is not distinct)
or: the culture that LIVES as if wild were not a word,
 were not the negative side of a dichotomy that the dominant culture is doing everything it can to destroy?

A self perpetuating feedback loop,
how do we break this cycle?
Is there hope?
(“The quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of [our] greatest strength, and [our] greatest weakness.”)
a generational shift perhaps
of aesthetics...

Click to see a larger image. 

Controlled, Ordered Part of the Food Forest

Edge Between Controlled and Wild Part of the Food Forest

Colonization in Process

Wild Forest