The word “culture” has its origins in the metaphor of cultivation, of agrarian culture, though in the course of human development, “culture” became a synonym for the struggle between humans and nature. The twentieth-century crisis of culture made it clear that changing the way we interact with nature is the only way for humans and their culture to survive. The foundation of permaculture in the 1970's returned the notion of “culture” to agriculture. This new model of agri-culture rejects the more abstracted notions of cultivation – such as aggressive land use, the destruction of natural resources for monoculture harvest, the practice of eradicating the “weeds” of nature – and paves the way for a more balanced relationship and harmonious development between the natural and the human.
The story you are holding – “The Way,” by Gia Razmadze, Wato Tsereteli and Irakli Lomouri – is a guidebook for permaculture practices and natural farming philosophy and technology. Metaphorically speaking, it is not a book but a way – a cultural technology. It leads the reader through the knowledge about permaculture systems framed by Bill Mollison, acknowledges the techniques of “do-nothing farming” and “natural farming” as outlined by Masanobu Fukouka, and eventually leaves the reader in the "forest garden" –
an agronomic system that mimics the structure of a natural forest. This story is structured as a dialogue between a passenger and a driver, an expert and a skeptic. The passenger, an expert in permaculture and “the one straw revolution,” invites the driver to think about the importance of the farm land that the driver left for a city job. In the dialogue between driver and passenger, ideas about recovering a trust in nature, ancestors' knowledge on farming, the rejection of contemporary land cultivation techniques, and the creation of ecologically based design takes on visible forms.
an agronomic system that mimics the structure of a natural forest. This story is structured as a dialogue between a passenger and a driver, an expert and a skeptic. The passenger, an expert in permaculture and “the one straw revolution,” invites the driver to think about the importance of the farm land that the driver left for a city job. In the dialogue between driver and passenger, ideas about recovering a trust in nature, ancestors' knowledge on farming, the rejection of contemporary land cultivation techniques, and the creation of ecologically based design takes on visible forms.
This story is a “cultural” form of storytelling insofar as it does not consider cultivation as a form of culture, nor does it turn knowledge into a weapon of the pedagogue. The narrative debate, as presented in “The Way,” in fact opens up a scientific methodology that outlines a new relationship between the human and the natural.
Lali Pertenava
Tbilisi, Georgia, 2020
