FROM OUR FRIEND ROSEMARY ('ROWE') MORROW

How did studying permaculture change the way I see the world?

Permaculture was my niche. In a way, there wasn’t a lot that was new because agriculture, horticulture and environmental studies had supplied much natural science for me. It was the whole approach which enchanted me. It was interactive and overlaid and interconnective of all disciplines.

I was also intrigued by finding a course that began with ethics. None of my other studies had ever mentioned the word.

Now I was at home. I had found a way to reconcile my need to grow food for food security, with the need to create habitat, preserve and restore Indigenous land systems. So when I began to teach permaculture, I made sure my courses have these goals.

In 1978 I had become a Quaker and realised that their testimonies gave me a creative and meaningful way to live. I decided that an ethical life was the one which offered the most value and interest, compared with lifestyle materialism. It seemed to me, and still does, that the ethical life is stimulating and challenging, never fully achievable yet it can be monitored and, that everything we do and say has consequences, so it’s vital to live life ethically.

That was the correspondence between Quakerism and permaculture. They had in common: care for people, simplicity, community, ethical use of money and right livelihood. They both render infinite positive outcomes when practised.

I went further and realised that my work with the earth and people could have ethics in every segment. For example we could have ethics for our water use, and the way we treat soils and other living species.

So the spiritual and the secular were coming together.

At the same time my appreciation, observation and awareness of life and its processes really developed. My body and breathing would almost stop when I considered the whole of life and my being able to reflect on it – to see, heat, touch, taste, tell, read about life. I couldn’t believe that Life was, and that I was conscious and part of it.

I became tender in my heart for all life, but sometimes harder on many humans for their lack of appreciation and gratitude for the fact that they are taking part in the great miracle which is Life. Later I was even further awed by cosmology and how remote the chances were that life could occur at all. I still can’t think about it without swallowing hard. I have moved to holding all people compassionately.

Rowe is a member of Blue Mountains Local Meeting
and the author of Earth-User's Guide to Permaculture.