I know old farmers in Alabama never heard of the word "permaculture", but I learned something about their ethics when I traveled around the South doing my work. We often had to get land clearance to survey land, and that's how I met countless old folks in the South and learned what they thought was the right thing to do.
Invariably, when you talk to an older person in Alabama you would leave his property with a brown paper sack full of what ever he had to spare at the moment. It might be a sack full of pecans. Or, it could be some jars of strawberries that his wife had just canned. But to send some one off -- even a passerby like ourselves surveying property -- with nothing would be unthinkable.
