Great piece, this is the type of thinking I was hoping to see expanded on in the newsletter. Permaculture's been transformative to me on a personal and philosophical level but I find the politics overall totally lacking or absent most of the time.
Reading this I thought of David Holmgren's "Retrosuburbia" as as an example of a relatively popular permie text that doesn't really articulate a cohesive political vision, but at least considers the broader urban landscape and offers some examples on the "coop" scale (several households).
Thanks, I really appreciate that! This piece is a loving critique: permaculture means so much to me, personally. But I agree, its politics—both in the texts and in the community—have always been disappointing.
I think Mollison and Holmgren both realized something needed to be said about the broader context, they just weren’t equipped to say it. But it’s not too late, permaculture is very much still finding its way, and we can help set it on a new path.
Nice read. Curious what specific politics you think permaculture should engage in to help bring about an eco-socialist world? Given that simply changing individual lives or even families is insufficient… Do u mean classic “educate, organise, agitate” approaches through grassroots networks, building a new world of material exchange, local agency and enriching subsistence within the shell of the old etc etc? Or electoral politics, door knocking and canvassing votes like Bookchin’s strategy of gaining representation on local councils and pulling those existing structures towards confederated municipalism? Or some combo?
This is a great question and very well articulated. I think the moment demands an “all of the above” strategy, but permaculture has some unique ways it can contribute. Internationally, permaculturists should engage with movements for land reform & rural justice like the Landless Peoples Movement in Brazil, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, and various groups in Kerala and Emilia-Romagna. People around the world are fighting for access to the land and for a just vision of agriculture, and permaculture should take sides in that fight.
Domestically/in the Global North, there are some of those same opportunities, but I do think the context is more suited to electoral work a la Bookchin (who ended up endorsing Bernie Sanders in his local election.) So yes, I think the moment demands that we try to shape policy in a way that prevents our extinction, and the most viable path to do that is through elections. Certainly the basics like canvassing are essential, but permaculturists should also be trying to shape policy in other ways. For instance, in 2023, Congress will take a new Farm Bill, as it does every 5 years, and I very much wish a permaculture policy think tank was coordinating an effort to get some permaculture-friendly policies and funding into it. Alas.
Do you think Tiered Democratic Governance might be useful in permaculture politics? Here's a link to info in case you aren't familiar. I have nothing to do with it, but find the possibilities it brings intriguing. http://www.tiereddemocraticgovernance.org/tdg.php
Honestly it's hard to see any viable path towards replacing industrial capitalism so long as the central driver of capitalism's conquest of the planet remains, namely, cheap and abundant energy and all of its cascading effects within society, political economy, etc. Capitalism itself did not emerge into dominance primarily as a result of political strategy, but instead can be seen as developing into its modern form within a handful of rather rarified contexts, then exploding onto the global stage through the nineteenth century's energy and technology revolution (steam power and the telegraph, to over-simplify things), a revolution largely made possible by the tapping into incredibly powerful energy reserves contained within the earth, combined with the already existing practices of tapping into an increasingly large 'reserve' of human labor, enslaved or- technically, if only in de jure form- free. Politics arguably followed the technological, economic, and energy developments, with states and political actors wrestling to give particular space to emergent capitalist forms, or to lend the violent muscle to ensure maximum territory.
I don't want to suggest that political action is pointless or vain, but I do think we should be realistic about what we can achieve in the short-term, and that long-term transformation is almost certainly contingent upon systems-scale changes that lie outside of human power to bring about intentionally or to predict. It might be a nice myth I tell myself to keep going with things, but it is historically the case that technologies, ways of life, belief systems, etc, which for long periods of time 'gestated' within small and obscure corners of humanity have quite suddenly and powerfully emerged onto the scene and gone global, their time having come as it were, often with multiple sites of development and emergence (agriculture is a good example, as is capitalism- both had multiple sites of emergence and diffusion, evolving convergently if not necessarily connectedly). To be sure, prefigurative politics can easily become a comforting myth or cover for some pleasant but ultimately politically sterile hobbies, but it also has a grain of truth and possibility, sustaining both hope and realism about the world.
tl:dr: Today's marginal practices and obscure political actors can become tomorrow's global paradigms; whether or not they will partially depends on what one does now, but it also depends on factors and dynamics beyond our ken our control.
Great piece, this is the type of thinking I was hoping to see expanded on in the newsletter. Permaculture's been transformative to me on a personal and philosophical level but I find the politics overall totally lacking or absent most of the time.
Reading this I thought of David Holmgren's "Retrosuburbia" as as an example of a relatively popular permie text that doesn't really articulate a cohesive political vision, but at least considers the broader urban landscape and offers some examples on the "coop" scale (several households).
Thanks, I really appreciate that! This piece is a loving critique: permaculture means so much to me, personally. But I agree, its politics—both in the texts and in the community—have always been disappointing.
I think Mollison and Holmgren both realized something needed to be said about the broader context, they just weren’t equipped to say it. But it’s not too late, permaculture is very much still finding its way, and we can help set it on a new path.
Nice read. Curious what specific politics you think permaculture should engage in to help bring about an eco-socialist world? Given that simply changing individual lives or even families is insufficient… Do u mean classic “educate, organise, agitate” approaches through grassroots networks, building a new world of material exchange, local agency and enriching subsistence within the shell of the old etc etc? Or electoral politics, door knocking and canvassing votes like Bookchin’s strategy of gaining representation on local councils and pulling those existing structures towards confederated municipalism? Or some combo?
This is a great question and very well articulated. I think the moment demands an “all of the above” strategy, but permaculture has some unique ways it can contribute. Internationally, permaculturists should engage with movements for land reform & rural justice like the Landless Peoples Movement in Brazil, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, and various groups in Kerala and Emilia-Romagna. People around the world are fighting for access to the land and for a just vision of agriculture, and permaculture should take sides in that fight.
Domestically/in the Global North, there are some of those same opportunities, but I do think the context is more suited to electoral work a la Bookchin (who ended up endorsing Bernie Sanders in his local election.) So yes, I think the moment demands that we try to shape policy in a way that prevents our extinction, and the most viable path to do that is through elections. Certainly the basics like canvassing are essential, but permaculturists should also be trying to shape policy in other ways. For instance, in 2023, Congress will take a new Farm Bill, as it does every 5 years, and I very much wish a permaculture policy think tank was coordinating an effort to get some permaculture-friendly policies and funding into it. Alas.
Do you think Tiered Democratic Governance might be useful in permaculture politics? Here's a link to info in case you aren't familiar. I have nothing to do with it, but find the possibilities it brings intriguing. http://www.tiereddemocraticgovernance.org/tdg.php
I’m not familiar with it, but I will check it out!
Honestly it's hard to see any viable path towards replacing industrial capitalism so long as the central driver of capitalism's conquest of the planet remains, namely, cheap and abundant energy and all of its cascading effects within society, political economy, etc. Capitalism itself did not emerge into dominance primarily as a result of political strategy, but instead can be seen as developing into its modern form within a handful of rather rarified contexts, then exploding onto the global stage through the nineteenth century's energy and technology revolution (steam power and the telegraph, to over-simplify things), a revolution largely made possible by the tapping into incredibly powerful energy reserves contained within the earth, combined with the already existing practices of tapping into an increasingly large 'reserve' of human labor, enslaved or- technically, if only in de jure form- free. Politics arguably followed the technological, economic, and energy developments, with states and political actors wrestling to give particular space to emergent capitalist forms, or to lend the violent muscle to ensure maximum territory.
I don't want to suggest that political action is pointless or vain, but I do think we should be realistic about what we can achieve in the short-term, and that long-term transformation is almost certainly contingent upon systems-scale changes that lie outside of human power to bring about intentionally or to predict. It might be a nice myth I tell myself to keep going with things, but it is historically the case that technologies, ways of life, belief systems, etc, which for long periods of time 'gestated' within small and obscure corners of humanity have quite suddenly and powerfully emerged onto the scene and gone global, their time having come as it were, often with multiple sites of development and emergence (agriculture is a good example, as is capitalism- both had multiple sites of emergence and diffusion, evolving convergently if not necessarily connectedly). To be sure, prefigurative politics can easily become a comforting myth or cover for some pleasant but ultimately politically sterile hobbies, but it also has a grain of truth and possibility, sustaining both hope and realism about the world.
tl:dr: Today's marginal practices and obscure political actors can become tomorrow's global paradigms; whether or not they will partially depends on what one does now, but it also depends on factors and dynamics beyond our ken our control.