Organizing To Win The Future

How Permaculture Can Put Politics Into Practice

Last month, I wrote a call for permaculture to reform its politics, arguing that in order for it to succeed on its own terms, it needs to join the fight for eco-socialism. Today, I'm going to talk about what that should look like in practice.

To be clear, my call is not that permaculture should reflect my personal politics; it’s that its politics should simply reflect its own self-professed values. So let's revisit the first ethic of permaculture:

"Care of the Earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply."

In order to live up to this ethic, permaculture must join the fight to prevent the collapse of human civilization due to the overlapping ecological crises brought on by petro-capitalism. At 4 degrees C of global heating, your carefully constructed food forest will be a pile of ashes or a salt water lagoon, and the scattered bands of surviving humans will be fighting to the death over scavenged cans of cat food. Life systems cannot "continue and multiply" under such conditions.

Clearly, in order for permaculture to embody its own values, it must work to prevent such a scenario from coming to pass. First though, the permaculture community has to acknowledge that what it is doing now is not working. Since the 19070s, when permaculture entered the public consciousness, the ecological crisis has only gotten worse, and no amount of "living by example" or renovating suburban backyards or consulting for international NGOs has done anything to change that. We must accept the failure of those tactics in order to arrive at a better course of action.

So, what would work? There are natural points of entry, and I will walk through them in increasing levels of difficulty. (Caveat: I live in the United States and my perspective will necessarily reflect that. To create a comprehensive political program, this discussion would need to have a much wider group of participants.)

First, permaculture must begin by advocating for its own interests. By way of example, consider that the U.S. Congress will take up a new Farm Bill this year, something it does every five years, which will allocate roughly $709 BILLION. The Farm Bill determines the entire course of American agriculture, which in turn, has enormous consequences for every farmer on the planet. What does the process of divvying up that money look like?

"Most of the D.C. lawmakers behind our food and agriculture policy are pragmatists. Every five years, they stick to the same old script, tweak a few programs in small ways to make farm and hunger groups happy, and pass a business-as-usual farm bill."

Permaculture will have no organized presence in that process. No seat at the table. No list of demands. No coalition partners. No impact on the outcome. No way of changing "business as usual." That is a shame.

The simplest and most achievable action permaculturists could take to engage in the political process is to organize around a list of winnable demands for inclusion in the Farm Bill and its equivalents in other countries. In short, citizen lobbying. As corrupt as our politics may seem, citizens of democratic countries have real power to influence processes like these. It's not hard, either, and plenty of loosely organized groups do it successfully.

Consider an extremely entry-level, eminently-winnable demand: that every USDA Extension Office in the country--all 3,000 of them--offer a weekend long permaculture course, with $3,000 allocated to pay an instructor for each course. That's an allocation of $9,000,000, or .001% of the total Farm Bill budget. Let's assume 10 people take each course. What would that accomplish? It would introduce 30,000 people to permaculture and transfer $9,000,000 in wealth to permaculture practitioners. Not a small thing! And yet, it's something that could be achieved with a pretty minimal amount of organizing. It's not hard to imagine how to build on such a success, should it happen.

But let's expand the scope a little bit, and set our sights on some larger goals. The biggest hurdle to permaculture's relevance is a lack of long-term access to land. There is simply no widespread use for a long-term agricultural technique like permaculture in a world where capitalists make it impossible for most people to access land. If permaculture is content to continue as a hobby for middle-class landowners, then fine, it can continue doing what it's doing. But if it wants to displace industrial agriculture, then it has a lot of political work to do.

The way to do this is to integrate calls for land reform and permaculture education into the movement for a Green New Deal. This movement has real momentum and a variety of excellent political organizations working towards it, most notably the Democratic Socialists of America. Permaculture, though, has no organized presence in the movement, and so it is largely absent from the conversation. That must change, for the sake of both permaculture and the Green New Deal, which risks repeating mistakes from the past without permaculture's presence.

In the Global North, processes like the Farm Bill are again the best place for such work to start. An example would be an initiative to make the federal government the buyer of last resort for bankrupt farms, with the land then subdivided into homestead-sized chunks and sold at cost to anyone willing to live and farm on the land sustainably. One can even an imagine an interlocking series of educational programs offered through USDA Extension Offices and the land redistribution program, such that people who have "graduated" from a more extensive educational curriculum are offered land at increasingly subsidized prices. Such a program would help chip away at the existence of industrial mega-farms and make land accessible to those who want it.

In the Global South, the situation is different. Laws and governments offer different opportunities and challenges. One example is the MST, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement. The MST is a highly-effective and long-standing movement to reclaim land stolen by land barons and agribusiness corporations using a diversity of tactics that rely on favorable rules in Brazil's constitution. Permaculturists in the Global North have a history of traveling to the Global South to aid in permaculture projects, a commendable impulse even if the results have not led to lasting change. That impulse should remain, but it must shift to supporting explicitly political groups like the MST, rather than replicating the same failed politics over and over again. The MST also has a great deal to teach organizers in the Global North about how to avoid many of the common pitfalls of political organizing, and permaculturists would do well to learn those lessons first hand.

Another way citizen lobbying can help tip the balance towards permaculture is by building on existing programs that favor local agriculture. A good example is the various "double up bucks" programs for SNAP benefit recipients, which make food stamps go further when spent on local ag. It is clearly in permaculture's interest to expand and improve such programs, such that SNAP benefits, which amount to $114 billion a year, become a means of subsidizing permaculture producers while simultaneously improving the lives of the poor.

These are examples of some of the small, reformist positive initiatives that make sense for permaculturists to organize around. But we cannot ignore the fact that even if we were to win such initiatives, the continued existence of industrial agriculture would undermine our success: a food forest next to a glyphosphate sprayed corn field cannot survive.

So, how should we respond? To quote famous permaculture wizard Geoff Lawton:

"In its present form, industrial agriculture--that destroys soil and depletes ecosystems and diminishes diversity--all of that stuff should be illegal."

I agree. In the context of the Green New Deal, the Farm Bill, and citizen lobbying, we must also fight to ban the apocalyptic practices that are rapidly dimming the future of humanity. Our demands must not just be for the promotion of permaculture, but for the end to conditions which make its widespread implementation impossible.

There is so much more that permaculturists should seek to accomplish through politics: from municipal nurseries and food forests to town goat herds, tool libraries, canteens, and composting facilities. In short, a world in which permaculture becomes the default mode of subsistence. But the reality is that such a world historic victory will require a broad and sturdy foundation of organizing upon which to build, and an integration with the broader eco-socialist and degrowth movements.

While the program I describe here is a long way from the radical changes our society needs, we will never make those changes without a vastly expanded capacity to organize. And to do that, we should start by cohering around a list of small, winnable demands while simultaneously painting a picture of a much better future. That process—if followed faithfully—will the open the doors to our more utopian aspirations.

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