Sketches on Permaculture and Society (pt.2)
How to Change the World is a weekly blog about reversing American decline. I study successful models of governance throughout history, primarily in the West, highlight what’s going wrong leading to institutional decline or ‘political decay’, and present models of democratic innovation that could lead us into a prosperous, peaceful and abundant 21st century.
This is part 2 in a series looking over the final chapter of Bill Mollison’s Permaculture Designers Manual titled The Strategies of an Alternative Global Nation. You can find Part 1 here.
Greetings, friends. Since my last update I’ve returned from Costa Rica to Boulder. I’m happy to report that my time down in the jungle re-ignited my interest in Permaculture. I was reminded that it’s not only a beautiful and bountiful regenerative food system, or a practical and tangible counterweight to the overly-theoretical and detached lifestyle of the average tech-worker, but it can also teach us how to build a regenerative society. Not bad!
Those of us trying to make a positive impact on the world need frameworks, and the more diverse the better. In this series we’re exploring the principles and tactics Permaculture would employ to regenerate society. I had no idea how I would feel about it when I began reading, but at this point in my study, about half way through chapter, I feel it does a great job of combining idealism, practicality and rigor.
The world needs a new, non-polarized, and non-contentious politics; one not possible by those that promote a left, right, black, white, capitalist, communist, believer, infidel, thinking.
Here, Mollison highlights the cooperative, rather than antagonistic, principles that animate Permaculture. The true solution doesn’t lie in a new candidate if he’s held back by the old system. From the beginning we need to thing about a new system anchored not in contention, but in collaboration.
Part of being conservative is to concentrate on developing a mosaic of small, well managed, and effective systems. Such modest systems are unlikely to cause widespread upheavals and would not be subject to external or unethical control.
Mollison wrote this book in Tasmania in the late 80’s, so his use of the word ‘conservative’ surely had a different meaning than we’re used to. And yet, what he’s saying does speak to the American conservative tradition (now seemingly forgotten) of decentralized, efficient, local control. His description is simple but penetrating:
a mosaic: Small, separate but connected units. Diverse. A network.
well-managed: Efficient. Doing more with less. Intelligent. Responsive to feedback.
effective: Measurable. Focused on outcomes
What is this not? It’s not a Federal solution. It’s not a big budget. It’s not coordinated by an impersonal bureaucracy.
He advises us to move away from the centralized, unaccountable and wasteful toward the responsive, participatory and diverse. This, according to Mollison, actually helps maintain ethical control.
The argument for simplicity is never a political argument… When people practice it in their lives… They don’t even need any politics. People can act independently of political theory (which rarely, if ever, covers the questions of ethics, simplicity, local autonomy, or life-oriented action).
What I love about the above is the reminder that the ideal life is both simple and free of politics. A beautiful north star. Of course he’s not suggesting people don’t get involved at the local level. Quite the contrary, this chapter is full of exampled of how and why to get involved.
I’ll admit that It is probably not possible in this stage in American history to simply remove politics from our lives. We have allowed our federal government to grow to such proportions that it’s now essential to our healthcare, retirement, educational policy, even the very information we’re allowed access to. So while I love Mollison’s vision of disregarding politics, and while I do believe the average person could turn their consumption of politics down by about 95%, there are dire issues we need to resolve and must stay tuned to affect them.
The real cause of a lack of shelter in any country is not that of finance, but of restrictive practices by a regulatory bureaucracy.
More and more as I read this Mollison represents a kind of anarchist thinking that was very popular on the left in the 80’s and 90’s but which has ceded all it’s ground now to big state solutions. He had the manner of thinking that said: the system which is offering the solutions is actually the one that caused the problem in the first place. This is a healthy worldview and I wish it was more popular nowadays outside libertarian circles.
As I see it, conflict arises on “national” boundaries that are fixed or disputed. A web of multiracial, multicultural, and multi occupational families in global nations obliterates these “defended territories,” and suits peaceful lifestyles.
This is an example of a very ambitious proposal from Mollison. In the last paper I mentioned Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State, which posits something similar. The idea is we need new ‘nations’ (global groups w/ the same affinity). Mollison calls them ‘occupational families’ that form ‘global nations.’ They must begin with special arrangements within existing states. This will obviously be challenging. These ‘extended families’ need property rights to be enforced and certain nation states, the US among them, are already quite good at this. So these new “extended families” won’t be antagonistic to the state - they will rely on a relationship with it. But they must also wrest some autonomy back from the central governments.
It is quite possible, even sensible, to completely replace the bureaucracy of public services with a series of locally administered trusts, and Holland, in particular largely supplants expensive paid public services (burdened, as they are with heavy salary and capital, costs, and liable to inaction, self interest, and inefficiency) to publicly formed trusts, called stichtings. In the case of any small country, such trusts can run all public operations, and the “government “becomes simply a way of conveying tax capital back to the regions via local trusts.
How’s this for a modest proposal? “replace the bureaucracy of public services..” I wonder how this went for Holland and to what extend modern small localities have experimented with it. There’s no doubt it’s an exciting, and again, very libertarian solution. I don’t have the knowledge to weigh in on the applicability of the idea, but I’m glad to know it’s out there as a potential north-star as localities face increased financial strain, due too often to financial mismanagement.
And I’ll have to leave you here. When I really study Mollison’s ideas here I realize that though he’s often thought of as a conservationist, agriculturalist, and ecologist, his political theory was deeply pragmatic and probably resembled Libertarianism.
Although I had to leave the tomb that possessed this chapter back in Costa Rica I scanned the remaining 20 or so pages of the chapter so may continue working on this exercise next week. If you’d like me to, let me know if the comments. Or just say hello.
Talk to you next week!
Matt Harder runs the public engagement firm Civic Trust, where he helps cities strengthen their civic environment by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government work together to create public projects. Follow him on Twitter.
Would be very interested in a follow-up post (or multiple!)