Journalism…
From utopia to dystopia
Sarah Connor’s blog post charts our journey from the hopes that followed the end of the Cold War to their decline in the present time.
It happened in 1989 with the opening of the Berlin Wall, that solid edifice that split the city and marked the stark divisions of the Cold War. Soon after, the Soviet Union imploded and the previously Soviet-controlled states of Eastern Europe opened up. The threat of global nuclear war that had hung over the post-World War II generation dissipated. It seemed a new age was in birth.
In her Collapse 2050 blog, Sarah Connor describes the nineties as an optimistic time, a time she calls ‘peak humanity’. I agree with her because I, too, lived through those times. I watched the Soviet Union disintegrate and Eastern Europe open up to the West, and like millions of others I breathed a sigh of relief as the threat of nuclear war moved into the background.
Sarah writes that the decade saw the emergence of new musical forms and initiatives like the Kyoto Protocol that sparked optimism about global cooperation on environmental issues. She reminisces about a time when life felt less burdened by existential dread, contrasting it with the current climate of fear, anxiety and uncertainty as the Trump regime goes about dismantling democracy in the USA, threatening neighbouring nations and undertaking a realignment of the global geostrategic structure. Sarah mourns the loss of joy of that decade and of living without the social divisions and crises that followed. Those not-quite carefree days of the past now seem irretrievable, like some kind of distant era akin to a golden age.
My recollection of those days when the Soviet Union crashed under its own contradictions and nuclear weapons reduction talks got underway is of a time of rapid geopolitical change, a time when the strictures of the Cold War that accompanied my generation through our childhood and into our middle years started to dissolve. It was as if a great weight had been lifted from both the international political scene and from the collective minds of my generation. The future suddenly and unexpectedly seemed open, full of possibilities, full of potential. After decades living under the nuclear threat of Mutually Assured Destruction with its more-than-appropriate acronym of MAD, a policy supported by both the Soviet Union and the USA, it felt as though we had come out of the other end of a dark tunnel.
Reading Sarah’s blog, it occurred to me that people of my generation experienced something similar to this opening up of society decades before. That was as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s and the so-called boomer generation, born in the years following the Second World War, came of age and set off on new life adventures, a good many of them, anyway. Those were the years, the decade, of the so-called alternative lifestyles movement, the back-to-the-land movement or the counterculture — depending on your preferred term. They were a time when people set out to build intentional communities in decaying rural towns and in the forested hills. Just like Sarah describes the 1990s as a time of mindshift, a psychological separation from the past that looked forward to a new and safer future, so was the decade of the 70s.
Of course, we still lived with the Cold War threat of mutual assured nuclear destruction, had some idiot pressed the red button. Yes, we came close to that twice, the first time during the Cuban Missile Crisis of the late 60s and later with the Able Archer military exercise in Europe in the 1980s when the Soviets mistook military exercises for the West preparing an attack on them.
My generation lived with the Cold War playing as a background tune to daily life, so it is understandable that with the opening of the 1990s, as Sarah describes, we experienced a sense of relief and started to believe that the world could be made a better place.
Creating better ways to live had been a motivation for the social innovators of the alternative lifestyles movement back in the 70s. Whether in city or country they had set out to create a more communal, environmentally sustainable and socially fairer way of life. My generation retained that idea into the 1990s, however I am unclear on any structured way of approaching those things that appeared in that decade other than among people participating in the permaculture design system and, to a narrower degree, those active in environmental issues. That decade, coincidentally, saw the environment movement in Australia reach its apogee in participation and political influence.
From hopeful past to bleak present
Sarah’s story captures a deep sense of longing for a more optimistic era and highlights its stark difference to contemporary challenges. After painting her rosy picture of the 1990s, her narrative shifts to a bleak present marked by climate crisis, social division, the disinformation pandemic and the destructive leadership of authoritarian states. She asks whether today’s youth fully grasps the severity of these simultaneous issues. Having experienced neither the exuberance of the 1970s or the sense of liberation of the 1990s, today’s younger generation has nothing experiential to compare the present to, no shared peak moments. All they have is what they have experienced in life, and for probably most, all that has been are stories of global warming gloom, dysfunctional institutions of church and state, the collapse of neoliberalism’s economic globalisation, recurrent financial crisis, a rapidly deteriorating global security environment and now the chaos of the Trump presidency and the meddling in other nations’ affairs by the richest man in the world. All of a sudden, things don’t look so good for democracy.
So, where to from here? I don’t know. All my generation can do is say to young people, yes, we did have hope and yes, we did try and create the sort of world we wanted to live in. We can ask them whether they think they can do the same and how they would go about it. My impression is that options are now more limited. There is greater financial pressure on people, especially young families. The real estate market has gone fully birko and the challenge of buying a home is worsened by the cost of living crisis. The disinformation pandemic sweeping the world is a major complicating factor in today’s social malaise. People don’t know who to turn to, who are the reliable sources of information, where to find rational and evidence-based answers.
Back in its early days, I was inspired by the sense of hope generated by the emerging permaculture design movement. Its unofficial motto was that we are not out there on the streets trying to stop the things we don’t want, we are here trying to build those things that we do want to see. That notion came from one of its founders, Bill Mollison. In doing that it reached back to those days of the 1970s alternative movement which had taken much the same approach. Perhaps Bill’s motto was a little naive for a movement that lacked both a social change strategy and political nous. I wonder how much the exclusion of young (and older) people from the housing market due to unrealistic prices has stymied the growth of permaculture with its focus on design, improving energy and water efficiency and home gardening to supplement the household food supply. I say this because although permaculture is a comprehensive design system for resilient communities, it is popularly portrayed as a domestic application.
There remains a perception, more a belief within the social movement around permaculture, that simply by doing things as individuals and local groups they will create change for the common good. That idea comes from Everett Rodger’s Ideas Diffusion Theory which postulates that as an idea or a social movement attracts enough followers to take it beyond its small coterie of early adopters, it moves into mass adoption and gains momentum. I’ve spoken with people in permaculture over the years and the idea I get is that permaculture moved into an early mass adoption stage some years ago but now may have stalled there. This is conjecture and permaculture continues to attract people, however whether it moves into later mass adoption to become more influential depends not only on recruiting new people but on retaining those already in the system and addressing the big issues facing societies and how people live within them.
It depends, too, on whom it is that permaculture attracts. A few of its long-term and well-known practitioners like Rosemary Morrow have pointed out that permaculture is largely a middle class social movement because it is the middle class that has the personal resources to access training in permaculture and to practice it, and many of them have the security of home ownership. The middle class is better educated than what we might once have called the working class and so, in theory, it is open to ideas like permaculture. The danger is that in adopting permaculture as a personal life strategy, middle class people individualise it and blunt the design system’s potential as the social change agent that it once was. We might also see that the old social class structure of working/middle/wealthy class is evolving into an oligarchic/everyone else class structure as the middle class shrinks and wealth distribution in societies becomes even more polarised. This suggests that permaculture as a social movement could increase its social relevance by mobilising to address critical needs like food security and mutual assistance.
The downfall of the diversity principle
I went on to teach the permaculture design system and apply it both in Australia and in the Southwest Pacific on international development programs. I continue to see permaculture as one of the few positive approaches to building communities and a better world, however over the decades I’ve watched as permaculture moved into its own comfort zone, its own safe space, despite Bill Mollison exhorting people to once in a while get out of their gardens and engage in the world to stop the things they don’t want to see.
That is a question muddied by one of permaculture design’s own principles — that diversity in systems strengthens them. That is true to a degree, however as permaculture designer, Cecilia McCauley told a workshop in Sydney, the diversity principle is insufficient unless it is nuanced by separating wanted from unwanted diversity. When there is too much of the unwanted kind you end up with chaos. With disinformation over medicine, science, gender and other issues present within the social movement around permaculture, its potential as a coherent social change strategy could be blunted by too much diversity of belief and opinion.
Just as Sarah describes the 1990s as a kind of liminal space in time — a transition zone — so I see our present time in the same way. The difference now, and especially following the 2024 federal election in the United States, is that in the 1990s the vibe of the times suggested that we could move into a positive future, whereas the present moment suggests something less than positive. I hope I am wrong.
Sarah Connor: https://www.collapse2050.com/remember-happy-2/?ref=collapse-newsletter
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