Permaculture’s politics…
A state of confusion: Permaculture’s politics
“THE TRAGIC REALITY is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them.
“We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.”
If ever there was a political and communitarian call to implement permaculture then it is this made by Bill Mollison. In making the call Bill positioned permaculture as a subtly oppositional practice based on principles of self-organisation and self-help.
He went on: “I teach self-reliance, the world’s most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.”
Bill’s notion that growing your own food is “shockingly subversive” is not accepted by all in permaculture or in the broader sustainability movement. It might go some way to subverting the food industry supply chain by promoting a limited self-reliance in providing a life necessity, however it shows no sign yet of being a threat to the food industry. If anything, growing your own food is a reform of the food supply chain rather than subversion or revolution.
US permaculture blogger, Rafter Sass Ferguson, put it this way: “If you’ve disguised your revolution as gardening too well, for too long, you may in fact just be gardening.”
Whatever subversion of the dominant food supply chain there might be in self-provisioning of part of our food supply is contingent on people having land and time to grow their own food. Both are in short supply. Obtaining both those needs is a political challenge.
A product of Western liberal civilisation
Bill’s statement about ceasing to look to power structures, hierarchical systems or governments epitomises why permaculture could only have come out of a Western liberal society such as Australia was at the end of the 1970s. The civil liberties found in the Western democracies were critical to the design system’s emergence and development.
This might also explain why permaculture has a poor start-up record in authoritarian states, the exception being in Cuba during its emergency period following the loss of its markets in the Soviet Union. It was Australian permaculturists who went to Havana to teach urban agriculture to help Cubans restore food security. Permaculture did not challenge the Cuban state by emphasising Bill’s statement about growing your own food being “shockingly subversive”. It focussed on the evident need of the moment, with whatever political lessons people might draw from its actions.
In his acceptance speech on receiving the Right Livelihood Award in 1981, Bill Mollison describes how he developed his own political position as something different to the politics offered through political parties and the electoral systems of representative democracy:
“I withdrew from society about 1970 because I had been long in opposition to the systems that I saw were killing us. I decided it was no good persisting with opposition that got you nowhere. I thought for two years. I wanted to return to society but I wanted to come back only with something very positive. I did not want to oppose anything again and waste my time.
“Somewhere someone had given me Mao‑Tse‑Tung’s little red book. I didn’t understand it very well, in fact it was very difficult for me to read. But, at one point when he was talking about an attack on the city of Tai Ching, his advice to his army was ‘Don’t attack Tai Ching: it’s too heavily defended. Go around it and Tai Ching will fall.’
“So I’ve been going around the things that I think are killing us.”
Bill’s notion of “going around” is similar to Edward de Bono’s ’water logic’. de Bono likened water logic to the way water in a stream flows around a big boulder, bypassing it and slowly eroding it away rather than confronting it with brute force when it might prove immovable.
A criticism of going around rather than confronting something is that going around an obstacle leaves it intact. It might eventually be worn down or pass into irrelavance, however until it does either of those things it can do a lot of damage. If it is powerful enough it can block those side passages which those those going round it make use of.
“Going around” and building solutions at small scale summarises the permaculture approach to politics. It is a politics not of political parties and elections, more of practical, grassroots alternatives, more a politics of doing. Its success relies on the development of a critical mass of small scale initiatives sufficient to supplant the status quo. Whether permaculture or any other grassroots movement can develop the influence to achieve that is unknown.
Politics in permaculture
Think about permaculture and think about those inhabiting it. What a mixed bunch they are. They come from across the social and the wealth spectrum. They live in suburbs affluent and leafy and poor and industrial. They also bring with them the politics of their past and they sometimes struggle to reconcile that with permaculture’s ethics of earthcare and peoplecare and its ethic of redistributing surplus, the sharing ethic. As has been repeatedly pointed out by permaculture practitioners in different countries, when it comes to its ethics, permaculturer’s greatest failure in its second ethic of peoplecare. Permaculture practitioners sometimes treat their colleagues no differently, and in some cases worse, than we experience in mainstream society.
Permaculture in Australia is largely populated by middle class people. It is they who are attracted to its siren song of peaceful social change and regenerative development. Middle class people appear to form the majority at permaculture design courses. Permaculture’s class structure has been a discussion point on overseas permaculture online fora, yet it receives scant attention in Australia.
Before we get into the nitty gritty of permaculture’s dabbling in politics let’s explore its relation to big picture political thinking.
Permaculture and capitalism
It is no surprise that permaculture displays characteristics of capitalism, as it grew from a society in which that system prevails. To make a livelihood in permaculture we have to set up small businesses on the for-profit model, as not-for-profit social enterprise or as workers’ cooperatives. All have to operate as businesses in a capitalist economy. All have to engage in competition, establish labour relations and comply with industrial, development and other law.
Read permaculture’s social media and it becomes apparent that most prefer the small business model rather than the big corporate model of capitalism. Big corporations are viewed with suspicion, distrust and dislike on account of the economic and political power they wield and their bad behaviour.
Neoliberal ideas enjoyed a limited currency among some in permaculture in the eighties and nineties. Notions like user-pays gained currency despite the reality that users can only pay if they have the funds to participate in a user-pays economy. Many did not — pensioners, the unemployed or disabled and others on a limited income. It was not a good move for permaculture and it ignored its second ethic of peoplecare.
Notions like the economic trickle-down effect had some currency as well. An organic food advocate told me how it was justified to promote organic food to affluent people because its availability would trickle-down to the less-financially-well-off. Those people are still waiting. Trickle-down is a core neoliberal concept.
When it comes to capitalism, it is the small-scale variety rather than the globalised corporation that permaculture people gravitate towards.
Permaculture and socialism
Social media posts suggests that there are some who see affinity between socialism and permaculture. With permaculture’s ethic of redistribution this is how it should be. An indication of permaculture’s relationship with socialism comes from a Facebook page post:
“While there does tend to be a strong “socialist” side to Permaculture in Australia, this is not so for the whole world. Many “survivalists” are into Permaculture, and tend to be a bit more right wing. Proper Permacultural policy though, should try to avoid such labels, and should also try to avoid the related oppositional dichotomies.”
from each according to his ability, to each according to his need…
Despite any socialist leanings, there is a pervasive view that socialism is the flip side of capitalism, the same thing in a different form in that both are about big economic systems, big organisations and hierarchical control structures. Presumably, socialism would still dig up valuable ecosystems for the minerals beneath. Presumably, socialism would still have left us with global warming. These conjectures might be challenged by socialists, but that is their record.
Karl Marx might have said “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, but societies like the Soviet Union and China that professed a socialist structure proved to be anything but what Marx said. Rather than the dissolving away of the state, they became powerful authoritarian states monitoring their citizens in detail. China became a paranoid kleptocracy that fueled much of its rapid economic rise and hi-tech industry by stealing technologies and intellectual property from Western corporations.
While some permaculture practitioners might agree with the humanitarian motivations of socialism in ensuring social wellbeing, there seems to be a generalised suspicion of socialism as just another big system with big system problems.
Permaculture and anarchism
Like socialism, anarchism comes in a variety of flavours. Here I use the term to describe not a state of disorganised chaos as per one of its meanings but as a stateless polity relying on self-organisation for the supply of goods and services and social decision making.
The term is bandied about among permaculture people without much thought as to its meaning. The suggestion seems to be that permaculture is ‘anarchistic’ in the sense that it contains many different opinions and practices. That is not anarchy. That is diversity.
Others use the term to describe how gaining agreement in often difficult in permaculture. This gets to what permaculture co-originator, David Holmgren, told his audience at Australasian Permaculture Convergence 14 in Canberra in April 2018. He said permaculture is made up of “cantankerous individuals”. True enough, but that is not anarchism. That is an absence of effective facilitation in decision making.
Let’s theorise. Could permaculture be used in some imaginary anarchist society? I think it could, primarily because of its ethic of sharing resources and its focus on community.
Permaculture and fascism
What of permaculture in a fascist regime?
I can’t see it going far because fascism traditionally favours big corporations over small business and it disfavours community-level organisations over which it has no control. Fascist regimes have limited lives, either self-destructing from within or starting conflicts which end up in their destruction. Not conducive ground for a culture of permanence, for a perma -culture.
Facism’s racial preferences would militate against permaculture’s peoplecare ethic. The centralised, powerful state apparatus would contravene all of the ethics. This assumes fascist states with a strong ethno-cultural strand to their structure in which one culture is promoted while others are discriminated against.
Permaculture and garden-variety authoritarianism
Avowedly authoritarian states, even where they have elections, are not fertile ground for permaculture. Permaculture could not have originated in them because it required open discussion of ideas, access to information and the personal freedom to engage in critical public discourse for it to emerge and flourish.
Such freedoms are lacking in places like present day Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and some Middle Eastern states. Further suspicion of permaculture would be imputed in nations where any permaculture organisation accepting support from outside the country would have to register as a ‘foreign agent’. Russia has such a law and India has considered a similar move to blunt the influence of Western environmental organisations.
A further barrier in authoritarian states comes through government control and monitoring of public communications. China’s Great Firewall is the most glaring of this denial of access to information. Chinese interested in permaculture are denied access to the social media conversation around it on Facebook, because Facebook and Twitter are banned by the Chinese Communist Party, the governing party. The Chinese government is wary of Western influence despite relying on Western economies for the nation’s economic development and for invention, many of the technologies for which it acquired by hacking corporate computers and by espionage in Western nations. Hong Kong might be something of an exception thanks to its Western heritage as a British colony, however there are signs that the government is trying to limit civic freedoms there.
If we imagine permaculture in an authoritarian state then elements of it possibly could be introduced, such as improved farming systems, but it could not rise to a situation where its criticism of government came to be seen as a threat. That would apply to Bill Mollison’s attitude to government.
Permaculture and Western liberal democracy
Online and personal conversations strongly suggest that permaculture practitioners in Australia prefer a form of social democracy, a legacy of our liberal Western democtatic system. Rather than that of the Australian Labor Party which now forsakes much of its ideological past to take a neoliberal line, it is the Scandanavian model of social democracy which would most closely accord with attitudes expressed on social and other media. When permaculture emerged towards the end of the seventies, the neoliberal economic globalisation experiment was just starting.
Permaculture came out of the social and intellectual ferment that was the 1970s in Australia. It required not only the personal freedoms of movement, expression and enquiry of Western democracies, but the freedom to criticise without fear. It also required freedom of the press to publish its ideas. In other words it required an open society.
At the time when Permaculture One was published, Bill Mollison was a lecturer at the University of Tasmania. He had earlier been a researcher for the CSIRO (Australia’s national scientific research agency) and Tasmania’s Inland Fisheries Commission. Bill also researched and published a genealogy of Tasmanian Aborigines. This experience fed into the emerging concept of permaculture. To articulate the concept as it developed, Bill required the traditional academic freedom to publish and discuss what were unorthodox ideas and, in the case of the genealogy, findings that contradicted the government.
Permaculture gained most traction in Australia, Aotearoa-New Zealand, the USA and the UK. That is understandable as these are English speaking countries that required no translation of permaculture’s library of books. It then caught on in Europe and parts of Asia and South America. It seems to have little presence in mainland China although permaculture educators have taught there and in Hong Kong. It does have a presence in Taiwan, the Republic of China. There is a minimal presence in Russia and Eastern European states although permaculture had or has a minor presence in some of those places. This I put down to it being a product that could only have arisen in a Western, liberal democratic society.
Permaculture and libertarianism
Permaculture practitioner comments sometimes suggest they have a limited affinity with libertarianism. Like socialism, libertarianism comes in a range of flavours.
At one extreme is the US flavour that favours individual freedoms but a much reduced role for government and government regulation, and freer reign for corporations. This is more tuned to Ayn Rand-type thinking and is known as ‘Right Libertarianism’.
those interested in sustainability should be careful in choosing their heroes…
It is also the type of libertarianism that Joel Salatin, the innovative American farmer popular in Australian regenerative agriculture circles seems to align with. I recall Salatin telling the public meeting at the Sydney’s Teachers Federation auditorium that he was a “Christian libertarian”. I wondered what that meant at the time and found out later when, during his 2016 visit, an Australian food sovereignty advocate asked Salatin about his attitude to the advertising of tobacco and other harmful products. According to the advocate Salatin said he didn’t favour any restrictions at all.
A woman attending the same event asked him about health policy and Salatin was again reported not to be in favour of universal schemes. The woman informed him that here in Australia we actually like our universal scheme. This was all reported on Facebook with the message from the food sovereignty advocate that those interested in sustainability should be careful in choosing their heroes.
I mention this not to discredit Joel Salatin’s significant contribution to regenerative agriculture but to show that permaculture practitioners can overlook some aspects of those it turns into champions who might be a poor fit with its ethics.
…break free of the doctrinal rigidity that has been imposed on us by fanatics of both the so-called Left and the so-called Right…
I think many in permaculture would agree with scientist and science fiction author, David Brin:
“It’s time to free ourselves from the old left-right axis of the 19th and 20th centuries.
“Might believers in modernity — whether ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ — find ways to break free of the doctrinal rigidity that has been imposed on us by fanatics of both the so-called Left and the so-called Right?”
Source: Alliance for a Modern World. davidbrin.com
Comment suggests whatever affinity might exist with libertarianism, permaculture favours ‘Left Libertarian’ . This is communitarian rather than corporate-favouring. It avoids the extreme private property focus of Right Libertarianism. What it has in common with Right Libertarianism is a preference for individual freedoms and a reduced role for government. Left-libertarianism differs in that it sees a role for communal property, the commons, as well as private property, the need for some degree of government regulation to reduce the environmental and social impact of industry and for a social safety net. This aligns it with permaculture’s second ethic of care of people. As David Brin puts it:
“Most left-libertarians support some form of income redistribution on the grounds of a claim by each individual to be entitled to an equal share of natural resources. A number of left-libertarians of this school argue for the desirability of some state social welfare programs.”
Left-libertarianism comes across as a mashup of the personal freedoms of libertarianism and its limitations on government combined with the self-management of anarchism with elements of social democracy.
Perhaps the type of libertarianism that permaculture would be most at home with is the Municipal Libertarianism of Murray Bookchin. This is based on local assemblies as decision-making bodies and their extension as a means to replace the state as it presently exists.
We should be clear that support for Left-libertarianism is implied rather than openly stated in permaculture social media postings and websites. Seldom is the word ‘libertarian’ heard in permaculture circles. We can only draw the conclusion that this is the drift of permaculture politics because we have no data on which to base a more authoritative conclusion.
Permaculture’s party allegiances
Reading through comments on permaculture Facebook groups and pages from 2014 through 2017, is becomes clear that the great majority of commenters favour Australia’s Greens party as their political choice. The Green are social democratic in policy. At the same time reservations about The Greens are evident. An example is a political commentator who on social media described The Greens as “economic rationalists on bicycles”. A commment on a Facebook page stated “The Greens are abandoning their policies left, right & centre to go after more main stream voters.”.
Facebook posts and comments do not constitute a proper survey but it is all we have to go on in the absence of any sort of statistically valid data.
The Australian Labor Party (ALP) has received some support but only a small fraction of the number of favourable comments and reposts supporting The Greens. Many hold the ALP in the same contempt they hold the Liberal Party, for which I found no supportive comment but plenty that was damning.
…permaculture is anti-political. There is no room for politicians or administrators or priests…
Research into political party support among permaculture practitioners would be interesting. Would it show patterns of support according to wealth and income correlated to place of residence? That could indicate how deeply people assimilate permaculture’s ethics of earthcare, peoplecare and resource redistribution. Would more financially well-off permaculturists living in safe conservative (Liberal Party) electorates show a different voting pattern to those of less-affluent areas?
Voting patterns can be taken as an indicator of the degree of seriousness that people have towards permaculture’s three ethics as well as their understanding of permaculture’s implied message about politics. A vote for conservative politicians, for instance, is a vote for a coal-industry-friendly party not noted for social justice, while a vote for The Greens is the opposite. Would voting for the conservatives indicate those voters’ interest in permaculture as more as a type of organic gardening rather than as a design system favouring social and economic equity? Would taking their vote away from the conservatives be too great a step out of their political comfort zone?
Permaculture’s own party
It must have been in the late nineties or maybe a few years later that Bill Mollison seemed to contradict his earlier criticism of political party politics when he proposed the formation of the Permaculture Peoples’ Party. The intention was to contest elections.
The idea gained traction, but not much. People said they saw little value in the proposal and that more could be done outside the political system. Others said that another small party would further fracture the political space favoured by many in permaculture. Conversation around the idea started to decline and it withered.
In mid-2016 there remained a Facebook page for the Party though there was minimal posting on it.
A precedent to any greater political involvement by permaculture would be the formulation of a succinct, compelling narrative describing the type of society its practitioners would like to see.
Why didn’t the idea take off given the dissatisfaction with the two big parties?
First, permaculture has traditionally distanced itself from party politics. The proposal to form a political party came across as ironic.
I don’t know where the quote from Bill Mollison first appeared, but the move seemed something of a contradiction to his earlier attitude to politics:
“ …permaculture is anti-political. There is no room for politicians or administrators or priests. And there are no laws either. The only ethics we obey are: care of the earth, care of people, and reinvestment in those ends.”
Second, there was widespread cynicism towards party politics as an institution dominated by the big two Australian parties, Labor and Liberal.
Third, The Greens were perceived as being largely compatible with permaculture’s political ambitions, however ill-defined those ambitions were. In effect, The Greens had already occupied the permaculture political niche.
Is there a political future for permaculture?
Permaculture’s politics are ambiguous but favour individual freedom, a social safety net and environmental and social wellbeing before corporate profits. They favour markets in which small business can flourish.
Its approach to change has been less through elections and more through following the dictum of Buckminster Fuller:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
“To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
As Eliot Peper wrote in his article in Medium:
“We need hackers, makers, artists, and independent thinkers. We need to play smarter and think long-term. We need to call our leaders to action. We need to educate ourselves and build a future in which we can thrive, not fight to survive.”
Those statements sum up permaculture’s approach to politics quite well and similar sentiments appear frequently in permaculture’s social media. That epitomises something pervasive in permaculture: recognition of the problems and challenges we face and criticism of mainstream politics, but little thinking about how permaculture as a community of practice could address them politically.
It reflects an attitude also pervasive in permaculture. Permaculture practitioners propose that taking small, local actions in communities or in households and private life will somehow aggregate to a level at which it brings change from below. There is potential here, but it gets back to the water logic problem and begs the question of how such an uncoordinated movement would deal with the political, economic and social power structures it would encounter.
The future for permaculture and politics seems to be one of a deliberately-cultivated distance. There appears little incentive for permaculture people to engage with politics in its conventional sense. There is danger in this as it renders permaculture politically irrelavent and limits its potential as a change agent.
A precedent to any greater political involvement by pemaculture would be the formulation of a succinct, compelling narrative describing the type of society its practitioners would like to see.
More:
