Thinking about permaculture…
Is social polarisation popping the permaculture bubble?
Permaculture has occupied its own bubble for decades, but now the social polarisation of the Western world is poking pins in that bubble. Whether this eventually manifests as a struggle for the hearts and minds of permaculture only time will tell.
AFTER I POSTED a story about the ABC TV 7.30 Report’s coverage of My Place, a populist-right organisation promoting a selection of conspiracy theories and targeting local government, I received a curious response in the comments to the link on my personal facebook:
I’m not actively involved but familiar with My Place who challenged their local Council who have signed up to 20min City with the UN without any consultation with residents. A small business owner providing organic F&V will have to pay for a permit to travel to the farms to collect the produce which is not grown locally. This is just the tip of the iceberg. That same council is preventing incorporated CG’s from growing food on the land they were promised 3 yrs ago. As a permie you will understand their concerns for the well being of their kids & grandkids.
The woman is an advocate of local food systems and community gardens and appeals to my being a “permie”. Yet, my permie education and activities in the design system have been guided by the key role of rational thinking and by the skeptical attitude of Bill Mollison. That is what guides my response here.
Let’s unpack her comment.
The war on town planning: the 15-minute city
It is about mobility, not lockdown…
Urban design has for a long time been a core part of permaculture design activism, stemming all the way back to Colin Ball and associates’ permaculture work in Adelaide, South Australia, during the 1980s and described in his book Sustainable urban renewal: urban permaculture in Bowden, Brompton and Ridleyton (1985; Ball, Colin, and Permaculture Association of South Australia; Social Impacts Publications in association with the Permaculture Association of South Australia, Armidale, NSW ).
The planning concept of the 15 Minute City harks back to Jane Jacobs, the American author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, who wrote way back in the 1970s about how more densley populated, walkable cities with services close at hand are socially healthy cities that create opportunity. Dan Luscher, founder of the 15-Minute City Project wrote that it is about “enabling people to get their needs met within their own neighborhood, not confining them to that neighborhood. It is about mobility, not lockdown.”
The concept is desirable to planners and people who want to see fewer vehicles on the road and services available within a short walk or cycle ride. Reuters reports that: “The 15-minute model is a proposal to redesign cities so residents can access all their needs within a quarter-hour radius of their homes, according to Carlos Moreno, an urbanist who is widely credited with coining and popularising the term. Instead of spending hours on end in transport, we can bring all the essential things people need closer to them”, Moreno told Reuters, adding that “it is a theory to improve quality of life and strengthen the sense of community”.
We see implied support for the 15 Minute City in the writing of David Holmgren, the co-originator of the permaculture design system, in his 2018 book, Retrosuburbia (2018 David Holmgren, Melliodora, Hepburn Victoria. ISBN 9780994392879). David expands on the idea of localism, of a decentralised urban development in which needs are located in the local area. What defines ‘local’ is debatable and would differ according to geography (the terms ‘local’ and ‘regional’ are sometimes used as having the same meaning), however in regard to access it would comply with our understandings of urban geography such as the idea of the ‘range of goods’—the spacing of businesses and services according to their monetary value and frequency of purchase, and to the urban transportation network.
The 15 Minute City. Sounds like a good idea, yes? Not to all. Following the cooker* strategy of weaponising everything, the idea of the walkable city as a viable alternative to the car-dominated city is now entrenched in the Cooker Manual of Cognitive Combat where it is being weaponised by the so-called ‘freedom’ movement. It joins opposition to 5G broadband, vaccinations and the World Economic Forum as well as chemtrails, climate change, Covid denial and the plethora of other rallying points in their Catalog of Nutter Folk Devils that they use to recruit members. They claim the 15 Minute City is another type of lockdown stemming from the those introduced to reduce the spread of the Covid19 virus during the pandemic, and that it is a conspiracy to curtail our freedom of movement. A woman even posted a YouTube video in May 2023 showing suburban footpath repaving in Melbourne, falsely claiming it was in a country town and was preparation for the introduction of the 15-minute city — because we would all have to walk everywhere… everywhere within a 15-minute radius, that is. Now, the urban footpath is being weaponised.
A 2022 working group report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (pages 897 and 909) says the implementation of the 15 Minute City is likely to reduce urban energy use by 20% — 25% by 2050. The 15-minute city obviously has a role in reducing fossil fuel use for transport prior to its phasing out and replacement by electric vehicles and, so, helping to ameliorate our warming climate and urban air pollution with its health impacts. The catch with the climate change amelioration effect of the 15 Minute City is that climate change denialism is part of the ‘freedom’ movement’s agenda.
Permaculture activists and educators have advocated walkable and cyclable cities for years. The 15-minute city should be good news to permaculture people because it supports the localism that permaculture promotes and counteracts David Holmgren’s ‘brown technology’ future that he discusses in his book, Future Scenarios (2012, Chelsea Green Publishing).
The commentator to my story does not disclose her personal attitude to “the 20 minute city”, as she calls it, however her comment suggests she follows the ‘freedom’ movement’s line. She alleges council signed up to it without consulting the community. Councils sign up to a range of things without consulting communities, usually because they comply with their city plans. As for her “understand their concerns for the well being of their kids & grandkids”, well, that is what they call a motherhood statement—because motherhood is good and it is unlikely to elicit opposition, isn’t it? That is why allusions to children and their protection figure so prominently in the ‘freedom’ movement as a catch-phrases—it is a tactic of cognitive entry into the public mind by highlighting a point of agreement. It they want to protect children they can’t be all that bad, can they?
A permit to travel
Well, they won’t need it because it won’t exist. I have no idea where her “…small business owner providing organic F&V will have to pay for a permit to travel to the farms to collect the produce which is not grown locally” comes from.
First, small business fruit and vegetable sellers do not usually go to farms to collect their produce. The farmer usually delivers to them or to a central market from where the sellers buy the produce that they resell.
Is this just about organic fruit and vegetable resellers or all fruit and vegetable resellers? Is this a hint that only organic suppliers are being targeted? And where is the evidence that (council? state government? whom?) is actually planning this? Of course, it is not there, simply because it is a fake allegation coming out of the ‘freedom’ movement and, probably, organisations like My Place so as to stir up fear among people for their own political ends.
Then there is the claim that council is preventing incorporated community gardens from growing food on the land they were promised. I don’t know the backstory here, so all I will say (speaking from the perspective of my past community garden and landcare coordinator role with the City of Sydney and from my work with Community Gardens Australia), councils can have a range of reasons for refusing a community garden access to land including land contamination, preexisting plans for the land and as being an incompatible landuse in a public reserve. In the absense of further information I will leave this to Community Gardens Australia to deal with.
What does all if this stuff indicate?
The commentator links her comments to My Place’s assumed concerns for their children and grandchildren. Does that exist or is My Place’s concerns more to do with furthering their far-right agenda? One can only wonder.
Am I imagining things when I see the comment to the link to my story as indicative of how far-right ideas are penetrating social movements like permaculture, local food and the environment movement? How does this happen? I think it may be because some of the people in those social movements might be open to populist-right ideas because their campaigning against governments and corporations has made them critical and suspicious of those entities. Then along comes the populist-right talking about government conspiracies, big-pharma and the rest and it seems to be targeting the same entities. Again, the tactic of cognitive entry into the public mind by highlighting a point of agreement. Or, perhaps, confirmation bias.
For many, probably the majority attracted to these populist-right organisations, the attraction is made by the organisations tapping into popular sentiment rather than it being a deliberate political choice on their part. The populist-right has learned to speak the language of ordinary people and to game them on their concerns. People are often critical of government and suspicious of the motivations of big corporations. That is in good part the consequences of the bad behaviour of those organisations and the arrogance and failure to communicate effectively by government. That sets the scene for the infusion of ideas critical of those organisations and false allegations about them. Put another way, they have to take some of the responsibility themselves.
As someone who takes an interest in social movements I have written about this previously. A populist-right push into permaculture, were that to happen (assuming it is not already happening in the form of a deliberate hearts-and-minds tactic), would create a negative public perception of the design system that could set it back decades in its quest to be adopted by the social mainstream. Local government and even perhaps the tertiary education sector where permaculture is taught could be scared off. To be clear, I am speculating on a worse-case scenario that probably will not eventuate, however doing that is part of organisational risk assessment that prominent permaculture organisations could do more of.
It might not require a deliberate targetting of permaculture to achieve this (see: 4. Infiltrate existing social movements and institutions—Tactic: infiltrate, influence and control in my article here). Subvert from inside the society you would destabilise and take it down by joining and white-anting social institutions and organisations. As the example of the woman commenting on 15-Minute Cities on my post suggests, the process may happen more by osmosis than direction. Further evidence of permaculture practitioners voluntarily associating with organisations linked with the populist-right was provided in the Tinfoil Tales podcast (around the 00.30’ mark) when the presenters were discussing the My Place strategy of setting up regional branches and mentioned how My Place in the Hills, in Melbourne, practiced permaculture.
The ‘freedom’ movement makes their phobias sound reasonable and in doing so attracts people, including what is most likely a small number in permaculture, who are susceptible to their messaging. Although the public reaction to the 7.30 Report suggests that their fringe comes across as a bunch of nutters, the more considered among them have mastered the interpersonal and organisational communications skills that has opened windows into what were previously regarded as socially progressive social movements, like permaculture.
And, so, the future?
These are confusing times. Old political alignments are being reconfigured. Science, so basic to permaculture’s body of knowledge and application, is being denigrated and denied by people with no scientific training or background, and the scientific method of developing and assessing scientific theories and existing practices is blatantly disregarded. A loud and aggressive anti-science movement stimulated by far-right political forces gaslights the public, including (and assisted) by some in permaculture, and leads them to doubt their own education and beliefs. A culture war weaponises language about gender, social privilege, social equality and race (ironic, because biology recognises only one human race—it is called Homo sapiens—all what is commonly called ‘race’ is about ethnicity and culture) and makes inroads into permaculture conversations when some, with the best of intentions, take on the role of language police to correct someone else’s words rather than focus on the point of the conversation. Is it any wonder that these currents circulating in society seep into permaculture?
Whether the influence of these things is a passing phenomenon or whether it becomes a part of the public permaculture attitude will affect the future of the design system and its utility to a world grappling with so many challenges.
*‘Cooker’ is a collective Australianism for spreaders of social myth, disinformation, misinformation and conspiracy theories such as climate change denial, flat earthers, deep state believers, anti-vaxxers, Covid denialists, chemtrail, illuminati, anti-science and similar beliefs. It is an abbreviation of ‘cooked in the head’ and is sometimes used in mockery and at other times as an acceptable generic term.
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