Permaculture as social movement…
Permaculture’s continuing political dilemma
Further rumination on the political fracture
A FEW WEEKS have passed since David Holmgren and his permaculture banner made their appearance at the Melbourne rally of November 20 against a variety of Covid response issues. Since the photo of David and partner Su Dennett with the banner was made public when Hepburn-based artistasfamily posted it on their instagram, it has spread through the permaculture networks where it has generated comments supportive, critical and hostile.
This story is an appreciation of the issue to date and a thought piece about the implications potentially flowing from the incident. It is as much my own attempt to understand it as anything else… thinking out loud in words, more or less.
What happened?
What we have seen on permaculture facebooks since David Holmgren and Su Dennett apparently implicated all permaculture practitioners, according to many commentators, in supporting the multifarious demands of the Melbourne rallies with their banner was initial surprise and shock followed by analysis of the implications. This is the usual course of controversies. People have to react emotionally as they try to make sense of what is happening, then, hopefully, they move on to analysis:
- what happened?
- why did it happen?
- what does it mean?
The latter question can refer not only to the permaculture design system as a whole but to peoples’ individual part in it.
The rallies are the manifestation of a sustained campaign against a variety of issues stemming from opposition to Victoria’s (now modified and enacted) pandemic emergency legislation through opposition to so-called vaccine passports and on to anti-vaccination demands. Participants other than permaculture include people fearful, or who have been, displaced from jobs on account of their vaccination status; both vaccinated and unvaccinated people opposed to government restrictions on access to venues; a few Indigenous people; far-right politicians such as coal-mining industrialist and United Australia Party leader, Clive Palmer, and rightwing politician and Liberal Party deserter now United Australia Party wannabe Craig Kelly, and One Nation’s Pauline Hanson; and elements of the far-right.
As permaculture folk reacted to the all-inclusive implications of David’s banner, what followed was a conflating of David and other permaculture people’s presence, such as the artistasfamily crew from Hepburn, with the goals of the far-right organisers and participants.
Based on the political ideas he has expressed on his blog and verbally in the past, linking David with the far-right was erroneous, however it is the perception of permaculture as a fellow-traveller with that political formation that has stuck.
Following what is now more than three weeks of online conversations centred on both permaculture’s representation at the rallies and David’s blog articles, we can discern a range of potential issues raised by commentators. Let’s summarise them…
- David’s presence under a permaculture banner is unrepresentative of the movement as a whole; there exists significant differences in attitude towards vaccination and politics within the movement; permaculture claims to be a diverse social movement but by appearing to represent permaculture at the rally the dissenting part of that diversity is overwritten by the dominant voice of the movement expressing an unrepresentative political position — that’s the gist of comments as I read them, anyway
- claims that David and other influencers in the permaculture milieu are deliberately or, most likely, inadvertently supporting the far-right’s political agenda through their presence at the rallies — the ‘participation is collaboration’ perception
- that some are abandoning permaculture because its politicisaton at the rallies has tainted it
- opposition to David’s presence does not mean that permaculture itself should be discarded
- attending the rallies signals the collapse of permaculture’s ‘peoplecare’ ethic because it inadvertently or deliberately lends support to social-health-damaging anti-vaxx and other sentiments evident at the rallies and puts individual rights ahead of social wellbeing
- David’s opposing the Covid vaccination positions individual rights above the common good and abrogates permaculture’s social solidarity in facing a threat that is common to all
- David and Su would have been better attending the rally as private citizens rather than risk implicating permaculture-as-a-whole with their banner
- that conflating a permaculture presence with permaculture taking political sides compromises the work of those using permaculture professionally as well as in a public or community context; it is about how institutions and individuals perceive a politicised permaculture
- because permaculture is neither owned nor licenced, anyone can attend a rally with a permaculture banner or speak at an event and claim to represent permaculture; this is where the permaculture principle of diversity starts to lead to confusion
- there is opinion that it is now necessary to separate the future of the design system from its leading charismatic authority, on the grounds that David may be the design system’s co-inventor and prominent voice but does not officially represent permaculture in its entirety because permaculture is the common property of all of its practitioners; thus, there can be no ‘official’ voice representing the movement, and nor can anyone in or outside of permaculture take any official position on permaculture; while claims of representation of particular strands of thought within permaculture could be made, or when speaking for a permaculture organisation, it would create the perception that the design system is faction-riven irrespective of the truth value of the assertion.
There are probably more but this is a snapshot of thoughts and ideas spinning around the conversation to date. I want to make it clear that these are not necessarily my personal beliefs or observations. They are derived from the online discussion that has been going on.
What does it mean?
David and Su’s presence at the rallies and the blog posts on David’s website (in one of which he explains why he is avoiding the Covid vaccination and in which he describes scientists as “the priests of arcane specialised knowledge maintained by an empire of extraction and exploitation”) has revealed something else.
It is this: there has been a long-running questioning of permaculture ideas but there has been nowhere to express and discuss them. In past years others have commented on that, saying that permaculture lacks an intellectual space where ideas can be openly discussed. There has also been an previously-unstated hesitation over David’s prominent role in the movement. Some commented that his blog posts display an attitude attributable to his life as a middle class, rural property owner living in a rural enclave of permaculture thinking. The same allegation could be made of other permaculture practitioners. Somewhere in his book, Retrosuburbia, David mentions the virtues of living in like-minded enclaves. The risk that critics seem to be getting at is that like-minded enclaves can generate group-think, like an echo-chamber, and block ideas coming in from the outside world especially when they are challenging.
The ongoing conversation has led me to think of what I make of this.
- first, regarding use of the term ‘Nazi’ in some posts; I think it is best reserved for authentic Nazis
- allegations of links with the far-right are likewise of a general nature and should be reserved, as some commentators have done, for authentic far-right presences.
The far-right has been identified as present in organising and participation in the rallies. Are they a threat? Maybe the fact that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisations devotes a third of its time to monitoring the far-right should answer that, as well as state police intelligence units.
Is David complicit in supporting the far-right? While some say participation at the rallies makes him complicit, I have to disagree. I see him more as some kind of libertarian in what he says and does and how he lives. As for perceptions of inadvertant support by attending the rallies, I’ll leave that to individual judgement because opinion differs.
My attitude, and I reserve the right to change it with new evidence, is that:
- David made a tactical error in appearing at the rallies as representing permaculture rather than as a private citizen or as a Holmgren Design Services presence
- his presence triggered the controversy because many saw it as unrepresentative and were dismayed and alienated by it
- David’s blog posts are expressions of his beliefs and attitudes, as are mine, and do not represent ‘official’ permaculture thinking because as an open source property held in common by its practitioners there can be no official representation of permaculture because there is no ‘official’.
A few implications
There is a big-picture frame to this, however, and it is about more than David and Su’s attending the rallies and the presence and supportive video blogging on Instagram by artistasfamily and the verbal support their fans give them.
It is this: attendance contributes to the building a groundswell of support for populist politicians like Clive Palmer, Craig Kelly and Pauline Hanson. It is a safe bet that this is an objective of the far-right formations behind the rallies and to the attendance of those politicians and public figures who spoke. The danger here is that the rallies feed a populist, Trump-like political presence in Australia.
Is there evidence of support for a populist right within the permaculture milieu? All we have to go by are social media posts and comments, which we all now know are far from representative. My observation is that there is no substantial base but that a base could be developed. There are a few people with links to permaculture who post on social media who evidently support small, fringe political parties that appeared with the coronavirus and that take an anti-vaxx, anti-5G stance, and whom repost News Ltd and United Australia Party propaganda, and continue to perpetuate discredited beliefs about vaccination and the virus.
Responses in the comments following their posts suggest that there is some support for what they post and for discredited beliefs about vaccination, the virus and associated matters. How much comes from people affiliated with permaculture in some way, we do not know, however there are some who are.
Here’s the contradiction, the dilemma, and the questions that those of you attending the rallies as well as the permaculture movement as a whole now has to answer:
- How do you reconcile your permaculture ethics and principles with the opposition to moves to ameliorate global heating, in favour of coal mining and fossil fuel industries and hostility to people who do not fit the dominant gender, religious or sexual preferences that are evident among the religious fundamentalists at the rallies and the public figures who spoke at them?
- How do you rationalise your apparent high regard for the science of climate change with your apparent disregard of the medical science the behind Covid19 response when the scientific method is common to both?
We now have to ask this question: do permaculture people want a populist political movement reminiscent of what happened in America to come about? It would be helpful for any who do want this to comment below to explain their reasoning. I would be good for them to identify themselves.
A populist rightwing polity is the agenda hard-wired into some of the political interests behind the rallies. It is a contradiction that those permaculture people attending the rallies contribute to creating it even when they imagine that they are not. Is this the future permaculture people want for ourselves, our families and our nation? As a social movement we have to answer that question, answer it soon and take action.
Many of its practitioners resist political intrusion into permaculture. It threatens their perception that permaculture is a space beyond social division and controversy. They now know it is not. Permaculture is a part of the socio-economic system we all live within even though it positions itself as oppositional. Let me quote Leon Trotsky on this: “You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”
Questions for a new movement
With this in mind I’m a bit concerned that David wrote in his blog that he looks forward to a new political movement developing from the sentiment evident at the rallies, as well as new forms of trade unions and professional organisations. He harks back to the anti-Vietnam war years of the late-sixties, but this is a fallacy because those rallies had a different motivation than those around the virus.
More questions come to to mind:
- what does David mean by a new political movement, new trade unions and new professional organisations developing out of the sentiment expressed at the rallies? Some detail would be enlightening; (David’s statement followed his observation that those entities were absent from the rally but he did not explore that their absence came from their distancing themselves from association with the right and its agenda and out of concern for the health of their members)
- how and where would those new worker formations and the social movement fit into the Australian political landscape?
- how would permaculture fit into this new political movement and how would permaculture then be perceived by people both inside and outside of it, if it supports a populist-right politics led by Clive Palmer, Craig Kelly and Pauline Hanson with their attitudes towards global heating, the fossil fuel industries and their social policies, such as they are?
- what effect does David think doing that would have on permaculture as a social movement?
A couple additional questions not to do directly with the issue at hand but some of which have been raised in the conversation around it, and about permaculture’s silence on them:
- why has no one posted a photo of David with his banner at a rally supporting action on global heating?
- David made a political statement at the rallies, on vaccination for Covid and on scientists on his blog, but where is there a statement on the permaculture position on the national housing crisis— the steep increases in house and rental prices and how mainly a younger demographic is being denied home ownership (house prices have risen more than 20 percent over the past year)? and the estimated more-than-116,000 Australians experiencing homeless or living in overcrowded or temporary housing and, for some, living in their vehicles?
- where is the permaculture statement on the gig economy and how people, like the 2.4 million casual employees making a living in it, can deal with financial insecurity and the lack of workers’ privileges such as the sick leave, annual leave and compassionate leave that fulltime employees enjoy, and other things affecting Australian workers in this new economy?
- where is the permaculture perspective on the impact of AI, roboticisation and automation of the economy and its impact on working Australians and on Australian society in general?
Some won’t see these as pertinent questions for permaculture. They will see them as outside its boundary. It that is true, then permaculture has been dumbed down since its early days when it was actively involved in creating an alternative economy, in urban planning and social issues that went well-beyond the garden.
I ask these questions because while some permaculture people are prominent in taking to the streets to react to measures to stem the spread of Covid19 while the vast majority demonstrate social solidarity in being vaccinated, including prominent figures in it, permaculture is strangely silent about these other things that are important to our near-future.
Not an attack
This is not the first time David has presumed to speak for people he was not elected to speak for and for whom he had no evidential basis to speak for. In 2019, he issued a statement apologising to future generations for the state the boomer generation has left the world in. He mentioned that some boomers had campaigned to ameliorate this, however comments suggest he did not acknowledge the scale of the work that a great many boomers had devoted decades of their lives to. Some boomers were upset that David presumed he could speak for an entire generation.
I mention David a lot in this piece, but that is inevitable given the circumstances. None of what I write should be taken as a personal attack on David. Like my past commentary on the issue, this one is just about my thoughts as the issue evolves and on the implications of how people will view permaculture and its political direction.
The incident and blog posts have triggered a political, ideological and tactical fracture in permaculture such as it has not previously experienced. Now, as it evolves we wait to see where it takes us.
Ref:
Homelessness
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-11/covid-19-vaccine-for-homeless-as-health-clinics-rollout/100329452
