Social movements leave their legacy
It is said that there is little that is new, that what we have now is the legacy of what went before. That is no truer than the legacy left to permaculture by Australia’s alternative movement.
Eaten brown rice lately? Tofu? Been to a naturopath? Acupuncturist? Used herbal medicines? Grown organic veges? Got a solar hot water system or photovoltaic panels on your roof? Done any owner building? Practicing permaculture?
If so, then welcome to the legacy of the alternative culture of the 1970s. All of those and more were popularised by what is sometimes called ‘hippie’ culture. Here in Australia the term ‘alternative subculture’ became popular. It was a better term to describe the constructive wing of a social movement that recruited tens of thousands of mainly young people and took many of them from the cities in search of a new way of living in the country. Many are still there.
This wasn’t a movement requiring any kind of formal membership or any kind of organisation. It was a social movement that emerged from the dynamics of the late 1960s and the following decade. It had no leadership. It self-organised as mainly young people saw a different and what was for many a better way to live. It called for spontaneity and courage. It came out of the mainstream social culture and, partially, parted with it.
Rather than seek to reform mainstream society it sought a different path that eschewed materialism, consumerism and conventional career paths for ways of living that did less environmental damage, offered more independence and recognised peoples’ autonomy in making decisions about how they lived. Alternative Australia — communities for the future by researcher Peter Cock (Quartet Books, Melbourne, 1979) was an authoritative book on the movement no long out of print.
Subculture or mainstream?
The history of that movement parallels thinking that has appeared among permaculture practitioners from time to time. It revolved around this question: Do we try to influence and reform mainstream society or do we build a social movement, a closely-connected permaculture subculture, that parallels it?
With the decentralised network that permaculture has evolved into, building a cohesive subculture would be difficult. In-part, this is due to the greater value placed on localism in permaculture than on becoming a unified social movement. The tendency was already there before the Transition Town movement reinforced it for participating permaculture practitioners.
Various means of creating permaculture as a distinctive subculture with its own norms, beliefs and practices have been proposed, such as buying goods and services from other permaculture practitioners to create a permaculture economy. That idea was current in the 1990s. It would be more easily done today through permaculture e-commerce websites.
Permaculture practitioners have not been the most effective communicators, yet in such a networked subculture communication would be the lifeblood. Harold Rheingold and Stewart Brand realised this about alternative culture at the end of the 1960s. They launched The Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of tools, publications and ideas that would appear as updated editions over the next couple decades. The Catalog succeeded in tying alternative culture practitioners into a loose network and gave them a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves or their group of friends.
Also blocking the rerouting of permaculture into a distinct and closely-connected subculture is its diverse social makeup. The idea would appeal to those interested in trying new ideas and to those on the social fringe who feel themselves not fully part of mainstream culture. It would have less appeal to others, especially the more-affluent who have some degree of identification with permaculture but who are doing well from the mainstream economy. How numerous this group is we don’t know, however it is sometimes visible as socially and economically comfortable, middle class people who cherrypick from permaculture, practicing the palatable parts like home gardening and leaving aside the less-palatable ideas like permaculture being about change and being inherently political in challenging the system they are doing well from.
Recruiting ground
Alternative subculture was a recruiting ground for early permaculture. That is no surprise because it was within that culture that the more innovative thinkers, the tinkerers, the dissatisfied, the searchers lived — the people who would naturally gravitate to a new, innovative idea like permaculture which addressed their concerns and offered solutions. Read early copies of Permaculture magazine (later Permaculture International Journal) and you find Bill Mollison acknowledging this.
The occasionally-heard call of earlier decades for permaculture to dissociate from its assumed ‘hippie image’ was a call to mainstream the design system. That, anyway, is the direction many in permaculture took and which initiatives like Permaculture Australia’s Accredited Permaculture Training, the nationally recognised tertiary education scheme, moved the design system towards. The call to leave behind its supposed hippy image inadvertently proposed a revision of permaculture history to make it appeal to mainstream audiences, yet that image was one held by few. Rewriting history is seldom a good idea. History need to be acknowledged so we understand what we are dealing with and move forward.
Absorption
As many of the innovations of alternative culture were absorbed into the social mainstream they became everyday practices. Others drifted into the economic mainstream and became industries. They are with us today — the organic food industry, natural therapies, home food-gardening, renewable energy technologies and more. Some originated outside alternative culture and were adopted by it. In the process, that set those ideas and innovations on-course for mainstream society.
History is easily overlooked. The origins of ideas and organisations that are not revisited are often forgotten. So it is with the source in alternative culture of many of the things we find in today’s culture and in today’s permaculture. Time and again I have encountered people new to permaculture who know little to nothing of its past.
Now, a new book promises to explore the origins of alternative ideas persisting in today’s societies. How We Got from Twinkies to Tofu, by Johnathan Kauffman, takes food as its focus.
The book presents a US perspective, however while paralleling the US experience alternative culture in Australia had its differences. One is that it was probably more successful here. We should keep this in mind when reading Johnathan’s book.
Read a review of Hippy Food on Lloyd Khan’s blog.
