Permaculture: our story, our history…
The Trainer Papers: 2
The Trainer Papers were first published in 2010. I am republishing them 21 years after first publication because their perspective may be of historical value to the story of the permaculture design system and associated initiatives like the Transition Towns movement, and because of the upsurge in interest in ideas about sustainability and regenerative systems.
Preamble
The Trainer Papers document the late-2009 conversations between retired UNSW lecturer, Ted Trainer, and journalist, Russ Grayson. In The Trainer Papers: 2, Russ responds to Ted’s friendly critique of the Transitions Towns movement published in The Trainer Papers: 1.
Russ was a tutor and occasional guest lecturer in Ted’s UNSW course which was based on the ideas appearing in the Club of Rome’s 1972 book, The Limits to Growth.
The Trainer Papers: 2-a response to Ted Trainer
Here’s my response to Ted Trainer’s article in The Trainer Papers: 1. I take points that Ted raises and comment on them. I advise reading The Trainer Papers: 1 to understand them in the context in which Ted places them.
Ted’s paragraphs quote straight from The Trainer Papers: 1 and are followed by my responses denoted by RG.
TED
The way of life we have in rich countries is grossly unsustainable and unjust.
RG
What constitutes a rich country is changing rapidly. When Ted started to use the term a few decades ago, things were more clear cut — the rich world was the industrialised world, predominately but not completely the West (Japan and South Korea were not of the West but were industrialised capitalist economies). Now, China is rising to affluence and India is next and could even outdo China in this regard.
Ted writes that “Our way of life would not be possible if rich countries were not taking far more than their fair share of world resources… “. China, of course, is sourcing much of its industrial raw materials, including energy, from all over the world, providing further evidence that we should include the newly-industrialising states as part of the ‘rich world’.
TED
“… it is not possible to solve the problems without transition to a very different kind of society, one not based on globalisation… “.
RG
Ted apparently means economic globalisation, something that has been with us, off and on, since the days of mercantile capitalism and the China tea trade.
If we go further back, economic globalisation of the known world can be seen in the form of its primary overland trade route — the Silk Road — that carried goods back and forth from Asia to Europe via the Islamic world, and the later sea route linking Europe and Asia. Then there was the Roman Empire which sources grains and other goods from countries bordering the Mediterranean — Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) — to use the concept of the maritime trade routes. So, globalisation, trade through the known world of different empires and civilisation, has long been a feature of civilisation.
That is a historic note. It does not deny the negative impacts of our current globalisation with its exploitation of developing country labour and the pollution it produces. For sure, those things need remediation.
I don’t think we should discard all globalisation. The internet, for example, has allowed the emergence of a globalised civil society, a global online economy and global cooperation at the community organisational level. We are a globalised civilisation other than in economics and some of that is surely a good thing given the need for international agreements to limit pollution and other negative aspects of technological civilisation, such as the successful Montreal Protocol which is reducing the volume of chlorofluorocarbon gases in the upper atmosphere and so reducing their weakening of the planetary ozone layer.
TED
“… A quite different economic system, one not driven by market forces and profit, and in which there is far less work, production and consumption than at present, and a large cashless sector, including many free goods from local commons.”
RG
Ted mentions this in his explanation of his concept of The Simpler Way and it is clear that his ‘different economic system’ is not the corporate growth economy.
Local economies, especially when it comes to the exchange of basic goods and services, might be based on an understanding of what we might call the ‘natural market’. This is not a trade in eucalyptus leaves and koala skins, it is the local exchange in kind or for cash that emerges from human needs and their satisfaction by local growers, processors, manufacturers and service providers. It is the economy of life basics that can be found in village markets. Perhaps a scaled-up version of it could be developed for modern societies in transition into new forms.
Humanity has tried a range of different economic systems. There is the corporate-dominated system, versions of which look much like what we have. There was communism, which, to quote Karl Marx, would reward people contributing “according to their skills” and rewarding them “according to their needs”. That idea was lost as communist states adopted the Stalinist model and reverted to the old-fashioned, garden variety authoritarianism which was, in part, what their revolutions originally revolted against. There is socialism, a diverse range of socio-economies some of which adopt the liberal economy model and modify it for social and economic justice.
Ted’s contention that economically liberal capitalist societies can absorb initiatives like community-based local currencies, local trading systems like LETS (Local Exchange and Trading System) and other non-monetary local exchange systems is proven by actuality. An example was the way in which ‘alternative’ ideas and practices coming out of the countercultural alternative social movement of the late-1960s and 1970s were adopted in the form of small businesses and eventually incorporated into the economic system over the following two decades. The practice of yoga, some New Age practices, natural therapies and traditional Chinese medicine are just three examples of what started out as socially fringe practices becoming industries. While they were alternatives to analogous practices in mainstream society, they offered no alternative models in becoming livelihoods and services to that society, as they would have had they adopted a worker or other co-operative structure.
Modern capitalism is an adaptive system which absorbs new ideas like these and, where it cannot turn them to profit-making ends, usually ignores them. The challenge for Ted’s Economy B model is in avoiding co-option while offering utility value to users.
Ted
“… a radically different culture, in which competitive and acquisitive individualism is replaced by frugal, self-sufficient collectivism.”
RG
Cultural change is slow and a big job. Culture cannot be imposed as it grows organically as the combination of tradition, geography, economy and social structure.
A word about terms. Words carry implied meaning. Thus, ‘frugal’ while having some appeal to those cogniscent of global trends, is easily interpreted as ‘poverty’ and ‘doing without essentials’ by others. Likewise, ‘collectivism’, while Ted uses it to describe shared culture, also brings to mind the disaster of forced collectivisation of farms in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, China’s Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s Year Zero. It’s okay to use the terms for Ted’s preferred audience, but we should choose words carefully when addressing the general public.
Another example is Ted’s: “An economy that focuses on need, rights, justice, especially with respect to the Third World”.
The term in question here is ‘Third World’, because it has been disappearing now for some time. Why? Third World was an economistic term formulated to describe the so-called ‘developing’ countries so as to distinguish them from the First World — the affluent, industrialised states — and the Second World—the states that made up the Soviet bloc of the 1950s to the 1990s.
That international structure started to change with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the opening of borders in Europe between the then-collapsing Soviet satellite states and the West. The world that has evolved is so different that the Third World description has lost its relevance. What were Third World countries when the term had its greatest use in the 1960s and the following decade now display a stratification and polarisation of wealth like that found in the First World. Like economies, social dysfunction and growing poverty has been globalised, rendering these terms of little practical value.
TED
” …living among many artists and crafts people…”.
RG
I’ve known Ted for some time and I know that Ted is a man of the manual world, of doing things by hand. He’s an artisan at heart as well as in practice at his home at Pigface Point.
However, we do not live in an artisan world anymore. I’m not saying we discard artisanship; it remains a valuable and valid approach to production, however we should not forget that modern technology is a large part of the lives of contemporary people, especially younger demographics. Technologies are an everyday part of their being. The technophobes among us might not like this, however I think we should recognise and make use of it.
Technologies have been an integral part of human evolution and today’s tech is a continuity of that historic association. What were palaeolithic depictions of animals on cave walls have evolved into high-resolution photographs on digital networks.
It’s not only younger people who adopt digital and other modern tech. This I learned when attending a workshop to learn about my first iPhone quite some time ago now, the one I had to buy after my Palm Pilot crashed completely (sorry, Microsoft, your Windows Mobile 6.5 was a dog’s dinner of an operating system). Who attended? They were all people my age. That says something about the adoption of technology by people outside the younger demographic.
What I suggest is that we learn to use and be at home with modern digital communications and production technologies because it enables us to reach a wider audience and, anyway, we can’t leave all the fun to young people.
Technophobia is today less of a barrier to the penetration of new ideas although all too often it finds a home among the environmentally minded. I believe that modern technology applied to the production of needs and wants (which is what some artisan products qualify as) can happily coexist with the artisan approach in a productive, enjoyable and workable hybrid culture.
Ted
“Modern/high technologies and mass production can be used extensively where appropriate, including IT. The Simpler Way will free many more resources for purposes such as medical research than are devoted to these at present because most of the present vast quantity of unnecessary production will be phased out.”
RG
This is a point Ted emphasised in his university lectures. It is a theory of resource diversion, of redirecting investment, intellectual and material resources from production of unnecessary products and services towards those with social benefit. It is more a socialist idea in its basics, in the sense that its focus is social wellbeing, however Ted didn’t envision or put it in political terms.
It would be difficult to envision a world free of IT now, if that is part of Ted’s “unnecessary production”. As for freeing resources for Ted’s example of medical research and the like, I have a question that maybe others out there can answer for me. It is this: In the sort of zero economic growth society that Ted advocates, with its lower GDP, would there be sufficient governmental and corporate revenue to devote to medical research and associated hi-tech pursuits? Is hi-tech, modern medicine and other technology-intensive applications, and the research and development that goes into it, an artefact of a socio-economy based on growth or can it be done within a steady stare economy?
If the answer to this is negative, then in a steady state economy such as Ted favours do we risk a return to the bad old days of communicable disease and preventative disorders that plagued past centuries?
TED
“What we will have done is build a new economy, Economy B, under the old one. Economy B will give us the power to produce the basic goods and services we need not just to survive as the old economy increasingly fails to provide, but to give all a high quality of life. The old economy could collapse and we would still be able to provide for ourselves.”
RG
Ted seems to be advocating the approach taken by permaculture and the ‘alternative’ social culture of the 1970s of creating the new within the body of an increasingly dysfunctional old society. Permaculture’s idea was to sidestep the conventional tactics of political opposition, such as confrontation. Instead, permaculture advocates talked about building the social utilities they saw as beneficial and hoping that their uptake would eventually reach a critical mass where they merged into the social mainstream without turmoil. The approach is reminiscent of Rodgers Ideas Diffusion Theory. The precedents would be the drift of 1970s countercultural artefacts like natural therapies, organic food and intentional communities (today’s versions are known as ‘ecovillages’) into the mainstream socio-economy.
This is a social evolutionary approach and it is how much social change occurs. It differs from social revolutionary and other abrupt disjunctions that flip societies into a new state as the old suddenly falls apart. Ted, of course, understood how abrupt disjunction could disrupt societies and lead to collapse or substantial reconfiguration, however his thinking didn’t drift towards catastrophism.
To play a role in this sociocultural transition, Transition Town organisations, a focus of Ted’s critique appearing in The Trainer Papers: 1, will have to become more sophisticated in their approach and move beyond the permaculture model as it is presently and popularly practiced.
As a social movement, Transition Towns could be described as ‘permaculture plus’. It will have to be this because, through its 35 years of evolution, permaculture has become a better-known grassroots technology for sustainable living but has achieved little by way of influencing social decision makers and institutions. Permaculture, in rightly focusing on acting at the local level, has not been an achiever in acting at the state or national level to any appreciable degree. There is anecdotal evidence that quite a few in permaculture do not favour such a role for the design system. If this continues, does that relegate permaculture to a bit-player role in social change if its ideas diffusion model proves insufficient?
Here’s an aspect of permaculture for transitioners to avoid: sometimes in permaculture organisations you see a kind of self-induced euphoria, something like the groupthink and self-generated enthusiasm of an Amway convention in which people imagine that their permaculture association or permaculture in its entirety is so well known and so influential and commonsensical that it foreshadows imminent change in society. Take a step outside the permaculture milieu, however, and you find that the design system is known (most popularly as a type of organic gardening that doesn’t dig the soil but spreads dry grasses on top of it) but is less influential than imagined.
The New Left of the late-1960s fell into this self-delusion when some if its more-revolutionarily-minded participants believed that big demonstrations and increasing public opposition to the war in Vietnam were creating a pre-revolutionary situation foreshadowing sudden and substantial political change.
The error is in mistaking quantity for quality, correlation for causation. You can have a horde of members in a permaculture organisation but if most are not active in any significant way beyond their garden gate, then quantity is countered by inertia. Better to go for a small number of key, innovative people who will act to jointly create an impact larger than their numbers would suggest (ref: the well known Margaret Mead truism about small groups of people leading change). Perhaps that would be the way to go for Ted to see the changes he wants.
TED
“The Simpler Way contradicts the core systems of the present society and cannot be built unless we replace them. Consumer-capitalist society cannot be fixed;… “.
RG
This is where Ted could be seen to depart from the permaculture approach.
Permaculture contains a Mollisonian principle that proposes the smallest proportionally effective investment in making change happen (‘make the least change for the greatest effect’). The implication here is the reform of existing social institutions rather than completely taking them down and replacing them with something better. Permaculture would seek to change ‘consumer-capitalist’ society by changing its direction from within. Is this different to Ted’s approach which could be seen as having more in common with social revolutionaries, although in his document he doesn’t discuss the mechanics of how change would happen.
TED
“What do we have to do in order to eventually achieve such huge and radical changes?
“The answer goes far beyond the things that green/transition people are doing now, such as setting up community gardens, food co-ops, recycling centres, permaculture groups, skill banks, home-craft courses, commons, volunteering, downshifting, etc. Yes, all these are the kinds of institutions and practices we will have in the new sustainable and just world so it is understandable that many people within the ecovillage, Transition Towns and green movements assume that if we just work at establishing more and more of these things then in time this will have created the new society. I think this is a serious mistake.”
RG
All of these things that Ted mentions are components of a sustainable society, as he says. This is the closest he comes to delving into the detail of how his Economy B would come about. These things have caught the popular imagination and are replicating because they are good ideas whose time has come or because they meet some social/personal needs. This happens in an organic way, not through some central plan. Unlike environmental organisations, permaculture follows no central plan or strategy. It evolves by drift, by the initiatives its practitioners take and the ideas they hatch. Together, perhaps these initiatives will generate some emergent properties within conventional society and a new model of society emerges from the body of the old.
The characteristics Ted lists are a great deal more than what he describes as “…the lifestyle choices and hobby interests of a relatively few people”. The numbers participating are growing. In idea-diffusion terms, many of these things are the property of the innovative fringe, the early adopters. As we can see with ecovillages, community gardens and permaculture, ideas flow from early adopters to early mass adopters. This is how ideas become part of the social mainstream, exactly where we want them.
Moreover, for Ted to categories them as “hobby interests” is to denigrate the social innovators adopting them. They might be hobby interests to some, however for many, things like community gardening have become a part of everyday life. They have been normalised and are a part of daily lived experience. This implies that they are more than hobbies.
Ted
“If the global vision sketched above is valid then we ordinary people in our towns and suburbs eventually have to establish our own local Economy B, take control of it and relegate the market to a very minor role, identify local needs and work out how to meet them, get rid of unemployment, work out how to cut town imports, etc. Sandgrope towards the practices which enable us to collectively self-govern the town.”
RG
A few comments on this statement which, surprisingly for Ted, fails to consider the history of the permaculture and allied movements:
Economy B: people like Robert Rosen and Damien Lynch (who started August Investments) were early developers of what became the ethical or social investment movement (and here), and they came from the early permaculture milieu.
The market: see my comments earlier on the ‘natural market’. Ted’s comment about “relegating the market to a very minor role” will not build the viable local economies that we need to sustain a sustainable culture. Sure, it’s a different market that Ted is talking about, however markets at the local and regional scale are important to sustainable civilisations and in Ted’s Economy B there would probably be the need for a national market in some goods and services. Regions cannot produce all of their needs.
I wonder if Ted still labours under the old notion that markets are somehow evil? It was a notion that permeated the early environment movement, probably a leftover from the alternative culture of the 1970s. This, some of the alternative economic innovators found out when environmentalists preferred not to support them and kept their money with conventional banking and investment institutions.
Ted’s “…get rid of unemployment, work out how to cut town imports, etc” all depend on the development of viable local and regional economies.
TED
“ …if your goal is to build the kind of society that I’ve argued we must have if we are to solve global problems of sustainability and justice, you would very definitely not think it was sufficient or appropriate just to encourage a thousand flowers to bloom. You would think very carefully about what projects were most important to achieve that goal, you would realise that this must involve taking collective control over the local economy, and you would recognise that developing this vision among people in the region is the supremely important task to work on.”
“From the perspective I’ve outlined, making your town more resilient is far from a sufficient goal. That could be little more than building a haven of safety in a world of oil scarcity, a haven within a wider society that remains obsessed with growth, markets, exploiting the Third World, and using mobile phones made with tantalum from the Congo.”
RG
“You would think very carefully about what projects were most important…”. Ted’s is a call for prioritising the projects we engage with. This, though, is something which can be tackled only at the regional or local level by permaculture and allied organisations because the design system has no central authority to guide what it does nationally or even state-by-state. This is a strength because it makes space for a diversity of projects. It is a weakness because it limits the larger-scale application of permaculture ideas.
Ted’s “community gardens, food co-ops, recycling centres, permaculture groups, skill banks, home-craft courses, commons, volunteering…” and so on that he mentioned earlier seem to me to be the means of, to quote, “…taking collective control over the local economy and… developing this vision among people in the region”.
His comment about taking control over local economies and stimulating that vision in the region is a huge ask. It is not the current drift in permaculture, the environment or social justice movements, all ideological fellow travellers of permaculture. Permaculture’s focus on an alternative economics in the 1980s has long-since faded although it has not disappeared. My guess is that it faded because it was not as hands-on as, say, making an organic garden, and because it presumed at least a basic knowledge of economics.
Permaculture has partially achieved Ted’s idea of stimulating an alternative vision in the regions. The Permaculture International Journal was important in doing that, as was Green Connections, Joy Finch’s Australian quarterly reporting the permaculture, environmental and social activist scene that ran in parallel with Permaculture International Journal through the late-1990s. In its latter years Permaculture International Journal moved to newsagent distribution, extending the reaach of the ideas between its covers.
I’m unsure why Ted singles out “… using mobile phones made with Tantalum from the Congo” rather than any other technology using raw materials from developing countries. It probably has to do with the environmental impact of mining as an extractive industry, the extent of the tantalum reserves and the working conditions of the people doing the mining and mineral processing. Perhaps it’s also because the technology is on a steep upward adoption curve and is therefore more noticable. He says nothing of the advantages the technology brings and his statement comes across as a little technophobic and contrary to his idea that hi-tech has a role in a sustainable future.
Ted says elsewhere in his document that hi-tech has a place in his Economy B society. He is a practitioner of intermediate, later called ‘appropriate’ technology that stands midpoint between less-efficient traditional technology and costly hi-tech. Visitors to his Pigface Point property see many of these technologies as working models. Ted is an advocate of Fritz Schumacher’s intermediate technology.
Writing about the Transition Towns movement, Ted earlier criticised its lack of detail in describing a strategy to achieve its goals. I don’t buy this. If anything, the movement and its publications have been more specific in describing how to go about making change than, for example, the permaculture movement which relies largely upon the alternative though compatible sets of general design principles devised by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. Sure, it lacks the unitary and strategic approach that has proven successful for the environment movement, however Transition Towns is diffuse in structure, not unitary, although it appears to have achieved greater unity in approach than has permaculture. That I put down to the detail in its literature.
Ted’s writing and his teaching at UNSW bring a focus on widescale societal reconstruction. He does not propose creating resilient towns, cities and suburbs as enclaves amid chaos. That could lead to an ‘I’m alright Jack’ mentality more attuned to survivalism than social change. The real value of establishing the things that would make up a sustainable culture is as proof-of-concept examples and as prototypes that, like any good idea, can be replicated and adapted.
NEXT: The Trainer Papers 3
The Trainer Papers—a four part series
The Trainer Papers 1
The Trainer Papers 2
The Trainer Papers 3
The Trainer Papers 4
Ted Trainer on Permaculture
Simpler Way podcast
Ted Trainer has recorded a podcast about his Simpler Way concept. Find it just down from the top of the list of Michael’s podcasts, which the following link goes to. 53 minutes. Critical feedback welcome.
Books by Ted Trainer…
- The Conserver Society: Alternatives for Sustainability. 1995, Ted Trainer; Zed Books, UK. ISBN 1856492753.
- Towards a Sustainable Economy: The Need for Fundamental Change. 1995, Ted Trainer; Carpenter Publishing. ISBN 1897766149. A critique of economics as it exists and the story of how it could be in setting up regenerative local economies.
- Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society. 2007, Ted Trainer; Springer. ISBN 140205548X. A challenge to the assumption that simply switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy can sustain our consumer society.
- The Simpler Way: Collected Writings of Ted Trainer. 2020, Ted Trainer; Simplicity Institute. ISBN 0994282877. An anthology contains some of Trainer’s most insightful essays about sustainable society, a new economy and local self-management while living within ecological limits.
Books mentioned in the text…
The Limits to Growth. 1972, Donnella H Meadows, Dennis L Meadows, Jorgen Randers, William W Behrens 111; Signet. ISBN 0451057678
Permaculture the social movement — a look inside…
A little permaculture history
