Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The late David Fleming was a maverick economist who left his imprint across British environmentalism from the Green Party to the Transition movement by way of the New Economics Foundation. In Lean Logic, he presents a lifetime’s thinking on how humanity might deal with a coming ‘climacteric’ – an interlocking crisis of climate, energy, water, food and other resources.
We are living the first stages of a major change in civilization. Two of its basic characteristics are a reduction of energy and available materials. This will mean greater social simplification (fewer people, interconnections and social specialization).
My hypothesis is the following – permaculture as a third wave green movement, with its strong emphasis on a philosophical lifestyle and holistic paradigm, lacks a strong political approach, which eventually will forbid the movement to go from a middle-class lifestyle to a more general model of society.
What is concerning is that it is ever more apparent that many of our civilization’s structural systems, many of which resemble the pyramid archetype, seem more and more dysfunctional or “captured”.
Bright, experienced and committed folks have been developing and refining them for a very long time: solutions waiting for the general populace to acknowledge that the nature and urgency of the crises that threaten our existence requires systemic change.
Our purpose should be to force governments and corporations to do what must be done. There is no other way that this is going to happen.
Nor is there any need for politics to be something inflicted on us, at great cost to our souls, by tyrannical, abstract systems. Instead it should and could be something we recapture from its lofty conceptual realms, disarm, bring down to earth, and revive — in the process remaking ourselves and our world.
Suddenly believers in the possibility of a better civilization, one rooted in increasing human co-operation and harmony, find ourselves in a world where demagogues can now realistically plot the polar opposite: a new despotism rooted in rising isolationist nationalism and human conflict. The more we dig into how the demagogues and their supporters have organised their recent successes, in particular in using technology to manipulate voter beliefs on an industrial scale, the more terrified many of us find ourselves.
As a developed set of social practices, techniques and ethical norms, permaculture has a lot to say to the world of the commons. This is immediately clear from reading the twelve design principles of permaculture that David Holmgren enumerated in his 2002 book Permaculture: Principles and Practices Beyond Sustainability.
The island state of Dominica (absolutely NOT the Dominican Republic!) is unique, constantly confounding my expectations. It is a tropical Caribbean island, but not a typical Caribbean island. It is hot and wet, mountainous, with small rocky beaches, few tourists, and a fiercely independent spirit in a part of the world dominated by their powerful neighbour to the North. I was invited by WEF, the Waitukubuli Ecological Foundation, to visit and help them explore Transition as a possible way for this island.
Whither Earthland? The only certainty about the future is surprise, the one constant change.
Both Trump and Brexit can be explained by the failure of mainstream political elites to address the pain inflicted on ordinary citizens in the neoliberal era.
