Underneath the Bunting at the Potluck Supper

David Holmgren’s ‘Crash on Demand: Welcome to the Brown Tech Future’ article has provoked some interesting discussion, with high-profile responses from Nicole Foss of the Automatic Earth and Rob Hopkins of Transition and comments beneath both. I’ve found the richest stream to be the informal conversations about Holmgren, Foss and Hopkins’s articles in the Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design Facebook group. In that forum there appears to be two main camps of opinion forming: one following the Hopkins (and to a degree the Foss) critique sees Holmgren’s idea as unhelpful at best and a poor demonstration of people care at worst, the other camp sees Holmgren’s idea as an opportunity for ‘direct-action’ and ‘that people of influence should be stating where they stand in these philosophical debates’. This resonated with a comment expressed by a fellow Permaculture Association trustee that at our next meeting we should discuss some of these ideas on the positioning of 'permaculture' in the public/online debates, because we have a responsibility to give a steer from the Permaculture Association.

I think that it might be difficult to find a common  position that contains the diverse opinions of the trustees, let alone the membership we represent, so I can’t personally see at present that our steer should be more than a reminder to use and value diversity.  I posted the original article and responses in the Facebook group but initially stayed out of the discussion afterwards, feeling that all the articles had their particular merits. Then someone posted this quote from Bill Mollison in Introduction to Permaculture:

“The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.”

To which I felt compelled to reply:

“I guess we keep going back to who that 'us' is, of which 10% is enough. Mind you, I always take Mollison's statistics with a pinch of salt - he talks a good talk. I don't know when Mollison wrote or said that - most of his public comments come from the 1980s and early 1990s. Given the growth of permaculture & similar activities since, I imagine that a number of people greater than the 10% of 'us' he was referring to then probably have produced at least on a small-scale in their gardens. Is there any more 'enough for everyone' than there was then because of it? I guess this is a reason why RH looks toward outreach, engagement and scalability through Transition points and perhaps why he questions Holmgren's unsourced throwing about of numbers.”

That seemed to be taking more of a ‘Hopkins line’ than I felt, but it took another comment to bring that out. Some one else noted that:

 “I do not want a future where small % of the population plot to throw the rest into turmoil, I want a future where everyone is empowered to join in and make their difference and to help take society forwards. Planning to crash the system doesnt fit well with the kind of world and attitude I want to create. As Rob says, it’s not very 'people care'


For some reason that provoked me into some more thoughts on the issue, which follow:

Holmgren’s strategy is basically [as he acknowledges] a version of the well-worn economic-boycott, which previous social movements have used to influence systems perceived as destructive of human and/or natural capital: such as economic boycotts of South Africa, Israel, Nestle, Coca Cola etc. Withdrawal of economic relations with these nation states or corporations is designed to have negative consequences for those boycotted, through consumers providing negative feedback – placing a financial capital cost on abuse of human/natural capitals. If the boycotted actors do not respond by ending their abuse of human/natural capitals, they incur the financial capital costs, which may lead to other consequences such as employees losing their jobs and personal financial security through redundancy. This means an action to try and end human rights abuses through an economic boycott, might involve some harm to people through bring economic turmoil to their lives. Nevertheless, if the harm to people effected by the continuing business-as-usual of an actor is significantly greater than the harm to people effected by crashing that business-as-usual – e.g. boycotting South African businesses and products, leading to job losses in order to catalyse the end of apartheid – then the strategy might still be considered an ethical response reflecting people care and fair share.

The Holmgren ‘plot’ (I use quotes as the conventional definition of plot is a plan made in secret by a group of people to do something illegal or harmful – and this is a public proposal not a secret plan, not illegal and questionably harmful) is: ‘behaviour change from dependent consumers to responsible self-reliant producers’ with the intent of ‘reducing consumption and capital enough to trigger a crash of the fragile global financial system’.

I understand the ‘global financial system’ to represent business-as-usual: growth focused economics, based on ever increasing over-exploitation of the Earth’s resources, with evident consequences including dangerous carbon emissions, nose-diving biodiversity, acidification of the oceans, massive wealth disparities, declining amounts of freshwater, topsoil, forests, wetlands, coral reefs etc. Natural capital is already failing suddenly (crashing) – business-as-usual has triggered a crash. Everyday it gets worse. If we agree that this is the case, then we should be explicit that we do not want business to carry on as usual leaving us with three main options: trying to adapt the status quo situation to a sustainable alternative over  time, trying to end the status quo situation as quickly as possible, doing nothing.

‘Doing nothing’ is implicit support for business-as-usual and therefore untenable. Trying to adapt the status quo situation to a sustainable alternative over  time is the strategy of ‘transition’ – it is based on the incremental approach, it is designed to be inclusive, to take as long as it takes and to lead towards designing and implementing a plan for energy descent. Many Transition groups are in their early stages, others are more progressed and no doubt have had some success in their locality. Meanwhile everyday carbon emissions, biodiversity figures, ocean acidity, wealth disparity, and the amounts of freshwater, topsoil, forests, wetlands, coral reefs etc. have got worse. As Rob Hopkins notes in ‘the economies where emissions are actually growing’ like China and India ‘the kind of 'post-materialists' who in Western economies might pioneer … [a] "crash on demand" hardly exist’, it might be fair to conclude therefore  that the kind of ‘post-materialists’ who might pioneer Transition do not exist in those ‘economies where emissions are actually growing’ either. In fact, this tends to highlight that in terms of tactics there is not a lot of difference between Transition and ‘Crash on Demand’ – both focus on the household and local community levels as loci of action, both hope for a ripple effect from action on these levels by dispersed concerned individuals across the world, both think we should start right now if we haven’t already started, both promote actions which are worth doing anyway, both know that the success of their approach is not guaranteed.

The point of contention commonly found with Holmgren’s proposal appears to largely be a matter of marketing. Rob Hopkins has long held that the ‘key to our success will be our ability to generate positive visions of future, to harness the power of engaged optimism’, similarly in Nicole Foss’s response to Holmgren she writes ‘Permaculture has a very positive image as a solution to the need for perpetual growth, and this might be put at risk if it became associated with any deliberate attempt to cause system failure.’
If the success of Transition and/or permaculture is predicated on how well it “plays with the masses” or ‘speak[s] beyond the People Like Us’ – does it have to hide genuine desires and need for deep systemic change? If we believe that business-as-usual is killing the planet and  that swift action is necessary to stop it, is it either ethical or effective to hide that away underneath the bunting at the potluck supper?

I'll give the last word to Jamie Saunders:

'Design/Plan for the best, prepare for the worst... with spread-betting for robustness, resilience, durability and 'stability'/viability'... not either/or, and/both as 'the future is unwritten'... '

Crash on Demand

My attention has just been drawn to David Holmgren's new essay Crash on Demand. This slide from the article has some relevance to the scalability issue. Many permaculture designs are at the household scale, many others are at the local community scale and it seems fairly clear to me how many designs would be scalable from the first to the second.

If I understand Holmgren correctly, he sees the local community level being the highest level that can effectively be influenced by bottom-up action in the near to medium term:

The nested future scenarios concept highlights the importance of household and local community strategies whether or not larger scale systems collapse. Those (permaculture) strategies are effective at the local and household scale, while the ones promoted to us by the upper levels of power (e.g. upgrading the light bulb) are weak and tend to undermine our resilience and autonomy (e.g. centralised disaster management systems). This understanding can save us spending too much emotional energy focused on which scenario will win out in the end.

This is not a rejection of the idea of systems change at higher levels however but an identification of where the permaculture intervention point actually is most effective:

I believe that actively building parallel and largely non-monetary household and local community economies with as little as 10% of the population has the potential to function as a deep systematic boycott of the centralised systems as a whole, that could lead to more than 5% contraction in the centralised economies. Whether this became the straw that broke the back of the global financial system or a tipping point, on one could ever say, even after the event.

The driving argument of Holmgren's article is that by concentrating our energies on the household and local community levels and withdrawing from the global financial system, we might leverage global change. Systemic change effected by strategic withdrawal.  No pussyfooting however, this is a radical withdrawal from financial instruments that  the western middle class is well-adjusted to - mortgages, pensions, investments - as well as the conspicuous consumerism that is rife and almost define modern life.

This global change is also predicated on facilitating a global economic crash to save us from the worst climate calamities. Economics as a subset of ecology, planet before profit, international Terraism.

Permafutures: Continuation

Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision

Via John Robb's Global Guerillas blog, here's a couple of corporate future visions of the 'Continuation' scenario from Microsoft and Ericcson:



Robb notes that: "Here are two corporate visions of what the future will feel/look like.  They are visually slick.  Unfortunately, the futures these videos depict won't happen."

Microsoft's vision is explored more on the company's site here.

Permafutures

Video from the Permafutures workshop at the 2011 London Permaculture Festival:

Ecotopia

It’s a truism that speculative fiction tells the reader more about the present it was written in than about the future – a fact born out yet again by two pieces of this week’s reading.

If this fact is more evident in Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia than it is in the “Ecopolis” articles in this week’s New Scientist (17/06/2006) then that only reveals our blindness to the conventions of our own time.

In Ecotopia the pungent reek of the early Seventies issues from practically every page. The fashions, the sexual politics, the marijuana usage – all speak of a particular hippy moment and now tend to detract from the deeper intention of the book to present a vision of a sustainable society. It’s easy now to fault Callenbach for this, but equally easy to see how important it was for him to present some vision of how a change in social mores could parallel and allow a change in the wider society. For me personally a degree of uneasiness was brought on by the louche promiscuity of Callenbach’s utopia. I’m prepared to accept that this could just be my hang-up – but it also seemed wrapped up in a vision of liberated womanhood more to do with male fantasy than female emancipation. The admirable intention of presenting a more feminine society, female leadership and sexual equality felt somewhat tainted by the air of a free-wheeling Lothario who really ‘understands’ and ‘digs’ women. Again, perhaps these are just my hang-ups.

If I’ve gone on at length about these aspects of the book that didn’t gel with me, that’s only to precede my declaration that I felt pretty down with most of the rest of its vision. Ignoring the conceit of the Pacific North West seceding from the USA, much of the novel seemed to present a realistic vision of a future society.

What is interesting comparing Ecotopia and Ecopolis are the similarities of vision presented 31 years apart (that very little has been implemented across the span of most of my entire life thus far - which that 31 years also personally represents - is rather depressing.)

The proposed new Chinese suburb-city of Dongtan is pedestrianised with electric vehicles, trains, urban greenery, urban food production, mass recycling and alternative energy generation. Not at all dissimilar to Ecotopia’s San Francisco. Peer a little deeper however and the cracks appear – both in the divergence of Ecotopian and Ecopolitan visions – and in the sustainable vision of Dongtan per se.

Dongtan is a new build – an entirely new satellite city for Shanghai “20 minutes drive” away. It is thus a very different beast to the retro-fitted San Francisco in Ecotopia. In this way the city sized debate mirrors the eco-home debate. One can start from scratch and build a brand new eco-home to the highest standards possible – but not everyone can do this. Our existing buildings also represent decades if not centuries of embodied energy that we are likely to waste (which we can ill afford) if we reject them, demolish them to build anew. If we could do it all, we could only do so by exploiting even more excessive amounts of the global energy supply –and this vision is clearly not sustainable on a local or global scale. We must follow a more earthy path of converting our existing housing stock to greater sustainability – retro fitting.

To the great credit of New Scientist it makes a critical analysis of Dongtan’s eco-credibility. The Dongtan vision proposed as a possible model for China’s future cities aims for a per-resident carbon footprint of 2.2 ha. This both exceeds the current footprint of the rural Chinese population (1.6 ha) that are migrating to become the new city dwellers (thus increasing China’s total footprint) and the “idealised global per capita footprint” (1.8ha – based on 2006 population levels). Dongtan is therefore not as bad as our conventional cities – but does not present in itself a sustainable vision. We could perhaps hope that developments like Dongtan will be bridging solutions to ever more sustainable implementations – but would we be correct in doing so? Retrofitting Shanghai for sustainability may have been a more useful activity. In fact, given that so much of Shanghai is itself new-build, one wonders where the true vision for sustainability lies. That Dongtan is perceived as having value as a tourist attraction perhaps indicates something of its showcase function.

The ecological problems faced by China will inevitably lead them towards some lower energy solutions, and the world can usefully benefit by learning from them. But will China put sustainability before growth? If it does not, can anything it does be truly sustainable?

Ecotopia is a steady-state economy that has sloughed off the demon driver of ‘growth’ – that totemic bugbear of capitalism eating away the world like a necrotic virus. It is the vision of capitalism, its modus operandi and belief systems which are the contemporary conventions permeating the speculations of Ecopolis. We can only hope that 31 years hence those seem as amusing and of their time as some of Callenbach’s seventies-ism. Otherwise we are well and truly screwed.

[Originally published on the Yourmindfire blog: http://yourmindfire.blogspot.com/2006/06/grow-your-own-hope.html]