2017 continues to unpack the expected and inevitable spools of horror, shock and outrage. But -this being an Aeonography post- let me remind you that Spring is on its way in the Northern Hemisphere.
It is worthwhile sitting with that idea for a moment. Change. The unstoppable warming of the soil triggering the described-but-not-explained process of seed becoming shoot becoming leaf becoming solar sugar factory.
That is what green plants are, of course. They are how the energy of the sun -of Sol itself- enters the systems and food supply of the entire planet. Sugars converted in the leaf are traded into the soil biome at the roots for minerals that enter the diets of more complex creatures, who themselves enter the diets of other complex creatures, who are all ultimately returned to the earth as minerals to be exchanged for sugars in the root zone again after another century or so.
Green plants are -in a real sense- how Light embodies itself on earth.
Driving around Pohnpei last week, I notice a lot more banana plants than on my last visit. Pohnpei has the second highest rainfall on earth and an even, warm, equatorial climate. Banana is a vigorously growing herb. If you go out to check your mail, you will come back inside to find ten giant banana plants in your front room.
I was eavesdropping on a conversation in the departure lounge at Port Moresby on the way to Micronesia, where some Irish teachers who had lived there for a few years were returning to see friends. It turns out it is quite difficult to buy bananas on Pohnpei if you want them, because they're everywhere. No one thinks to bring them to market because you'd be selling them for almost nothing. Meanwhile, Australians -who eat more bananas per person than any other country- pay exorbitant rates for them any time Queensland gets a bit of weather. (Which is often.)
Looking at the species assembly on the island with the benefit of a further fifteen years of life experience, I also see the way Bill Mollison must have seen:
“The only safe energy systems are those derived from biological systems. A New Guinea gardener can walk through the gates of his garden taking one unit of energy and hand out 70. A modern farmer who drives a tractor through the gate takes 1,000 units of energy in and gives one back. Who is the most sophisticated agriculturalist?”
Islands are novel ecosystems. Like the Amazon, they're better considered overgrown gardens than the European imperial fantasy of 'pristine' nature. The impact of humans has brought hundreds of plants and animals that otherwise wouldn't be there -dramatically increasing biodiversity.
European colonists didn't think the people of these islands or Australia or the Amazon farmed much because there were no straight lines of wheat. But the whole place is a garden. And in that garden/jungle live their pigs and their chickens. If you want to see what chickens -originally Southeast Asian jungle fowl in the first place- used to look like, go to Pohnpei and watch them stalk their way around the overgrown, upper ruins of Nan Madol. Remarkable.
Pohnpei has a tiny, largely artificial economy that owes the majority of its money to the deal struck with the US military to keep a large presence there. And the majority of this money goes to funding the FSM government. So there are government jobs, or there are jobs for Micronesians in the US. That's about it.
This means that many of the people who choose to remain -and the FSM has a serious population drain problem- have never 'worked' a day in their lives the way you or I might have. Why would they? They grow their own food and drugs, the chickens feed themselves, the pigs mostly feed themselves, it's a reef-ringed, mangrove island so the fishing is good. (Much of Japan's sashimi tuna comes from these waters.)
Now, it's far from paradise and I was not looking at these lifeways with rose-tinted glasses. I fantasised about dictatorial optimisation: There should be freshwater shrimp in the wet taro patches. Composting toilets should replace the primitive sewer system that empties straight into the sea, and these should be incorporated into village composting schemes to supplement the typically poor island soil so as to extend the range of species grown. Each of the five provinces should have a community nursery that raises at least a hundred different permaculture-useful plants from easily-obtainable seeds and then wild-plants the seedlings in composted soil. The banana species range should be extended at least to include a few plantains to switch up the main starch crop a bit. Passionfruit should be growing up the sunside of the uninsulated -often corrugated- housing to cool them. Antibacterial and anti-inflammatory herbs should be grown alongside the clandestinely farmed marijuana to build a natural medical system to mitigate their reliance on the worst-of-both-worlds combination of an American health care approach and having no money at all.
So the observed lifeways -like our own- are incomplete. Do not be surprised if the 'thing' mankind needs to accomplish in order to become truly interplanetary is some kind of interlocking of the best of each culture on earth. I think about that sometimes. If the evolution of the universe has a purpose, I suspect it would look something like that. (Instead, what we currently have in the teetering globalist regime is the interlocking of the worst of each culture. Gnosticism though, eh?)
And I think that's the only way to navigate around the 'white saviour' problem that infects so much environmentalism and social justice. That was Mollison's approach. Learning from and then assembling the best practice of the planet's best agriculturalists, rather than swooping in with tractors, Netflix and diabetes.
Outside of Pohnpei's one main town, the housing is obviously very simple. But it's warm and everyone knows each other. Who needs walls and gates? Regional Pohnpeians have accidentally arranged their lives to straddle the Taleb line between robust and antifragile: Nothing short of a once-in-a-century typhoon will impact their access to food. (The thick-walled churches do double-duty as shelters. It's clever.) Electricity, mobile signal and even internet access are available outside the main town, but if the grid goes down... oh well. It'll get fixed eventually. It doesn't materially impact vital systems. Wanna eat bananas and get high?
It seems to me that on an individual, local and even national level we should be managing our risk in a Pohnpeish way. As it stands, it is the technological systems that sit at the bottom of our pyramid, not natural ones. When they fail, all other vital systems go with them. Much of our failed thinking on these matters seems to be semantic. We call non-western ways of living/farming/gardening subsistence. Subsist rather than exist. But if Russia and the US start lobbing EMPs at each other, who will be doing the subsisting then? Bill Mollison's question stands. Who is the more sophisticated?
Since the 2008 crisis -along with the needs-to-die 'Keep Calm and Carry On'- the victory garden meme has returned to consciousness. In both Britain and the US, private property was turned over to the growing of enormous amounts of food to support the war effort, reduce supply chain risk and feed the domestic population.
We are living through a time where the source of risk is more diffuse than during the war but its current and potential impact remains the same. That's the bad news. The good news is the prior sixty or so years of suburbanisation have arisen along with the development of dramatic techniques for growing a surprisingly large amount of food in surprisingly small spaces. At the same time, the available species range is unprecedented in all of human history.
However bad things are, there has truly never been a better time for gardening. And Spring is coming for most of you.
Do you want to know the difference between permaculture and prepping? Prepping is about walling yourself off in New Zealand with a Paypal billionaire, a lot of guns and an underground bunker filled with long-life food. It is the very definition of selfish. Permaculture doesn't work at all unless it is locally engaged. It is the opposite response to the same problem.
So yes, there are community gardens. Yes, club together with friends and family to have your own decentralised farm in your various yards (me right now). Yes, apartment dwellers should investigate just how much you actually can grow because it's more than you think. Yes to Community Supported Agriculture schemes. Yes to seed sharing. These are all and, and, and, not either, either, either.
I was asked in the video Q&A last year what books should someone interested in permaculture read. There really is only one answer and that's THE book, Bill Mollison's Permaculture: A Designer's Manual. With his typical flair for the dramatic, he once described it as the one book you would need if you ever had to rebuild civilisation.
And we do have to rebuild civilisation today -if not after a physical collapse (debatable) then at least after a moral, epistemological and spiritual one. There is probably another book -which is cheaper- that you could read, even though I really want you to buy the manual. And that's Mollison's Introduction to Permaculture. Below is the preface he wrote for it.
In the fishing village of Stanley, Tasmania, where I grew up, everything that we needed we made. We made our own boots, our own metal works; we caught fish, grew food, and made bread. I did not know anyone who had only one job, or even anything that you could define as a job. All residents worked at several things.
Living in a sort of dream until I was about 28 years old, you could find me spending most of my time either in the bush or on the sea, hunting, fishing and collecting, for pleasure and for income. During the 1950s I noticed large parts of the system in which I lived disappearing. Fish stocks were collapsing and seaweed around shorelines had thinned out. Large patches of forest began to die. I realise then that I had become extremely fond of this environment. The feeling was pure love for my country.
Based on my observations over many years with the CSIRO in the wildlife survey section and with the Tasmanian Inland fisheries Department, I began to protest against the political and industrial systems I saw were killing the world around us and its constituents along with it. Very soon, however, I realised that it is no good persisting with opposition, because in the end the opposition was achieving nothing. I withdrew from protesting to contemplate positive actions and modalities to achieve the outcomes which I envisioned. To wit; the way in which we can live without collapsing the biological systems which sustain all life on earth.
During my 10 year career as a senior lecturer with the University of Tasmania, I evolved a framework for a sustainable agricultural system based on the durable systems I had observed in nature. These systems, both enduring and rebuilding, provided for a large range of browsing marsupials, mammals, birds, reptiles and other life forms. From these observations and agricultural system of stacked crops including perennial trees, shrubs, herbs, fungi and root systems was envisioned. I coined the word permaculture for this system and began building a species rich garden. A young student, David Holmgren, who was living with me at the time, assisted me with these endeavours. Our work culminated in the publication of Permaculture One in 1978.
Public reaction to Permaculture One was mixed. The professional community was outraged of the fact we were combining previously separate subjects such as architecture with landscaping; agriculture with biology, forestry and animal husbandry et cetera, so that everyone who thought themselves to be a specialist felt a bit offended.
But among the general population, the reaction was very different. Many people have been thinking along the same lines. They were dissatisfied with agriculture as it is now practiced and looking towards more natural and ecologically beneficial systems.
I saw permaculture as I see it today; a multidimensional design system encompassing: first and foremost education, financial and land access strategies, legal and business structures, regional self financing, land restoration on any scale, effective aid delivery to those in need, in addition to domestic food and water security through soil creation and intelligent water harvesting and saving techniques. All this is achievable if we train local people and instruct them to teach, and to create more teachers, in their own language and culture, which is what we do. Sadly many aid agencies do not take this sensible approach.
By 1976, I was lecturing on permaculture and in 1979 I resigned from a tenured university lecturer position and at an advanced age, threw myself into an uncertain future. I decided to do nothing else but to educate, encourage and assist people to build good biological systems which would care for their needs. After designing numerous properties with good results and conducting courses, I realise the most intelligent way to achieve my goals, of exponential growth of education of the strategies, was to create a curriculum. This curriculum is the book Permaculture: A Designer's Manual, and is presented in the 72 hour permaculture design certificate course (PDC).
True to my vision, permaculture education, design techniques and strategies lap the globe. It is growing exponentially and influencing all levels of humanity from the Third World village level to upmarket, high-end developments. Courses are taught in most countries and languages, teachers are growing in numbers, as is land restoration. Together we are creating the world we want to live in.
The reality is the world has never done what we told it to and elite university research has conclusively proven that the wishes of the people have a 0% correlation with the behaviour of politicians. It has simply been a persistent denialism and selective inattention over the last forty years -now eroding- that prevents the majority of us from realising it. (All the good things -civil rights, etc- have been won from outside the system.)
Which brings me to another description Mollison had for permaculture: A benign form of sedition. We are in the reaping phase of the whirlwind right now. The promises of both the left and the right are going to unspool in unpredictable and dangerous ways.
But a garden is benignly seditious. It is also the physical transformation of space currently arranged to support a worldview or worldviews that probably none of us share. It doesn't care or notice whether your preferred team -blue or red- is leading the medal tally in the corruption olympics.
Across western communities, local governments and municipalities are cracking down in mean-spirited and random ways against these benign forms of sedition. Petty little clerks, drunk on their minuscule power, are wagging their grubby little fingers at deviations from the horrific banality of the domestic/suburban landscape of the postwar era.
We need to flood them. We need to be having these debates and threatening their re-elections in thousands of locations, we need to push against strata groups and suburban planning meetings in hundreds and hundreds of different encounters -some of which we will win, some of which we won't. But we all need to become vectors of decentralised, reclaimed food production and increasing biodiversity.
Ask yourself this. Ask yourself whether the skills associated with growing your own food will become more useful or less useful between now and 2030. Would you rather get good at this while it is fun to learn, or when you're in a knife fight with a local gang while fishing expired crab meat from a dumpster to feed your child? None of us know what is going to happen between now and 2030 but you are on some fine intoxicants if you think it is going to be smooth sailing.
However grim things get, benign sedition has truly never been easier than it is right now.
Spring is coming. Ask yourself whether we need to bring more Light to earth or less.