Minor annoyances

Realisations come

Starting points

Local currency

Time-based currency

A few difficulties

CDC as parallel government

Ted sees the CDC evolving into a sort of parallel local government much as the revolutionaries of the 60s set up parallel governments in liberated areas. I found Ted’s postulating that the CDC would start to provide livelihoods and fulfil social welfare roles reminescent of Hamas, in Palestine, which provides social services while it carries on its program of opposition.

Some of Ted’s terms require explanation, such as his idea that the CDC would exert “control over our town”. Here’s hoping he means a popular, democratically-derived control. Likewise Ted’s statement that “This is our town and it’s our business what’s going on here…”. All well in theory, however this statement can easily lapse into NIMBYism and exclusivity. This I have seen.

Over the years, Ted’s ideas have been criticised as simplistic and lacking the insight that come with actually creating some of the things he discusses. I take what his critics say, however I think this new book should be read as the product of an academic who deals in ideas rather than the implementation of them.

I can’t comment on the value of Ted’s book to sustainability advocates, not having read it and having read only one chapter. The impression I get is that it would be of value more as an ideas book than as a practical manual of how to get from where we are to where Ted would like us to be. If true, this makes it a further development of his earlier writings.

Chapter 13 of Ted Trainer’s new book, A Practical Strategy…

Chapter 13.  A Practical Strategy.

10.3.10

This chapter sets out the kind of action strategy I think will be the most effective for those who wish to help save the planet.  It is built on the argument elaborated through the previous 12 Chapters.  I believe they constitute a weighty case against most previous thinking about how to bring about social change and against most of the planet-saving effort presently being made.  The argument has been that these ground-clearing considerations point to one and only one general approach. Its theoretical form has been offered in Chapter 13.  This Chapter translates those conclusions into practical steps.

So there you are, living in a typical suburb within consumer society, and surrounded by people who only know the consumer way and are unaware of the need to shift the world to very different ways, quickly.  What on earth should you do?

The following sequence of practical steps is set out as if a small group is starting from scratch, the only ones in the town who have the vision, and as if they are without any assistance from official bodies.  Often conditions will be much more favourable than this.  Sometimes local councils will be eager to help with many of our proposals and many local people will be interested in or already doing some of the things suggested.

I have argued this general strategy for a long time (e.g., see Trainer, 1985, 1995.)  It is most encouraging that in recent years the Transition Towns movement has taken off more or less in this general direction (although I doubt that’s due to any influence I have had.)  There are some significant differences between what is happening in the movement and the ideas in this Chapter, and my hope is that in time the movement will take up the ideas offered here.

1. Form a  Community Development Cooperative.

A small group of people simply begins meeting as an embryonic Community Development Cooperative (hereafter CDC).  This will eventually develop into the institution which organises and “runs” the town’s new economic, political, ecological and social systems, but at first it would be tiny with very humble goals.

The CDC will think about the town’s many unmet needs and its many unused productive resources.  Any neighbourhood has unemployed people, all that time spent watching TV, unused backyards and nature strips and school yards, retired people, skills and the immense untapped good will and energy that people could give to the cause.  The town also has vast unmet needs, including the need for more basic food, furniture, entertainment, etc., the need for livelihoods and for the sense of making a valued contribution, for community, solidarity, friendship, comradeship, worthwhile activities for young people and a sense of having some power over the control of local affairs.  So our task is to harness and connect and organise, to begin applying some of that unused productive capacity to producing to meet some of those unsatisfied needs.

2. Set up a community garden and workshop.

The ideal project to begin with is the establishment of a cooperative garden and workshop.  Even if only on a very small scale this quickly gives the capacity to grow and make many important things participants need.  While it might be decided to also enable individuals to garden their own private plots, the central function must be to organise a cooperative “firm”” whereby people can work together to produce things they all need.  This enables working bees to get the site into shape and to share the thinking, the expertise and research, and to share the produce.  It also means that if only one person knows how to grow good vegies, we can all have good vegies.

Now we have the means to begin providing for those many people dumped by the conventional economy.  We make it possible for local people who are unemployed, homeless, convalescent or retired. to join us in productive activity, working to start producing vegetable, repairs, toys, for ourselves and each other.

We will record time inputs to the cooperative firm with a view to sharing output in proportion to these contributions.  Thus someone who can only come along occasionally can be part of the team.  (What we have done here is create a new currency, i.e., “print” our own money.  The significance of this will be elaborated below.)

Every carrot we produce represents a saving of scarce money participants do not have to spend at the supermarket.  More importantly we have begun to create livelihoods, purposes, community and cooperative skills, leisure resources and a cooperative climate… and a new economy.

3. What else can we do?

The CDC would then look for other activities to take up.  What else could we produce for ourselves, cooperatively and without much capital?  Bread is an obvious possibility.  We could research and build an earth oven, buy a bag of flour, and organise a weekly bake-up to churn out stacks of irresistible hot bread, pizzas, biscuits and cakes.  Baking day would then become the beginning of the weekly community working bee, business meeting, banquet and concert.

Of course all the way we will be publicising and recruiting, knocking on doors to explain what’s going on and to invite people to join us.  Remember our primary objective is not to build things, it is to develop in people the consciousness that will lead them to build eagerly.

Our working bees will build the benches, seats and shade houses, and landscape the garden the workshop site.  We will find out who can play musical instruments, tell jokes, act and sing, and we will then organises the first concert.  We will celebrate our productivity and power and take pride in the way we are providing for each other.  We are not just providing vegies and bread but solidarity and the satisfaction that comes from knowing we have started the revolution!

What about food processing, such as buying bulk fruit and bottling or drying, making juices, fruit wines and cider?  What then to do with the peelings?  Of course, feed them to the newly acquired rabbits and poultry, which we will locate in pens the working bees will build and which will become vegie patches when the animals have cleared them up and fertilized them.  The duck ponds will produce large volumes of rich sludge for the gardens.  We will plant the communal herb patches, fruit trees, and in time make the fish ponds and the sheds for the beekeeping equipment.  Meanwhile sub-groups will research all this and set up committees to look after the fish, rabbits and bees.

We will organise to buy things in bulk, setting up sub-committees to find the best places to get flour, jars, nuts and bolts.  We will scrounge the treasure thrown out on council clean up days, to accumulate the wood and iron we can use in the workshop, and the bikes and appliances we can fix to use or sell.

It is difficult to understand why so few charitable agencies, especially churches, have not set up ventures like this.  (An inspiring example is The Homeless Garden Project based in California.) The standard charitable organization confines itself to merely giving things to “disadvantaged” people, especially money so they can buy more from supermarkets.  Consider the typical old person’s “home” where expensive buildings and staff tend to people who have almost nothing to do all day, when they could have a thriving mixed garden with animals and workers right in their midst.  Some could join in and others could just watch and chat…while the institution’s food bill was reduced.  In Holland such gardens have been found to have beneficial effects on dementia sufferers.

After we get our operations at the garden and workshop site under way and in the backyards of participants, we can explore harnessing other resources in the neighbourhood and taking on other activities there.   Are there sheds and trucks, tools, machinery and waste products we can get access to, especially bits of land on which we might plant commons? Can we put in small dams and ponds for water plants and fish, develop pits for clay and earth for building?  Can we stack some areas with edible herbs, such as New Zealand spinach that will thrive almost anywhere?  Can we arrange with councils how to get access to the vast amount of treasure that goes into waste tips, especially the building and craft materials, the appliances and bikes we can repair. (Eventually we will operate these salvage and recycling depots.)

Councils are likely to give us permission to plant and maintain small herb patches, bush tucker, bee hives, bamboos, fruit and nut groves and timber trees on public land. Much can be done without their approval or knowledge though.  In some cities “green guerrillas” just plant on vacant land.

Our working bees and committees will organise and run these activities.  These projects out in the community will be very powerful educational devices, enabling us to explain our project to people. We will publicise the up-coming working bees and identify them not as owned by the CDC but as town events in which all are invited to contribute.  We will be seen to be working for the good of the town, we will be showing how the town can get together to do important things for itself, and we will be explaining our vision.

We will set up a market day so that people can exchange their garden and craft produce with each other, and sell surpluses to the townspeople.  This helps to connect our new economy with the old one, earn us more normal money, and spread awareness of our project to more people.   Our market will only sell important items, not trinkets, and only items made locally, not imports.  If possible our Saturday morning stalls will be set up in a prominent position. Market day has very important social, political and educational functions.  It gives us the opportunity to discuss issues and work towards consensus decisions about what is best for the town.

Remember, the most important work we are doing is not feeding ourselves or providing livelihoods or community.  It is educating the town, increasing the numbers who understand our perspective and who will join us, if not now then when the crunches begin.  Nothing will be more effective in this campaign than real life visible activities whereby we can be seen to be practising the new ways. Behind one of our stalls will be a big map of the town as we think it could be restructured, with many streets converted to gardens and commons.

Everything will be discussed at the community meetings.  The group as a whole will thereby be developing the skills needed to make good decisions about priorities and what’s feasible and how best to organise.  We will be learning the art of self government.

Leisure, entertainment, celebrations, festivals and culture.

A committee will focus on the possibilities for providing local and free entertainment, eventually including regular concerts, dances, visiting speakers, local artists, craft and produce shows, art galleries, discussion groups,  book clubs, picnic days and festivals.  Can we form a drama club, a comedy group, a choir, a gym display troupe?   After the Saturday morning market we might establish an afternoon working bee followed by a town meeting, games, evening meal, party and performances of some sort?  What regular celebrations, rituals and festivals can be organised?  Can we get a group to work on the local history, museum, culture and folklore?  Eventually we will think about ways in which the town centre could be made into a more convivial space that will facilitate informal meeting, discussion and leisure activities?  Of course it is not that these are novel ideas.  Many country towns are well aware of the importance of these sorts of activities and projects and most councils engage in some of them   But at the neighbourhood and suburban level cars are not necessary for access.

Setting up small family firms and co-ops.

If the CDC’s bee keeping operation goes well, and Fred’s family really enjoys running it, we might set it up as a fairly independent firm “leased” to Fred.    Thus the CDC is in a position to create firms and livelihoods. It can give people the satisfaction of running their own little enterprise, enjoying making a valued contribution to the community.   Our power to do these things derives from the fact that we have working bees, community expertise, our own bank (below) and buying power.  Our working bees can quickly build the sheds and we would buy from Fred rather than the supermarket

But what if Fred tried to become the regional honey tycoon, trying to drive other honey producers out of business and take over their operations?  If he tried to do that we would simply refuse to buy from him.  But he would not be likely to do it because he would realise that the goal now has to be building town solidarity and security and enjoying a livelihood, a modest but sufficient income, and working for the common good, or we will all go down.  The CDC will not be in the business of setting up little entrepreneurs with an opportunity to get rich.  It will be in the business of establishing the town’s capacity to produce the many basic things it needs and give worthwhile activity to unemployed people, and Fred knows he’s there to help fulfil the need for honey, and that if does this he will get milk and eggs from others making their contributions.

It should be apparent to all involved that the whole approach must be basically collectivist.  Although small private firms might make up the biggest sector of the new economy, especially family businesses and farms, it cannot be got going or kept in good shape unless it is guided by concern to work out and set up what is in the best interests of the town.  Many crucial functions must be organised, planned, coordinated, monitored, regulated, revised etc.  This could not happen in an economy made up of many competing private firms.  In conditions of serious scarcity that would quickly lead to a few most “efficient” winning and driving the rest out of business, and out of town, resulting before long in the collapse of the town.

One problem here is that councils and other agencies have unnecessarily expensive standards, especially regarding house construction.  For instance their room sizes, ceiling heights, and materials rules help to make a house cost perhaps  ten times as much as it should.  Councils also often have silly rules inhibiting the keeping of poultry and animals in suburban areas, food processing and cooperative projects.  However, when the time of troubles impacts most of these rules will be quickly swept away as everyone realises that it is essential to facilitate the maximum amount of local productive activity.

The significance of beginning our tiny CDC and the garden and the little productive enterprises and the working bees and commons cannot be exaggerated.  To start doing this even in the most humble way is to have begun to develop totally different economic, political, social, geographical and cultural systems.  These activities, no matter how small in scale at first, constitute systems that contradict and spurn the acquisitiveness, competition, individualism, power, greed, affluence and growth that drive the normal economy.  Just to have got the CDC going is to have put in place astoundingly revolutionary new social forms.  All that remains to be done is extend it to include the town, then the region, then….

Go out into the locality and start doing something!

I think it is symbolically important at some early stage for us to find some need in the locality that does not affect the CDC’s welfare but which we can take action on.  Maybe it’s assisting a youth group, or a struggling family, or some homeless people.  This is to take our first step towards taking responsibility for and control over our town.  We are not going to leave that problem to the officials, who aren’t dealing with it anyway.  We will go over there and see what we can do about it.  This is the stroppy attitude that will drive the new economy –  this is our town and its our business what’s going on here and we want to know what problems there are around here and we will take action on them.

The suggestion is that it would be good for us to take on a job of this kind, early on, to start getting the hang of such action and building our confidence about it.

Connecting with the normal/old town economy.

So far the discussion has been about starting to create a new economy operating beside the old one, mostly involving people excluded from the old one.  Right from the beginning the new economy can achieve miracles but there will be many things we can’t produce and which can only be obtained from the old/normal economy. It has many things such as radios and computers that we will want to use.  How then can we who have little or no normal money begin to trade with the normal economy?

The core and obvious point here is that we cannot get things from the old economy unless we can sell things to it. The CDC therefore has to begin researching and consulting in order to find items that it can begin selling to firms in the old/normal economy.  A likely beginning point might be to trade vegetables, fish, fruit and poultry with the town restaurant in exchange for meals we can buy from it, using our currency.

The restaurant would be very keen to trade with us, because we represent a large amount of potential demand for meals which previously the restaurant was not able to tap (because most of us were unemployed we could not afford to eat there.)  We open up for him the possibility of selling a lot of dinners, but only if our new currency is used, because we can’t pay for meals in the old currency, because we haven’t got much/any of it. He can only sell meals to us if he accepts payment in the money we will create for the purpose (see below), and he can’t do that unless he can spend that money buying something he needs from us.  It is our capacity to produce and sell something that is crucial, not the existence of the currency.

Thus we will begin to trade with the town.  The extent of this trade will be limited by how many things it needs that we can produce and the CDC must work hard on this.  The problem will be greatly reduced as petroleum becomes scarcer, because that will devastate the capacity of the town’s old firms to import goods to sell.  They will have to get those things from local suppliers, or do without them, and thus we will have opportunities to take up some of this productive activity.

We will have to make sure everyone understands that our new economic sector with its new firms and money are no threat to the old one.  Old firms are not going to see us as taking business from them, because those firms are only going to sell (for our new money) to people who do not have much old money and therefore wouldn’t have been buying from old/normal firms anyway.  The CDC will not start producing things that are already being produced in the town.  For instance if we were to set up a bakery and take sales from the existing bakery that would only be to put it out of business with no net gain in town jobs, bread supply or welfare.  However we would not hesitate to compete with and take business from firms that are selling imported goods (and help the locals who worked there to move into our new firms.)

Focusing on frugality, sufficiency, what is good-enough.

Right from the start we will make it clear that we reject the affluent consumer way.  This will be evident in our attitude to “standards”.  We will insist on providing what is sufficient in the resource, dollar and ecologically cheapest ways.  We will in principle reject luxurious and new things and this will be visible in our early projects.  We will make do, patch up, be content with what is good enough, and spurn the best, and we will explain why we will assert the moral superiority of out standards, and point to their effect on our footprint and dollar cost of living.

The role of money.

Very important in the development of the new economy is the creation of our own money, which the Community Development Cooperative will use to enable economic activity among those who the conventional economy forces into idleness, unemployment and poverty.

There is much confusion about the nature and function of local currencies and often proposed schemes would not have desirable effects.  All money has to be created, somewhere, somehow, and got into circulation.  Chapter 4 discussed the absurd and unacceptable way this is done in the normal economy.  There is a tendency in alternative circles to proceed as if just creating an alternative or local currency of any old kind would do wonders, without any thinking through of how it is supposed to work.  lt will not have desirable effects unless it is carefully designed to do so.

What would happen if new money was introduced by giving it to poor people to spend in participating shops?  When the poor recipients had spent the money they would still be without a productive role or the capacity to go on earning an income. And on what would the participating shops spend the new money they had accepted?  This situation could be avoided only if those low-income people had been able to get into lasting productive roles, so that they could continually produce and sell things to those shops, enabling the shops to use the money they took in.

Similarly, what if the council created new money, spent it into circulation by paying previously unemployed people to build a swimming pool, and accepting part of their rate payments in new money?  After the pool had been completed those workers would again be without income and the council would have nothing on which to spend the rate income.

The same general problems arise with LETSystems.  These give people the capacity to pay for goods just by writing “IOUs”. This can be quite helpful, enabling some people without normal money to trade some things.  However the problem is that most people do not have much they can sell, i.e., they do not have many productive skills or the capital to set up a firm.  It is therefore not surprising that LETSystems typically do not grow to account for more than a very small proportion of a town’s economic activity. (Douthwaite, 1996.)  What is needed and what LETSystems do not create well is productive capacity, enterprises.  It will not set up a cooperative bakery in which many people with little or no skill can be organised to produce their own bread.

So the crucial element becomes clear.  Nothing significant can be achieved unless people acquire the capacity to produce and sell things that others want.  Obviously, unless one produces and sells to others one can’t earn the money with which to purchase things one needs from others.  So the question we have to focus on is how can the introduction of a new currency facilitate this setting up of “firms” that will enable those who had no economic role to start producing, selling, earning, buying. The crucial task is to create productive roles, not to create a currency.  The new currency should be seen as little more than an accounting device, a necessary but not the most important factor.  And the crucial question should be, how can we use a new currency to help get production going by people who are idle.

The way we might best introduce a new currency has been noted above.  The CDC has set up the cooperative garden “firm” and invited people to come along and work in it, recording time contributions, with the intention of sharing produce later in proportion to contributions. The slips of paper issued when one has worked an hour function like an IOU or “promissory note”.  These slips are new money. They can be used to get, buy, garden produce.  The key element here is the organising of the productive opportunities, the setting up of the “firm” which enables people to have “jobs” and this is not done just by creating a currency.

Note that the bits of paper are not actually promissory notes.  We would all understand that all participants share the risk that the crop will fail.  (In a satisfactory society all would share the risks associated with major investment decisions, which are made by all of us to achieve goals we all endorse.)  The slips of paper would be understood as records of what proportion of the product each contributor was entitled to when it became available.

When we then set up the baking venture the time inputs will again be tallied and now those who do the baking can use their time credits to buy vegetables produced by the gardeners, and vici versa.  We will have begun to diversify our new economy, and that it will function on our new currency

It would be best to use an hour’s work as the unit of currency, regardless of what activity it goes into or what differences the normal economy would put on the various things people produce in their hour.  In other words we would be working for “time dollars.”  This is done in a number of communities.  Because most or all of us will be using relatively simple skills there is not likely to be a problem of some thinking their hour is more productive or worth more than that someone else puts in.  All that matters is that everyone contributes conscientiously, although some will do a bit more in the hour than others.

Consider recessions.
Now let us take a moment to reflect on the appalling fact that recessions, depressions and unemployment are allowed to occur.  Hundreds of millions of people are condemned to go without livelihoods, enough money, purpose, or self respect, for years – when all this would be totally and easily prevented, just by doing what the above CDC has done?  If the economy begins to slow, causing unemployment, a government could simply set up cooperatives in which unemployed people could – you guessed it – organise themselves to work to produce many of the simple things they need.  The start-up and administration expenditure would be far less than the savings in unemployment benefits and social breakdown, let alone in quality of life.  These people would be producing, running the organization, largely or wholly off the “welfare” budget, enjoying life, and paying tax.

So why isn’t this done?  Why did more than 15% of Australian workers have to endure unemployment and degradation for years after 1929?  Why isn’t it done now, to eliminate the deprivation and depression of the unemployed millions today?  The answer of course is that the kind of solution outlined is totally unacceptable in capitalist society.  It would be (gasp) “socialism”, and everyone knows that is stupid, evil and does not work.

So in parts of East Timor and PNG they tolerate unemployment rates of 70%, because everybody accepts that there can be no development unless someone with capital decides to set up an enterprise that will make more money for himself than investing in anything else anywhere else in the world.  Then they are surprised and dismayed to find that the bored, hungry and angry young men join rebel gangs and armies, which are of course immediately identified as “insurgents” (used to be “communists”) and therefore must be crushed to restore (capitalist) order.

Capital; Form a town bank

In general little very capital will be needed to get the new local economy going because the main enterprises are mostly humble and labour-intensive and do not need elaborate premises or expensive machinery or purchased stock. The CDC can organise campaigns to accumulate voluntary donations of capital for particularly important development projects. Some  communities have low or zero interest town development accounts into which those who are willing and able deposit some of their savings because they wish to support desirable local development.  The CDC can also operate voluntary taxation schemes.  (In a sensible world most of the normal tax revenue would be collected locally and spent locally.) Note how those developments can proceed even if only a small number of people support them; it is usually not the case that nothing worthwhile can be done unless everyone agrees.  On some communes only those who want to see a particular project undertaken contribute capital to it.

The town or region should at some stage establish its own bank or credit union.   Normal banks take our savings and lend them to corporations far away.  Our town bank should have as one of its rules that the savings of local people will only be lent for projects within the region and that top priority will go to borrowers who intend to develop the town in desirable ways. This means depositors will probably be subsidising town development.  The bank which gives low or zero interest loans to worthwhile ventures and does not make the highest returns on all loans will probably not be able to offer to its depositors interest rates as high as they could get from banks that are only concerned with making as much money as possible.  Again this is a price we will be willing to pay in order to make sure that (some of) our savings go into developments that will improve our town.  (Eventually, in a zero-growth economy, there can be no interest payments.)  However our bank will not be drained by outrageous executive salaries and bonuses or shareholder dividends, and you will have a say in its lending and investment decisions.  All its officers might be voluntary.

Along with the bank we will form a business incubator, to give new little firms assistance with accounting and tax advice, access to computers, perhaps premises, and especially expertise from our panel of the town’s most experienced business people.  Along with our bank this will put us in a powerful position to take more control over our own economic development.  We can set up the firms we want, even if they might not be profitable, create jobs and livelihoods, cut town imports, and reduce dependence on the global economy and on oil.

The remarkable success over many decades of the Spanish Mondragon Cooperative movement testifies to the power of these institutions and this approach.  Largely because the town formed its own cooperative bank and advisory institutions it has been able to build many modern and powerful businesses capable of succeeding in international trade (not that we will want to do that.) Similarly the achievements of the Spanish Anarchist collectives of the 1930s showed how socially beneficial development can take place rapidly when people have control over factories land banks.

Another important task right from the earliest days is to make links with groups that can be enlisted and assisted — and helped to see what we are on about…the charities, churches, welfare agencies, aged people’s homes, Lions and Rotary service clubs, farmers markets, youth-off-the-street initiatives, indigenous, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, parole support, slow food, Men’s Shed movement…

Building a new local economy which we run.

Now look what we have done.  We have built a radically new economy, one which all of us participate in making rational decisions about what we need and therefore are going to produce cooperatively.  Even though it might be tiny for a long time, it is an economy which we run to do what we want done.  We can therefore begin to eliminate unemployment and poverty and homelessness in our town and provide livelihoods and security to all.  We have not waited for government or the economy to provide for us, we got out there and did it for ourselves.  Do we have lonely old people or bored youth around here – well let’s just see what we can organise to get rid of these problems.

The significance of this attitude could not be exaggerated.  Although for a long time we might not have the capacity to exercise much control over anything important, that’s  where we must be clearly determined to go from the start. So our orientation will not be centred on encouraging little entrepreneurs to set up, or households to take up gardening, or the town to plant an orchard…within the old framework of individuals and groups functioning in a town that’s part of consumer capitalist society and whose fate is mostly left to global market forces and officials from the council and the state.  What we are about is gradually taking cooperative responsibility and control over our town and talking it out of consumer-capitalist society and running it to meet our needs.

The two level economy.

We should be keenly aware that what we are doing can be put in terms of building and running Economy B, the one which ensures that all our basic needs are provided for.  Many will live well almost entirely within Economy B because they opt to live very simply, produce much in their home gardens, contribute to community working bees and networks, and meet many needs via commons and the giving/gift sectors.  However for a long time most of us will probably also be involved in Economy A which will be the (possibly large) remnant of the present economy.  In this economy mostly non-essential but desirable goods and services will be produced for sale, we will work for money, and we will be able to purchase imports to the town.  However economy A could collapse without harming us because Economy B is the one that will provide and guarantee our quality of life.  No matter what happens to the global economy we know we can always produce all the carrots, repairs, jobs and concerts we need, totally secure because we are in complete control of these processes.

The transition will be a gradual stepping from Economy A to Economy B.  At first we will not be able to provide much for ourselves but as we get more activities going our dependence on the normal economy will decline.  In the very long term it will probably make sense to completely shift Economy A’s remaining components into Economy B, so that everything is rationally planned and cooperatively organised.

Learning to govern ourselves.

As our scope increases we will be making more and bigger decisions and this will involve us in working out by trial and error and a lot of careful thinking what are the best ways for us to do this.  The first tiny CDC discussions around the pot belly stove in the workshop will grow towards eventually becoming town meetings and along the way we will be focussed  by our circumstances on what is best for the collective, what are the best ways to find agreement, how best to handle disagreements, to make sure all feelings have been expressed, how to monitor, review and revise our decisions.  We will be learning a very different political process, one that cannot be about engineering 51% majorities that force the rest to comply.  We will be in situations where it is glaringly obvious that we must find ways that all can see are the best, and therefore ways all will willingly support.

Reducing town importing and exporting; making the town more self-sufficient

In time we must work on enabling the town and its nearby region to produce as many of the things it needs as possible from local resources.  At present most people live in suburbs which must depend almost entirely on imported goods and services.  This means huge costs in terms of energy, resources, footprints, and dollars, and it means dependence on the fickle, treacherous and predatory global economy.  People must export a lot to earn the money with which to import a lot via the supermarkets.  So when a poor country has sold off all its forests it will have to find something else to sell.  It must worry that at any moment the global economy could trash it.  The main export from rich world suburbs is labour and this cannot be sold without travelling a long way to work.  The coming petroleum crunch will wreak havoc on that arrangement.  You and your neighbours will wish desperately that you could provide for yourself without this dependence on exporting and importing.

There are five areas in which the CDS must work in order to help increase local economic self-sufficiency.

a)  Setting up import-replacing firms.

The CDC must look for items which can be imported into the town but might be produced locally.  Can we encourage and assist existing firms to take on such ventures.  What firms do we need? Do we need and can we organise a bike repairer, shoe repairer, bee keeper, butcher, jam maker, fish farm, poultry farm, baker, house insulator, mini-dairy? Can we develop some local energy sources, windmills, water wheels, woodlots, ethanol plants?   What firms are producing non-necessities and might be persuaded that their fate is precarious and that they should try to deal in local wares.  How can we help them to do this?  How can we make sure no one crashes into bankruptcy and has to leave town? We are in a powerful position to lever the transition of firms, because we can bring into play our working bees, town banks and business incubators, new money and our power to purchase or boycott.  We can for instance build the dirt-cheap mud brick premises for the baker or bee keeper.

As petroleum becomes scarce the town will be rapidly increasing its understanding that we must assist these developments by at times subsidising, paying more and helping, or the town will not have affordable honey or bread.

b) Set up co-operatives.

Given that at first the town or suburb will be highly dependent on imports when these begin to become problematic many people will be threatened with unemployment.  Many who were travelling long distances to work will also run into serious difficulties.  For the CDC these firms and people represent abundant resources to be redeployed into local co-ops. We must be thinking ahead, preparing to help threatened firms and people to foresee the restructuring they will have to deal with and how they could start producing some of the things the town needs.  Does the town need a poultry farm, or acquaculture – then just form a co-op and set these ventures up.

c) Increase household production.

Of course town self-sufficiency also depends greatly on increasing household self-sufficiency.  The more goods that are produced in home kitchens and workshops, craft rooms and gardens the less that will have to come through supermarkets.  The CDC can greatly assist here, for example by developing recipe books for great dinners from the abundant plants that thrive locally, including the garden and roadside “weeds”.  It will develop formulae for cleaners, solvents, oils, dyes, glues, paint, etc. that can be made from local ingredients, within households or small firms.  lt will put out designs and recipes for soap making, tanning leather, bread baking, weaving, leatherwork, pottery, blacksmithing, preserving, and making sandals, hats, baskets and basic clothing.

The CDC will develop craft groups to increase home production of many items for use within the home. It will organise classes, skill sharing, display days (no prizes!), local sources of materials and the listing of skilled people willing to give advice or run classes.  The CDC will develop and make available information on gardening, repairing, and how to cut household costs.

Many highly enjoyable leisure activities can be central in our skill development, such as field days, craft demonstrations and displays, talks by experienced practitioners from other towns, visits to gardens and systems.

d. Building up the commons.

Commons are very important in increasing local self-sufficiency because they provide lots of “free food”, materials and services for all.  The CDC’s early experience with this powerful device at the garden site will put it in a position to lead the town in thinking out what to locate where, and how best to organise the working bees that will do the building and maintenance.

e) Living simply!

The literature on local economic development usually fails to recognise that its prospects depend greatly on the readiness to reduce consumption in the first place.  Our chances of providing most or all we need locally will be much better if we can cut back on the demand for stuff, especially high tech items that have to be imported via transnational corporations.  We must keep in mind that the planet would not benefit much even if we produced all we use locally but went on consuming as much as before.  Localisation gets rid of the transport and packaging costs but much more important is all the unnecessary consuming presently going on.

The supremely important “educational” function of the CDC.

As I have said a number of times, by far the most important task is to do with developing the ideas and values that will lead people to work for the transition.  At the start few if any people in the town or suburb will have thought from the perspective argued in this book.

There are two goals here. One is increasing the realisation that the alternative ways are enjoyable and effective means for achieving extremely important economic and social goals lin the era of increasing scarcity, such as providing good food and building community solidarity, escaping oil depletion, and raising the quality of life.  The second element is increasing the realisation that consumer-capitalist society is unacceptable, that it is the cause of serious global problems — and that it can’t be fixed and can never solve our problems let alone those of the poor majority in the world, that it is likely to plunge us all into chaos soon, that it is not compatible with ecological sustainability or justice and therefore that we must move on from it soon.  There is no better base from which to develop these critical global understandings than through the activities under discussion.

Ask yourself how else could we go about trying to develop general public understanding that this social system is deeply flawed and has to be replaced?  We can’t force people to attend lectures or read books.  We can’t walk into people’s homes and start telling them about the global situation.  We can’t explain these things via the media, because we have almost no influence on what they present.  But we can make these connections clear throughout all the CDC’s activities.  When we are glaringly visible doing things in the neighbourhood we will explain that the ultimate point of what we are doing is to eliminate the global problems consumer society is causing and to illustrate and pioneer much better ways, and persuade more people to join us.

This public education function can also be carried out via the CDC’s many research activities.  Various surveys and audits will need to be made, such as into what goods are being imported and might be replaced by local products, what items existing firms would be willing to buy locally if they were available, what problems and needs people are experiencing, and what attitudes people have towards our project.  While door knocking to collect this evidence we can explain the global significance of what we are doing and invite people to meetings and events.

Among the devices a small group can use are, organising public meetings to discuss the town’s situation in view of the coming oil problem, drawing up a possible new town geography showing what roads could be dug up for commons, surveying what people think are the most neglected needs in the area, listing the most urgently needed new co-operative businesses the town might consider setting up, listing possible working bee projects, and reporting the results of door knock surveys of town opinion on these kinds of issues.  We could put our findings into reports and newsletters.  These activities will always involve reference to succinct analyses of the global situation, so people can see the rationale for our projects and proposals.

The community garden site can be crammed with information boards, displays, dioramas and examples.  Wonders can be done with a few bits and pieces.  For instance earth  building can be illustrated by a mould, a heap of mud, a few mud bricks, and lots of stunning pictures.  A waist-high sand tray can enable people to move model houses to design an ideal settlement, and redesign the one they are living in.  A few such items enables a very-informative school visit.  A similar venture involves examples located in various households in the neigh bourhood, a chicken pen here, a mud brick dog kennel there, a mini orchard, ac part we have planes to cram with useful plants, the place where a mud brick quarry and pond might go.   We then take people on explanatory tours.

One of the many concerns of the CDC will be to develop (or find) good indices of per capita ecological footprint, and of the quality of life.  It will also develop measures of cohesion and social wealth; e.g., how well the working bees and town meetings are attended, how many feel excluded or stressed, how the old and the young are faring.  The CDC will liase closely with other localities on these issues, refining measures and sharing information and ideas.   Right from the earliest days some of these measures will be valuable educational devices, for example having a town footprint figure prominently displayed on the big noticeboard outside the garden.

The CDC will make sure people realise from the start that the overall goal is not “prosperity” as is conventionally understood.  It is not raising the town’s “living standards” defined in terms of GNP per capita.  It is not bringing more income into the region.  The immediate goal is to enable the town, suburb or region to provide itself with many of the basic goods and services needed for well-being and security, and to enable all those excluded by the old economy to have access to productive activity and incomes.  The ultimate goal is to develop the consciousness that will lead people to eagerly work hard to build settlements, economies and lifestyles that make a sustainable and just world possible.

Conclusion

My argument has been that there is a powerful logic leading to the strategy outlined in this Chapter.  After hundreds of years in which progress was indubitably identified with getting richer we have suddenly run into an era of scarcity that will oblige us to scrap many of the ideas and values that have driven Western culture.  An examination of this situation gives us no choice but to accept that a sane, sustainable and just, and satisfying society now has to be defined in terms such as frugality, self-sufficiency, stability, participation, localism and cooperation.

The implications for the transition process are just as coercive, inescapable and radical, contradicting many classic theories and strategies.  The new society cannot be imposed or even given.  Unless it is willingly developed it will not work, and it must be learned.  Communities must bumble their way to the geographies and practices that suit them in their conditions.  This then means there is little choice about how to proceed.  The only way to get there from here is to start now, where we live, building the new ways.

If we ever do make it to a sustainable and just world order then we could not have got there unless tiny groups of people had begun to take on this task of working out how they can start the transition in their town or suburb.  The Eco-village and Transition Towns movements have got us started on this path.   Before long we want to be able to derive from their accumulating experience the recipe book that will enable many more groups to quickly and easily apply the strategies the pioneers have found to be most effective.

But what matters most is not that we start building new ways but that we use these activities as the educational devices that will enable us to increase the understanding that huge and radical restructuring is needed.  If we can succeed at that task then the remaking of our settlements will romp along.

None of this will happen anywhere unless people just like you and me take up the challenge.  No one is an expert on how to do it and governments aren’t going to do it for us.  Don’t think there are lots of people out there much better qualified than you are.  It can only be done in your locality by the ordinary people who live there.  Even if we had experts in the process they could not come in and start telling your neighbours what to do; that would not work. The people who live there are the only ones who know that scene, and they are the only ones who can work out how best to go about achieving the goal within their conditions.

You could not be offered a nicer revolution!  No need for sacrifices or suffering, or to contend with secret police or tanks.  Many good people feel very disturbed at their rich world comfort and security and worry about what they should do.   This book derives a clear and emphatic answer.  If you are concerned about the fate of the planet and want to  know what is by far the most important thing you can do about, then form a CDC!

Rosemary Morrow

She had been at a course in something called ‘Appreciative Inquiry’, which is a process that has something to do with strategic planning for organisations and that is based on systems thinking. She told me that the process focuses on what is right with an organisation or its activities and builds on that, rather than focusing on what goes wrong.  ‘What we focus on grows’, says the course’s handout.

Maybe this is the way to think about Gary’s video, I thought. If so, then what is it that is right with the image it presents of Rosemary’s work, what aspects of it can we focus on to improve our own work? And if it is to be built upon by people involved in international development and in the permaculture design system of which Rosemary is a well-experienced practitioner, then what lessons does her experience as documented in the film offer us?

I was aware that having known Rosemary for quite some years my opinion might be a little biased. I was also aware that the setting for the film, Afghanistan, is the pointy end of what US writer, Samuel Huntington, describes as the ‘clash of civilisations’, the clash between cultures he said would emerge following the ending of the Cold War. I thought that using my own experience in international development, in the South Pacific and mainly the Solomon Islands might be a useful filter in defining learnings of use to those involved or planning to be involved in such work.

Permaculture and Rosemary

Rosemary and permaculture design are closely coupled. She teaches the skills of the design system and has done so in Vietnam, Cambodia and Africa as well as in Australia. She wrote The Earth Users Guide to Permaculture which I had the pleasure of launching in her home town of Katoomba.

“Permaculture offers people skills they can do”, Rosemary says in the film, explaining that if people can grow food then “ ..they can go on to do other things”. This truth was defined by Abraham Maslow in his well known heirarchy of needs when he put food and water as being among the basic survival requirements that people must have before they can go on to improve their lives. The others are personal security, health, appropriate clothing for the climate and shelter. It is these things that are conspicuously missing in Afghanistan.

Permaculture has its own code of ethics and so does Rosemary. Perhaps it’s not going too far to say that they coincide remarkably. According to Rosemary, both individuals and organisations need such a code to guide their work in the world.

Social permaculture — the key to self-help

So, this Appreciative Inquiry stuff about improving the work of our organisations and ourselves by building on what it is that we are doing right — what could I see in the film that Rosemary was doing that came across as positive, as ‘right’?

My own bias influenced the first thing that came across about her work. In my years as a permaculture educator, advocate and commentator I have noticed that the design system is good at doing physical things but less good at doing things involving working with people and the social side of design. I generalise, of course, and recognise the people/social skills work of people like Robina McCurdy and Robyn Clayfield.

So it was heartening to hear Rosemary talking about ‘social permaculture’, a topic we have discussed briefly in the past. She says that social permaculture is as relevant in Australia as it is in Afghanistan and I believe she is right.

Essentially, social permaculture is about social design, working with people to improve their ability to organise themselves to achieve their goals and to gain useful skills in the process of doing so.

In Afghanistan, Rosemary’s social permaculture was about building the capacity of the NGO (non-government development organisation) she was working for, Mahboba’s Promise, to carry out its work of supporting war widows and their families and working with internally displaced people, mainly children. Capacity building, as it’s known in international development-speak, or social permaculture in Rosemary’s words, is a means of assisting the NGO to do its people-care work more effectively so that people can manage their own future.

Another reason I found affinity with Rosemary’ approach to doing permaculture is that her social permaculture is not unlike my own work for local government in assisting new community food garden teams make a start. The lesson for me in this is that developing effective working relationships is essential to achieving other goals.

No cult-of-permaculture-hero

What else is there in Gary Caginoff’s film that is the sort of positive thing that could be used to improve the work of individuals within the permaculture design system?

I thought about this after watching the video and realised that there is something missing in Gary’s film just as there is something missing in Rosemary’ personality. It is something that from time to time creeps into permaculture when people go out to work in lesser-developed countries, especially when they do this solo, offering workshops here and there then moving on.

So what is it that is missing? It’s ego, or ego of the wrong type. Despite all her work in Australia and overseas, Rosemary does not come across as a ‘permaculture hero’, a saviour bringing ‘the knowledge’ to those less fortunate. Although not so common now in permaculture circles, the gung-ho ‘hero’ image harks back to the bad old days of international development when the ‘expert’ descended upon village communities to bless them with the knowledge of how to do things and then left them to work it out for themselves.

Rosemary might not be a gung-ho permaculture hero but over the years she has taken the ‘hero’s journey’ in the Jungian sense of the term by journeying out from her everyday life in Australia to modestly offer her skills where people might need them. In doing so, she has overcome fears and challenges and transformed herself through gaining insight into her own essence and that of other peoples, then sharing what she has learned with others on her return. It is in this sharing that Rosemary’s meeting with film producer Gary Caginoff has been fortuitous because the medium he is expert in has made Rosemary’ insights available to all with electricity and a video player or computer. If you were of superstitious frame of mind you might say that their meeting was synchronicity rather than accident.

While Rosemary has more than enough accomplishments to claim the status of permaculture hero, thankfully it is Rosemary’s modesty that is most impressive and refreshing.

Meet the producer

That’s Rosemary. What about producer Gary Caginoff?

Gary has Lysis Films, his own production house in Katoomba. It was he who produced A Good Home Forever, Rosemary’s story of how she retrofitted her house for energy efficiency.

The Garden at the End of the World is a far different film whose mood is set with the opening images of mountains and mist accompanied by singing in the traditional style. It continues in this steady, measured pace for its duration, without dramatic bursts of activity and energy.

You get the sense that Gary has a feeling for landscape as the venue in which life is carried out from the images where he slowly pans the camera across vistas of mountain and plain. Another sense you get is that he uses the video camera like a stills camera to capture portraits of people. Young and old, they appear though the film looking to camera as if gazing directly at the viewer. This adds to the film’s power.

All of this could lead to describing Gary’s production as a ‘visual’ film in which Rosemary’s pieces to camera and scenes of her sitting talking with children in the orphanage, intercut with reportage footage of conflict, provide counterpoint.

Return

Good stories often have return and reflection written into them. Rosemary’s time in Afghanistan was a return to her past.

We learn in the film that Rosemary had come this way — through Afghanistan  — in 1975. The few years around that period, from the late 1960s to the ill-fated Soviet invasion of the country in 1979, was a unique time when people made journeys that are no longer possible. Off they set from London in van, old bus, truck or on foot hitching to venture down through Turkey and across Asia to their fabled destination, Kathmandu.

It was an escape from Western civilistion as much as it was an escape into the world for a generation searching for something different to what industrial society could offer. The route is well described in Rory Maclean’s Magic Bus — on the hippie trail from Instanbul to India (2007, Penguin Books, UK), a documentary travelogue by the writer who traversed the trail 30 years later. It was heartening to know Rosemary had been somewhere on that trail in its heyday.

Now, that overland trail is no more. Borders have closed. Wars have intervened.

A undercurrent of dilemma

This is not a political film. It is critical of all protagonists that have brought war to this country these past 21 years — the Soviets, the Taliban and assorted warlords, the present intervention by NATO-led forces. All have left the country in ruins, in what Gary Caginoff describes as a “political, social and environmental nightmare”.

As a production about a remarkable woman and the NGO, Mahboba’s Promise, the film does not delve into the dilemma that is presented by Afganistan’s potential future although the scenes of ruined buildings that permeate the production are a constant reminder of this. Yet, watching the film, this dilemma resurfaces in mind and Gary, in describing the history of big power rivalry in the region, reminds us of it.

What is this dilemma with Afghanistan that runs as a constant anxiety in the background of today’s big powers? It is this. Were Afghanistan again to fall to the Taliban, Pakistan could be destabilised (given the complicity of that country’s intelligence service in past support for the Taliban and the presence of Taliban in the country) and, were an allied force to gain control, they would find themselves with nuclear capability. What would the US do in these circumstances? More pressing, what would nuclear armed India do given the history of Indian-Pakistani conflict? Would they seek negotiation? Stand by and watch? Or would they perceive a great danger and act? And would that acting be more than diplomacy? Would India act by taking out Pakistani nuclear weapon capability, presumably with conventional weapons, but could it go nuclear? If either of the latter, how would the Islamic world react?

This is the potential nightmare both the US and India are well aware of, especially given the recent resurgence in Taliban activity. It is not explicit in the film, but if you have followed trends in the region, it might be implicit.

How to use this video

Gary’s story of Rosemary and Mahboba’s Promise would be useful as the centrepoint of a group discussion around international development and the role of the permaculture design system in it.

Focus questions in a discussion could be about what permaculture has to offer peoples in circumstances such as those found in Afghanistan; how social permaculture could be improved to increase its effectiveness; now that aid workers are targetted by combatants, how could their personal securty be improved; which of Rosemary’s experiences and insights could be of use in Australia?

This is a film that is both a documentary and a travelogue of a journey through a ruined land. It is stark in its contrasts of the impacts of war with the everyday lives of people trying to create new lives, of ruined city and the bare beauty of the mountains, of the conditions in the country and the efforts of one woman small of stature but big of goodness in doing her small part to put things right.

The film ends with one of Gary’s video-come-stills-images. Seen through a window, a young girl sits in a room. Outside stands a bicycle. It is raining. I think it was the rain that raised in me a sense of hope that something really will rise from the chaos of this unfortunate country, that just as the rain nourishes the soil and the plants that grow in it and the animals that graze upon them, so too will the work of Rosemary Morrow and Mahboba’s Promise create new lives for Afghanistan’s people. Is this too much to ask or hope for?

I asked at the start of this review what it was that was right, that was positive about the film that viewers could focus on to make their work in the world all that better. Now I have the answer. It is the example that, no matter where we are, we can take those small steps to make life better for those around us. These can be modest things like the capacity building that Rosemary describes as social permaculture… and other little things that we can do.

In writing this the words of TS Elliot, about how experience can change perceptions of the everyday, come to mind. His words, I realise now, are about that ‘hero’s journey’ I mentioned before, a journey we can undertake wherever we are simply by finding the courage to take that first step beyong the familiar and the comfortable. The words are something that The Garden at the End of the World, in bringing us the tale of Rosemary’s own journey, remind me strongly of. Let’s finish with TS:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Shall be to return to where we started
And know the place for the first time.

……………………………………………………………..

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Most of us have at least a working familarity with climate change and its likely consequences, however the peaking of global oil extraction and the impacts that it is likely to bring are less known. Peak oil, as it has become known, is the time at which extraction from economically accessible oil wells reaches its peak. After that, extraction plateaus awhile, then starts to fall below demand. The effect of this will be to boost oil prices and the cost of anything that uses oil in its extraction, manufacture, processing, transportation or consumption. New oil field discoveries, such as those likely to be accessed by deep sea drilling made possible by the retreat of the northern ice cap, will bring temporary relief but are unlikely to affect the downward tend in global production.

Peak oil is not a theory. The US peaked in 1970, Australia in 2000, and the North Sea wells peaked in 1999 — there, production had dropped by 43 percent by 2007. David Holmgren made this point — that peak oil is reality, not theory — while speaking at the Conversations With Authors at the Randwick Ecoliving Fair this year. There is plenty of empirical evidence for the peak. As for the projected price rises as supply falls below global demand for oil, that relationship is basic market economics.

Future Scanarios is more or less a paper version of David’s website of the same name. It’s not a large book in terms of number of pages, but it nonetheless serves as something of a wake-up call for those still in the slumber of an oil saturated present.

Exploring future scenarios

People familiar with David’s reasoning will find much that is familiar in the book. David takes the reader through his four scenarios that range from the consequences of business as usual to futures ranging through green technology, the survivalist ‘lifeboat’ scenario of social desperation that can end only in civilisational collapse, and his preferred scenario that he calls ‘earth stewardship’.

This latter invokes life as decentralised, self-governing towns and communities, with at least a partial abandonment of the cities which are mined for their materials. Life continues in the suburbs, however, though far from its present form. Although he does not go into detail in Future Scenarios, the multi-generational model of suburban conversion that David discussed during his 2006 national tour with US journalist and peak oil analyst, Richard Heinberg would likely be relevant here.

The model sees the development of multi-generational households and a substantial increase in food production, water harvesting and the use of renewable energies in the suburbs. In terms of urban infrastructure, it is a model I first encountered in the 1990s while working for Dr Ted Trainer at UNSW and that he called the ‘conserver society’, the title of a book be published on the topic. Through his books of the period, and in his courses at UNSW, Ted presaged many of David’s ideas on suburban conversion. This ‘ruralised city’ scanario is a model criticised by the authors of Resilient Cities, including the noted planner and educator, Peter Newman.

The book does not explore how this model would evolve in any detail — it is an investigation using the established scenario methodology that precludes detail, focusing instead on larger trends. The method has been used by government, corporations and civil society for some decades and takes existing demographic, resource, political, economic and other factors and projects how they could evolve within variables set for each scenario. Trends in oil production and other resources form the basis onto which David grafts projections about the possible impact of climate change to generate his four scenarios.

Return to appropriate technology

Earth stewardship is a model that is unlikely to be found universally appealing because it renders useless the skillsets of many. It is basically an agrarian future in which manual skills are those most valuable. It would be a profoundly different future, one less secure in many ways. Without hi-tech medicine, old diseases could return with little hope of cure. There is also the risk of a return to parochialism were global electronic communications to cease.

The scenario raises questions. How would human knowledge be preserved? Would we lose the extensive knowledge base drawn up over thousands of years of civilisation? Would there be any capacity to cooperate on projects of common endeavour over large regions ?

Writing this review, I recall ideas from the 1970s that were part of that exploration of what we then called ‘intermediate technology’, a term coined by British economist, Fritz Schumacher. Propelled by the 1973 oil crisis — the embargo of the West imposed by members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, in retaliation for Western support for Israel during the Yom Kippur war of the same year — intermediate technology (later to be renamed ‘appropriate technology’) sought simpler, cost-effective and more easily maintained tools and technologies to accomplish life needs. It was the dawn of renewable energy systems and paralleled the rise in popularity, although it remained organisationally separate to, organic gardening and farming.

Initially, intermediate technology found practical application in the intentional communities that developed during that period, however there was substantial interest among the more innovative of urban youth, especially those that considered themselves a part of the ‘alternative culture’ of the time, and by international development practitioners. Appropriate technology would certainly come of age in David’s earth stewardship society.

Imagining the scenarios

David outlines two ways of looking at his scenarios — as separate trends and in a nested structure. For me, it is the nested structure that is the most realistic as it recognises that different trends exist simultaneously, though at different scales and in different social milieus, in Western and, probably, other societies. Thus, the 1970s alternative culture existed within a growth economy then still expanding. Today, David’s earth stewardship model exists as loosely connected components in contemporary society focused around a number of movements such as permaculture, climate change and some elements of environmentalism.

Another way of looking at this is to see it as the new being born and prototyped in the bosom of the old. From that comes the resolution of what is a perceived contradiction among change agents making a living and pursuing their agendas within the infrastructure of a society they would severely modify or replace. Realistically, they have to live in both worlds at the same time, with a foot firmly planted in both. We all do.

Elements of the earth stewardship and the green technology scenarios are found within the permaculture milieu which David has some responsibility for co-creating. Here, there is a creative tension between the advocates of a basic and largely ruralised lifestyle and those who seek socially constructive solutions through green technology. Fortunately, David sees green technology a starting point for his journey to earth stewardship. The transition will come as energy supplies run down over time.

It is the force of David’s reputation, based on his role as co-originator of the permaculture design system and in recent years as its most prominent thinker, that leads to the ready adoption of his ideas by those within that milieu.

The influence of government

David writes that government has a substantial influence on these different nested scenarios, with local government holding most promise of influencing community-based initiatives that would form elements of the earth stewardship model. Through legislation, regulation and subsidies, local government has an influence on the structuring of households as, in effect, microcosms of the lifeboat scenario yet, at the same time, as components of the earth stewardship model.

What is implied here is David and his partner, Sue Dennet’s notion of the ‘household economy’. This views the household — whatever its makeup — as primarily a productive rather than consumptive entity. In reality, of course, households would be both consumers and producers, especially where they participate in a community-based, non-monetary system of exchange such as time dollars or LETS (Local Exchange and Trading System).

Seen as ‘prosumer’ (producer-consumer) entities and as micro-lifeboats, households would:

• produce in home or community gardens (and process as preserves) some of the food their inhabitants consume
• harvest and store for subsistence purposes rainfall and overland flow (the later where households have garden space)
• generate energy via photovoltaic or other system
• and form the basis, perhaps, for some home-based industry that produces goods or services for trade with others through LETS-like systems or as part of the informal or formal economies.

Local government, though in still-too-few cases, has made a start on educating people in these basic skills. Some offer workshops and courses in sustainable living where participants pick up largely forgotten skills in what Rob Hopkins, spokesman for the Transition movement, calls ‘skill-up for powerdown’ — growing food, storing water, producing home energy and other like things. Some councils facilitate the setting up of community food gardens and farmers’ markets. Others install photovoltaic systems on their buildings.

These things are not done as some deliberate policy of popular skilling-up but because they are components of the green technology model, the most popular model of sustainability, and because it is compatible with local government policy and practice for ameliorating and adapting to climate change. This motivation does not matter, of course, because such initiatives smooth the way to a earth stewardship society and have a firm place within it.

Both idea and template

Future Scenarios will no doubt be criticised because it will be seen to offer little option other than the evolution of earth stewardship societies.

Green technology advocates might feel a little chargrined that their preferred future might be only a transitional form between the present and the future. That is understandable, because much of the search for solutions to impending global trends focuses on technological fixes even though some proposing this foresee a less growth-oriented, perhaps even an economically steady state society emerging.

It is in discussing these different models that Future Scenarios provides a service. The book, and the workshops David offers as a means of exploring the topic more fully, introduce a sophistication to permaculture design that is not always present in its popular forms. In doing so, David once again offers permaculture a new lease on life as an applied technology for a community-based response to climate change and peak oil that complements that being developed by the transition initiative movement and that offers opportunities to the more innovative permaculture and sustainability, community-based organisations that are capable of addressing those parts of society outside their usual sphere of influence.

In the community sector, the term ‘resilient communities’ is heard among those active in the relatively new Transtions Initiative groups (www.transitionsydney.org.au). There, it summarises a range of ideas on how societies can adapt to the synchronous impact of peak oil and climate change.

Transition Initiatives, however, are far from the only ones using the term. That was reinforced for me while in Gleebooks one day. There, while perusing the environment titles shelves, I came across a paperback, the collective work of three authors: Peter Newman, professor of sustainability at Curtin University in WA, author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems (2007, Island Press) — Peter Newman was once the NSW Sustainabilty Commissioner — Timothy Beatley, professor of Sustainable Communities at the University of Virginia and author of Green Urbanism Down Under (2008, Island Press); and Heather Boyer, senior editor at Island Press and Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. None of these are intellectual light weights and what they say must be taken with more than a grain of seriousness.

And the book — it was called Resilient Cities – responding to peak oil and climate change.

Necessary reading

This is exactly the sort of book Transition Initiative people and their fellow travelers, permaculturists, should take the time to read. The synchronous peak oil-climate change challenge to our resource intensive cities is analysed, as is the nature of the climatic and energy threats. After creating a typology of four urban future scenarios, the authors go on to describe visions and hopes for sustainable cities. What is good is that there are many examples of positive responses drawn from Australia

What is also of interest, to those active in the permaculture and Transition movements, anyway, is the revelation of how permaculture is perceived by planning and design professionals working in education and sustainability practice. The authors certainly take permaculture seriously, however they remain critical of its approach to an oil-depleted and climatically-altered future for our cities.

Why this is important is because these people are influential. They frame thinking about permaculture and affect how others perceive it. Permaculture, Transitions and related approaches to sustainable development at the community level all circulate in the public marketplace for ideas, something that makes how they are perceived critical to their future opportunities.

This is revealed in the chapter describing four scenarios for the future of cities. Drawing up scenarios is a way of thinking about the future that has now been in use for decades and has been adopted by a range of organisations in society, including business. One of its advantages is that it engages the imagination to envision alternative futures based on current and likely events and trends, as well as unexpected events, and allows you to step out along exploratory pathways of the imagination in considering how things could unfold from different starting conditions and how they might be responded to.

What becomes clear as you read the book is that the authors are familiar with the different scenarios, including those of Richard Heinberg and David Holmgren. Heinberg, an American, toured with David Holmgren several years ago to alert Australian audiences to the challenge offered by the peaking of global oil supplies. The authors have done their research and, to that, they add their extensive and more than credible knowledge developed of years of experience.

The four urban scenarios the authors explore are: collapse, ruralisation, the divided city and the resilient city. Transition and permaculture interests might wonder why the ruralised city and the resilient city are treated separately, for surely they are the same? Hasn’t permaculture’s Bill Mollison and David Holmgren painted them as such? Well, it turns out that they are not the same and that, for the authors, the resilient city is the preferred future.

Collapse

The collapse scenario is familiar — the synchronous impact of peak oil and climate change combine to create a descending spiral… price rises for fuels and food hit the less affluent hardest… markets change as household funds are diverted from discretionary spending into buying increasingly costly basic needs, businesses collapse, jobs disappear, family and mortgage stress increases, family homelessness (already a phenomenon in Australia in the current recession) becomes more common and, as a result of this trend, a climate of fear and panic descends.

This is likely be be felt more keenly, the authors say, in the newer, outer ring of suburbs that have grown up on the assumption of a continuous supply of relatively cheap vehicle fuel. Out there, car reliance is a basic given, public transport is not particularly effective at moving people to and from workplace, commercial centre and shopping mall and walking and cycling simply are not options due to distance and lack of safe cycling facilities. These distant suburbs are vulnerable suburbs in a situation of energy and climate stress.

In a climate of despair, family and community stress, the fear that sets in starts to manifest as panic. Opportunities for adaptive responses collapse as the resilience of civil society goes into freefall. Those who remain in the vulnerable suburbs live on whatever meagre resources a society tumbling into recession can provide. Others move on.

We can imagine this. Just as in the Great Depression of the 1930s, shanty towns and tent cities appear. And just as in those years, this triggers social resistance by the more affluent, the employed middle class and environmentalists who press the authorities to remove the squatter camps from their view and off of nature reserves and national parks. Quickly, a social fracture becomes a social chasm.

According to the authors, this is the type of future that stems from the denial of peak oil and climate change. It is as Thomas Homer Dixon wrote in The Upside of Down — that it is when resource, environmental and social stresses combine in synchrounous failure that social and personal support systems start to fail.

This is a bleak future that has a certain appeal to the apocalyptic mindset. That mindset is more prevalent in the US than in Australia and New Zealand, however it is being talked up here, too, the authors suggest.

Bill Mollison and David Holmgren (co-originators of the permaculture design concept) and Ted Trained (a UNSW lecturer who has written extensively on future scenarios and sustainability) have warned that our present society may find it difficult to adapt to the potential impact of peak oil and climate change, especially if their impacts start to be felt at the same time.

None, however, say that we should accept collapse in the way that some peak oilers (those who see peak oil as, primarily, a collapse scenario) do with what the authors say is their often overstated rhetoric. They say that in Energy Bulletin, edition 6.6.04, David Holmgren is reported as portraying such a doomsayer vision of a peak oil future.

The divided city

This model is one unconducive to achieving urban sustainability. It is of a model the city divided along the lines of social class, with wealth a determinant of sustainable living.

It was years ago that I first found this model described in a novel. That book portrayed American society of what was the near future, a society in which the less affluent masses lived in socially and environmentally decaying suburbs in which there was limited opportunity. The wealthier occupied what we would now call ecovillages – in effect, they were gated communities in which the residents enjoyed the benefits of renewable energy systems and other technologies of sustainability, and the security that comes from having guards on the gates.

We already have gated communities, the most effective barrier of entry to which is less the guards than the cost of the real estate. The products of social fear and exclusivity, they are increasingly criticised by planners. They sometimes have regulations that in effect become a form of social control. In this, they have some parallel with some ecovillages in which aspects of behaviour may be constrained, such as the colours you can paint your house, how you can make use of your land, what types of domestic animals you cannot keep, the discouragement of informal, uninvited visitation to the ecovillage and so on. For the most part, such restrictions are based on environmental considerations, and while this is both reasonable and responsible, it is often only one particular take on people and their environment. Nonetheless, it is this that distinguishes authentic ecovillages from gated communities.

The divided city is one in which this social divide is also an opportunity divide. It is not a model for sustainable urbanisation.

The ruralised city

Those in permaculture and some in the Transition Initiative movement will be familiar with the ruralised city model. The scenario goes like this — as climate change and peak oil make their combined impacts felt, a demographic and agricultural renaissance takes place in the suburbs of Australian cities as they are transformed into places where food, fuelwood and fibre are produced.

This is an evolutionary scenario in that it takes place over time. It is based on a household-led renaissance in which suburban houses become multigenerational, extended family locales amid the new, urban fields of food and fuel. It is a vision very much along the lines of conventional permaculture thinking and is even one that people have here and there sought to give birth to where they have removed fences between adjoining properties and shared resources. Ted Trainer, in particular, has been a strong advocate of this vision of the city.

Those instances, few they might be, where neighbours remove fences and share resources have been exemplary, however they have proven largely unreplicable, not because the idea is unworkable but because there has been no broad motivation and because urban populations are often mobile populations, a situation in which linking adjoining properties and sharing space is unlikely to endure.

Elsewhere, the authors acknowledge that urban agriculture is a good thing, however they agree that David Holmgren’s vision of the rurualised city is a flawed one. Their objections follow.

Urban sprawl

David’s model encourages urban sprawl. Its focus on the detached suburban dwelling would see the further spread of the suburbs and the further loss of our urban fringe farmlands, already threatened in Sydney and Melbourne by urban development (52 percent of Sydney’s existing market gardens and small scale farming enterprises are in the state government’s urban growth areas).

The model thus threatens the resiliency of the cities.

The individualisation of the problems

A focus on the ruralised city and the suburban house as the centre of adaptation to peak oil and climate change individualises both the problem and the solution. The authors assert that individual, uncoordinated approaches to sustainable living will not achieve desirable outcomes. What is needed are region-wide solutions, not just the one-offs that rely on the individual initiatives of householders. Those exemplary initiatives need to be scaled-up and made affordable and accessible to thousands.

Helena Norberg-Hodge, of the International Society for Ecology and Culture and a leading figure promoting community-based, urban food systems in the UK, has warned against the individualisation of responsibility for our environmental problems and against the placing of responsblity solely upon householders and individuals. This, she suggests, allows industry, government and institutions to avoid their share of responsibility.

Whatsmore, the individualised approach is socially inequitable, being dependent upon home ownership and access to sufficient affluence to fund the changes. The continuity of that affluence into a period marked by economic downturn stemming from peak oil and climate change must be doubted. I realised that this really is a factor when friends explained to me that they could not afford to install solar hot water, although they would have preferred to. People need funds for discretionary spending, even when government rebates are available, to install solar water heating, photovotaic panels and the rest of the energy and water efficiency domestic tech kit. Maybe this is why we see them in mainly better off, more affluent suburbs.

The authors say that cities are collective entities… that is, they are more than individualised houses and the nuclear or other family types inhabiting them. Thus, common solutions are what is needed, rather than the one-off initiatives of the environmentally committed. This might have been what social entrepreneur Mitra Aadron was getting at when, some time ago, he wrote on the Oceania permaculture email discussion list that sustainability initiatives have been one-off affairs and that a more innovative approach was called for to scale-up access to the technologies of sustainability for householders. His solution was the bulk-buying of the technology of household sustainability.

A bleak future for parts of the city

The ruralised city model offers a bleak future for those parts of the city unable to grow food and fuelwood, harvest and store water and process their wastes

Presumably, this would include the denser, inner urban ring of urbanisation close to the city centres. Yet, it is just this density of population that commentators say is needed to make public transport economically viable, and thus reliable and efficient, and to make those places into walkable and cyclable suburbs.

This is a critique of the ruralised city model that has been offered by others. They say it has little to offer medium density residents at a time when more and more people are attracted to apartment living or when that is the only type of dwelling that is affordable… such as with first home buyers.

The sustainable city

This is the authors’ preferred model. It is eco-efficient in regard to energy and water, has effective public transportation that includes walkable and bicycleable suburbs, viable local economies, produces much of its own fresh foods – especially in the ecovillages located in what are presently the newer, outer suburbs vulnerable to peak oil and climate change, and its infrastructure is carbon neutral.

If I am allowed to add my bit, I would say that the sustainable city is also the wired city in which teleworking and teleconferencing replace a portion of personal, workplace-related travel. High-speed, affordable bandwidth makes this possible, as do the technologies of the mobile Internet.

It is also the food city, with urban fringe market gardens, orchards, poultry farms and mushroomeries protected by zoning legislation from being overrun by urban development. Aquaponic installations exist as small businesses within the suburbs as do community gardens for their food and social values.

The path

So, how do we avoid the divided city and collapse and get to the sustainable city?

You will have to read the book for the detail in which the authors describe ten strategic steps towards sustainability. They include among these the installation of sustainable infrastructure, the regeneration of households and neighbourhoods, the facilitation of localisation and the use of government approvals to regulate for a post-oil transition.

For those community associations pursuing the Transition approach to a sustainable future, Resilient Cities – responding to peak oil and climate change will help to bring rigour and credibility to their argument. At the same time it will challenge them, especially in its constructive criticism of David Holmgren’s scenario of suburban adaptation. This might not be received well in some permaculture circles as self-criticism has never been a strong feature in permaculture and reaction to outside critical comment has sometimes been quite defensive rather than considerate.

Nonetheless, as the Transition Towns/Transition Initiatives movement makes its presence felt more keenly in the social marketplace for ideas, criticism will become more frequent and more pointed. Reading this book in an open frame of mind will help such groups revisit their core beliefs and ask themselves questions about their validity.

Publisher’s information

Newman P, Beatley T, Boyer H; 2009; Resilient Cities – responding to peak oil and climate change; Island Press, Washington DC.

Reviewed by Russ Grayson, June 2009

The good thing about the house is its garden. It’s a garden of typically modest Inner West size  – which is another way of saying small — but hosts avocado, various citrus, a longan, clusters of banana and pawpaw, beds of herbs and vegetables and three off-white, very quiet bantams. Even the footpath has been terraformed with a small orange tree and New Zealand spinach.

It was when making my way from kitchen to office — steaming cup of brewed coffee in hand to ward off winter’s chilly air — that I glanced at the titles on the bookshelf and saw a copy of an old book that I am sure I owned down in Hobart towards the end of the 1970s.

The book was the work of that productive publishing duo of the early alternative, rural resettlement movement of the 1970s, Keith and Irene Smith. These were the same people who brought us that long running and still-in-publication magazine (though for many years no longer published by Keith and Irene), Earth Garden.

It is difficult to understate that magazine’s importance to the social movement it emerged from, the movement that it reported to while, at the same time, stimulating it. Earth Garden and a little later, Grass Roots magazine (still in production too) both informed and networked the rural resettlement or back-to-the-land alternative movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, bringing its participants together into a community of readers. That’s no mean accomplishment and the role of those two periodicals in creating a sense of commonality and identity should not be underestimated.

In the days before the Internet, before universal access to email, Earth Garden and Grass Roots created networks of alternatives and new settlers much as the Whole Earth Catalog did in the USA. Out on those early intentional communities, in rural towns, farmhouses, urban share houses and in capital cities, the arrival of those quarterlies was eagerly awaited. They connected people to another reality, one they were attempting to live or one they imagined living as they wistfully flicked through the pages. Over the the dawn of the early alternative/back-to-the-land movement, Earth Garden and Grass Roots shone like an illuminating sun to inform, inspire and connect.

If media is important to starting and sustaining social movements, what was the literary context of those magazines?

Those were the days when the ideas in Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (R. Buckminster Fuller; E.P. Dutton & Co, New York. c1963, 1971) retained a resonance among the creative fringe. So did the writings of British economist, Fritz Schumacher, whose late-1960s book, Small Is Beautiful – economics as if people mattered, was still inspiring an innovative alternative technology movement and was quite influential in the ideologies and technologies of the emerging intentional communities and urban alternative share houses. Late the previous decade, Theodore Roszak had written The Making of a Counter Culture (1968), a book that analysed the social movement of that time. Two years later, Charles Reich’s The Greening of America (1970) attempted to encapsulate what at the time was a somewhat perplexing turbulence of people and ideas.

These books were available in Australia but their influence is undocumented. Certainly, Roszak and Reich’s books were read by those identifying with the New Left as they were available in Sydney at specialist booksellers such as the Third World Bookshop, which opened in 1967 and traded into the start of the following decade before morphing into the bookselling establishments of veteran Sydney leftist politico, Bob Gould.

The first attempt to document the alternative or back-to-the-land movement in this county had to await Peter Cock’s substantial 1979 work, Alternative Australia – communities of the future (Quartet Books, Melbourne). By that time, the movement has gone through its gestatory period and was settling into a set of attitudes, practices and forms applicable to alternative city and country living. The movement’s origin lay back in the latter years of the 1960s when it was an incipient trend among footloose youth unattracted to mainstream society’s offerings. While many of its participants also identified with the New Left, especially in its opposition to Australia’s participation in the war in Vietnam, it was in many ways a parallel strand of the youth movement that saw personal change, rather than political and economic change, as the route to a different future.

Earth Garden and Grass Roots certainly belong in this parallel, non-political strand of the alternative movement. What they reported were personal and small group solutions to new ways of living in city and country. All movements develop their own literature and the Earth Garden and Grass Roots quickly became the titles that would reflect this alternative movement, particularly its back-to-the-land, new ruralists segment of it, back onto itself and which would go on to build up a substantial following in the suburbs of our major centres. That they continue in print today is testament to the staying power of the ideas they wrote about. Unlike the anti-war movement of the New Left which came to an end when its main demand was met — cessation of the war in Vietnam — the social trend represented by the two magazines retained a currency that continues today and that was given impetus first by the organic gardening movement and later, to some extent, by the emerging philosophy of permaculture.

Oh, the name of that book I mentioned before – the book I discovered on the shelf  in that house in the Inner West– it was The First Earth Garden Book (ISBN 01 7005 4446)  and it was published in 1975.

Change

History juxtaposes. Social trends overlay political events that overlay technological and economic change.

1975. A year that juxtaposed all of those trends. Only a few years before Australia had pulled out of Vietnam, leaving the gathering quagmire to the Americans. This was a pleasingly chaotic decade, a time of change, and in its own way that book of the Smiths’ was a vector for that change, carrying news of it in the form of a how-to manual of personal experience to a youth hungry for better ways of doing things.

1978. A few years pass and the second edition of the Smith’s book is published. Put yourself in Hobart at that time. A small city of around 200,000 sprawling along the banks of the Derwent estuary, overshadowed by a high, rocky mountain and looking out to Storm Bay and the open seas of the turbulent Southern Ocean, you can see why David Holmgren once described Hobart as sitting on the edge of industrial civilisation.

Back to the present. Only a couple weeks ago I had a conversation with Terry White, one of the permaculture design system’s early adopters. It was an illuminating conversation that cleared some ambiguity about what happened when, back in those closing years of the 1970s. Terry described how, in the year that the second edition of Keith and Irene’s book was published, two minds met in a living room below that mountain that overshadows the city — Mt Wellington.

The outcome of those meetings spilled out of that living room on Wellington’s lower slopes to assume book form. And therein lies the coincidence — a book compiling writings published by the Smiths over previous years meets a book bearing news of a new idea.

They had much in common.

A design context

Today, we know that new idea, that product of those two minds in the living room on the lower slopes of Mt Wellington, as permaculture. What permaculture did was to put those earlier ideas represented by the Smith’s book into the context of a design system. Oh, that book developed from the ideas of those two innovators was called Permaculture One.

Terry White also figures among the coincidences of 1978. I knew it before, but I became truly aware of it while writing for ABC Organic Gardener editor, Steve Payne (one-time editor of Permaculture International Journal). We were working collaboratively on material for an upcoming edition of New Internationalist magazine, a special edition on permaculture. It was while producing this that I spoke with Terry.

Terry is not nationally prominent in the permaculture of today but he was instrumental in getting the design system to its present situation, and how he did this anchors us in 1978. In that year, while living in the rural Victorian city of Maryborough, he heard a radio interview with someone by the name of Bill Mollison. He liked what he heard… there was more than a resonance with his own work… and he invited Bill to come to Maryborough. This Bill did. Out of that meeting and the first permaculture course came another of those publishing coincidences of that year. It was called Permaculture and it was a glossy, authoritative quarterly magazine, and its editor was Terry White. And just as Earth Garden and Grass Roots fed an alternative rural resettlement movement with news and information, creating a sense of participation in a network national in scale, so Permaculture quarterly came to do.

As the cliché goes, the rest is history. Almost ten years after creating a published presence for the permaculture design system Terry handed Permaculture over to Robyn Francis who, in turn and under the name Permaculture International Journal handed it on to Steve Payne.

The reason I write this is because permaculture is a movement approaching its thirtieth birthday — and it may be a social movement losing its memory. Thirty years since 1978 and Permaculture One. Thirty years is time enough for a history of permaculture to be written but that task remains unfulfilled. The need for it is seldom mentioned. All we have is Bill Mollison’s own story as documented in Travels in Dreams and, valuable though that is, it is not the history of the broader movement, the stories of those that were there at its birth. We do have a few brief memoirs of people in permaculture scattered across websites and we will have a proposed book of permaculture biographies in a couple years, but I suspect these together will still not make up a cogent history of the movement.

On reflection, writing the history of a decentralised movement carries with it the danger of omission, the accidental leaving out of people whose stories should properly be included. It also carries the risk of selectivity, as do all media products, because the people who would originate such a project will define its content and direction.

But none of this is a valid argument for not trying. I have this nagging belief that a movement without a history lacks some critical sense of self and is the lesser for it. A documented history brings self-concept, a sense of evolution and some insight into how the movement has accommodated the changes emerging from within itself and those impinging from the wider world. A friend recently asked me, when we were discussing permaculture and the information available about it, whether it was only we journalists – he was referring to the two of us – that have this need to document things. I answered that was probably the case. Somehow, fate has landed us with an interest in stringing words and images together to reflect on things and tell their story.

The road from 1978 to 2008 has been long but, seemingly, has been rapidly travelled. Now, thirty years after that meeting of minds on the lower slopes of Mt Wellington, it really is time to look back as a means to understand the road ahead.

First published ABC Organic Gardener 2006.

WHAT CAN YOU SAY about a book by someone who wears pearls while gardening and who talks about being a ‘WWEW’ – a Wild Wise Elderly Woman? Nothing that would surprise her, that’s for sure… just good things.

Rosemary Morrow is a Blue Mountains, NSW, woman who thinks globally and acts the same way. She was already thinking and acting like that when, in 1993, she wrote The Earthkeepers Guide to Permaculture. This new edition changes ‘Earthkeepers’ in the title to ‘Earth Users’, but it retains much of the original content and updates it. The original book proved popular, especially among Permaculture educators some of whom recommended it as a key text for students.  They did that because Rosemary’s focus was on the implementation of Permaculture rather than on the theory alone – that had already been taken care of in Bill Mollison’s Permaculture -  A Designer’s Manual and Mollison and Reny Slay’s Introduction to Permaculture. Rosemary’s book made Permaculture accessible.

Rosemary Morrow

New times, new edition

Books need updating if they are to address current circumstances.

The world of the 1993, when the first edition appeared, was in many ways a different place than it is today. Changes to the text in this new edition include Rosemary’s ideas on ‘social permaculture’ and designing for disaster. This is essentially a community-based approach to security in the face of natural and human-caused disasters. It is timely, especially now that global warming and peak oil may challenge the way we live. The new edition draws on Rosemary’s food security and community development work in Cambodia and Vietnam, countries she has returned to repeatedly. In between those extended journeys Rosemary has taught Permaculture design courses in her home town of Katoomba.

The Earth Users Guide is a practical book. The language is plain English and the illustrations are clear. A folio of colour prints illustrate the themes. There’s all that you would expect in a permaculture manual – garden design, community economics and Rosemary’s own iteration of permaculture’s design principles. This, too, is welcome as principles have to be adapted to changing circumstances and reinterpreted to suit new times. Rosemary lists attitudinal principles, with outcomes, as well as strategic principles of design.

Anything missing?

So, what’s missing? Very little, I think. As a local food systems advocate I would have liked more on those systems – food cooperatives, farmers’ markets and the like – though Rosemary briefly covers community gardens and community supported agriculture. More Australian references to community food gardens would have been helpful. I would also have liked something on how to make medium density city living more sustainable, however little work has been applied to this even by planners, architects or local government, let alone permaculture designers, so I can’t complain that it doesn’t get a lot of  space in Rosemary’s book.

Illustrating Rosemary’s ideas are the line drawings of Rob Allsop. Rob is ‘The Quite Permaculturist’. Where some shout their accomplishments out loud and others, like me, prattle on about permaculture in text and image -  Rob just does it and says little. Thus I feel compelled to highlight the work of this accomplished illustrator and photographer. Rob is an old associate of Rosemary and has traveled to Cambodia to participate in food security and other projects.

Rosemary Morrow’s contribution to permaculture has garnered support through a practical, humane and dogma-free approach to sustainability at the local level. And the book? Yes, even if you have the first edition there’s more in this new one that justifies the investment.

Read it and learn, think, plan, make and do. And in doing know that you are basing your actions on the knowledge and experience of one of permaculture’s true ‘elders’, an unpretentious, all-too-modest woman who through straightforward, common sense ideas and personal example, is transforming the lives of those that come into contact with her.

Morrow R, 2006; The Earth Users Guide to Permaculture; Kangaroo Press, Sydney. ISBN 0 7318 1271 9

Rosemary Morrow wrote the teaching notes to the first edition of her book in the 1990s.

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THERE’S NO DOUBT ABOUT IT — Gleebooks has become the literary centre of Sydney. Not only does the bookshop in Glebe Point Road have a wonderfully diverse range of titles, it has a constant program of talks and book launches in its upstairs room. These literary evenings can be crowded.

So it was when veteran UK green, Jonathan Porritt, spoke about his latest book there in January 2006. Entitled Capitalism as if the World Mattered, the event provided Porritt a forum to make observations about topics such as environmentalists, the culture of consumerism and the role of government in promoting sustainability.

Porritt is a tall, slightly thick-set man whose black hair is becoming somewhat thin on top. Articulate as you would expect somebody who stood for the UK Parliament (he got 4.5 percent of the vote) and who started the charity, Forum for the Future, and who was a member of the SouthWest Regional Development Agency, Porritt started making an impact in the sustainability milieu in the UK while director of Friends of the Earth. He was awarded an CBE in 2000 for services to environmental protection.

Dressed in dark blue shirt and trousers, Porritt spoke to those crowded into Glebooks upstairs room in a voice educated and cultured and that somehow epitomised his role as middle class UK environmental spokesman.

Environmentalists should change their expression

First up was advice for environmentalists, some of it critical but qualified by his long and distinguished history in the environment movement.

Mocking environmentalists, Porritt tells the audience that a “hangdog countenance in the face of empirical reality” has become “a must” for environmentalists.

“It is difficult for environmentalists to say they are having a good time. It is almost important never to be optimistic”.

We have to ask some hard questions about where we are

Citing an “apocalyptic tendency”, Porritt says that there is “an escapist tendency in the environment movement that is dangerous .

“Environmentalists are regarded negatively as party-poopers. The challenge is to make sustainability appear desirable so as to get the numbers. I think it can be done”.

Environmentalists have to “stop whacking people around the head” he tells an audience many of whom probably have environmentalist tendencies themselves.

Losing ground

For Porritt, a period has now ended in which environmentalists could easily influence government.

“It ends a 30-year period”, he says, adding that the “seductive power of the business community” has gained the ear of government.

“Greens? There are none in power in places like the UK and Germany now. This is not a good place to be. We have to ask some hard questions about where we are”.

Referring to a Sierra Club USA article, Porritt explores further environmentalism’s falling influence, referring to the Bush administration:  “Neo-conservatives took the high ground and US environmentalists were pushed off by a bunch of fundamentalist nut cases. They have been more convincing to US voters than the appeal of  environmentalism”.

This, he says, is due to environmentalists’ failure to address American values “whatever they are”.

Capitalism the only game

Porritt addresses issues of more philosophical content when he asked: “Is a sustainable future for nine billion people possible with a capitalist economy?” at a time when companies engage in “systematic Earth trashing”.

It is not possible with the current version of capitalism, he assures listeners. “It’s just not possible. It will never happen”. We need a different version of capitalism to achieve sustainability, but “there is nothing that will shove capitalism out of the way over the next 20 years”. We have to work within it for change and there are no alternatives to this. “It’s the only game in town”, he says definitively.

Governments the world over are pathetic. Some politicians have given up and just don’t care. It is a denial of reality

Capitalism in its current form is inextricably linked with the culture of consumerism.

“There are people living in the OECD countries in the thrall of consumerism but the growth economy does not make them happier. People do not feel better about society or themselves.

“Where are the politicians who would once have campaigned on happiness?

“There is no resonance to transformation apparent  in university student bodies. The only source of change comes from the teaching staff and the communities in which they are embedded, not the students.”

New model for business

Business, said Porritt, must realise that “we destroy value by destroying nature. It is hard to get people to live more responsible lives as consumers.

“We have to create wealth differently, use the tax system and create different outcomes… we need new patterns of prosperity. It is about the desirability of sustainability and opportunity and sustainability should be about making people feel good about themselves”.

Porritt believes that we are heading towards “the end of what we hold of value. Governments the world over are pathetic. Some politicians have given up and just don’t care. It is a denial of reality”.

But government can use public money to drive sustainability, he asserts.

“We have to get real about the use of tax and so on through procurement policy and the like. Governments can shape markets to what we need. Business needs government to do this as it cannot do it itself”.

Finally, in regard to the reality that sustainability advocates have to live with one foot in the world they are creating and the other in the world of present reality, Porritt believes we must acknowledge our contradictions.

“We all have contradictions in life. How do you think I got here? I didn’t swim.

“We have to find responsible paths of consumerism and make them smart in media terms”.