Design for Revolution
– What’s this all about?
Site last updated 14 December 2008
Design for Revolution |
– What’s this all about? |
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Site last updated 14 December 2008 |
Latest in: observation, priorities, design. Latest link | ||
Design for RevolutionOne new book on land degradation, below, 22/8/08
I embarked on this project more than two years ago, and over that time this site has grown ramblingly and lost its original structure and plan. I feel I am getting near to a result, a ‘Design for Revolution’, but not near enough to scrap all the preliminaries and exploration, all the history, including short-term priorities and distractions which have got in the way, and the design ideas which drew me for a while. This home page calls itself ‘What’s this all about?’, but hasn’t been answering that question – not that this matters much; people don’t read headers and such, do they? – so, temporarily, I’ll reinstate two introductions, from a year ago and the original.
What’s this all about?Noting – as one does – that the world is in a terrible mess and the planet is badly in need of healing, I decided to try to do a permaculture design for the much-needed revolution. The site began in embryo on 7th July 2004 and since then I’ve collected anything that seemed relevant to my project of ‘Designing a Revolution’ and put links to it all on a table. This was the ‘Observation and Interaction ’ stage you need in any permaculture design, and it’s ongoing. But designing a revolution was not the only thing I was doing. There were other priorities and distractions. Everybody has these, so it seems necessary to make the next stage or layer of my design looking at that phenomenon. On 10th April 2005 I began to put together some ‘Design Ideas’ – not the Design as such, but (mainly) constructive thoughts towards it. Eventually, on 23 September 2006, I began a page on the Design. Still a long way to go ... (original) IntroductionIn order to make a difference to the world we need to understand the underlying causes for the way it is now and why there is no deep or long-lasting improvement. Profound changes are needed. I think that solutions may lie with a combination of deep ecology principles, permaculture design and Marxist socialist revolutionary change. This also brings together long standing interests I have had in these subjects. I’ve invited comments and already another element has been suggested, one with a long history that I’m just beginning to explore: anarchism, whence I’ve also been introduced to Social Ecology, and Murray Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom. DesignDesign refers to permaculture design My original intention was to pursue this design via the Permaculture Association (Britain) (PAB) Diploma process, hence my Proposal. I have also wondered if Bill Mollison produced the definitive ‘design for revolution’ 14 years ago. Bookchin also has taken us a long way towards designing a new – non-hierarchical – ecological society. (added 27/12/04). RevolutionRevolution refers to Marxist socialist revolution, but with a deep green as well as a red agenda, to a society characterised by the following principle:
Discussions so far indicate that a necessary and desirable First Stage is to bring together red and deep-green activism, so I organised the collection into ‘red’, ‘green’ and ‘design ideas’ columns. I have a backlog of material to go in, so do keep coming back. In parallel, permaculture people need to reclaim the global deep ecology vision of ‘permanent agriculture’ (see ‘What is Permaculture?’). Also the movement needs to get ‘mainstream friendly’, and judging by the response to a workshop at PAB Convergence21 (27 people squashed into a small yurt, others unable to get in; see handout and write-ups), there is much enthusiasm for this. However, there is a faction keen to keep the PAB an exclusive sect - where have you met this before, Comrades? This is still the observation stage of the design process. All comments and suggestions very welcome. Chris Marsh 9 September 2004 PS Note for Site Design experts
Leftovers, moved from top on 19 October 2006, updated 26 April 2008
This page is a mess and needs a purge, but it’s not my top priority at the moment.
I have the Design for Revolution in mind, and ... perhaps it won’t take too long to write the Design up here. Needless to say, the Design will be in draft form; it cannot be fixed until the Revolution has happened – and anyway, it’s already happening… So, watch this space! (Actually don’t, but do check it out towards the end of the month.) Btw, I’m not intending to re-design the site; I rather like its Noddy style, a product of basic Dreamweaver plus bit of html tinkering; intermediate technology, one might say. But ‘Design Ideas’ (above) will go in favour of ‘Design’, and when that’s there, click it and see what you think… The Tropical Rainforests are Dying‘One Year Left for the Amazon Rainforest? – Recent droughts have severely stressed the Amazonian rainforest. Computer modelling indicates that if things are not better by next year, “Earth’s lungs” may be damaged to the point that recovery is impossible.’ Despite the journalist’s headline text being wrongly worded: the Amazon rainforest is not the “Earth’s lungs”, it produces oxygen due to photosynthesis, of course, but so do vast masses of photosynthesising algae in the oceans, which are much more lung-like. The Amazon rainforest is more important for its genetic diversity, and sheer living amazingness. So, this is incredibly awful, the worst possible outcome of millennia of human depredations of our planet. This news – even the possibility that it could be true, could happen – brings up thoughts: firstly my father being concerned having seen during the War felling of areas of rainforest in West Africa and telling me about how vital and wonderful rainforests are when I was a girl aged about 10, over 50 years ago! And then I remember giving my fee of £6000 for a job I’d hated – working at Marks and Spencer Head Office – to Friends of the Earth to ‘save the rainforest’, and being told I had to give the money to Friends of the Earth Trust so they could reclaim the tax I’d paid, but then I got a thank-you letter from the Director, Jonathan Porritt, saying how valuable my contribution towards FoE literature would be. Rabindranath Tagore!A contribution to Tagore scholarship: ‘The Village and the World: A Political Reading of Rabindranath Tagore’s Prose Fiction’. I had intended to start writing a book on Tagore’s political vision, with the provisional title, A Different Dharma, as part of the Design for Revolution, to be published here first, probably chapter by chapter. I now have a new web site: www.homeandlocalfood.org.uk, dedicated to Tagore. PreambleI suppose this site is a book in hypertext: a much more exciting literary medium than words on a page because of the easy jumping around it all, and because the ‘all’ keeps changing – or should do if one’s ideas are developing. But the whole thing does lose coherence, parts get left behind, and I noticed recently that my home page was seldom changing, apart from its ‘last updated’ date - so are visitors likely to go to see what in the other pages via the ‘Latest in’ links (above)? So I’ve put here:
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Check these outwww.crisispapers.org Books on land degradationThis mini-list, below, has been here since I set up this site in 2004. I’ve been indexing the books in my library as a ‘bit of knitting’ for when I have time, which isn’t often.
I have indexed the first bookcase-full on Land, Gardening and Permaculture. 23/8/08
When I do the indexing, of many books from the 1980s and 90s and some much earlier, I’m mildly surprised at how little has changed, and with new books I find myself saying: ‘I know, I know, I was trying to tell people that 20 years ago!’ I was saying that as I was reading one new book I will add now, and for me it only got interesting in the last chapter called ‘Sitopia’, about ‘solutions’, except that really there are no solutions in the pipeline, and I agreed with her that any solution will have to focus on food. In that chapter, the author mentions permaculture and the transition towns movement. In my view, those two movements with much potential have not yet got to grips with the need to research a new kind of agriculture which is really high-yielding, and they don’t recognise that capitalism has got to go if we are to save ourselves and the planet.
That new book is:
Carolyn Steel, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives ( London: Chattor & Windus, 2008)
22 August, 2008 The 2004 List: Vernon Gill Carter and Tom Dale, Topsoil and Civilization (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974) Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Land and People (Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1997) Johan Goudsblom, Fire and Civilisation (London: Penguin, 1994) Andrew Goudie, The Human Impact on the Natural Environment: Third Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield, Land Degradation and Society (London: Methuen, 1987) Piers Blaikie, The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (Harlow, Essex: Longman Scientific and Technical, 1987) John A. Dixon, David E. James and Paul B. Sherman, The Economics of Dryland Management (London: Earthscan, 1989) Simmons, I G, Changing the Face of the Earth, ( Oxford:Blackwell, 1989 |