Socialists want a world based on the principle: ‘from each according to his or her means and capabilities, to each according to his or her self-determined needs and desires.’

This is a humanistic goal, in permaculture circles we would call it ‘people care’.

 

But, socialists will not ‘draw up a blueprint’ for a socialist society; that will be done by the people, not by any political Party, once the revolution has taken place.

Permaculture design is about how to use local resources, natural processes and people’s skills and energy to meet the self-determined needs and desires of local people, at the same time enhancing the local ecology.

Permaculture has an ethical basis expressed as: ‘earth care’, ‘people care’ and ‘fair shares’. ‘Earth care’ is primary, even from an anthropocentric perspective, because we need to care for the earth to survive, and it is currently severely threatened.

 

The permaculture revolution is already happening, but it is a quiet one (perhaps too quiet and too slow).

There is such a strong coincidence of aims and ethics that it must be worth a try to see if socialists’ revolutionary aims could be achieved by means of permaculture design.

What is permaculture?

As originally conceived, permaculture – short for ‘permanent agriculture’ – is a revolutionary form of agriculture, intended to replace the methods of cultivation introduced thousands of years ago with the advent of urban civilisation, and not essentially changed since then. Bill Mollison, who coined the term, observed that agriculture has lacked design, having generally involved a crude process of clearing the wilderness and establishing a cycle of digging or ploughing, then seeding with a few useful species, primarily grasses, then harvesting the crop to feed humans and livestock – and the cycle begins again year on year until the land is exhausted – after which a new area of wilderness is cleared. Mollison proposed introducing design into agriculture with a view to making it sustainable and high-yielding so that human communities could have their needs met on the least possible land area, in order to preserve the little remaining wilderness worldwide for other species, and release land for natural ecosystems to be re-established. This would also result in extensive areas of prolific vegetative growth capable of acting as a carbon sink and to stabilise climate regionally and globally.

In order to implement this global vision, we need locally specific designs, because every place on earth is different in local climate, land form, soils, and the combinations of species which will thrive. Not only does the land and its potential vary from place to place, but so do people vary in their needs and preferences and their capacities. Hence at the local level, permaculture designers often refer to permaculture as being about designing for ‘permanent culture’, and encompassing housing, water systems, transport and so on, and also invisible structures such as legal and financial systems, and the development of supportive social networks.

So, permaculture is about local people participating in their own local land and community designs to meet their needs and those of other life forms, so that together the multiplicity of designs make a revolution in land use worldwide to save and regenerate wilderness for the sake of the survival and health of the living planet.

The first, most important and ongoing stage of a

permaculture design is Observation

A. Get a picture of the world

• A ‘developed’ country, say Britain (NB too big to do a design for): what do we know about its land, soils, climate, native species, history, politics?
• A less ‘developed’ country, say Brazil: what do we know about threatened ecosystems, the causes, the people, the politics?
• An impoverished region, say sub-Saharan Africa: how are people suffering, why, is their land resource poor?
• A part of the world at war, say Palestine: what is happening and why, and what could be done about it?

Consider global perspectives eg Susan George: in ‘developed’ countries, 80% within capitalist system, 20% excluded; in ‘underdeveloped’ countries vice versa. How do the excluded survive?

Why do we ask different questions about different categories of place? What are ‘countries’, ‘regions’, ‘parts of the world’ anyway?

B. Get a picture of your place

• What do you name it?
• What are its characteristics?
• What do you like about it?
• What would you like to change?
• Who do you know, interact with?
• How do you and others make a living?
• What effects do you have on the world?

C. Reconnect with the land

On a day out in the ‘countryside’ what do you notice? how do you feel? what do you eat? Suppose you take a cheese sandwich, a banana and a carton of orange juice, what effect are you having on the world?

What can socialists contribute?

Socialists today:

• do not talk about a future society based around centralised five-year plans. They are more likely to envisage a devolved kind of local community participatory democracy, with links to wider regions when necessary, a vision with more than a passing resemblance to anarchism;
• have a ‘green’ vision only to the extent that they want the future to be ‘sustainable’, but theirs is not a ‘deep ecology’ vision recognising the inherent rights of all life;
• still believe that capitalism has to be overturned before a socialist future can arise. Some believe the revolution has to be led, others trust the dialectical workings of history;
• are uncertain how the revolution can come about. Will it involve the armed struggle, such that millions die for a better world? Or can a revolution come through the ballot box, peacefully?

Socialists interested in permaculture:

• would see that people are already designing new ways of living in their places and communities, and that these pockets of healthy change are multiplying world wide;
• would recognise that the first step in a global revolution is to see how you could participate in helping change come about where you are right now – unless change happens at the grassroots it is not real.

But permaculture needs to get political:

• What happens when capitalist vested interests see permaculture activities as a threat?
• How can the permaculture quiet revolution grow fast enough and strongly enough in an integrated fashion so that it becomes unstoppable?
• Can socialists get together with permaculturists to

Design for Revolution?

www.des4rev.org.uk