permaculture

[rmhoward@omninet.net.au]

STEPS TO AN  ECONOMY OF PERMACULTURE

The title is a take from Gregory Bateson's "Steps to an ecology of the mind". 
That 
book, and Mary O'Brien's "The Politics of Reproduction" have profoundly 
influenced my thinking and this essay.

Gregory Bateson talks about three levels of learning, 'rote learning", 
"learning to 
learn", and "learning to challenge one's learning". To create a permaculture 
we 
need to challenge the learning of ourselves and of our fellow citizens. We 
need all 
to become mavens. 

Mary O'Brien demands that we recognize that patriarchal economy is built 
around 
an edifice that denies the existence of reproductive work. Reproductive work 
and 
productive work differ in three fundamental ways. 
        (1) time is cyclical in reproductive work but linear in productive 
work
        (2) reproductive work can't wait, productive work can
        (3) reproductive work is necessarily social whereas productive work 
is 
socially necessary.

Drug addiction (the second biggest aspect of the global economy after arms) 
is the 
result of the fetishization of cyclical time.The collapse of all meaning into 
the "next 
fix". This conflation occurs because of fact that linear time is one 
dimensional and 
hence can be measured in dollars. Kerry Packer has a heart attack and spends 
millions on Cardiac ambulance units and needs another man's kidney because 
his 
time is valued in thousands of dollars per hour and he cannot 'afford' to 
spend an 
hour a day exercising. Think about it.

Cyclical time is two dimensional which also means that there exists not one 
but a 
whole series of equilibrium points and hence the idea of 'supply and demand' 
is 
simply inadequate. It is an old truism that a government is only a day's 
starvation 
away from a revolution. Yet it is also obvious that in some countries people 
starve 
before they revolt. What is apparent is that the social conditions (i.e. the 
nature of 
the government) are a primary determinant regarding which equilibrium point 
society will settle around.

Because food(and water) is a reproductive good, (as opposed to a television) 
- it's 
cost and availability is the single most important material arbiter of the 
other 
reproductive aspects of society. The 'necessarily social' agreements that 
enable 
food to be produced and harvested. (from bank credit to the casual labour of 
the 
harvest, etc). The increase in the price of rice and kerosene(used for 
cooking and 
lighting) in Indonesia was considered to be the dominant factor in the 
downfall of 
the Suharto regime. Change does not occur incrementally in cyclical systems.

Women who do most of the reproductive work in the world manage by 'doing many 
things at once'. This is a cognitive process that is being put to good effect 
in 
revolutionary robot software designs. It is also a dynamic restatement of the 
permaculture principle that everything should have multiple uses.

There are only 24 hours in a day, in which we must earn enough to satisfy our 
reproductive needs ( this assuredly includes children). We are all familiar 
with this 
economy. Aphorisms like "plenty of money but no time, plenty of time but no 
money" sum up this daily dilemma. 

But what is happening in a cyclical sense is that we are caught in our 
habits. 
(Addiction is a pathology of habit.) Because habits are things that we have 
'learned 
to learn'. Then we must learn to challenge our learning. For Gregory Bateson, 
this 
is cognitively the equivalent of a zen enlightenment, or a psycho-therapeutic 
insight, where a person's behaviour is changed(not just their opinion!). 

But this also occurs on a more prosaic level when communities collapse or 
individuals lose their jobs. In this case, whether a person learns or dies, 
can be the 
tragic consequence.

I don't think that we are going to have a choice about reducing our energy 
consumption. We don't need to proselytize about the virtue of living 
cheaply(or 
energy efficiently) because it will be a necessity before long for all of us( 
and it 
already is for most of the world's population). 

The seductiveness of the agrarian solution is easy to understand if you 
simply take 
a productive view(reducing the transport component, recycling the phosphorus 
etc.) But it doesn't work for  Australian soldier settler's after two world 
wars or for 
Year Zero Cambodians.  The reason it doesn't work is because farming requires 
a 
major readjustment to our personal reproductive cycle's. The reproductive 
aspects 
of farming ("it can't wait") mean that we can't learn on the job in the same 
way that i 
can learn to make a shoe or a book. 

Instead what we need to do is to establish the value of our reproductive 
work. In 
Australia, we have almost lost sight of the 8 hour day. But it's still out 
there. We 
know what reproductive work is we simply have lost our voice for articulating 
it. 

As I said above, it is the social conditions that determine, the equilibrium 
of supply 
and demand when it comes to reproductive work. This means that with the rich 
getting richer and the poor getting poorer which is in effect a result of a 
collapsing 
supply of reproductive goods (food and water)

Please let's forget about oil for a while and think about the consequences of 
the 
already occurring climate change! The price of fresh food is rising 
inexorably in 
the supermarkets today and that's got to do with (1) the consolidation of 
multinational power through supermarkets and (2)the 'thousand and one 
accidents 
of nature' to quote the chemist Berthollet. (He was extolling the virtue of 
synthetic 
indigo made from coal tar instead of grown in the fields of India, a 
discovery that 
gave birth to the organic chemistry industry.)

There are a thousand and one accidents now because of the consequences of the 
CO2 already present in the atmosphere. This CO2 is there largely because of 
the 
actions of the US imperium and it's devotion to the so-called capitalist 
enterprise. 
The rise of agri-business and the rise of CO2 levels have a common cause.

It follows that creative ways of undermining the power of the supermarket 
chains 
are the most effective - hence farmer's markets work. But we need to bear in 
mind 
is that supermarket chains are going to price themselves out of poor people's 
reach anyway and that the provision of food through communal activity will be 
a 
necessity. It is to this sort of action that creative thought needs to be 
applied. 

Lastly, (for now ;-), we should recognize that the power that multinationals 
have is 
gained through their control over information as much as over resources. Yet 
information is the lightest of things. It ways but a light wave and it likes 
to be free. 

One of the consequences of the internet is that small businesses can benefit 
enormously especially if their produce has a high information to weight 
ratio. One 
of the first things I ever bought on the net was some hand made paper cards 
from 
Alaska and that was before e-commerce had even started. Now this may have 
been energetically irresponsible of me, but it illustrates that the net may 
have 
unintended consequences when it comes to estimating transport growth and 
economic growth. The question is whether when rising oil prices reduce the 
amount of bulk goods transported this is offset by a rise in the transport of 
value 
added goods around the world.

It is clear however, that there is no technological fix, since information is 
routinely 
kept off the net and resources are controlled by armed guards and these are 
the 
real issues when it comes to an economy of permaculture. How do we 
participate 
in the revolution? How can we design a permaculture soup kitchen, or a 
permaculture work place? How can we do four things at once? How can we work a 
four hour day?


Bob Howard (c). 5 November 2003


There is a quote from an old Albany Noongar whaler, Jack Hansum, who could 
spot the whales from the lookout above the harbour before anyone else. He'd 
say 
"Look as far as you can see, now look farder[sic]" (Albany Advertiser, 1891)