Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - Re: [permaculture] 'invisible structures'

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Nancy Elizabeth <nesutton@yahoo.com>
  • To: "permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] 'invisible structures'
  • Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2016 05:52:36 +0000 (UTC)

(Love Scott's direction, btw, )  Posted far outside the main p.c. channels....
https://www.reddit.com/r/Permaculture/comments/4t8dps/end_of_nations_is_there_an_alternative_to/d5fxrgw?st=ireh5ndo&sh=aecf75ef

If you are interested in this stuff you might want to track down Bill
Mollison's 1983 PDC. He breaks down a whole system of using the existing
institutions of the nation state such as trust law to form non profit public
interest trusts (the same legal form as churches and universities) that own
profit seeking companies. The trust owns all of the land and capital
equipment collectively and lends or leases it out to profit seeking companies
owned by the trust. The profit seeking companies then donate all of their
taxable profits to the trust and the trust pays what is effectively a minimum
basic income to all of the beneficiaries of the trust (who are also the
people in the companies and operating the land trust). Because all of the
land, housing and capital can be provided by the trust holdings the basic
income stipends can be below taxable rates but still provide a living wage.
It's pretty much what Joel Salatin describes in this talk but with a more
communitarian focus and a few sneakier institutional strategies. Effectively
it means that a small group can get together, provide a livings for each
other, pay no or almost no tax and be very legally defensible if state or
corporate interests try to come after them (as they did with the original
permaculture institute which was modelled this way).This land based form can
then be networked into regional coops. Mollison largely models this on
mondragon which the exception that there is a care of the earth, care of
people etc charter in the coops (so they don't end up making consumer goods
like standard washing machines). These coops can then be knitted into
bioregional groups where the waste products of one coop become the inputs for
another not unlike the Plant in Chicago. At this scale the groups would be
large and coordinated enough to run local political candidates or have
considerable sway in local politics which could remove regulatory barriers to
regenerative and ecological activities.The whole thing is very interesting,
especially since it's a roadmap that used existing institutions and legal
forms which largely serve corporate interests but turns them to the service
of regenerative social ecological systems. Rather than sitting on our thumbs
waiting for nations to collapse it gives us an effective means of using the
existing nation states to become incubators for permaculture federations
which would have some measure of independence from centralized means of
control. Even better than that it allows for a prefigurative politics and
staging a social prototype in a context of use which allows us to identify
'misfits' and sort out problems that would not be apparent in theoretical
plan. What's more everything he talks about was able to be done in Australia
or in larger cases in the Basque regions of Spain. It's not a bunch of pie in
the sky postulates or theory.




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page