My time in Chile is almost at an end. But, before I go, I want to share with you the present and future plans for transitioning the community here in El Manzano. They are not insignificant.

The second community meeting I attended during my stay was to discuss these plans and solicit community input and participation. It is the end of the agricultural season here, so people are in high spirits and also have a little extra time for contemplative discussion.

But before I jump straight into the meeting it’d be good to get a grip on practicalities of advancement here.

Financials

Funding for transitioning at El Manzano comes primarily from the following three revenue streams:

1) The farm, consisting of 120 hectares of land: 80 ha of Zone 5 (70 ha of primarily pine and some eucalyptus trees and 10 ha of regenerating forest – i.e. re-establishing natives along stream beds and borders to protect the watershed and improve eco-system services, aiming to eventually become 30% of the property), 5 ha of organic blueberries, 30 ha of broadscale horticulture (horses used for cultivation as much as possible), 2 ha of orchards, and 3 in Zone 1 intensive gardening. The farm is entirely chemical-free, implements permaculture principles throughout and is steadily transitioning to increase diversity and reduce dependence. It currently employs seven of the villagers, and others work, as expressed in the last post, on a very appreciative voluntary basis so they can share in the farm’s harvest – essentially bartering labour for food.

2) Eco Escuela: Eco Escuela El Manzano translates to ‘Apple Tree Eco School’. It is the educational business set up by Grifen and Javiera, and includes other family members as business partners and teachers-in-training. The school has trained 145 students, now Permaculture Design Certificate holders, since the school was launched two years ago, and is poised to teach many more (more on that below). In addition two students have completed their two-year Permaculture Diploma here (Eco Escuela is also Gaia University Chile, the only Gaia University node in Latin America), and 33 more are current diploma works-in-progress. Funding through permaculture education is, as regular readers will know, part of our Permaculture Master Plan concept, where sites become financially self-sufficient, and self-replicating, through education – a proven and efficient way to move permaculture forward sustainably.

El Manzano’s outdoor class, when weather conditions invite

3) Grants: Funding is sought from outside individuals or organisations for various endeavours where possible. An example: two years ago the family met with the local community and discussed the need to transition the village to meet future resource constraints caused by energy descent (peak oil) and climate change. They determined to petition the Chilean Ministry of the Environment for funding to help implement initiatives that would reduce the village’s impact on its surrounding whilst increasing their resilience. Jorge and Carolina were subsequently delegated the task of creating the application, and their request was rewarded with support by way of U.S.$16,500. Another example is funding for the house project, a demonstration of sustainable post-quake redevelopment, where U.S.$5,000 was secured via Artists Project Earth, and of course the assistance of the Permaculture Research Institute, and the likes of you!

All of these aspects take time, dedication, persistence and vision. The good news is these traits don’t seem to be in short supply here.

The community discusses a possible budget

Back to the meeting

The main point of the meeting was to look at the financials – how much funding they had, and options for expenditure. Central in this discussion were plans the family and the community had long been brainstorming, which would utilise some of the family’s 120 ha mentioned above to develop new building and land features to benefit both Eco Escuela (the eco school) and the community. It was decided at this meeting that the plans had ripened sufficiently in maturity of evolution and consensus in thought, so that Angel Carrillo, the architect profiled in a previous post, could begin formal designs based on community feedback for this development.

The meeting broke into groups to brainstorm the design concepts

And then the three groups shared their ideas before the entire meeting

Until everyone came to happy agreement, and even applause!

There’s more than can be described within the constraints of this post, but in a nutshell, the new development would fulfil multiple functions:

1. increase the capacity of the villagers to work together in mutually beneficial ways to improve their lives along highly sustainable lines – one example is in converting the Adobe House into a food storage and preserving facility, village bakery, and potentially even an outdoor cafe supplied with farm produce, all providing employment for villagers and healthy food options for the increasing student numbers.
2. utilise some of the land to build an additional classroom that can be utilised by both the existing children’s school and Eco Escuela, and to create additional facilities (kitchen, accommodations, etc.) that can also be utilised by the growing training centre and the villagers.
3. create public spaces and environmental elements – a walkable landscape – that will benefit all of the above.

The goal, and one that seems entirely within reach, is for the community to become a beacon of realism, inspiration and reskilling – making not just the school a source of education, but also making the entire settlement a lesson in appropriate development, and cooperative endeavour. The designs being worked on today, once turned into reality, will essentially see a permaculture university in the midst of the village – with maximum participation and benefits for the villagers themselves.

Reversing the trend

These initiatives for El Manzano have great potential to not only stem the flow of rural migrants into cities, where they become wholly dependent on a collapsing money economy, but to actually reverse it. As the quality of life here improves, and resiliency builds – and the social order elsewhere continues to unravel – sons, daughters, brothers will notice the change during their visits and will inevitably decide to move back home and get involved. This is another motivating factor for the villagers who have up until recently seen their community steadily disintegrate as people head to regional capitals in search of work.

People want to see their families come to life again, and this work is making it happen.

Culture of plants, not careless propagation

One thing that needs to be clear, El Manzano is wholly unlike many ‘alternative communities’ we hear about, or have been involved in, where several well meaning but oft-naive folk decide to converge on a newly purchased property due to their shared, idealistic vision of the lifestyle they want to possess. That eco-village scenario is said to have a ninety percent failure rate. Comparable to plants being mismatched with soil and climate types, throwing westernised individuals together in situations out of their element can be rife with tension, misunderstandings, maladjustments and heartbreak.

Instead, El Manzano is about inspiring an existing community, in situ, to consider their future, and to begin to work together to achieve common goals – goals based on an increasing understanding of current events and a determination to meet them head on. The work here is taking a village and transforming it from within. This is the transition approach – one that arguably has a far higher likelihood of success.

Better to give

One thing I noted during my stay was the feeling of peace oozing from the Carrion family. Rather than cling to land ownership as an inherited ‘right’, or narrowly considering it as merely a means of securing short term gain, they’re gaining great satisfaction from finding ways to use it to create something of far greater value, and in doing so feel a weight is being lifted from their shoulders.

If this attitude were to become infectious, the world’s troubles could dissipate rather fast.

Continue on to read Part X: Eco Escuela El Manzano, a Nice Place to Learn

Contemplating the past, present and future – and land redistribution – in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Chile.

All photos © copyright Craig Mackintosh

He stares back at us from the t-shirts of millions of youths worldwide. Che Guevara’s face has become one of the most recognisable counter-cultural and political symbols ever known. The history books tell us the man was famously sympathetic to the lot of the poor, and that his overriding passion was to fight against inequality, oppression, control. Che comes to my mind as I write this article from South America, because, in his rise to power, one of his driving ambitions, and which became one of his key responsibilities under Castro, was land redistribution – where he sought to break the stranglehold that was keeping the masses impoverished and robbing them of their potential. I bring this topic up, as, when I look at what’s happening in the world, and the radical changes needed to put us onto a sustainable path, the issue keeps coming back to my mind. These two words – land redistribution – strike fear into the hearts of the rich, and feelings of ambition and even violent revolution in those of the poor, yet, if we’re to stake a claim on the future, I feel we must, both rich and poor, come to terms with them.

Those studying how to address our precipitant trends – our dire soil erosion issues, our increasingly desperate water situation, and the complete vulnerability of our having made our entire large scale food system, from seed-sowing to consumption, completely dependent on waning supplies of fossil fuels – will recognise the need to harmonise our culture with the realities of biology, of soil science, and the urgent need to diversify and relocalise our food production, and, indeed, the production of everything we need for human habitation.

Forging a permanent culture, particularly in the era of energy descent we now find ourselves in, necessitates a rapid shift of food production to small scale biodiverse systems – polycultures. A logical flow should cause us to turn to face our current predicament – where millions of farmers over the last fifty years have succumbed to the onslaught of ‘get big or get out’ agricultural policies and have done just that; gotten out. Most of the agricultural land in the ‘developed’ world today is held, and abused, by Big Agri. Indeed, only a handful of companies control the land, seed, fertilisers, pesticides and even distribution and sale of much of what we eat. Unfortunately it is not well recognised that the same can be said for much of the best land in the South as well, which is also largely serving only the needs of the wealthy – inefficiently, as industrial agriculture is – to the detriment of locals who should have the rights to that land (example) but who are exporting their water and their best soils in the produce that feeds the North.

The question of how to rapidly, but peacefully, transition society back to small scale farming systems should be on everyone’s mind, and should be pressed upon politicians at every turn. But, we should be aware that carving up land is never an easy ask. Historically, land redistribution almost never came without bloodshed. Land reforms, whether in the form of a centralised government-enforced collectivisation program or government-enforced redistribution, or whether by bloody grass-roots uprisings, are arguably the biggest cause of radicalisation, revolution and violent unrest within regional social contexts. The reason for this is simple – they are based on the most pressing of human needs: food and water.

But, worse, and this is central thought to this article: despite all the upheaval and unrest, usually these ‘reforms’, by whatever method, fail miserably.

Often, for example, the peasant class who might benefit from land redistribution look upon the situation as a way to ‘get even’ or to take back wealth from their ‘oppressors’. It becomes a class war, rather than a conscious, sober-minded and objective effort to rebuild society for the betterment of all.

Conversely, it is entirely difficult for those with large land titles to objectively appreciate the demands and needs of the landless – particularly when profits are still being made and an entire economy is based on the current paradigm. Just as medieval feudal lords fought to retain their hold on power, our contemporary corporate feudal lords will be just as unwilling to relinquish it.

And, often land reforms come to nothing because of a lack of skills, equipment or capital. People receive land, or take it by force, but then end up failing to accomplish anything with it simply due to their own inability to do so. Or, the rapid change brought about by redistribution rudely interrupts market mechanisms in place, and people fail to build a viable new system to replace it from one day to the next. This inability to plan, to strategically and objectively implement – to transition – has been the cause of some of the world’s worst famines and social implosions.

Why do I talk about these things in the context of this particular series? Well, the community development here at El Manzano is, I believe, better appreciated in the light of its historical context – and from it we may draw some lessons for the social adjustments we need to work towards and press for.

El Manzano history in a nutshell

In 1931, an ex-navy man by the name of Sydney Raby-Matthews (the great great grandfather of Grifen and Javiera’s son Anaru) bought 600 hectares of land right here in El Manzano, converting it to dairy pasture and installing electricity, fencing and roads. In the 1970s his son Lionel took over and continued with the same. El Manzano was highly self-sufficient in food, water, etc. and became a bustling little village with a much greater population than we see today.

This was the time of the Marxist politician Salvador Allende – one of whose defining acts was to expropriate lands from wealthy land holders for redistribution. The abject failure of this move set the stage for the U.S./CIA-backed military coup by Augusto Pinochet, whose regime, despite being highly repressive, happened to favour neo-liberal capitalism during the cold war years and thus endeared it to the U.S., who were, by the way, only too happy to assist him and other South American leaders in a rather muddied and murderous history.

Grifen Hope explains what happened here at El Manzano:

As the story goes, armed young men with training in Cuba came to El Manzano and rallied the villagers to take the land. They held the family at gunpoint for a few weeks in the house. They destroyed buildings and ate all the cows or herded them off. When the siege was over the leaders took everything of value – the machinery, tools and animals, etc., and left the campansinos the land. With nothing to work it they abandoned and sold it. People left and migrated to the cities of Concepcion and Santiago to find work.

Pinochet offered the land back to Lionel but he refused all but 120 hectares.

In 2004 the municipal government zoned El Manzano urban and shared the land with remaining families, giving them all a small plot. They have since constructed half of the promised homes, installed a pump, electrics and septic tank. Half the villagers remain in shacks. Around this time Maureen, the daughter of Lionel received the land and began to repair it. With her husband, Victor, CEO of a mining company, she planted 80 hectares of forest, re-employed seven of the villagers and began to live on the farm again. Her three children, Javiera (now my wife), Jorge and Jose, all with a passion for the farm and a desire to live here, trained as agricultural engineers and rallied to keep the farm in family hands and make it turn a buck.

Heavy influenced by Miguel Alteiri and Agroecology they began a process of transforming the farm to organic and started working with the village to improve quality of life.

Javiera, in a quest for knowledge that saw her visiting several countries, ultimately took a Permaculture Design Certificate course in New Zealand in 2006. One of her instructors, Grifen, quoted above, an accomplished kiwi permaculture practitioner and teacher, took an interest in both Javiera and El Manzano – resulting in Grifen leaving his country, culture and language behind to start anew in a strange land.

Investing in a future for all

Seeing great potential right here in El Manzano, Chile, the combined drive of Javiera and Grifen helped move the family’s plans ahead apace. Together they are seeing the kind of community development I’m endeavouring to share with you all. This development goes well beyond the kind of thinking that normally categorises land-holding elite. As well as seeking to transition the farm to sustainable systems and increasing diversity, some of the ‘oddities’ include:

• Encouraging and facilitating participatory decision-making for the community.
• A half/half system, where the farm supplies land, seeds, fertiliser (compost) and tools, and the villagers supply the labour. Come harvest time the villagers get half the produce. No money changes hands, no taxman, and fresh nutrient-dense food goes to families who do not possess sufficient land, and for very little input in time.
• Victor Carrion, the very supportive patriarch in this picture, is subsiding the farm with capital as it makes its transition.
• Maureen Raby, matriarch, is working with the family to bring to fruition long-studied plans to change the pattern of land ownership in the village. Legalities have yet to be finalised, but portions of land will be leased for token sums for long term use (100 years) by the community – for community facilities and common spaces (more details on this in a subsequent post). Rather than give land allotments to people outright – people who are not yet capable of making the most of it, or who are not fully aware of the crises we face and the need to maximise potential (and who may otherwise sell it or simply try to work independently of the community) – the plan will instead provide strong transition elements that incentise community development for a win-win-win scenario with promise.
• There are several transition initiatives underway (example from just my brief stay here). In fact, El Manzano is the only official transition community in Latin America.
• Assisting in times of difficulty – example.
• Five of the family members are working together as sustainability professionals to develop natural capital in the land, provide employment for villagers, and build an education centre that will increase capacity for the excellent instructional programs run here (Permaculture Design Certificate courses, full Permaculture Diplomas and even Bachelors and Masters degrees via Gaia University).

This scenario is very interesting to me. South America is well known for its massive land aggregation by the wealthy. Here many people are either Dueños (owners) or Campansinos (peasant farmers). Landlords or peasants. The family could easily just defend their ‘rights’ as land barons – and live for their own gain – but, instead, see their energies targeting the needs and development of the community around them. We see a determined effort to not only keep El Manzano alive, but to see it develop along wholly sustainable lines – to create a community that works in mutually beneficial ways, just like the symbiosis and synergism found amongst elements in a permaculture garden. And, more, the ambition is that this community will set an example to the rest of the region, country, continent and world for how people can work to create harmony and all the other elements that, in total, represent true wealth – fertile soils, clean water, sensible housing, and positive social interaction and interdependencies.

For even greater context – although the children of the community here go to school, many of the parents are illiterate. As such, it is harder for these people to progress their skills for land or any other kind of development. The family’s work to educate the community, and to educate in historically appropriate ways to build resilience (given our energy-challenged future) is thus a significant, positive intervention from people with the means to do so. In the context of peak oil and the inevitable social upheaval that will come with it, such community investment ultimately leads to self-preservation as well.

I said above that land redistribution rarely occurs without bloodshed. One exception that comes to mind – an alternative, if you will, to Che Guevara’s armed approach – is Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan movement. Vinoba Bhave was a disciple of Gandhi, and is often regarded as his spiritual successor. The Bhoodan movement was his effort to peacefully redistribute land – he walked from place to place asking the wealthy to voluntarily donate a portion of their land holdings to him, which he then passed on to the poor. In total some 5 million acres of land were redistributed, entirely peacefully, by these means.

But, it needs to be understood that, whether delivered voluntarily or by force of arms, distributing land to our current generation would, for the most part, end in catastrophe either way. Today, with an alarming proportion of mankind a few decades removed from life on the land, we’re now far more adept with our Xboxes and Chevrolets than we are with plants, life cycles and hand tools. With all of our technological smarts, we’re barely more capable at living off the land now as adults than we were the day our umbilicals were severed.

As much as many of us loathe the system we’re held captive in, the reality is if it were pulled down tomorrow, most of us would perish. This, again, screams of the need for transition – for investment in knowledge and commitment to training; for investment in community building.

In this sense, I wonder if there isn’t a place for feudalism, of an ethically motivated kind, where well positioned individuals and corporations – rather than defend their castle walls so they can cling to riches they can’t eat and hoarding their wealth for descendents who can’t possibly defend them from starving masses – consider the real needs of the future and start to use their means and potential to invest in natural capital and the knowledge needed to create and preserve it.

Imagine if the more privileged amongst us gave up the easter island attitude – vying to beat the other guy to take down the very last stand of trees – and instead put their means and energies into rebuilding the future, and in doing so creating sustainability and peace? Imagine land holders in every region coming to terms with reality, and beginning to work with the people around them? Imagine how fast the world could change for the better!

We share this planet with 6.8 billion people – more than half of whom are packed into urban centres. Re-educating the masses in sustainable and highly productive land management, and getting them onto plots they are incentivised to steward, has got to become a priority. I don’t know about you, but I shudder when I consider the alternatives.

Che Guevara took up the struggle by force of arms, living by the sword and dying at the hands of C.I.A.-backed Bolivian forces – summarily executed without trial. Today, I would propose, despite glaring flaws in his personal character, he has become the symbol for what is now a purely conceptual and impotent struggle against oppression and inequality. His face is meant to represent hope for the underdog, and be a warning to the leaders of unbridled capitalism – yet it has become little more than a logo, a brand name to be exploited by capitalism itself; a feel good but ineffectual abstraction to give a little identity to young capitalist drones.

But, as the world’s population rises, and resources deplete, and competition grows, the prospect of renewed and increasing calls for revolution seems likely. Desperate times lead to desperate measures. But, I like to dream of another kind of revolution – one based on foresight, on objectivity, on cooperation and on education. This kind of revolution needs to happen worldwide, but, at the very least, I think I can see these concepts coming to life here at El Manzano.

Continue on to read Part IX: Building Community Around a Permaculture University

Please consider contributing to this worthy cause – you can do so via donation links on this page!

Many good things came from the Permaculture Design Course we held last September at the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation. Our project is on target to be self-sustaining within three years and has moved beyond that in a number of ways.

Bryan Deans and OLCERI (Oglala-Lakota Cultural and Economic Revitalization Initiative), who hosted the course, decided to focus on the economics side of permaculture, the benefits of which would move far beyond Bryan’s own self-sufficient ranch project and throughout the entire reservation.

Almost immediately after the course, Bryan began teaching a farmer/rancher program on the rez, incorporating permaculture principles such as microlending. Ranchers are lent five cows which calf, thereby giving them a small herd which they can build up. They can give back the cows, or younger ones, once the herd is established. Farmers are given seed and loaned equipment as needed as well. A cooperative is in its formative stages which will allow the farmers and ranchers to share equipment, buy in bulk and market more effectively.

This is a true community effort that, if translated to other industries as well, could spread throughout the entire reservation and reverse the long term cycle of poverty which has continued to make this county the poorest in the US. It will also set an example for industry throughout the US.

Other potential economic engines and cooperatives include sustainable logging and milling, biodiesel, manufacture of high efficiency rocket/sawdust type stoves and water heaters, natural home building, traditional Lakota crafts such as leatherwork and beadwork, and the raising of other types of animals including horses and buffalo.

These cooperatives can be woven into the lives of the People and their ancient ways. The successes of the Mondragon cooperative, which was created by the Basque tribe in Spain and now includes dozens of profitable enterprises, are an inspiration – the Lakota will bring their unique traditions and wisdom to the council fires. Bryan’s vision is to focus on industries that complement and support one another, and are environmentally and culturally sustainable or regenerative.

The tribe has received a substantial grant, part of which can be used toward rehabilitating the two million acres of prairie that the reservation encompasses. The rez has been heavily damaged by overgrazing and other abuse to the point where the clay-silt soils are so impacted that succession has not moved beyond pioneer stage in many areas, and only short, tough buffalo grass survives in clumps – in contrast to the tall, diverse prairie grasses that grew thick and rich as far as one could see when the People managed it. Erosion is a huge problem, with dams blowing out regularly from the heavy force of water and canyons being cut deeper and deeper. For generations, the plains were sustainably managed by the People who used controlled burns and buffalo to revitalize the fertile prairie grass system and keep it healthy. Last year, Bryan and Warren Brush of Quail Springs, who taught the PDC then and will teach it again this August, created plans to use keyline and permaculture techniques to regenerate Bryan’s 8000 acre ranch, but since then the plans have gotten much bigger.

Diverse prairie grass systems are one of the best carbon sequestering systems on the planet, even better than forests in some cases. Pine Ridge reservation consists of two million acres that could be rehabbed, and Bryan has a plan that could leverage available funding into a 10 year program to accomplish this (via the economic cooperatives). Not only will this create carbon sequestering on a huge scale, it will create substantial long term employment on a rez that experiences between 60-90% unemployment, and will revitalize natural resources and ecosystems for the tribe that will last for many generations. This is OLCERI’s vision – and Warren will teach a Keyline course this summer to kick it off. OLCERI is looking for donations for keyline plows as the grant money does not necessarily cover equipment like this. The entire machine is not needed, but only the plow head, as tractors are available that can be used. We would like ti teach the first crew of Lakota this July how to keyline design and plow and get them started on an historic 3000 acre watershed on tribal lands that OLCERI controls currently.

Last year’s course had some other great results. One student is doing a permaculture project at a different location on the rez and will be offering a number of courses this year including cob building and food forestry.

Two other students are currently working on an economic and water revitilization project with the Huichol Indians of Mexico, and another student has brought the 13 grandmothers into her network of sustainability in Northern California.

OLCERI, in tandem with Permaculture Guild will be holding four permaculture courses this year on the rez and is also offering internships and apprenticeships. The courses will be: Straw bale building (to complete a workshop on OLCERI’s site that will have multiple functions); Regenerative Skills – a unique course for young adults which will incorporate ancient Lakota skills such as hunting with bow and arrow, tracking, beadwork, medicinal herbs, etc, with permaculture design; the Permaculture Design Certificate Course, and Keyline Design. In addition, Permaculture Guild will teach a food forestry course and plant a food forest on the rez.

All of the courses will serve multiple functions – bringing new energy to the reservation via outside students, completing strategically key projects to move toward regenerative self-sufficiency, and creating economic engines that will move beyond OLCERI to positively impact the entire reservation and set a model and example for others.

The course for young adults flanks successful Lakota youth programs, such as Kiza and Running Strong, that focus on empowering youth at risk by providing cultural opportunities. In addition, youth will learn the rudiments of marketable skill sets such as straw bale building and sustainable farming and ranching.

Because of the work we did last year, we are already getting strong interest in the courses for this year, so early enrollment is encouraged. Our goals to fund Lakota participation via paying students from outside the rez should be met with full enrollment.

Additional intern/apprentice projects at OLCERI this summer include:

• Planting a kitchen garden
• Planting a communal food forest in the riparian area of tribal lands
• Planting wind breaks on the ranch for energy efficiency and to protect the animals and gardens
• Creating water catchment and irrigation
• Completing the wind power and biodiesel project so the ranch is fully off the grid energy wise
• Building a straw bale workshop
• We continue to seek funding for materials for the straw bale building, keyline plow, trees for the food forest, and heavy equipment needed for prairie rehabilitation.

For more information see permacultureguild.us or contact cory (at) permacultureguild.us

Properly defining and orienting permaculture is of prime importance in its being appropriately applied. I’ve found it to be a very useful personal exercise. Doing so prevents me from straying too far from its practical origins and helps to keep it from being transformed into some kind of Utopian, escapist ideal.

First referencing Bill Mollison’s definition (taken from The Designers’ Manual):

Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is the practical conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.

Permaculture, as a design system, attempts to integrate fabricated, natural, spatial, temporal, social, and ethical parts (components) to achieve a functional whole. To do so, it concentrates not on the components themselves, but on the relationships between them, and on how they function to assist each other.

It is in the arrangement of parts that design has its being and function, and it is the adoption of a purpose which decides the direction of design.

Permaculture is concerned with the institutional and functional design of the dynamic infrastructure provided by the natural world in the form of ecosystem services. We are given a concrete means of intelligently managing natural capital in a way that strengthens it while supplying our needs in an ethical, conscious manner.

Our practical goal is to create designs that self-regulate/self-manage – just like ecosystems do. Without pollutants. Without unnecessary extra work.

The purpose of a functional & self-regulating design is to place elements or components in such a way that each serves the needs, and accepts the products, of other elements.

An Important Factor to Consider:

The context in which permaculture is applied is critical. And, I’m not simply referring to the physical, geographical, topographical, climatic contexts.

It’s going to mean different things to different people depending on who you are, where you are and where you would like to go.

It’s very personal. The reasons for being drawn to permaculture are driven by a variety of factors. For some, it’s concern for the environment, for others it’s economic, or political, or social – or, more likely, a combination of all of these factors.

All of them are closely related. None of them exist in a vacuum or in isolation.

The Prussian military thinker Karl Von Clausewitz was quoted as saying:

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

A couple of useful corollary statements easily follow (attributed to the American dissident thinker Michael Ruppert):

Politics is a continuation of Economics by different means.

Economics is a continuation of Energy by different means.

Money represents the ability to do work. Fossil fuels furnish the ability to do work – quite a lot of it, and, for the moment, relatively cheaply when one accounts for the finite nature of its supply in relation to what it facilitates.

Before the advent of fossil fuels (and modern finance), the ability to do work was represented by the possession of human chattel – or slaves. History – in its politics, economics, and social development – can be condensed into the progressive unfolding of how we have determined the most effective ways for our human needs to be provided for and subsequently how wealth is generated. Permaculture has far-reaching implications in altering our understanding what is available and what is possible in every conceivable area of human endeavor.

From that perspective, permaculture stands as a wholly revolutionary concept in form and function given what it can potentially provide us with. We collectively cannot allow it to be made into another alternative lifestyle affectation. Or some sort of Utopian, escapist fantasy which marginalizes itself by remaining at the fringes, alienating those who need it most.

The modern era – the Industrial Age – is synonymous with the the Oil Age. One doesn’t exist without the other. Viewing our present world through that lens, it becomes quite easy to understand the state of things.

Given the finite nature of the lifeblood of the modern world, one can do nothing but concede that the economics and politics driving it cannot continue.

As Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under American Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, once said:

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

Economists are very good at saying that something cannot go on forever, but not so good at saying when it will stop.

We are all in some way, shape or form, implicated in these statements. We’re all affected by this reality.

Ultimately, we all have to answer a couple of questions given the aforementioned: How do we best supply our needs? And who determines how that question is answered? These are longstanding historical dilemmas requiring practical solutions.

Our collective sociopolitical/socioeconomic situation is dictated by how those questions are answered.

This lies at the heart of what drove the formation and development of permaculture in its ethics and practice.

The "Hi Lo-Tech" integrated design methodology embodied by permaculture will become an essential tool in formulating the vision of a post-industrial, post-oil world and what it needs to look like in order for it to be viable.

In case two trillion dollars doesn’t mean a lot to you – here’s an equation to help put this into perspective: If you were to spend one million dollars, every day, from today onwards, for the next 5,500 years, you’d have spent just a little over two trillion dollars….

No wonder these people are getting upset:

For more background details, be sure to check out Money As Debt, and The Crash Course, and follow up with Thomas’ excellent ‘Money Literacy‘ series, where we seek to find an economic model that works for people and place.

If you have ideas on economic alternatives you believe could foster a permanent culture, send them as explanatory articles to editor (at) permaculture.org.au for publishing.

With the high risk of our seeing hyperinflation hit us sometime in the next 2-3 years, many are wondering what to do with their money before it becomes worthless. This is why serious investors have at least part of their portfolio in tangible assets such as gold or land.

For a long time I wanted to buy some land and do something with it, but where I live the land is stupidly expensive (particularly for small amounts), the prices propped up by grants and other scams. I knew there was affordable land in other parts of the world but I had neither the contacts nor the confidence to do anything. Recently I bought a small piece of land in Morocco to build a school and internet project, based around permaculture. Having gone through the purchasing process, with some good friends over there helping, and having the deeds in my possession, I am in a good position to help others do something good with their money.

Starting from the edges, it is quite possible to turn the desert back into a forest. Your investment would be part of the first stage, using permaculture principles to halt the spread of the desert, bring back fertility and then eventually expand into the sand dunes. Reforest the Sahara and not only keep your capital, but also have a good chance of increasing its value massively. Use your ‘insider knowledge’ of permaculture to invest in the real future.

The land I bought was quite fertile agricultural land, and quite expensive; altogether with legal costs it was about 3000 euros for a hectare or so. There’s marginal land in the area much cheaper because people don’t realize what can be achieved on such land. I was inspired by the whole region – it’s turning to desert but could easily be turned around with a little judicious planting and a respite from the goats. Anyone (or a group of friends) with around 3,000 euros could buy some and make it into a forest. This is the kind of land I’m talking about:

How it Works

We act as an agent:

• for the initial purchase, ensuring that the purchaser has legal title
• to employ local people to do the work
• for any subsequent sale or transfer

The agency would be entirely voluntary, no long term contract or penalty clauses. If you decide to manage your own land, or appoint someone else at any time, you are entirely free to do so.

The fees to cover labour and expenses could be annual or monthly, with no obligatory minimum, and as more land comes into the scheme the labor costs per acre would go down. As the land develops into forest, you will have crops such as nuts, fruit and olives, as well as timber. These can be used to pay the workers maintaining the forest, thus offsetting the ongoing expense altogether. All this can be managed for you by us, or by anyone else you choose to appoint.

Much of the initial work could be done as part of the courses we’ll be running for local people, as well as international students, volunteers and interns, who would benefit from the experience, This would mean you would not need to pay much for the time it should take to become productive enough to cover costs. After the intial earthworks we could pay someone 20 to 25 euros for a full day every now and then, at your discretion. The more work is done, the faster it will develop. This need not be intensive permaculture, more like zone three or four.

We can arrange hospitality and accommodation for you at local rates, so you can visit the project and see your land at any time with minimum cost. The area we are in has stunning scenery and welcoming people, so this could be a low-cost and unique holiday for you too.

Advantages over traditional ‘charity’:

• Totally Ethical (your ethics). Your children’s world will be enhanced by your investment, and no damage is done anywhere
• Land price would increase as the whole area becomes fertile. So your investment starts to grow even just in cash terms very soon
• The investment is under your control completely. You can run it yourself or appoint someone else as an agent at any time
• It’s free from the pitfalls of fiat currency, which affect virtually every other form of investment except things like gold
• None of your money is wasted. Most organizations spend a significant proportion of your donations on administrators, offices, computers etc. We will be using the already existing resources of the School/Permaculture Centre.
• You get to do something useful with your money and still keep it!

Small is Beautiful

By keeping the operation small we can save costs and avoid the burgeoning bureaucracy that plagues many projects.The core operation—the land agency and work co-ordination—can be done by two people, who will use the same resources as all the other projects, and not rely on this as a full-time job. Thus commission and admin fees can be kept to a bare minimum. The vast majority of your money is in the investment itself, and fees are in line with those of banks and other investment agents. The work will be carried out by local people trained on the permaculture design ceritifcate courses at our centre. Thus the communty will see immediate benefits from the project.

You Choose the Kind of Forest

• Food Forest: This is a diverse woodland designed with an overstory of thngs like palm, wth many fruit and nut trees growing beneath it, as well as a thriving support community of plants and animals. It mimics the natural forest system, producing a sturdy and stable ecosystem with abundant food and water. This is the best for our area, as it has a human population and we need to convince the locals of the benefits of permaculture.
• Timber: Similar design to the food forest, but with an emphasis on trees that wll be valuable for timber when fully grown.
• Wild: This would be left alone after some optional initial earthworks to preserve water. Many people believe wild land is worth nothng, but you only need to look at the degrees of corruption timber companies will go to in order to exploit the Public wildlands in the USA to see that this is not true. Usually there is quite an expense in fencing for this knd of project, but the goats here are herded, not free-ranging, and the locals will respect your wishes and not graze the land. There are wild baby-tree predators but the removal of the goats will be sufficient to ensure success.

Comment below if you have questions and/or expressions of interest – or email me on andy (at) tribalnetworks.org

"Money" is nothing but a social construct that comes with a number of "rules of the game". In one way, "money" has much in common with computer operating systems: most users are completely unaware of the degree to which these rules are flexible, malleable, and allow very different designs. So, before we ask ourselves: in what way could a different design of rules lead to a different role of money, it is worthwhile taking a look at what sort of phenomena the present arrangement gives rise to. A telling passage can be found in Bill Mollison’s autobiography:

For six days a week, 8 or more hours a day, for years on end, we felled and milled trees; at the end of each day, we had cut all the timber for houses. (…) On bad days, we cut five houses, on good days, seven.

We cut about 35 houses a week. But one lunch time, pondering on this remarkable record, I asked the apparently simple question of all seven of we mill-workers. "Do any of us own a house?" We all looked at each other; none of us did. To get a house, one would in those days borrow $7000, pay for 56 years, and repay $30,000 – 50,000 dollars. It all seemed ridiculous.

After very little discussion, we agreed to work one day for ourselves and easily cut seven houses.

(…)

Many working men must be able to count such wealth, but they never possess it. Something is seriously wrong and you cannot see what is wrong until you follow each product and its financing through. If I build a house for $7000 and it is ten years older, I may sell it for $30,000. The same house is sold for more money again and again and again. A confidence trick indeed. Every time it is sold, someone pays for it all their lives; yet it was already paid for! It seems clear that, in a very few weeks of a whole life, we could provide for all our needs; shelter, food, fuel, fibre, energy, the lot. But we waste our lives in debts. – Travels in Dreams, Tagari, p. 829

Things are quite a bit more subtle than presented here, but this passage certainly is valuable for raising the question: how big are the implications of the rules of the money game for society?

If money is needed for some specific economic activity, there are a number of alternatives to obtaining credit from a bank, which very often is the only strategy considered even though it may not be the economically most advantageous one. One such alternative would be subscription schemes: a book is announced and the money to print it is raised through pre-orders at a reduced price. Such schemes can become quite clever: The Permaculture Designers’ Manual gives the example of a restaurant that handed out dated meal vouchers at a reduced price ("A voucher for 8 dollars, for one 10-dollar meal, at one day in July") to raise the money for major refurbishment. Here, something interesting happens: as these vouchers have an immediately verifiable value, they themselves become a sort of "valid currency" (in the sense of "having a verifiable value", although they are not "legal tender") that can be used to settle debts between people who use them. In the end, what the restaurant did was to enlarge the money supply in circulation themselves, rather than asking a bank to do such a favour for them. (Banks have the exclusive strange privilege to expand the money supply, cf. [1], and charge massively for exerting this holy power, in the form of interest, ultimately paid for in real economic goods and services!) So, the provider is using his customers as a "bank" here. Once one starts to develop an eye for this, one discovers a zoo of such "banking with the customer" schemes already being in place, from cell phone top up vouchers, to customer accounts, and even "company money" [2].

The essential insight here is: banks are not "holy institutions", and there is pretty much nothing a bank can do (save from receiving large government bailouts maybe) which people themselves could not do as well – perhaps even in a much better way, considering the imperative of re-investing surplus from rehabilitative activities to further speed up rehabilitation, rather than re-investing loot to speed up plunder.

Wherever people can agree on rules to regulate the flow of claims on work, they can easily cast this into an own currency. As we have seen, taking away people’s freedom to come up with their own rules of the game for their currency is a serious step towards the destruction of their culture. But, this works in the opposite direction as well: if a culture wants to retain, strengthen, or rebuild its identity, it is well advised to take a close look into the money issue and start to design its own currency according to the rules that fit it best. The objective of such a currency is not to drive out the transregional currency, but it should be made very clear by which schemes the transregional currency in the past has elbowed its way into its present dominance.

There are a number of such regional currency schemes in place, quite many of them being based on ideas of the Austrian Silvio Gesell; a key one being that of "demurrage:" holding on to money rather than getting it back into circulation fast is punished in some form. While this rule seems somewhat popular among alternative currencies, it is by no means the only conceivable option: when it comes to the design of rules, the sky is the limit of our imagination.

A very interesting and quite successful regional currency scheme was set up in 2003 in a rural district in South-Eastern Bavaria (incidentally the home region of the author): the "Chiemgauer" currency [3]. This currency is restricted to a region of about 500,000 inhabitants and is governed by a few rules easily comprehensible by everyone, which, however, achieve quite interesting different effects depending on the role of the participant in the "Chiemgauer" economy.

Key rules are:

• There is a registered association, the "Chiemgauer e.V.", open to everyone, which administrates, runs, and sets the rules for the currency. The rules of the game are not cast in stone, but open for being fine-tuned by the inhabitants of the region (through participatory democracy) as needed in order to deal with positive or negative trends.
• Formally, the "Chiemgauer" is a voucher whose value is identical to the Euro. Available denominations presently are 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 Chiemgauer.
• When person X exchanges Euros for Chiemgauer, this is done at a 1:1 exchange rate. If, however, Chiemgauer are exchanged back by person Y for Euros, the reverse rate is 1:0.95. Of this 5% difference, 2% are presently used to pay the administrative costs for running the regional currency. The other 3% are passed on to a regional charitable organization (e.g. a kindergarten, a music school, a museum, etc.). This "charity tax" is entirely paid for by Y, the person withdrawing purchase power from the region (the reason for exchanging Chiemgauer into Euros, rather than spending them locally), while X gets to choose the charity (which is registered in a database along with the serial number of the bill). Charities receive the money generated from this scheme as Chiemgauer.
• There presently is a "2% per quarter" depreciation fee on Chiemgauer, i.e. a bill becomes invalid after three months, unless upgraded by a stamp costing 2% of the bill’s value. This provides an extra incentive to keep the currency circulating fast.
• From the perspective of a charity, asking their members to make their regional purchases in "Chiemgauer" with them as the re-exchange beneficiary is a great way of raising additional money at no additional expense to their members. As they receive this money in the form of "Chiemgauer", they have an incentive to preferentially spend it on regional products.
• From the perspective of a shop owner, the fee rates associated with accepting the "Chiemgauer" are comparable to the fees paid when accepting payment by credit card. However, it gives local businesses an interesting advantage over chain store competitors, as an enterprise that works by widely distributing centrally sourced identical goods throughout the country (rather than providing functionally equivalent goods produced from regional sources) is punished by the back-exchange tax not felt by regional businesses (who can pay their providers in Chiemgauer). As members of charitable organizations are keen on making their purchases in Chiemgauer, there is a need for opportunities to spend them, so accepting Chiemgauer means enlarging one’s customer base. Also, holders of Chiemgauer are keen on getting rid of that money fast, i.e. tend to pay their bills as soon as possible.
• From the perspective of a (residential) consumer, exchanging Euros into Chiemgauer is a great way of supporting specific regional organizations that contribute to the cultural strength and identity of the region without extra direct costs.

This fairly clever scheme seems to have proven its value, as is witnessed by the growing popularity of this currency. It clearly illustrates what can be done just through the design of the rules of a currency. One might expect that much more would be possible if a bit of effort were invested into educating people about what money is, and how it works – or rather, how we can make it work to our advantage by appropriately designing its rules.

References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking
2. http://www.disneydollars.net/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_dollar
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer, http://vimeo.com/4606454

Patterns are amazing things. Maybe, their fascination comes from the human mind being very good at spotting them, while at the same time also being very bad at spotting them. It is sometimes claimed that "a genius is someone who sees something that is patently obvious for the first time" and, very often, patterns are fascinatingly obvious – in hindsight.

By what process precisely does a culture lose its indigenous money as it gets connected to a more powerful economy? One might of course guess that "bait" is an important factor: Look at all these shiny new gadgets that the new money can buy. There’s even television screens! Still, some may not be that easily seduced, and as, unfortunately, we all feel better about major life decisions if we can avoid permanent confrontation with observations that force us to re-evaluate whether they might have been a major mistake, the question arises how to "connect" those to the new money economy who value their independence of it very highly.

History can tell us a lot about that. As it seems, there are indications throughout the centuries of the same mechanism, albeit dressed up very differently, at work all over the world. The general pattern seems to be that some essential resource is identified without which no one can exist. The rules of the game governing access to this resource are then changed, often for reasons that sound quite compelling and beneficial (in particular – and this is an important point – to those whose task it is to establish and enforce the new rules). Of course, one aspect of the new rules is that people now have to pay for something they previously could provide themselves, hence being forced to earn money. At best, this meant a major disruption of their previous schedule and mode of operation.

In the author’s place of origin – the key resource seems to have been water, even into quite recent times. Back in the 80s, some distant relatives could only get building permission if they signed a contract not to harvest rainwater. (They "illegally" built a cistern nevertheless.) Further back in time, there are local stories of farmers who were forced to give up their own springs, some of them being tracked down for illegal use of their springs due to mismatches between the amount of water they bought and the projected requirements of their livestock. (In a temperate climate with an annual rainfall well above 1000 mm.) The most bizarre case, however, happened to a farmer known to the author who one day got an official request to submit a water sample from their spring to have it tested for bacterial contamination. The farmer, not being stupid, did the most obvious thing, and later he received an (expected) order to stop using his spring, as the pathogen levels found in the water sample made it "unfit for drinking". Once he revealed he had actually submitted a sample of tap water, he got fined for "misleading the authorities".

It felt very eerie to learn that in India, the British colonial empire had established a "Salt Tax", and restricted the privilege to produce or trade with salt (essential in India’s hot climate) to the British. Same pattern here? In Africa, the British used a "Hut tax", which led to the famous "Hut tax war" in Sierra Leone. Looking at the details and history of these cases, it is not easy to draw conclusions as to what degree the destruction of a self-reliant culture through the introduction of novel "needs to earn money" was planned, accidental, or even mostly unrecognized. Salt, after all, has been taxed for a long time in India, the British just dramatically changed the rules of the game. A more recent case might be the U.S. occupation of Iraq, specifically Paul Bremer’s infamous Order 81, condemned by a number of right livelihood award laureates [1], which changed the rules for farmers with respect to seed saving.

Taken individually, none of these cases seem to provide conclusive evidence for a pattern (more likely an unintentional, rather than an actively planned one, anyway) at work that could be summarized as: "Western civilization re-programs other cultures by first destroying their indigenous money, and with it their self-reliance, through introducing an artificial need to earn exogenous currency through changing the rules of the game governing access to an essential resource." But still the observations are suggestive enough to warrant asking: Is there any evidence disconfirming, or further confirming, such a pattern from other places of the world? Comments on this from readers would be most welcome!

Continue to read Part V….

References:

1. http://www.gcn.de/download/Order_81.pdf

A small economy joins the big economy

In the last part of this series, we saw that linking a big economy to a small economy is by no means an innocent act: naively, this might be regarded as just ‘giving everybody more choice’, i.e. more options for trade, hence more ‘freedom’. But everything works in two ways: one cannot link a big economy to a small economy without linking the small economy to the big economy. So, this will simultaneously give the big economy a strong handle on the small economy. What would in principle prevent a small population of economically powerful participants in the big economy from using their sheer weight to e.g. buy up key resources such as land in the small economy? This is not a purely theoretical issue – we see such processes all around us. Note that this is practically bound to happen if the big economy keeps on generating major internal pressure to "grow". And, as one cannot separate a culture from its economy, this effectively means that the largest aggressive-expansive economy, that of the culture called "western civilization", keeps on re-programming other cultures’ economies, and eventually these cultures themselves. Might that even be called ethnocide?

There is one point in this whose crucial importance is often overlooked: expanding the options for trade – easily sold as "providing more freedom" – is reasoned to be harmless, as trade is assumed to be voluntary. Now, ‘voluntariness’ is sometimes regarded as a fairly elastic concept: there are many subtle ways to generate pressure, with the most effective ones being those where the people actually making the decisions that cause pressure are largely unaware of it. Starting from a situation where a big and a small economy just came into contact, an important step to facilitate trade between them is to establish a currency to be used for that exchange. Naturally, this will be the bigger economy’s money. So, from the perspective of the bigger economy, it would be very advantageous if everybody in the smaller economy were compelled to use the big economy’s money. But a need to use some specific kind of money can only come from a novel need to earn that particular money – it has to be novel, because there was no use for the big economy’s money in the small economy before they came into contact. The catch is that a "need to earn money" is always an aspect of non-freedom. So, in order to attain the freedom preached widely (essentially an expanded spectrum of options of what to spend money on), people are often forced into the non-freedom of having to use that money, and having to earn that money. Evidently, the term "freedom" is easily misused. Isn’t the freedom to choose a way of living – maybe just temporarily – where one does not have to earn "external money" an important one? Here, the concept "external money" is broader than that of "money imposed by a big economy": money, after all, was not created by God [1], but actually is just a social convention that comes with a number of rules that are in principle open to design. "External" money is any money where the user has no way whatsoever to influence the design of the rules of the game.

To a culture, a very direct measure of the degree of (loss of) self-reliance is the aggregated need to earn external money. So, if "freedom" is an objective, then, evidently, a very good use of money is to invest it to reduce the need to earn further money. This in itself is an important idea in permaculture, but it in addition has a number of other benefits (only superficially unrelated – if you do one thing really right, more right things will happen automatically): reducing heating bills by insulating one’s home not only produces more financial peace of mind. Note, however, how this runs totally counter to what one is implicitly told in western culture to use money on. So, as a thought experiment, what would happen if we all came to our senses this instant and made it priority one to spend money on everything that makes us less dependent on the (discomfortingly wobbly) economy? To the Gross Domestic Product, that might be a nuclear meltdown scenario – but this just shows the inappropriateness of this concept. In part, this problem already exists, and is being dealt with in quite an ingenious way: home-owners stop paying rent, hence if more people owned homes (which would be quite easily achievable if we allowed more modest dwellings), that would make a serious dent in the GDP – if we would not have "imputations". If you own your home, then for the purpose of determining the GDP, this is counted as you paying yourself the rent you would otherwise pay. The bizarreness of this entire concept has to be brought to wider attention, and art can play a major role in this. Let’s be creative: a ballpark figure for sexually active couples is to have intercourse about 100 times per year. Assuming for guesstimation purposes that roughly half the population are sexually active couples, that brings us to 150 million people x 100 sexual encounters per year. If, instead, couples paid one another, say, US$200 each time for that service, a staggering total economic value of three trillion dollars would have been produced from this alone! Evidently, we cannot let this go unaccounted for. Total US GDP, by the way, is about 14 trillion dollars, including – of course – housing and other imputations.

Continue to read Part IV…

References:

1. See, however this quite amusing old article from the Journal of Irreproducible Results: http://www.iijournals.com/doi/abs/10.3905/jpm.1981.408810 ("In the beginning, mammon created commerce and industry. And the marketplace was void and without form, and illiquidity was on the face of the balance sheet…")