Applying Permaculture Principles To Resistance
Applying Permaculture Principles To Resistance
Applying Permaculture Principles To Resistance
Overview The aim of this section is to use co-founder of permaculture, David Holmgrens developed principles of permaculture as an exercise to evaluate how we can apply these strategies to campaigning & resistance work. Key resources used include David Holmgrens Book, Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability. successful (and unsuccessful) groups and movements - ultimately ensuring lessons have been learnt and that people are re-designing their approaches as a result.
In relationship to community organising, there are also clear entropic systems in society e.g. poverty, wasting talent, loosing social and economic resources to the few, wage slavery and so forth that permaculture practitioners can recognise and seek to remediate through effective design.
When people think a group or movement is being effective aka obtaining a yield, these systems will spread (radical analysis may add that ineffective systems may also spread when perceived as being effective, without actually obtaining necessary yields), therefore how we obtain a yield is important. At the beginning of the campaign design process it may be worth deciding as a group what a yield is to the group and how it can be measured.
Obtain a Yield
This is a clear one - be effective! Obtaining a yield means getting results, and if we are not obtaining yields, why are we investing energy and how can we re-design to ensure we do? David Holmgren emphasises that we should design to provide for self-reliance at all levels. How is our organising working for self reliance? Even when doing defensive work (such as campaigns against fracking) how are we working for alternatives that build self reliance and community autonomy? In the book Winds from Below. Radical community organising to make a revolution possible, by the Team Colours Collective, the emphasis is on building movements that are self-reproducing. This is not only a political project, this is a project for existence How can we use resistance work to support existence? In the fracking campaign, functions have been stacked so that the campaign also promotes positive energy solutions that can genuinely meet community needs for example. David Holmgren also highlights that, Systems that most effectively obtain a yield, and use it most effectively to meet the needs of survival, tend to prevail over alternatives Ultimately, successful systems spread. Ever wondered why groups that are super active (even if being perceived so) explode and spread e.g. occupy, the transition movement, breeder campaigns in the animal rights movement in the early nineties.
What are we wasting within our cultures and movements? Where is the wasted potential or under-utilised groups of people? Another proverb of this principle is a stitch in time saves nine - how can we intervene before its too late? In resistance and community organising work the stitch is what is often most effective what can we do that really saves more spirals of erosion? On a smaller level than this, a stitch in time may mean spending the time and energy sorting out internal conflicts & strategy so that we can effectively save time and energy being lost e.g. preventing burn out or group dispersal through effective dialogue & facilitation.
approaches e.g. in a super conservative area, pitching a radical anarchist organisation may not be as skilful as starting a local green group, which then builds radicalism. By looking at all the local patterns we can more skilfully use place elements to create workable systems. Recognising patterns is also a core part of anti-oppression work - unlearning oppressive attitudes inherited from growing up in a matrix of patriarchical oppressions (sexism, racism, speciesm and so forth). Recognising patterns is also fundamentally about acknowledging relationships. We can build our collectivity on co-operative and symbiotic relationships.
Produce no waste
Waste could mean several things in respect to resistance organising. Waste can mean being ineffective. How are we wasting time/energy/ money? Waste could be anything from money and donations to actual materials we use to organise e.g. large print runs of leaflets that soon go out of date. Burnout of individuals also involves producing waste - loosing valuable people and their inputs. Waste could be seen as pollution, which in this case may be causing harm, what is harmful and what is not is obviously contentious. Waste can also be about wasting time on ineffective or unproductive projects (because our funders dictate them and so forth) or because cultural pressures disallow feedback to say this isnt working e.g. this is how its always been done. Another aspect of this principle is seeing wastes as resources e.g. mass unemployment could lead to unprecedented working class resistance, something as awful as fracking may threaten our landbases but may also trigger a widespread revival of energy/ climate change concern and ecological resistance. How we turn problems into solutions will be the down to the skills of community organisers and permaculture practitioners.
Bill Mollison defined a pollutant as an output of any system component that is not being used productively by any other component of the system.