Monkeywrenching
Nandor Tanczos on politics and culture in Aotearoa New Zealand
Category Archives: Social ecology
Writings from the past
I was just looking for a resource I wrote many years ago and came across this. It is the preface I wrote to a book by a British ecosocialist friend of mine, Derek Wall, called “Babylon and Beyond”. I thought I’d post it here in the off-chance someone found it interesting
Human beings face the greatest challenge in the history of our species. We face the destruction of the life support systems on which our very existence depends, and we face it because of our own activity.
There are some who deny or diminish that threat. They mostly either retreat into fairy tale thinking – that technology, or the “free” market, or UFO’s will save us – or hope that by closing their eyes they can it go away.
Yet the evidence is mounting almost daily that the threats are very real and are gathering momentum. A new report from the UK is saying that if we don’t turn carbon emissions around in the next decade, we will not be able to stop runaway climate change whatever we do.
Authoritative voices are warning us that we are very close to the point where world demand for oil will outstrip the capacity of the oilfields to supply. Our total dependence on fossil fuels, the use of which has provided the energy for an enormous expansion of human activity and population, is like a chemical addiction. And as the USA has recently confirmed in Iraq, strip a junkie of their supply and the temptation to turn to crime can be irresistable.
“The American way of life” says George Bush the First “is not negotiable”.
A time of crisis, however, is also the time of greatest opportunity. More and more people are waking up to the need to change, to change at a fundamental level, and to change right now. People are waking up to the fact that the institutions of society that so many have put their trust in are failing us. Government won’t do it. Big business can’t do it.
Because the challenge we are facing is about more than changing a few policies or practises. It requires a fundamental rethink of what it means to be a human being. Government and business can become allies, but the power to make real change lies in the hearts and the lives of ordinary people.
It is already happening. The international people’s movement against genetically engineered (GE) plants and animals has demonstrated how the reckless agenda of multinational corporations, aided and abetted by our own governments, can be stopped in its tracks and rolled back. One conglomerate has been outed bribing government regulatory officials in Indonesia, GE companies are pulling out of the EU and Australia, and GE agriculture firms are facing massive stock market losses. The promised gold rush is proving to be a fantasy, largely because of global consumer resistence.
While the campaign has significant support in the scientific community, for many ordinary people it began as a sense that something just didn’t feel right. That feeling is often quickly backed up by investigation, but the sense of something being fundamentally arrogant and wrong about GE is the key – it is our humanness talking to us.
What is it to be human? Western society, at least, defines us as individuals whose value can be judged by what job we have, what colour credit card, what kind of car we drive and the label on our clothes.
Yet beneath these displays of status, real people are emotional, social and spiritual beings – intrinsic characteristics that cannot be considered in isolation from each other. We seem to have forgotten that our relationships – with one another and all the other beings with whom we share this beautiful planet – are fundamental to who we are.
There is a passage in the Bible that says “where there is no vision, the people perish”.
The inability to step back and clearly see and understand the “big picture” is the central problem that we face in the world today. The main motivations for Western industrial society for the past few hundred years – belief in unlimited growth and technology as the solution to all problems – are the very things that are killing us.
We cannot grow forever on a finite planet. If we continue to assume that endless growth and consumption is possible, and disregard the biosphere’s capacity to meet our greed, and if we continue to neglect social justice and fair and sustainable wealth distribution, we will reap a bitter harvest.
Neither will technology on its own fix the problem. Yes, we need better technology, more efficient technology that uses non-polluting cyclical processes and that does not depend on fossil fuels. But just more technology will not do, because the problem is in us and the way we see ourselves in the world.
We humans think that we can own the planet, as if fleas could own a dog. Our concepts of property ownership are vastly different from traditional practises of recognising use rights over various resources. A right to grow or gather food or other resources in a particular place is about meeting needs. Property ownership is about the ability to live on one side of the world and speculate on resources on the other, possibly without ever seeing it, without regard to need or consequence.
The ability to “own” property is fundamental to capitalism. Since the first limited liability companies – the Dutch and British East India Companies – were formed, we have seen the kidnapping and enslavement of 20 – 60 million African people and the rape, murder and exploitation of indigenous people around the world. Colonisation was primarily about mercantile empires, not political ones. It was all about forcing indigenous, communitarian people to accept private individual ownership of resources, which could then be alienated, either by being bought or stolen. The subsequent political colonisation was just about how to enforce that ownership.
Today property rights are being extended through GATT and TRIPS agreements and through institutions such as the WTO and the World Bank. Private property rights are being imposed over public assets such as water, intellectual property and, through genetic engineering and biopiracy, on DNA sequences. Even traditional healing plants are under threat. In Aotearoa – New Zealand we have had multinationals attempting to patent piko piko and other native plants. This is all part of the “free” trade corporate globalisation agenda – to create tradeable rights over our common wealth, accumulate ownership and then sell back to us what is already ours.
This is only possible because we have lost our place in the scheme of things. We think of the environment as something “over there”, as something separate from human activity, something to either be exploited or protected. The reality is that we are as much part of the environment and the planet as the trees, insects and birds.
It is time to relearn what it means to be human.
Babylon and Beyond, the economics of anti-capatalist, anti-globalist and radical green movements by Derek Wall. Printed by Pluto Press
Reflections on Resilience
Some reflections following a permaculture workshop on Empowerment and Resilience that I run alongside Finn Mackesy from Auckland Permaculture Workshop (APW).
Resilience has become the new buzzword. Where a few years ago everyone was talking about sustainability, now they are all talking about resilience. The problem is that many of them don’t seem to know the difference.
I was recently at the Environmental Defence Society annual conference where the theme was resilience. It was a great conference with many excellent speakers, but at least one corporate functionary was talking about how his company is increasing its resilience by implementing more efficient production methods. Actually, resilience is more likely to be a function of increased redundancy in the system than increased efficiency. The best systems find the right balance between efficiency and strategic redundancy.
Even more concerning is that people use the word ‘resilience’ when they actually mean ‘robustness’. There is a great TED talk by a guy in the US who goes around looking at why houses fail in storms. It’s very interesting, and shows startling evidence that most roof, and therefore house, failures come from very small details – two instead of three nails in the hurricane strapping, or using the standard one and a half inch instead of two inch nails to hold the trusses on. He talks about building resilience by making the house stronger, but what he is actually doing is building a more robust house.
This may seem like pedantry of the highest order, but if people are trying to develop strategies to build resilience, in own lives or in their communities and businesses, then they need to understand what that means. Very often, strategies to build more robustness will run counter to strategies to build resilience. It is important to find the right balance so that systems are robust but also have the capacity for resilience. This can only be achieved if you are clear about what you are trying to achieve.
Robustness comes from the Latin word for ‘oak tree’, and that is a very good illustration of its meaning. A robust system is strong, able to withstand stress and pressure, able to shake off the storms that might break a lesser tree.
Resilience comes form the Latin word for ‘spring back’. Grass is the classic example – the wind can never break grass because it just gives way and then returns when the pressure is gone. Resilience is the ability of a system to bend, or regenerate itself when things break.
Ecosystems often go through phases of great robustness, such as a climax forest characterised by high levels of specialisation, complex interconnections, lots of embodied energy, followed by release, such as from a forest fire. The breaking up of that embodied energy and recycling it back into the system allows a range of species to make us of it, to build and reorganise, and sets the scene for a new phase of growth, with increasing levels of complexity and specialisation until the climax stage is reached again. This is called the cycle of adaptive change and is an ever changing and dynamic balance.
Strategies of sustainability often seem to be locked into trying to maintain the climax stage. Hence, a focus on increased efficiency and more specialisation. The sole focus is building more robustness into the system. There is nothing wrong with robustness, but if it is the sole focus it leaves no room for resilience when the system sooner or later inevitably fails. The global economy that is built on fossil carbon is like that. Design systems like permaculture are more about how to find the right balance between robustness and a capacity for resilience.
Visiting La’akea Permaculture Community, Hawai’i Island
I’d forgotten to ask for directions when I arranged to visit La’akea Permaculture Community so I had to stop for help in Pahoa. I stumbled upon The Locavore Store, which was full of great local fresh produce as well as sauces, balms, oils and things, and I swapped stories about food and politics with the friendly people tending the store. They offered me the use of their phone to ring the community.
Unfortunately I couldn’t understand a word the guy on the other end of the phone was saying. A lot of unfamiliar words plus some kind of American accent I’m not used to. I stopped asking him to repeat himself after the third attempt and decided to make do with the vague impressions I’d jotted down. Go past Pahoa then something about looking out for a couple of signs on the road. I half got the first one (Lelania Station?), no idea what the second one was. It was enough, anyway, to find the place after just one missed turn.
Tracy Matfin met us at the main house with a huge bowl of popcorn and a warm hug. An engaging and knowledgeable woman, Tracy explained to us how the community had come about and some of its ebbs and flows. It had started as the project of a wealthy individual who had purchased the land, had a permaculture design made for it and funded the first stages of its implementation. This had included trucking in large amounts of soil (since the land is basically broken lava for the most part), planting trees and establishing some infrastructure. The process had not left much time to “observe and interact” and some elements of the design had to be rearranged over time, such as the siting of water storage to allow it to be gravity fed to irrigated plots.
The land became available for sale at the right time to allow the original 7 community members to purchase it. That number has changed over time, with people coming, leaving and some people changing to living there seasonally. Now the community consists of 11 adults and 2 children, aged 6. The children have been attending a local Waldorf school but the intention is to develop some kind of home schooling.
The biggest focus for the community has been social permaculture. “It’s no good having a whole load of people who know how to plant trees if they argue all the time” says Tracy, emphasising the importance of Compassionate Communication (or Non Violent Communication) as part of the social toolkit. There is only one kitchen in the community so people learn to deal with things promptly instead of allowing them to fester. After all, you can’t hide away when you are having a problem with other people – sooner or later you have to emerge for dinner.
Despite having broken her leg roller skating, Tracy took us on a tour of part of the property. It was amazing to be in a tropical food forest and see papaya, huge lilikoi (passionfruit), cacao, coffee beans, vanilla beans, jackfruit, cardomom and a whole heap of tree crops (including greens) that I had never even heard of. There were also tropical sheep that looked like goats and some Australorp chickens. The high rain fall on the Puna side of the island meant the vegetation was thick and lush, although the same could be said for some of the invasives such as cane grass.
The property is financially self sustaining but the challenge now is for the members to be able to sustain themselves financially from the property as well. Most of what they eat is food they have grown but the community ebbs and flows around the question of how private they want to be – since the community is their home – compared to the income potential from running educational courses and events. This is a question that is regularly revisited as the membership changes.
From what Tracy said there is little coordination between permaculturalists in Hawai’i, to the extent that PDCs in different places can clash with each other, to everyone’s detriment. There is a desire to create some coordination and people to take this on may be starting to emerge. There is also an attempt being made on the mainland to create a US-wide permaculture organisation that will cover teacher accreditation among other things, but there is resistance among local teachers. The process is seen by some as being expensive, onerous and with no real value. Small and slow seems to be key here. The USA is such a big country that finding a way to organise without creating a distant, and bioregionally irrelevant, central bureaucracy will be a challenge.
Like in Aotearoa, an issue for the permaculture movement in Hawai’i is how it engages with the kanaka maoli, the indigenous people. There is a huge interest among native Hawai’ians in food sovereignty but access to land is the issue. Hawai’i is being sold to overseas developers at inflated prices while the indigenous people can rarely afford to buy land in their own ancestral islands.
Actually it didn’t make much sense to me for Hawai’i to be seen as part of a US based organisation. Hawai’i is a Pasifikan nation and while it may be under US occupation, it belongs firmly in the family of Oceanic islands. Creating stronger links between permaculturalists throughout the Pasifik Ocean seems a useful goal and already permaculturalist from Hawai’i have travelled in Aotearoa, while New Zealanders have come here – including time spent at La’akea by the ubiquitous and magnificent Robina McCurdy.
Papaya
Tree greens[/caption]
Cardomon [/caption]
Cacao [/caption]
Vanilla [/caption]
Tracy Matfin [/caption]
I was left with the thought that one day I would love to see a Pan-Pasifik Convergence. Visiting La’akea showed me that we have so much in common and so much that is unique to each island group. Sharing our stories and learning from each other can only be good for us all.
Monkeywrenching 