Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, December 12, 2008

This Is the Moment for Popular Permaculture

Updated and Adapted from the Moot:

Dan Coyote agrees with me that Obama seems determined and in fact poised to re-orient the public discourse of the American center back to the center-left where it actually belongs given the expressed attitudes of majorities. But he doubts, sensibly enough -- however unexpected and truly good all this is -- whether it can be even remotely good enough, and so wonders as well whether those of us who are on the left of that center-left (especially those of us who advocate permaculture politics) need to push that center-left far more leftward still, given the scope and scale of ongoing injustice and upcoming climate catastrophe.

Of course I agree with him about the necessity of "pushing the center ever more leftward still" and I agree with his suggestion in the Moot about "populating the ranks [I assume he means representatives and administrators and public servants across all the strata of American governance] with good greens." I think that part of the lesson of a successful Obama Administration will be that we have good reason to prefer pragmatic and inspirational variations of rhetoric to "push the center ever more leftward still" to the puritanical and demoralizing variations that sometimes prevail among those of us who share this conviction. And I strongly prefer the notion of anti-corporatist and anti-militarist greens taking over the Democratic Party over any futile and wasteful Third Party nonsense. (I say "nonsense" given the actually-existing institutional landscape in the US for Third Parties as going concerns, and obviously not because I think all actually-existing Third Parties are programmatically nonsenical -- since they're not.)

I really do think the problems for stable governance compelled by climate change and energy descent are pretty palpable in their sweep and scope and so that the governmental layer may clumsily stumble into throwing so much money and weight around that really extraordinary things might get done for good in spite of their inherent inertias, parochialisms, opportunisms, will to ignorance, and power-madness.

I also believe that given a sufficiently conducive legal-media-political environment (such as would prevail if what I just said in the preceding paragraph is remotely in the cards) there are, of course, an enormous number of already broadly and widely disseminated practical, material, and aspirational threads of permaculture theory/practice that are waiting (while working) to come into their own -- no doubt in a way that will appear very sudden and spontaneous both to those who approve and who disapprove of them when they do, but won't in fact have been spontaneous at all. When those threads weave and cross-pollinate there is the possibility for yet another of what Hannah Arendt liked to describe as unexpected Outbreaks of History.

You know, there really are Virtuous Circles in history. I've been thinking about these quite a lot lately in the aftermath of election day. So many of us have been worrying and warning and warding off the vicious ones we're immersed in that we can forget sometimes about the force of the virtuous ones. Virtuous circles -- democratization mobilizing ever more democratization, creativity enabling ever more creativity, good will inspiring ever more good will, pragmatism empowering ever more pragmatism, reliability bootstrapping ever more reliability and so on -- can change things for the better far more sweepingly and far more quickly than we can possibly know at a time like this when vicious circles are the webs we've been hacking through for a long generation.

I can remember well the incredibly popular and powerful ecological consciousness of the seventies (I was just a kid at the time, but it was definitely in the air, it helped shape me) and I don't think any of that ever died, even if it did grow quiescent in lots of places for a long while, even when we all were singing along to Madonna's "Material Girl." Anyway, I really do expect the flabbergasting weight of our problems and the willingness of an emerging generation of politicians and activists and good citizens to address these problems when coupled with the re-consolidation, re-emergence, and re-imagination of Ecology as Popular Permaculture will be a force to be reckoned with.

I do think, however, that there is a real risk that industrial elites will manage to commandeer the desire and demand for more sustainable policies through "existential risk discourse" and an endless focus on "geoengineering solutions" to ecological problems as a way to derange emerging green consciousness from Popular Permaculture into just endlessly more variations on their pet themes of terror and war. (Hey, go with what you know, as they always say.)

The reason I don't see this obviously awful and all too familiar eventuality as any kind of inevitability is because of the startling conjuncture of conditions conducive to the emergence of Popular Permaculture together with the emergence of peer-to-peer formations that bedevil conventional industrial-elitist strategies of misinformation, divisiveness, disenfranchisement in the service of incumbent interests.

The conjunction of climate catastrophe and p2p agitation, education, organization means all bets are off as far as I can see.

By the way, as a side issue involving mostly theoretical and terminological questions of a kind that exercise my personal attention enormously but ultimately don't matter as much as all that, I happen to prefer the term Polyculture to describe the politics of this specific historical conjuncture of sustainability concerns, p2p-formations, and the democratizing project for a consensual planetary multiculture.

3 comments:

niccolox said...

nice post

send it to the permaculture lists ?

also, you might be interested in 2 projects for 2009

www.permaculture.tv
and the permaculture cooperative

http://permaculturecoop.ning.com/

Anonymous said...

I'm pretty sure they are going to write YOU off as an existential risk, since permaculture can be dismissed as "bioconservative" and utterly at odds with immortality. No?

Dale Carrico said...

As it happens, reality is also utterly at odds with the notion of human immortality, at least to the extent that anything legible as human life is presumably being "immortalized," and unless we are wandering into religious discourse (let's not).

Of course, all functional medicine is broadly "longevizing," I suppose, if one wants to look at it that way, and I can imagine some particularly eeeevil folks who might proclaim that the provision of clean water (the single most important "miracle drug" we could make available to everybody on earth, here and now, and so save and extend and improve countless lives to the benefit of all) and universal healthcare on a planetary scale constitutes an "existential risk" to be avoided, given concerns of planetary carrying capacity and lack of infrastructure investment. Needless to say, I would advocate universal access to family planning and, wait for it, actually sound urban planning and development as the proper solution to such concerns, solutions which, in my view should definitely be rethought in polycultural terms, sensible family planning education should be p2p, urban planning should be sustainable, all matters of activating local knowledges and organization, both appropriate and, crucially, appropriable technologies, and so on.

But all that is neither here nor there, since I think you are mistaking the relevant "they" for this critique a bit here. My advocacy of Popular Permaculture politics (conjoining permaculture, p2p, and consensual planetary multiculture) is only tangentially related to my ongoing critique of superlative technology discourses like the ones transhumanists and singularitarians and techno-immortalists indulge in.

The Robot Cultists are small fry (interestingly symptomatic or illustrative of some of the forces in play, sure, but given their numbers and resources senso strictu irrelevant), I'm speaking here of the much larger battle of democracy against capitalism, which in ecological terms is very much a battle for survival for real.

Existential risk assessment by technocratic elites advocating geoengineering solutions to environmental catastrophe constitute an elite-industrial response to a crisis created by abstract/extractive elite-industrial modes of production and exchange, often "neutrally" described as "global development" in the neoliberal/neoconservative consummation of the capitalist/industrial epoch.

It's true that some transhumanist types are in on the game of existential risk assessment, championing geoengineered "solutions" for asteroid impacts, rising greenhouse waters, and so on. This is largely an effort to "mainstream" their Robot Cultism, to treat their sf fantasies as serious "ideas" rather than enjoyable sf blue-skying of a kind geeks in general are better at by far, and without making the mistake of confusing reality with pulp. In other words, they would have silly Robot God "waking up" online to wreak havoc scenarios are given a "probability value" for wonks to assess on a continuum that also includes actual problems like tracking tsunamis near population centers, hence finessing all the pesky problems of incoherence and foolishness that plague the very idea of superintelligent entitative AI.

But, honestly, transhumanists are hardly the ones you need to worry about when talk turns to deranging developmental discourses. The boardrooms and thinktanks and NGOs are filled with "serious" folks who are all too eager to direct sustainability discourse through the figures of terror and war back into elite-industrial developmental models, not because they are Robot Cultists, but because they want to keep those with money in the money and those with authority in charge, or because they lack the necessary (and I do mean necessary) intelligence and imagination to nudge themselves out of the confines of the usual selfish reductive elite-industrial grow-or-die assumptions that got us where we are.