PermacultureCooperative

Last night I attended the general meeting of the Network of Bay Area Worker’s Cooperative’s at the Rainbow Grocery Cooperative. It was fascinating to observe - and sometimes contribute or participate in - the democratic process at work.

I was there to observe, in the understanding that I am researching the feasibility of establishing a permaculture workers cooperative in the Bay Area, as a global group of workers cooperatives. There was quite a lot of interest in the potential for such a project, and I hope to be following-up next week and later in the year. My approach will be to find a small group of stakeholders and potential worker-owners and do interviews and research with them next week. I’d like to start pilot projects.

After the workers-cooperative event, at the Little Roxie Theater I saw Frank or the of Submedia.TV fame present Hopium; Surviving Fascism in the Age of Obama, which consisted of segments from his cult internet TV show, Its the End of the World as We Know It, and also the indymedia production from the RNC and DNC conventions, Ground Noise and Static, and a preview of his new movie End:Civ. 

At the end of the Roxie session with Frank, during questions, I asked him the following question, I paraphrase:

“During the making of the films, you would’ve of interviewed many people who as well as being involved in resistance, where also involved in permaculture and other tactics, the Transition movement is also huge, has just become big in the US, have you had anything to do with the Transition Movement... also I noticed recently that Derrick Jenson has created a new publishing project Flashpoint Press that has a joined with PM Press and published a book The Vegetarian Myth written by Lierre Keith, in that book, the author talks a lot about perennial polyculture and permaculture.”

Franks answer was basically that permaculture and non-industrial civilization perennial polyculture is part of the mix of strategies and tactics.

I must admit I have some questions and probably some issues with the tactics and ideas of Derrick Jenson’s movement. I am hoping that there is some sensible large-scale radical permaculture planning being done. Apocalypse could be inevitable, but a complete abandonment or destruction of industrial civilization could cause mega-death. More about Resistance / Non-Profit Industrial Complex mix later.

I guess, the question is “can we civilize civlization ? and if so, would be it be something completely new? some kind of evolution beyond anything known ? a return to a previous pre-totalitarian agriculture based society (and could we support 10 billion people ? or are we to accept mass extinction or will some kind of planetary-wide permaculture possibly support 10 billion people ?”. Chomsky and Michael Albert are opposed to the “end industrial civilization” anarcho-primitivism, but recently was acknowledged as being critical the creation of the book Pat Murphy’s Book, Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change, from the makers of the movie about Cuba’s response to energy descent from industrial agriculture during the Special Period in The Power of Community.

Afterwards, at the Victorian Theater at the Counter-Corp Film Festival the Canadian movie RIP: A Remix Manifesto, an expose on the insanity of the current copyright laws.

At APC9 (Australian Permaculture Convergance 9) in Sydney last year, Bill Mollison the founder of the modern movement of Permaculture, called for a new radical politics, and spoke of his time as an environmental psychology academic at Tasmania University. I paraphrase

“I remember the 60’s well, I smoked only tobacco…….. laughter… in the 60s I knew lots of communists, they all had very nice houses and where quite affluent, and they would always say to me, Bill, why dont you become a communist. I would reply to them. No ! Why dont you become an ecologist”.

This is the kind of brilliant insight that made Mollison a respected genius and the source of so much inspiriation and action.

I am working on making this happen.. however, I would call myself, an anarchist-communist, and anarcho-syndicalist, a libertarian socialist, a classical liberal or an Enlightenment era deist. Lately I  have also been inspired by Liberation Ecology (an extension of the Marxist priests Liberation Theology, see Sacred Gaia), the anarchist communist Catholic Worker tradition and more ordinarily the Catholic social doctrine as manifest in the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation of the Basque Country. I am also much heartened by the emerging progressive religious community, especially in the USA heartland and the growing ecologically aware inter-faith movement.

I believe that government, corporations, industry and especially finance can and must be run by and for the people who work and use them. The financial crisis, the economic crisis and the climate crisis, all prove that capitalism run by narrow private interests will destroy the world. I am talking about democracy, real democracy, in government, the multi-national business corporations, the consolidated oligarchial industrial networks and the global financial trading system. We have the technology, the knowledge and the will. But it will require social, political and economic revolution.

I am travelling around the world doing research on establishing a global-permaculture-workers-cooperative, under the title of GaiaPermaculture.com. At as write I am in Glen Park in San Francisco.

Tonight I am attending the General Meeting of the Network of Bay Area Workers Cooperatives at the Rainbow Grocery Cooperative.Afterwards I am attending the screening of Frank Lopez’s of Submedia.TV’s fame, movie Hopium: Surviving Fasicsm in the Age of Obama. He is also showing a preview to his new movie with Derrick Jenson “End:Civ”. About resistance to destructive industrial civilization.

I have been listening today, to the CD of Howard Zinn’s talk Heroe’s & Matyrs, about the people’s history of the United States of America.

Its remarkable to spot the parallels between today and the historical periods before WW1 and before WW2. The rise of industrial and financial capitalism, and the fall of the rest.

My latest thinking on the permaculture workers cooperative have evolved in details, but overall, have consolidated a handful of earlier posts to the permaculture lists operating out of Australian and the United States.

The plan, so far;

1. Establish a global permaculture workers cooperative, with incorporation in San Francisco (or Bay Area), Sydney or the Hunter Valley & the United Kingdom (possibly in Devon near the Transition Towns Totnes or other movements).
2.  The global-permaculture-workers-cooperative will give priority to the poor. It will be an eco-social justice worker-cooperative network or group that operates using the Mondragon, Rochdale and other working cooperative models, such as those from the Solidarity Economy emerging from the Global South and Global Justice movement in the North. Such princples as worker ownership, democratic control, industrial ecology etc. It will be non-hierarchial, democratic, social and ecological.
3. The first and primary business activity of the global-permaculture-workers-cooperative will education and media. Redmonk is a good model in that it provides stanard consulting packages on opensource software and publishes everything as open source.
4. The global-permaculture-workers-cooperative will operate a social planning website using OpenCore software at the domain GaiaPermaculture.com. It will also utilise other community and corporate social networking platforms. Facebook, Myspace, Ning, YouTube, WiserEarth, Wikipedia etc.
5. The global-permaculture-workers-cooperative will operate under a freemium model, with education and media, social, economic and ecological justice as free services. Paid services will be offered to individuals, organisations etc that can prove a certain commmitment to permaculture workers-cooperative principles.
6. The global-permaculture-workers-cooperative will operate within the context of the Global Justice Movement, the Transition Movement, the Worker Cooperative Movement, and the Solidarity Economy as its natural environment. FairTrade, Organics, and the broader Green Economy, with its heavy corporate and financial capitalism cooption will be dealt with without illusions. 
7. the global-permaculture-workers-cooperative does not abandon or seek to detsroy industrial civilization - while recognising that it may well be iredeemable. It seeks to “civilize civlization”. It is seeking a Mondragon industrial ecology.
8. the global-permaculture-workers-cooperative places climate change and other issues such as peak debt over such issues as peak oil. While accepting peak crude oil, does operate with the fact that vechile-fuel is fungible and can be made from coal, gas and other sources such as methane hydrates and biofuels.

hi all

thanks for the kind words of encouragement etc regarding Permaculture.TV

I am totally committed to Permaculture.TV and to a permaculture cooperative
model - personally, I just need a break..

coincidentally I just emailed Tagari about possibly using the
permaculture.coop domain (which is trust with Tagari after I registered it
last year) and place Permaculture.TV and other projects within it ...

I have had the idea of a permaculture workers cooperative, perhaps a
permaculture garden maintenance (& training?) business... a kind of
long-running permablitz or permabee business, focussed on social and
economic justice.. i.e. poor and needy neighborhoods... I thought this was
completely idealistic until I saw the http://MyFarmSF.com project in San
Francisco and also the Green Worker Coop in NYC  (
http://www.greenworker.coop/)
http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=EUZWczgZacQ
http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=g2ljlQ3×0kY
http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=qKh2smneytM

as an aside, MyFarmSF.com isn’t on Permaculture.TV because the producer of
the documentary (not the owner of the social enterprise) refused permission
because the platform couldn’t provide enough links back to his site… the
owner of the business actually asked me to put the video on the site, I did,
and then the producer denied me so I deleted it

in 2009 I want to form a group of advisers - along with the email lists - to
help me form the Permaculture Cooperative project - to organise legal,
economic, gardening, media and other aspects of the project

I am going to make every effort to make this a global cooperative, with
branches in the Hunter, Sydney and also San Francisco and New York City…
we cant simply retreat into localisation, we need a people’s globalisation,
we need global cooperatives and other forms of social economy… no doubt
this will be shakey and an experiment… but it needs to be tried and
developed.. we need a NEw Sustainability Paradigm, that goes beyond Market
Forces or Policy Reform… something more than EcoCommunalism

I see permaculture as a the missing element in the Great Transition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Transition

I need to raise some seed-money and find an auspicing body (Permaculture
Hunter is one strong possibility) so we can do a proper plan and budget for
these projects..

It would be great to be able to actually pay permaculture cooperative
workers a living wage - me included - and maybe that involves becoming a
branch or project of an existing work-for-the-dole provider or some other
kind of non-profit, educational or social justice organisation

regarding cooperation, the obvious answer is that we do cooperate all the
time, its the only thing that stops society, the economy etc from completely
breaking-down into a dog-eat-dog world. despite the last 30 years of
economic rationalisation, neo-liberalism and privatisation, people still
naturally are cooperative.. and learning that again, is part of the process

I dont think a cooperative model need destroy individual or business
livelihoods, CoopAmerica (http://coopamerica.org) is a good model of a
hybrid coop that supports individuals, businesses, organisations… it is at
a stage where it is only 10% gerant funded, the rest comes from enterprise
… i,e Green Festivals etc (http://www.greenfestivals.org/) which is a
joint project of Co-America and Global Exchange

Global Exchange is a good model for a people’s globalisation (
http://globalexchange.org) - and considering the global nature of
permaculture, and the realities of a multi-polar world, and the absolute
need for global economic democracy and sustainability - I think there are
lots of lessons to learn from this and embed in the global permaculture
cooperative

Regarding the business model behind Permaculture TV (and other permaculture
media)… I want it to be ad free, free-to-watch and member supported.. I
think there is a possibility for selling products via some kind of online
shop, and also a subscription service for high-quality DVDs.. perhaps doing
deals with copyright holders on classics like Global Gardener (god bless the
rent seekers)

i think we are entering a period in world history, where we need real
information, not advertising or public relations… and thats why I am
committed to the non-profit, educational, free-to-watch, ad-free,
member-supported, no corporate or government funding model
http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=cvmuG9EyQdw

growing-up on a small chook(chicken) farm on the edge of Newcastle, I
discovered permaculture in the early 90s (maybe earlier) and did my PC
course at Melany with Max and Francis Lang , after doing some gardening
experiments and wwoofing, I got drawn into the emerging internet and then
news and media. . I’d like to close the loop and do that by doing
Permaculture TV, the Permaculture Coop and merging community news, media and
permaculture.. no doubt it will take years, but I think it was suprisingly
easy to show how quickly one person - alone - could build a decent online
version of Permaculture.TV

I apologise if my emails are mercurial,but personally, I’ve been living poor
and precarious for all of this year (the last few years actually) and need
to rest and rethink and get some personal permaculture

–
Nicholas Roberts
[im] skype:niccolor

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/permaculture/2008-December/032313.html

also, I imagine there are plenty of farmers who would prefer to be working
for a permaculture cooperative equivalent of Monsanto... a kind of global
seed and agricultural cooperative

think a democratic, large organisation, efficient and very well run

you might be interested in what the head of the MIT Sloan business school
has to say about the corporate form... to me it sounds a lot like Chomsky

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=0yBM4D3MrMo

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=EIMLTGXff5Y&feature=channel_page

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=rv0tHfxe0qg

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=ANDaWFLcDcQ
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

Exactly. We need that now, yesterday. Market opportunities are getting coopted by
unscrupulour greedy entrepreneurial interests operating in most cases locally
but with interest in expanding their turnkey “systems” (scams) nationally.

I have to compete with them in the marketplace.

We need, as I have stated several times in this list,
a national (how about global for those who can export, why not?) farmer-owned,
farmer-run + permaculturist-owned, permaculturist-run production,
marketing and distribution network comprised of nodes making up local networks
which overlap making up regional networks which together form your national network.
This may, in some respects, be a socialistic system but in reality it is just
a practical one that works and gets the job done and keeps on doing that.
This group would contain anyone with a product or service to sell.
It would serve the needs of writers, mechanics, consultants, cooks,
healthcare professionals and farmers equally well. It is a system that
is one size to fit all. The power of the web, the telephone networks,
personal media and wireless electronic
communication devices and GIS could be brought to bear to make this
work efficiently and effectively.

LFLondon

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/permaculture/2008-December/032366.html