PermacultureCooperative

these notes started as a email to the permaculture list hosted by Lawrence London.

Are we going to localise climate? It's a nonsense. 
Democracy is a fractal. It can work on all scales and all systems.

"If you live in an unrealistic world then you can say everything should be a
community garden."
Rudolph Giuliani, quoted in The New York Times, 16 February 2000.
1965-1970: ”race riots” break out in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark,
New York and dozens of other poor and over-populated American cities.
Various think-tanks, commissions and institutes (some publicly announced,
 others top secret) study “the problem” and come up with ideas for suppressing
the symptoms.

1970-1972: NYC government begins “spatial deconcentration”
of over-populated neighborhoods by acting with “benign neglect”
: closing firehouses and police stations, refusing to discourage or
prosecute banks/insurance companies that “redline” poor neighborhoods
or building-owners who torch their own properties for the insurance
money, letting ruined buildings collapse and/or become centers of
criminal activity, etc.

Source: History of Community Gardens in Lower-East Side Manhattan 

The authors write from a perspective strongly rooted in their work as
left wing activists and educators, with a strong anti-corporate,
anti-globalisation stance. One of the aspects of their critique of
Transition is that it shies away from directly confronting what they
see as being the enemy. Their starting point can be summed up in the
sentence “it is fundamentally important to identify and name the
cenemies in the battle to make a real Transition”.
Transition is determinedly inclusive and non-blaming, arguing that a
successful transition through peak oil and climate change will by
necessity be about a bringing together of individuals and
organisations, rather than a continued fracturing and antagonising.
Here we are in twenty-first-century Britain, in a world not of our
making but one that has been moulded over thousands of years of
exploitation and injustice.
Our world is shaped by the forces of greed, capitalism and
materialism, where maximum production and optimum profits are
vigorously pursued, making life a misery for many and putting us and
the environment at risk.
The system is ultimately controlled by the rich and powerful,
the capitalists and bureaucrats, through the use of many mechanisms
such as ownership of the economy (making people slaves to a job) and
control of the media (creating a passive culture).
Radical Routes is a network of co-ops and individuals seeking to change all this.

The specific means it is pursuing are:
The setting up of housing co-ops to
house people and projects with the above aims.
 The setting up of workers co-ops which operate with the above aims.
 The promotion and organisation of participatory education through
skills- and knowledge-sharing events, Taking Control events,
informative material and workshops.
 The raising of finance to take control over resources (property,
technology, land...) through co-operation and economic interlocking of
the co-ops.
 The support of like-minded projects.

Rootstock is a social investment society set up as an initiative of
the Radical Routes network of co-operatives. Radical Routes is a
growing network of housing and workers’ co-operatives working for social change.
Radical Routes co-operatives are active in many fields, including:
Sustainable land use through permaculture, land restoration, 
woodland creation, and growing and distributing organic food.
Communal housing - co-operatively owned housing is a resource
for the whole community rather than a commodity for the profit of a few.
Resource centres for communities
Information through publications, radical bookshops and
practical support for new co-ops.
Campaigning on issues such as ecological preservation, animal rights and housing.
International peace work
Home education
Electrical, plumbing and small scale building work
Support services including Book keeping and accountancy,
Computer services, Training and consultancy,
Mediation and group working 

The current invasion and threat to be resisted is not the Romans, Visigoths, Fascists etc
It is the economic imperialism of a globalised capital via the modern transnational
corporation; finance capitalism, speculation, financialisation, outsourcing,
automation, transportation, genetic modification, intellectual property,
marketing and advertising. A system largely organised by US corporations. 

April 30, 2009 
Andrew Ross, author of Nice Work If You Can Get It, on life and labor in precarious times 
Michael Yates, author of Why Unions Matter, just out in a second edition, on just that topic
Food writer and activist Eric Schlosser, speaking at the Slow Food Nation
conference in San Francisco last fall, said that he would rather eat a
conventional tomato picked by well-treated workers than a local heirloom
variety harvested by oppressed workers.

In 1998, Swanton Berry's owner, Jim Cochran, deviated from the status quo
and approached the United Farm Workers to negotiate a contract. Cochran
was committed to a farm that was sustainable, not just organic. He
particularly wanted to offer his workers a health plan, but couldn't afford it
The pioneers of organic farming in the 1960s were as eclectic as a bag
of mixed greens. For some hippie farmers, embracing organic farming was
part of their broader vision and commitment to sustainable agriculture.
And, that meant not just treating the land well, but also the workers
and animals on that land.
The connection between environmental conservation through organic-farming
practices and labor rights, has been largely lost in much of today's organics
movement.

Kat: The Sacramento Bee reported on Sunday
that a supposedly organic fertilizer used by nearly a third of
California’s organic farmers was in fact spiked with the synthetic
fertilizer ammonium sulfate. In 2004, a whistleblower told California’s
Department of Food and Agriculture that this deception had been going
on for five years.
This sort of incident perpetuates the notion that higher priced organic
foods are some kind of scam, and vindicates the many small-scale
sustainable farmers who've chosen to go "beyond organic" and opt out of
the organic certification process altogether.

The sales volume of organic products, which had been growing at 20
percent a year in recent years, slowed to a much lower growth rate in
the last few months, according to the Nielsen Company, a market
research firm.
For the four-week period that ended Oct. 4, the volume of organic
products sold rose just 4 percent compared with the same period a year
earlier.
 “Organics continue to grow and outpace many
categories,” the Nielsen Company concluded in an October report.
“However, recent weeks are showing slower growths, possibly a start of
an organics growth plateau.” 
BEYOND ORGANIC tells the story of this amazing farm and its
long battle to survive in the face of rapid
suburban development. It explores the efforts of Ableman
 nd his staff to diversify the farm, open it to educational
tours for thousands of people -- especially schoolchildren
-- and defend it against angry neighbors, hostile public
officials and developers eager to re-zone the land
for condominiums. It draws a sharp contrast between
community supported agriculture and conventional chemical
farming, and it calls on organic farmers to remember
basic principles, including fair labor practices, as
their farms grow in size and power. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_organic

Beyond organic is a concept aligned with the idea of creating
sustainable and ecological systems of food production capable of
transcending the standards currently affixed to foods and processes now
categorized by the term “organic”. Since the organic food movement has
been increasingly industrialized and often forced to undergo processes
similar to those of conventional agriculture (such as monocultural
plantings on massive scales)due to market pressures, many members of
the what was originally the organic food movement are demanding that
new standards be established for sustainable organic foods. Many ardent
supporters of organic foods are frustrated that the integrity of what
constitutes “organic” foods and farming methods have been compromised
by FDA legislation that allows for synthetics to be introduced into
organic processed foods and other unsustainable industrial attributes
associated with “organic” foods.^[1]References
^ Pollan, Micheal. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Penguin Books, London. 2006

PermacultureCooperative

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Radical Routes

Transition Towns Totnes

Conclusion

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Mondragon, Basque, liberation, cooperatives and permaculture

Cooperative Feasibility Research

Green Collar Jobs are “mostly crappy jobs”

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San Francisco thoughts - global permaculture workers cooperative

global permaculture workers cooperative - PROPOSAL

global permaculture workers cooperative - PROPOSAL

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