PermacultureCooperative

  

1. Group Effort:

The Permaculture Designers Manual was a group effort: the manuscript was written and edited by Bill’s x-wife: Reny Mia Slay. It was illustrated by Andrew Jeeves. Do they get any money, royalties or credit ? where are they now ? I heard Reny went broke and now drives a taxi.

2. Sourcing:

There are precious few sources, or references for such a big, dense book ? so, the filter of Bill’s mind, then his dictation/colloboration to Reny and to Andrew make this legal, but maybe not the most ethical way to write such a encyclopedic designers manual. The contents of the manual are drawn from all over the world, and re-branded “permaculture”. For instance, do a search for permaculture in relation to the ecoburb Village Homes in Davis California. 

3. Inspirational not very educational:

As an inspirational guidebook, a pointer to future research directions, the Tagari Permaculture Designers Manual is the Old Testament. its stands apart, a kind of keystone to the Permaculture guild of books. However, as an actual Designers Manual, its not that good. I realise for many permies this is heresy, but I know quite a few people in Australia, that went through a long phase where they treated the PDM as a manual and actually lived by it, and quite frankly they are p%^ed off. Its full of factual inaccuracy, half baked theories, poor references, and is indiosyncratic in the extreme. They still believe in many of the ideas, but the content of the designers manual is not that great. 

4. Tagari Farm the Reality:

I went to Tagari Farm in Tyalgum in the mid 90s, during the peak of that wave of Permaculture popularity, the Global Gardener had followed-up In Grave Danger of Falling Foods on national TV in Australia and the Designers Manual had just been carried by the ABC book shops. The story I was told was that something like 3000 species has been planted in something like 20 acres. Already the ecosystems had signs of unbalance, bamboo running, sweat potato spreading. Worse the damns - 30% was to be aquaculture - eventually sprung leaks. The property Tagari in Tyalgum was eventually abadonded and is kind of the skeleton in the closet, the crazy aunt in the attic of permaculture. The Tyalgum farm was meant to embody, manifest the glories of the Permaculture Bible (Designers manual) from the Prophet Bill. No doubt if someone was crazy enough to buy the Tyalgum property for 2 million Australian dollars, Tagari in Tasmania would be in a much better financial situation. http://www.tagari.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/web_version.pdf

4. Spanish and other language editions:

Why isnt there a Spanish translation ? let alone other languages. Again, a story; I was told that someone made a verbal arrangement with Bill, did the translation and had copies printed all at their own expense. Then there was some kind of dispute with the Prophet and it came screeching to a halt, and the Spanish translator went broke. These kinds of stories around copyright with Bill/Tagari are legion.

5. Permaculture Word Copyrighted

Tagari tried to Copyright and license the actual usage of the WORD Permaculture. That would mean all of us, using or planning on using Permaculture in marketing material would need to obtain (and presumably) pay for a license. How many of the “Copyright is good crowd” have a paid-up license for using the Permaculture Word ?

6. International Copyright

Most developing nations, including and especially the United States of America IGNORED intellectual property regimes during their own development. It was the only way that they could break free of the imperialism of Europe and establish their own economic rights. The founders of the US where deeply sceptical of Copyright.. From the authors of the original Copyright Clause, Jefferson and Maddison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#History

Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. —Thomas Jefferson, to Isaac McPherson 13 Aug. 1813 Writings 13:333–35[14]

7. International Development:

If someone is starving to death, say in East Timor, your are not going to send them a book of high-level concepts and a myriad of interesting and inspiring stories. You need to help them with practical information now. The idea of sending the Permaculture Designers Manual to the Global South is basically like sending Bibles to the natives. Its much better to support the writing of a local edition of a Designers manual, drawn from global best practice (there are dozens of good permaculture and related specialty books now) and local knowledge. An excellent example is the East Timorese Permaculture Designers Manual, written like a cartoon, containing local species and traditional practice, in the local dialects. This book was funded and written in East Timor, “authored” by Ego Lemosand many others..

http://www.idepfoundation.org/ptl.html

http://www.petrabali.com/petra-s-publications/permaculture

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/the-face-ego-lemos/story-e6frg8n6-1111119019080 

 8. Online Market for the Designers Manual:

There isn’t an online market for the Permaculture Designers Manual, there never has been, and chances are there never will be. If there is any money to be extracted from the Mollison PDM it will be captured by Google and your ISP. Not the online publisher. There has been a huge ongoing debate about opensource, opencontent etc.. and many, many commercial operations - software especially - release software code AND documentation FREE.. .they do this as a kind of loss leader, a marketing exercise.They use the educational and marketing materials and experiences as an elaborate sales process. Then they make money from consultation and maintenance.

9. Squabbling while the planet burns

The Copenhagen Climate talks are offically going to fail, no agreement for reductions. However, the http://www.Klimaforum09.org is organised by a permaculturalist Tony Andersen, and they are working on a plan called 10 000 Trees per lifetime and less than 1 tonne GHG per persons year. To implement this plan they are lobbying for a carbon tax of 100 euro per tonne. They want to use the international permaculture network and expand the base of permaculture institutes from 300 to 50 000 in 50 years. Whether this plan gets funded or not, it gives one a sense of the WORK needed, the expansion of the International Permaculture Network required. Its way beyond where we are now as a discordant collection of permaculture small businesses. http://permaculture.tv/?s=klimaforum

10. What-If for Permaculture.coop ?

What if the 300 institutes and hundreds of design and related permaculture businesses and cooperatives and organisations, established a Permaculture.coop Intercooperation Framework (using Mondragon as a good model, like Mollison said in 1983 http://permaculture.tv/?s=mondragon)  What if this Permaculture.coop Intercooperation Framework had a Retirement Fund, that could provide Pioneers like Mollison with an income and real, tangible support ?  Like maintaining their farms in Tasmania and Tyalgum ? What if there was a sensible, global mass-multi-media campaign developed, where the large array of books, DVDs, courses etc, was managed like a global commons, and exploited sustainably ? If we gave away FREE a lot more courses, books, videos etc, and got a lot more PAID work and funds, and expanded the international permaculture network, this argument would simply disappear into the history of the 1990s. http://permaculture.tv/?p=1224 http://permaculture.tv/?tag=mondragon

11. Freedom is Not Free

I know how much time, money, resources go into publishing - I was webmaster for The Australian and The Daily Telegraph, and about 30 other newspapers in Sydney at News Ltd, between 2000-2003. The realities of modern print-publishing are really pretty dire. Its not easy printing these Designer Manuals. But it would be a hell of a lot easier if there was a cooperation system that went beyond email exchanges and some casual sending of funds. Online publishing is a nightmare. Quite literally MOST of the economic value of internet publishing is being gathered by Google. Look at the Google Books Settlement or this for a taste http://www.huffingtonpost.com/randall-amster/a-googlement-above-the-pe_b_165024.html

12. Reality Check

Like Evan, who I respect, I have been trying to get the International Permaculture Network to adjust to the realities of the 21st century; sudden, abrupt cllimate change, globalisation, neoliberalism and the Internet. Evans publishing of the PDF is important as a political gesture but its irrelevant in terms of effecting sales of the book. Reading PDFs online is not a great experience, and you would have to be pretty desperate (and poor) to do so. Those that can afford to buy the book, will. But sadly, many people in the West, and most people in the South, and that includes those who need them cannot afford them.

13. A different model:

The computer book publisher, Oreilly invented a new subscription based service, that allow you to spend say, 20 USD per month and you get access to a limited number of chapters and videos. What would happen if we did something similar ? a quality online offering ? allowing users to pay and login and access books, videos etc online for a subscription. It would actually create a market where none existed before. We could then pay authors, and offer free access for schools etc.  http://my.safaribooksonline.com/home?subpage=hometab2

 As they said on the TV series “Lost”… “Live together or die alone”

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

1.Mondragon and Permaculture

In the Mp3 audio of Bill Mollison 1983 PDC (Permaculture Designers Certificate) in Stanley,Tasmania (Geoff Lawton attended) that are available as DVD for sale and on the internet, Bill Mollison talks at length about the Mondragon Cooperative (along with Commonworks etc) as an organisational framework - a natural order of People Care and Fair Share for Earth Care that permaculture projects ought use.

I actually found and listened to these Mp3’s just before we went to Mondragon (such is life!). We really did Build The Road as We Travel (the only book on Mondragon that we saw on tour).

Also, re-reading the Permaculture Designers Manual 1988 he has a couple of references again to Mondragon in the Alternative Nation section towards the end of the book.

In the audio of the PDC Bill ends by saying something like “I think I will go and pay the Mondragon cooperators a visit”. As far as I know - which isnt much, he never did.

Judging from the conservative, industrial, mass-consumer framework of the Mondragon Cooperatives - who in the 1980s would of been immersed and adapting to the end of Franco’s regime, the enslaught of global neoliberalism i.e. outsourcing, multinationals moving into the local markets etc… Bill may of simply bounced straight-off the Mondragon Experience.

IMHO the Basque language and culture are one kind of self-protection mechanism for the Arrasate locals and also the Mondragon Cooperators. Also the highly developed and complicated internal “corporate culture”, the elaborate and specific “business rules of Mondragon” act as a auto-immune system. Protecting them from the outside.

So an approach from Bill in the early days of the permaculture movement may not have succeeded.

We where told during our information day that permaculture people - pioneers - had visited Mondragon Cooperative. Does anyone have information on who that might have been ?

2. Attack-on and Decline of Cooperatives

Cooperatives (especially worker cooperatives) in the advanced industrial societies are the opposite to the modern tyrannical corporation (with all its pathologies), see the film or the book, The Corporation or the Corporation2020 conference recently held in Boston. i.e. worker ownership and self-management, vs wage slavery and top-down decision making etc

The cooperative sector has been under systematic attack from the state and the business community for the last 30 years.

For instance, a single example (and there are many others) is the chart that maps the number of cooperative organic distributors in the USA. In 1982 there were 28 consumer cooperative distributors. Today there is just 1. http://www.msu.edu/~howardp/coopmap.pdf https://www.msu.edu/~howardp/organicdistributors.html

This pattern is repeated in Australia (New Labor), UK (Thatcher), USA (Reagan) with credit unions, mutual societies, food cooperatives, consumer cooperatives. etc.

The entire social economy, along with the social-welfare state is being systematically dismantled by neoliberalism and being replaced with the rapacious corporate state-capitalism we are now joyously living under. As the saying says “you might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”

In the global south, the attack on the social economy and the cooperative sector went much further, with right-wing dictatorships such as in Bolivia or Chile. See Noami Klein’s recent The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism [video]. Ominously, the engineer of the Schock Doctrine in Bolivia, Russia and many other countries, Jeffrey Sachs, is now running the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

3. Permaculture Pioneers Adapting to Neoliberalism

The permaculture pioneers, along with everybody else (from the Arctic to the space) have been forced to adapt to or perish from the realities of this form of globalisation.

And so as cooperative and social forms of organisation are systematically dismantled we are being sold an “entrepreneurial story” a lie sold through the commercial and state propaganda of the media. Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, Understanding Power.

The permaculture pioneers where forced to survive in this increasingly hostile market economy, with its tendency towards concentration of ownership and control.

They where not alone, as many of the products of the 60s and 70s such as intentional communities, ethical businesses etc suffered and where reversed or coopted and transformed during the period. See PHowards studies of the Organics Industry in the USA.

i.e Permaculture International Journal is killed and Gardening Australia takes the niche which is now printed by News Corp. Newsspace AD Specs for Gardening Australia

4. Organisational Succession for Permaculture Pioneers

I agree that there is an entire generation of babyboomer, and now later, permaculture pioneers that need support with succession, this was actually one of the first ideas discussed in Australia for a horizontal Permaculture Cooperative.

I actually registered the domain www.Permaculture.coop (and paid for it with mine and kirsties money) under trust with Tagari (Bill Mollison). Our written agreement with Tagari, which has been published to the internet was that Tagari would auspice the domain while we researched and developed a Mondragon style cooperative.

This support service would be a worker cooperative and provide administrative, marketing, finance, legal, IT and also perennial polyculture-style ecological farming services.

On many farms, sites, communes, communities etc… succession is failing.

The founders are really at retiring age, and want a succession, and sometimes will find a WWOOFer with abilities and will to help that transition.

Immediately there is a power imbalance. Usually the WWOOFer is already living precariously and has little support from any kind of succession planning organisation i.e. a global Permaculture.Coop.

Succession takes time, money, knowledge and services. Often is needs patience and is a slow process that goes beyond the skills of a single or small group of people.

Often the WWOOFer and the Pioneer are already burning-out and trying to do too much.

Eventually something gives, an argument ensues and the there is no Social Council (as in Mondragon) or any kind of third-party mechanism for resolution.

So the Pioneers that survive are still running things basically by themselves and are essentially bosses to the workers around them, that come and go.

The WWOOFers have no ownership of the permaculture operation; usually ZERO financial and often very little actual decision-making. They might be able to inform the options for decision-making, but they are NOT the ones taking the decisions.

If you dig below the surface and actually TALK to many WWOOFers or younger generation permies the stories of exploitation, arguments, falling-outs etc are legion.

Indeed for many this is THE Permaculture story.

This dynamic comes all the way from the top of the teacher-student hierarchy down to the smallest operation. Often its not an intentional, I am going to exploit you situation. Its a reality of survival. The Permaculture Pioneer is working abnormally long hours, and expects all around them to do the same.

The fact that there is little pooling of resources .i.e. services, finance, equipment… on an organised and global framework makes harder work inevitable.

 5. Example of Permaculture School converting to Cooperative

I havent followed this up, but I learned that the Dutch Permaculture School has made itself into a cooperative so that projects launched as part of the PDC design project have an organisational home. http://gaiapermaculture.com/projects/permaculturecooperative/blog/2009/08/30/permaculture-cooperation-in-netherlands/

6. Permaculture Worker Cooperatives in Britain

I had a kitchen meeting with Andy Goldring of Permaculture Association of Britain about a permaculture worker cooperative and he shared my view, that to scale-up and sustain BIG industrial ecology style permaculture projects, a Mondragon worker-cooperative (or UK-style Rochdale cooperative, or even like the Cooperative Group of the UK) was a natural phase in organisational evolution.

Some groups in the UK are Radical Routes secondary cooperative and Rootstock social investments division.  http://gaiapermaculture.com/projects/permaculturecooperative/blog/2009/08/26/permaculture-worker-cooperative-britain-ideas/

Also, Eastside Roots permaculture worker cooperative in Bristol. http://permaculture.tv/?p=998

The UK cooperative (social enterprise) scene is deep and rich and I am hoping to research and develop within this culture. Hopefully doing more in 2010 in the UK.

5. Transition Network

Was in Totnes and had a good chat with Ben Brangwyn, a co-founder of the Transition Network (of Transition Town Totnes).

The famous Transition Towns Totnes, have started a cooperative, an Industrial and Provident Society a kind of credit union for the Totnes Pound.

Interestingly the Totnes Pound section of the website is twice as busy as an other section and the in public meetings its also the most asked about the Transition Towns process.

For the Transition (Transition Towns) Movement the focus is on Project Delivery and Implementation. Rob Hopkins and the TTT team have raised a lot of awareness and interest and now are faced with delivering on the ground and managing expectations.

I expect to see more Transition cooperatives within the Transition Network and would encourage anyone interested in permaculture cooperation to get involved with the local Permaculture groups, Cooperatives & Transition process (they are often the same folks).

6. Social Economy Networks & Worker Cooperatives

Have recently started to email the SEN and share some of the permaculture worker cooperative research.

In the USA, there is an re-emergant interest in social economy networks and worker cooperatives.

Social economies and worker cooperatives emerged from the wreckage of the neoliberal engineered collapses of South American countries such as Argentinia. See Noami Klein’s movie The Take. Workers re-took their factories, that the capitalists wanted asset-sripped and closed and restarted their own cooperative economy. This popular economy underwrote the popular governments now running the entire continent.

The US Social Forum 2010 is in Detroit http://www.ussf2010.org/ where there is a lot of food justice, worker cooperative and sustainability style renewal going on now the big auto-makers have imploded and been bailed-out by the state-capitalists.

Mondragon is also working with the United Steel Workers (one of the only real unions in the USA) to work on setting-up Mondragon style worker cooperatives. Mondragon has a unionised operation manufacturing wind power generators.

• http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2009/11/03/steelworkers-aim-at-job-creation-with-worker-owned-factories/
• http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2009/11/01/mondragon-in-the-us-background-to-the-united-steel-workers-agreement/comment-page-1/#comment-42036

Micheal Moores movie Capitalism a Love Story  http://permaculture.tv/?p=739 features lost footage of FDR talking about an Economic Bill of Rights and features worker cooperatives.

The Catholics Social Doctrine, that informs the worker cooperatives of Mondragon (the Basque are Catholic, such famous Catholic Basques are Loyola the founder of the Jesuits). Mike Moore is also Catholic. So too are the South American social economy activists, Liberation Theology & Liberation Ecology are the stream of Catholic experience in much of Sur America.

We have the domain WorkerCooperatives.com and have been threatining to set-up a video blog like Permaculture TV. http://gaiapermaculture.com/projects/permaculturecooperative/blog/2009/09/09/climate-change-and-a-climate-of-change-in-manhattan/

Food Rebellions

The Nation has caused a splash, with a feature issue called “Food For All” about food activism from US coast to coast. A decent, if shallow and unimaginative critique “Cornucopia Blues” in that edition, calls for food activists to go beyond evangalism, for enduring institutional arrangements that go beyond informal volunteer driven local community efforts. Our focus has been worker cooperative organisations: Mondragon, Radical Routes etc.

These networks are forming, In Oakland, the Network of Bay Area Workers Cooperatives and other groups have formed JASecon for Just Alternative Sustainable Economy and hosting a Grassroots Economy Festival at the Humanist Hall. We visited some of these organisations earlier this year, and like Radical Routes in the UK and Mondragon in Basque Country the resilience comes from a network or group of cooperation.

Another article from The Nation is about Detroits “Quiet Revolution”, the food justice movement in Detroit, which will host the USA Social Forum in 2010.

7. Brazilian Permaculture Worker cooperatives

in relation to Jorgen’s direct question about avoiding mistakes when setting-up a new permaculture project in Brazil, think about giving ownership of decisions and the organisation to the people involved.

Perhaps it would be a multi-stakeholder hybrid model. i.e. teachers, students, workers, community.

I have some notes from the Mondragon talk and a PPT that I hesitate to post to the web, but will email privately permaculturecoop@gmail.com Also have a Mondragon tour video that needs uploading to Permaculture.TV.

There are also groups such as Via Campesina and The People’s Movement Against Climate Change

8. Permaculture Worker Cooperative Movement

we have been thinking that permaculture worker cooperatives need to become a movement, perhaps with a unique flavor of education, part permaculture, part worker cooperative education.

We have talked a little about having a convergance or an event, perhaps a PDC in Mondragon next year, perhaps before the IPC10 and the Klimaforum2010, we have the domain MondragonPermaculture.com

http://gaiapermaculture.com/projects/permaculturecooperative/blog/2009/08/29/permaculture-worker-cooperative-movement-climate-camp-uk/

9. 10 000 Trees: A Planetary Permaculture Strategy to Save the Earth

I have just had an interview with Tony Andersen, permaculture organiser of the Klimaforum09 (the climate social forum preceeding COP15) in Copenhagen this Dec 7-18. See Permaculture.TV

• Introduction to Klimaforum09

•  Save the Planet with Permaculture - Tony Andersen of Klimaforum09

The International Permaculture Council has developed a strategy for dealing with Climate Change. They call it 10 000 Trees.

Basically they think that 5-7 metres of sea-level rise is inevitable, its intertia/momentum in the climate/global ecology and we can try to stop the planet from mega-death if we plant something like 5000-7000 trees per person in the next 25 years (most of the sequestered carbon is in the soil within the perennial polyculture agroecology).

We also need to reduce C02 emissions down to 1 tonne per person. They see Permaculture Institutes (and in my view a permaculture worker cooperative movement) as the key to success. I have 30 minutes of interview that I will be posting ASAP.

• http://permaculture.tv/?p=1079
• http://permaculture.tv/?tag=tony-andersen
• http://permaculture.tv/?tag=klimaforum09
• http://permaculture.tv/?tag=10-000-trees

10. A Transition/Succession to Permaculture Mondragon Complex

Education at Mondragon is subsidised by the industrial cooperatives. The Mondragon University doesnt make money, education ought to lose money. It should be subsidised.

It is possible for students at Mondragon to work part-time within the cooperatives to help pay for study and living expenses. It also gives them a cooperative and industrial experience.

The Mondragon Cooperative is actually a group of 120 cooperatives, all working within a inter-cooperative framework. Organised with Industrial groups.

• INDUSTRIAL    87
• CREDIT        1
• CONSUMER    1
• AGRICULTURAL    4
• EDUCATION    8
• RESEARCH    13
• SERVICES    6
• TOTAL        120 cooperatives

Mondragons Strategy is

• People are the mainstay of the enterprise (twenty-first century, century of knowledge)
• We are all owners and protagonists
• One person, one vote (democracy)
• The involvement of everyone in: Management, Ownership and Results
• Self-management
• Decentralised organisation
• Real inter-cooperation in funds and people
• Reinvestment of surplus
• Social responsibility
• Innovation: Technical/Technological, Organisational, Financial, Social
• Balance between job creation and financial profitability
• Internationalization

Mondragon’s 10 principles are

1. Open Admission.
2. Democratic Organization.
3. Sovereignty of Labor.
4. Instrumental and Subordinate Nature of Capital.
5. Participatory Management.
6. Wage  Solidarity.
7. INTERCO-OPERATION.
8. Social Transformation.
9. Universality.
10. Education

Permaculture.coop Groups

Within permaculture the member cooperatives might organise in Industrial Groups and be;

Urban, Rural, Marketing, Education, Industrial (Solar, Wind, Hydro), Construction, Food, Research, Publishing, Finance.

• INDUSTRIAL    ?
• CREDIT        ?
• CONSUMER    ?
• AGRICULTURAL    ?
• EDUCATION    ?
• RESEARCH    ?
• SERVICES    ?
• TOTAL        ? cooperatives

Key to this is a Research and Development, Enterprise Development, Venture Capital and Financial Division.

We Build the Road as we Travel is a good book. The academic work of ….  see NOBAWC

Rules for joining the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC), the coordinating cooperative

• Relocation of staff among cooperatives.
• Restructuring results.
• Within the sectorial groups (>15%-<40%)
• Within corporative funds in MONDRAGON (Investment 10%) (Education 2%) (Solidarity 2% - for compensation In Case of losses)
• Solidarity in profit distribution (net profit of each co-op)
• 10% Fund of Education (Law 10%)
• 45% Fund or Reserve of Co-op (Law 20%)
• 45% Returns to workers > Capitalize > Interest 7,5% in cash
• Initial  capital (14.000 euros in 2008).
• Solidarity in remunerating managers.
• Reporting of data to MONDRAGON Headquarters.
• Not internal competition between co-ops within MONDRAGON.

11. David Holmgren’s Permaculture Principles

according to Permaculture co-creator/co-founder, David Holmgren 1994

“Cooperation not competition. Try where possible to arrange elements in cooperation not competition. In nature they work in balance, a dynamic tension. Natural systems tend to internalise cooperation and externalise the competition.”

12. Free Love vs Climate War

When babyboomers went back to the land things where very different from today.

Free love, cheap land, free health care, free education, plenty of work, relatively little debt. Optimism for the future.

Compared with the precarity of todays younger permies, where jobs are scarce, debt is high, education and healthcare are expensive, land is unaffordable.

Today many are attracted to permaculture as a kind of survivalism school, a way to live through the coming Climate War. Not exactly the Free Love era is it ? Lovelock Climate war could kill nearly all of us, leaving survivors in the Stone Age

In the past cooperation was a kind of dream, an ideal. Today its a requirement for survivial.

Pat Murphy’s Book, Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change

In Conclusion, a Call for Cooperation

I am personally grateful for the super hard work, creativity and dogged, never-say-die attitude of the Permaculture Pioneers. Like plant ecology, the Pioneers may be loners, spikey, tough, and pretty hard company, but they have had to adapt and survive in extremely hard conditions.

The organic farming, perennial polyculture, community supported agriculture pioneering work has been done.

We need to go back to that 1983 PDC talk of Mollisons and work-out a Permaculture.coop project. In my view its the organisational aspects that have held the international permaculture network back.

Kirstie and myself have been exploring the organisational level of permaculture evolution.

We hope others might join with us in the research and development of such a Permaculture.coop.

Anyone interested please get in touch with us below.

cheers

ps: an open letter to copyright holders, how much to make your collection a global commons ? how much money do you want so we can pool and open source ALL of the permaculture content ? making it freely available online ?

• Nicholas Roberts & Kirstie Stramler
• Permaculture Cooperative
• skype permaculturecoop
• email permaculturecoop@gmail.com
• US Skype phone +1 415 670 9710
• plans http://gaiapermaculture.com
• video http://Permaculture.TV

–

• http://twitter.com/permaculturetv
• http://www.youtube.com/user/permaculturecoop

Sitting in the Rose Room in the New York Public Library, chilled by over-powered air-conditioning. Arrived via the underground and walked from Times Square, where people have reclaimed the streets from cars, but not the future from mass-consumption, witness mile-high advertisements.

The underground is hot and dirty, the streets are noisy, dusty and distracting. The reading and wifi Rose Room is the largest room in the USA and the head-space, if not the Arctic air-con is a welcome respite.

Climate Change Industry

It seems there is so much going on and its hard to know where to place ones energies, time, and debts. There is a climate of change, and climate change, and a climate change industry. Or is it all noise, glimmer and glamour? Full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing? Or is the climate justice movement really having an effect in the USA and elsewhere? Can Gaia Permaculture Carbon Farming sequester the C02 and save us ? Or will be get more military-industrial sustainability (sustainment) via Bio-Char International and McGaia?

We landed at JFK sad to leave the UK after the friendships and sense of achievement after Camps for Climate Action Scotland and London (UK). Especially important was the work on the Coal Health Study and the media work. We have met cooperators and permaculturalists and all kinds of interesting people this past month at and through the Climate Camps, especially the good folks of the village of Douglas and the Mainshill Solidarity Camp Earth Firster’s and leads into the Radical Routes and Permaculture Association of Britain. 

At Climate Camp UK, in London, we kept getting asked “where we going to Copenhagen (for COP15 and to get involved in the network of Climate Justice Action ?”. The answer eventually was “we would like to, if we could afford it and had something serious to do!”. We developed a couple of ideas, one was a Climate Social Forum, in the World Social Forum principles and process.

After a little enquiry was informed there is government funded civil-society forum: Klimaforum09, which sounds rather like the European Social Forum, Malmo 2008 in its left-establishment (vertical-left) support. On the surface its structured like a World Social Forum, but under-the-hood, its a government funded conference for NGO’s, an extension of Nordic soft-power public-diplomacy.

However the Kilmaforum2009’s 9 themes and the attending organisations are right-on and would love to work-out how to go and work on Gaia Permaculture and the Permaculture Worker Cooperative Movement projects. The Klimaforum2009 creator is a Danish permaculturalist: Tony Anderson. So, its an amazing opportunity, will try to reconnect with Malmo solidarity accommodation types and contact  the Nordic permaculture contingent, and the Klimaforum online forum.

Glocalisation of climate

My major unresolved question with solutions, revolves on this reflexive obsession with localisation. It’s a kind of allergic reaction to the Washington Consensus modality of globalisation. Pure localisation just wont work. Globalisation is real; climate, weather, migration of organisms including people, trade etc. We live on a planet with a global climate.

Are we going to localise climate? It's a nonsense. 

The mindless business mantra of “Think Globally, Act Locally” is largely to blame. Corporations and the rich don’t limit themselves to this, they Think Globally and Act Globally. They Think Locally and Act Locally. Everyone knows the edge between the global and local is the most corrupt level of government, its the place where organised crime operates, dodgy planning occurs, corporations do things, see The Power Elite. Indeed there is a term; Glocalisation

Organisation needs to come from below but continue to the global level. We saw very large worker cooperative industrial democracy at Mondragon: from team to very large groups of 100 000s. It is possible to organise modern, industrial society with democratic decision-making and ownership. We need more highly organised social and economic arrangements. The anarcho-syndicalists also did it in Spain before betrayal by the liberal democracies, Socialists and Communists.

Democracy is a fractal. It can work on all scales and all systems.

Animals migrate yearly, organisms move. So do people. We need technology, transport, communications etc. While COP15 progresses inside, Kilmaforum09 runs outside. COP15 is top-down, and Kilmaforum09 is bottom-up. But where do they meet ? The place where globalisation meets localisation is where corporations, the rich and the powerful control the present and the future. One of the reasons localisation is so popular is that its is so harmless and diffuses energies away from real political economic change into gardening. As Mollison said, ad nauseum, permaculture is more than a gardening system. Again, keep coming back to Gaia Permaculture wiki project. Me thinks the Rose Room will be good for developing the wiki.

Media Leaders

A Glen Beck fascist Fox News green-scare/red-scare (green is the new red) made green jobs czar Van Jones resign. He said in 1994 he is a communist. I wouldn’t have believed Jones in ‘94, I don’t believe him now. If he really was an anarchist communist, or even an ecologist, he might be interesting and important. But the Obama-lovers are in a tizz as he loses battles and their man’s popularity has dived, and he ducks and covers further to the right. The Black Agenda Report‘s editor Glen Ford says that Obama fired Jones, not Glen Beck. Both Jones and Obama are media-leaders (like Tony Blair) and that the President is acting like progressives are the only thing stop a grand non-partisan alliance.

I agree with John Pilger “the Obama lovers need to grow-up” and Alexander Cockburn that this is Obama’s last chance. Chomsky spoke, was interviewed by The Real News and Democracy Now, and wrote at ZNET after the election at length about Brand Obama and Obama’s Army needing to mutiny and organise from below, to free themselves from the top-down social-network soft-power dicastorship. Obama is and has always been a conservative, at best a liberal Republicrat from his earliest days as a community organiser for the Catholic Church in Chicago, through Harvard Law School, as a Senator and campaigning netroots presidential candidate to now a perpetual-war imperial President, a kind of Pharoah to the world.

Food Rebellions

The Nation has caused a splash, with a feature issue called “Food For All” about food activism from US coast to coast. A decent, if shallow and unimaginative critique “Cornucopia Blues” in that edition, calls for food activists to go beyond evangalism, for enduring institutional arrangements that go beyond informal volunteer driven local community efforts. Our focus has been worker cooperative organisations: Mondragon, Radical Routes etc.

These networks are forming, In Oakland, the Network of Bay Area Workers Cooperatives and other groups have formed JASecon for Just Alternative Sustainable Economy and hosting a Grassroots Economy Festival at the Humanist Hall. We visited some of these organisations earlier this year, and like Radical Routes in the UK and Mondragon in Basque Country the resilience comes from a network or group of cooperation.

Another article from The Nation is about Detroits “Quiet Revolution”, the food justice movement in Detroit, which will host the USA Social Forum in 2010.

New York For Sale

"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.

In New York City, my goals are to do an film/blog on Co-op City in the Bronx (the largest co-op housing project in the world), the Green Workers Cooperative in the South Bronx, and take some good stock footage of the institutions of global capital: media corporations, finance houses, etc.

We are staying in the Upper West Side in Manhattan, with a friend whose work is on energy efficiency, he is an industry expert and maverick, from the boiler-room, the Wes Jackson of building energy efficiency. He is running a similar battle with the Big Green Establishment. He has a very solid critique of the cosy world of LEED which is largely an exercise in greenwash. Similar to the dodgy corporate organics, whole and natural foods markets, with dubious schemes and consolidated industry networks. But where is the Food Inc or Omnivores Dilemna for building efficiences? Considering the realities of energy consumption in existing housing stock, its needed. Siemens corporation is developing service lines.

Trying also to make time for the radical, anarchist, labour and other bookstores etc.

On a technical level, hoping to focus on the OpenCore, OpenGeo and TRAC ecosystems and work-out how we can develop further the technology cooperative aspect of our project. In my mind, MediaWiki, OpenCore, OpenGeo, TRAC are key tools. We also need accounting, CRM and design tools (video, audio, graphics, image, page etc).

Also want to research a New York City Food Justice Cooperative project, we had while staying at the Chelsea Hotel (getting the flu and further debt). The Office of Mayor and the Metro transport system support Greenmarket, the largest urban local food network in the world. However, the Indypendent newspaper has a story about the Bed-Stuy garden that is danger of closing. Is it outside of the Greenmarket system? Who else is ? Also, the first recorded guerilla gardening was in NYC, the cities first community garden: The Lizy Christy Community Garden.The strange neocon mayor Guiliani closed hundreds of community gardens, what was Greenmarket doing then ? A Google Timeline: History of Gardens in New York City 1920-2009 | GreenGuerillas

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 

With the far-right libertarian CEO and owner of Whole Foods calling against more comprehensive healthcare insurance for the poor, and Omnivore Dilemnas Micheal Pollan calling for him to resign but not for a a boycott of Whole Foods, deeper questions need to be asked about the social relations of production.

Democratic Capital

In other words, how do we organise a democratic economy ? 

Especially in the capital of global capital, a place that Mayor Bloomberg (the richest man in NYC) declares “loves rich people“, with New York For Sale, a city with the Highline for “human humans” of the Power Elite and the dusty, dirty streets for everyone else.

Last night at the Climate Camp UK plenary, there where a number of excellent speakers and an animated and informed discussion about neoliberal capitalism and its resistance and alternative social economies such as cooperative networks etc. It made me think there needs to be a Permaculture Worker Cooperative Movement. A 72 hour intensive permaculture worker cooperative course, body of knowledge etc. As Arizmendi, the priest founder of Mondragon said “its an education movement with an economic model, no an economic movement with an education component” (paraphrased, check quote)

• David Harvey: Red Pepper (who was wearing a PM Press hoodie, publisher of a new history of cooperative movement in the USA, For All the People and The Vegetarian Myth reviewed by Peter Bane of the Permaculture Activist)
  
• Nick Hildyard: The Corner House
  
• Molly Scot Cato: a green economist, Gaian Economics
  
• Keir Milburn: co-editor of Turbulence (was she/he there?)
  
• Claire Faucet: former researcher for Corporate Watch, author of Techno-Fixes
• Camper: Paddy Gillett

In short, it was a session that hit the key points of most of the Permaculture Worker Cooperative ideas.

It seems that the social economies of south America are way ahead in this. No wonder Chomsky’s newest book is on this topic: Hopes and Prospects. So too are the Radical Routes worker cooperative.

Regarding Climate Camp UK 2009, check-out the Blackheath Bugle and if you are really stuck the Climate Camp UK website

Today we are spending some time with cooperators from Radical Routes, Rootstock, Trapese Popular Education Collective and hopefully the Permaculture Association of Britain. The aim is to better understand how a UK permaculture worker cooperative group might form and operate, and act in a kind of cooperative federation with other geographical based permaculture worker cooperative groups.

At the moment we are on wifi on the train from Edinburg to Leeds. Google has decided we are in Sweden, which gives you an idea of geolocation.

Some (most or all?) of the cooperators in Leeds are vegans, and have advanced views about ecological and animal rights. Which made me think “could the concept of worker-cooperative be expanded to include all living (and non-living? machines, minerals, etc?) beings in an ecosystem?”. 

This idea happened while having lunch with Mondragon cooperators we where told and interesting story. Within the Mondragon Coop there is a only one primary-industry agricultural worker cooperative. A dairy cooperative. As with most Mondragon cooperative stories, themes where efficiency, excellence, etc… but one statement stood-out.

Paraphrasing “a dairy farm is just like any other factory, except the milk making machines are cows.” This reinforced the obvious industrial paradigm of Mondragon culture. But it also made me think ask “What if the cows where given the same labor rights as the people worker ? or in otherwords, what if the the cows where made members of the worker-cooperatives?”.

Certainly there is precedent to the concept of Nature’s Rights or Rights of Nature. Embedded in the new Constitution of Ecuador (again under attack by the Obama neoliberal counter-revolution) are environmental laws giving nature and ecosystems rights: Ecuadors Rights of Nature

“When Ecuador began the process of writing a new constitution, they received help from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund to draft environmental laws giving nature and ecosystems rights.[1] [2][3] [4] On September 28, 2008, the people of Ecuador voted for a new constitution that is the first in the world to recognize legally enforceable Rights of Nature, or ecosystem rights. It was approved by a large margin. [5]

Chapter: Rights for Nature

Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.

Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognition of rights for nature before public institutions. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

Art. 2. Nature has the right to an integral restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation of natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people and the collectives that depend on the natural systems.

In case of severe or permanent environmental impact, including that caused by the exploitation of non renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for restoration, and will adopt adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.

Art. 3. The State will motivate natural and juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.

Art. 4. The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.

The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter the national genetic heritage in a definitive way is prohibited.

Art. 5. The persons, people, communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and from natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.

The environmental services cannot be appropriated; their production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated by the State.”

HD Odum’s (which inspired David Holmgren when writing Permaculture One) scientific work on systems ecology, especially his ecological Maximum Power Principle (one of the principles of energetics) could work well within a framework of the Rights of Nature.

I am also thinking about the arguments made by Kevin Carson in his organisational theory (and other worker cooperative literarture) about the agency problem of alienated labor: Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective. If an ecosystem is “designed” so that all the ecology is empowered, extending the Catholic social doctrine that created Mondragon’s worker-cooperative culture to all life (and life supporting systems). We have some very important threads for developing a course and body of knowledge, a culture embedded in various events, media, industry of permaculture worker cooperatives.

Also, at the World Soclal Forum 2009, the Amazon as an ecosystem or ecology, including its indigenous inhabitants, where made a political actor: Pan-Amazonic movements manifesto. Again, enabling the idea of Rights of Nature, with the Rights of Humans embedded within, not the the way around. 

The permaculture principles of perennial polyculture, guilds and zones also compliments the ecosystem worker cooperative.

Lastly, its important to note, that these patterns of ecological worker cooperatives, or permaculture worker cooperatives (with a richer meaning) need to be global. The International Biochar Initiative makes it plain that organic farming and soil carbon are going to become a dangerous big business.

The Rights of Nature are an important foil to the UN and BIG BUSINESS sponsored “sustainable development” and ecosystems services financialisation, starting with soil carbon being included in the so-called CDM (Clean Development Mechanism ) of casino capitalism cap-and-trade

Also, its a paradigm shift from Environmental Economics (environment being a part of economics) to Ecological Economics (economics being a part of ecology)

Local solutions, local organisation is not enough. It is required, but global action cannot be left to centralised governments or corporations.

With all the talk of BIG GREEN, geo-engineering sustainment projects, its time for Gaia Permaculture.

Via colloboration at the Scottish Camp for Climate Action at the Mainshill Solidarity Camp, fighting the Greenhouse Fuedalism of the United Kingdom, we met some very wonderful people.

Permaculture cooperation ? why not forest gardens or Transition Towns ?

As I have written before i.e McGaia, I am interested in Fair Share and People Care ethics of permaculture. Also, focused on scaling-up permaculture from the home, garden and farm to community and larger i.e city, region, state and planet, see Gaia Permaculture. At Mondragon we discussed industrial ecology and permaculture, and how that might happen. As such, we have been focussed on permaculture AND cooperation projects. Which narrows the number of projects down enormously. Transition Towns Totnes is still on the list, but at the bottom, as I naturally must explore the more radically cooperative projects first. Robert Hart inspired forest gardening is vital, but its off the agenda for the moment. So to is Schumacher College, we where to study Gaia Permaculture there, but they have summer recess and are closed. Hopefully we might develop Gaia Permaculture at University of Massachuetts, Amherst. 

Permaculture Association of Britain 

A good friend, made at the camp, suggested the Permaculture Association of Britain would be a good place to start. That business is booming for the association.

Trapese Popular Education Collective

I asked said friend about Transition Towns Totnes, and he offered a reference to the Trapese Popular Education Collective’s critique “A Rocky Road To Transition” PDF. Indymedia review the critique, and a reply from Transition Culture.

Trapese are worth a special mention, as Transition Culture explain in their rebuttal of the critique.

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”.

I couldn’t agree more. Transition Culture response states that “Yes there are tremendously powerful global forces at work, doing appalling things with increasing boldness, but they function as such because, in many cases, we have given them, consciously or unconsciously, the power to do so”. What happens when they have taken the power, by force, by violence ? or manipulation of the institutions of industrial civilisation ? The Transition Culture response continues with magical thinking

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.

If only. The current trajectory is heading more towards a Sustainment scenario, a kind of Fotress World, with Green Zones for the rich and powerful (and perhaps communities of other classes that can organise themselves sufficiently and form symbiotic neofeudal relations).

Trapese have an excellent resources page Do it yourself; A handbook for changing our world, some highlights

• Why we need holisitic solutions for a world in crisis and How to get of the grid.
• Why do it without leaders. Seeds for change collective.
• Popular education and social movements
• Presentation on popular education (powerpoint)
• World time line (powerpoint)
• Introduction to permaculture

Radical Routes

Via another climate camper, a radical UK cooperative federation was suggested , Radical Routes.

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.

 Once again, this is exactly the correct position,

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.
  

 

Radical Routes have an ethical investment arm Rootsock

 

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 ­

­

Transition Towns Totnes

TTT have dropped to the bottom of my list of permaculture cooperative investigations.

Coming from the Mondragon-Permaculture investigations and most recently the activism of Scottish Climate Camp, the Transition Network seems naive and New Age at best, a kind of group therapy focussed on community gardens and workshops. I also have serious reservations about the pyramid selling business model of Transition Towns.

Conclusion

In the next two weeks we have an enormous amount to do; wrap-up this phase of the Mainshill campaign work, the Coal Health Study, a trip to the sustainable Isle of Eigg, presentation of our work at a workshop at London’s Climate Camp (possibly volunteering in the Indymedia again) and also the Permaculture cooperation network in the UK.

On the agenda with the Permaculture Association of Britain, Trapese, Radical Routes & Rootstock would be the creation of a global permaculture cooperative group or network of groups. Making real many of the projects listed on GaiaPermaculture.com.

 

Kirstie & Nicholas had an informal discussion with Professor Fred Freundlich of Mondragon University about the history and state of the worker-cooperative movement, and Mondragon in particular, in reference to our establishing a global permaculture worker cooperative.

We came away from the meeting optimistic that our dreams of developing sustainability projects in a worker-cooperative framework can be realized.  The two systems have the potential to be mutually beneficial:  permaculture can contribute to the environmental sustainability aspects of Mondragon, and the economic and social sustainability aspects of the Mondragon cooperative can stabilize permaculture in the world (Gaia Permaculture). A permaculture worker-cooperative could research, develop and replicate the permaculture worker cooperative complex and create a truly sustainable future. A Gaia Permaculture Mondragon Cooperative Complex.­

­

THE GIST OF IT

OTHER DISCUSSION POINTS

Mondragon is humane

Fred told us an anecdote, and said that people don’t sit at the dinner table each night and joyfully explain the ever-escalating cooperation, but instead gripe about their work-mates or their crappy supervisors. This is human. But at Mondragon, they have work-place democracy, internal organisatons that can resolve issues in a healthy way; Social Council, General Assembly, a Management Council and so on. At Mondragon they have a cooperative system that more humanely and creatively addresses the problems of work.

Cooperative renewal and extension

Within Mondragon the Cooperative identity is to be revitalised; educating new cooperators that joined for professional reasons and work conditions, and may not be so much cooperative activists. Many of the older cooperative activists are working to extract cooperative patterns from the cooperatives and promote those into other spheres; politics, sport, government etc

WorkerCooperatives.com and New Economy worker-cooperatives

Nicholas asked was there a media and education source for the internet generation regarding about the worker-cooperative movement. He has in mind a mass-multi-media project called WorkerCooperatives.com. Similar to Permaculture.TV, but focussing on the culture and stories of the broader worker-cooperative movement, which is largely industrial and often in an un-sustainable environmental mode.

Nicholas also asked Fred about Mondragon education and industry and open source business models and social media, and asked if there where any run by worker-cooperatives. Fred suggested there might be New Economy worker-cooperatives, but couldn’t think of any of hand. Nicholas explained, that although he knew of an excellent report on Tech Worker Coops funded by the US Freelancers Union, that profiled a number of development and service worker-cooperatives, he knew of not a single worker-cooperative run Facebook, Wikipedia or Firefox type project.

Nicholas also mentioned a recent Wired magazine article on the New New Economy, which has Wired’s New Socialism placing Facebook and Wikipedia on the same spectrum as the 21st Century Socialism of Venezualia, he said that hopefully the ground noise and static has reduced, and that he might be able to collate and make sense of the article and the reponses i.e. some perhaps muddled posts from Lawrence Lessig etc

Sustainability.Mondragon.EDU

Nicholas suggested that a website or initiative be created at Mondragon similar to Sustainability.MIT.edu and was interested in meeting and talking to students that would be interested.

21st Century Socialism

Nicholas asked whether there was a huge interest in Mondragon from the countries of Latin America such as Venezualia and Bolivia that are basing their Socialism of the 21st Century or social revolutions on worker and other cooperatives, on a social economy. Fred explained that there had been not as much interest from these nations as might be expected. There where students and visitors, but not huge numbers or big engagements.

Basque exceptionalism

We also talked about Basque nationalism and asked was cooperation unique and limited to them. Fred mentioned that if that was true, there would be more cooperatives, in total only 7% of the Basque economy is cooperative. Basque nationalism is clearly a major element of the culture here, the original cooperative activists wanted to create a system that was autonomous from Franco, that was better than a Francoist system. This created a technocratic culture, if they where to be autonomous AND succeed that meant more research and study, more competence and skill, more hard work and discipline. A more highly technical, organised and democratic system.

Democracy at work and in community

The lesson from Mondragon, so far, is that democratic debate is central to the cooperative process, and that although Mondragon operates as a single successful system it is internally very lively and animated with all sorts of discussion… they confront problems front-on, democratically with one person, one vote. All workers own financial and decision making at Mondragon.

 

 

Image: World map of human migrations, numbers represent thousands of years before present, letters are Haplogroups, Wikipedia

The Basque are demonstrating that for true sovereignty, sustainability, liberation and permanent culture (and permanent agriculture) a highly organised cooperative social and economic system must create resilience and resistance.

 We are in Basque Country researching both the Euskal Herriko Laborantza Ganbara and the Mondragon Cooperatives in order to establish a global permaculture cooperative. 

The Basque Country is a nation spread across provinces in Spain and France with a unique language unrelated to any other. Basque are thought to be remnants of pre-Indo-European’s with mitochondrial DNA (Haplogroup 8Ua) suggesting they are the aboriginals of Europe, perhaps without lineage to Africa and originating from West Asia.

Basque have lived in north-west Spain and south-west France, in the Bay of Biscay and Atlantic Pyrennes, since before the last Ice Age and continue the struggle for liberation and sovereignty by all means.

Some Basques include St Francis Xavier, Loyola (founder of the Jesuits), Simon Bolivar, Che Guevaria and Father José María Arizmendiarrieta Madariaga (founder of Mondragon Cooperative).

Basque culture is maintained by a fierce independence that depends on language and institutions; industrial and agricultural. 

In the Spanish industrial regions around Mondragon we have the Mongragon Cooperative Corporation, the global worker-cooperative founded by the Catholic priest José María Arizmendiarrieta Madariaga.

In rural Pay Basque (French Basque) we have the ELB or the Basque French Peasants Union (affiliated with Via Campesina).

Both Basque projects are organising socially, economically, culturally and most importantly, politically to create a system that can permanently sustain a democract and independent life.

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. 

The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation is an example of a humane and social response to the realities of industralisation and automation.

The ELB is a more recent project that is fighting for food sovereignty for Basque farmers and community members.

In a world being destroyed by European imperialism, with the US empire the latest and most dangerous example, the Basque experience is doing much to demonstrate that it is possible to humanise and advance the organisation of the industrial and agricultural systems.

The Basque experiences demonstrates that for democracy and sustainability a highly organised social and economic system must be accompanied by political struggle, education and permanent living culture. 

Sources

http://www.slideshare.net/jmluzarraga/mondragon-multilocalisation-strategy-jm-luzarraga-phd-defense-4th-june-2008-presentation

http://www.slideshare.net/jmluzarraga/mu-mba-lecture-feb-2009-competing-in-global-markets

http://www.mcc.es/ing/index.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikurri%C3%B1a

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mar%C3%ADa_Arizmendiarrieta

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Basque_people.png

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_U_%28mtDNA%29#Haplogroup_U8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map-of-human-migrations.jpg

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/bookreview_apr00_b.html

http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v13/n12/full/5201482a.html

 

­

in my view the ideal 3 permaculture ethics; Earth Care, People Care and Fair Share are clear

the actually existing permaculture ethics, especially the Fair Share became a victim to a dominant, neo-liberal, hyper-competitive “survival of the fittest” “free-market culture”…

Fair Share sounded Commie and hence there was all sorts of backflips, juggling, and other party tricks to distract from the obvious grotesque inequality, inequity… the abominable global and local injustice of the economic, social and political Washington Consensus system 

it didn’t help that Mollison and the hippies largely detached themselves from political activism after the late 60s and early 70s and so now are largely unaware and unaffiliated with Via Campesina, the world wide peasant union, with millions of members http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_Campesina

most importantly Permaculture as an institution has not progressed past a very loose collection of often competing teachers, designers, schools and some businesses (and cooperatives?)… 

in the 1983 audio of Mollison giving a PDC he talks a lot about Mondragon Cooperative http://www.permacultureplants.net/Audio/pdc83.htm and and the cooperative social, economic and industrial system run in the Basque Country of Spain… along with Commonwork and Ethical Investment he makes it very clear that this is how permaculture will produce Fair Share… he ends with “and I think I will go to Monragon and have a talk”… as far as I know, he never did

without an organised social and economic cooperative system permaculture is a fragmented collection of individuals and loose networks… it has none of the highly organised economic and social capacity of Mondragon or in fact any cooperative system

we are meeting professors and representatives from Mondragon in the morning to discuss a global sustainability cooperative, with reference to a permaculture worker cooperative.. if anyone has any questions they would like asked, please email us ­

Also:

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Community_development

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

 

An outline of the feasibility needs the following

• Write mission statement
• write business plan outline based on business activities that could grow into separate cooperative units
• discuss how global workers cooperative could work
• use examples or prototypes
  
• use similar existing business as reference
• discuss the role of the website, the open planning, radical transparency
• discuss the permaculture worker problem
• discuss the cooperative costs
• discuss start-up procedure including forms, costs, legal, financial etc 

   

  more on the Wiki