PermacultureCooperative

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.

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 ­

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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.­

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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

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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

The key idea of the permaculture workers cooperative is that those that work in the green-collar jobs are unionised and also own their place of work, having control over decision-making. The South Bronx worker-cooperative incubator GreenWorker.coop seeks to address that head-on and so does the this permaculture cooperative project.

On Doug Henwood’s Behind The News Radio show, in an interviews with NYU academic Andrew Ross and unionist Michael Yates (High MP3) we are reminded that unions are important, even in the new so called Green Collar Economy as most green jobs have poor conditions and pay, and are rarely unionised.

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

As Andrew Ross says “green collar jobs are ususally pretty crappy jobs” and there is some evidence for that below. 

A recent article by Sarah Newman of Alernet called The Ugly Truth Behind Organic Farms outlines some of the considerable problems with the organic industry.

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

For anyone who has worked in WWOOF’ing knows

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.

Kerry Trueman at The Huffington Post in Let’s Ask Marion Nestle: Are The USDA’s Organic Standards A Sham?

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.

A New York TImes article talks of the massive drop in the industry’s sales: Budgets Squeezed, Some Families Bypass Organics

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.” 

 The response to this is a return to the true definition of sustainability: economic, social AND environmental sustainability - The Beyond Organic movement, perhaps first termed by Michael Abelman, his film Beyond Organic. Also Beyond Organic: Whats Really At Stake

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. 

From Wikipedia

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

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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