Understanding Permaculture: The Four Pillars

 

Bill Mollison's Permaculture Logo

"We have two choices: A Gaian Future, or No Future."  --Norman Myers

"What is Permaculture?"  Virtually everyone who has developed a keen interest in Permaculture, or received his or her Permaculture Design Certificate, has heard this question from the vast majority of people out there who have either never heard of the term at all, or have heard it only in passing, and have developed stereotypical images of ragged, aging "back-to-the-land" hippies somewhere in the hinterlands, crowding around their woodstoves and strumming their guitars singing "Jeremiah was a Bullfrog" and other old favorites from the late '60s and '70's... 

In fact, Permaculture is something deeper, far more profound than this: it is not just a gardening technique, or even a set of gardening techniques, although gardening is the most common arena for the application of Permaculture principles.  Rather, it can best be understood, in my view, as the convergence of four "E's": Epistemology, Ethics, Ecology, and Energy.  Let's look at these one at a time:

Epistemology: This one takes the most explaining. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge; the study of how we know things or more specifically, the study of the presuppositions that undergird the ways in which we conceptualize our world. And in the West, these presuppositions have been rooted in what Greeks called ideas (after Plato) and what later Latin-speaking scholars called essences or entia.This way of knowing could be symbolized mathematically by saying "X, not Y."  For the Greeks, the whole of epistemic inquiry involved questioning the ways we could define X so as to exclude Y, and vice versa. What, essentially, is X?  We can flesh this out a bit by replacing the empty signifiers X and Y with two actual concepts: "Man" and "Nature."

Since the Agricultural Revolution, which occurred several thousand years before Plato's time, the general assumption among agricultural societies has been that "Man" and "Nature" are separate entities, that "Man" is apart from, not a part of, "Nature," and that "Nature" is a mere "resource" whose value is latent until it is transformed, by "Man," into a commodity--something for his \own personal use, or for sale to someone else. When this way of thinking is applied in practice, it leads exactly to what we have seen ever since the Agricultural Revolution, some 8 to 10 thousand years ago: the progressive transformation of complex, perennial ecosystems into monocultural, annual (and storable) high-carbohydrate grasses like wheat, rice, and corn; the simultaneous explosive growth of human population and the rise of cities and commerce (all dependent on converting nature to commodities). The spinoffs are thus entirely predictable as well: as the topsoil in one area of land was exhausted and as human populations increased, we saw the Age of Empire arise, as cities and states fought each other over access to agricultural land, or displaced indigenous horticultural and nomadic tribes to grab yet more land for conversion to monoculture. Meanwhile both topsoil loss and pollution of air, land, and water accelerated in every area that agriculture reached and transformed. The Industrial Revolution, of course, turbo-charged this process of turning ecosystems into monocultural crops, and replacing lost nutrients in topsoil with artificial fertilizers from fossil fuels--and thereby turning both oil and ecosystems into yet more people!

Permaculture seeks to reverse this whole destructive pattern, right from its epistemological roots. Rather than starting with an emphasis on entities--"Man" vs. "Nature"--it starts with an emphasis on relationships. Rather than X being defined as not Y, the expression of relatedness would be "X is X because Y is Y (and vice versa): "This is because that is," as the Buddha succinctly put it; an insight symbolized  by the familiar Tai Chi, or Yang/Yin Symbol in Chinese culture:

In this relational understanding, we see that humanity (not just "man") is what it is because nature is what it is--that we are a part of, not apart from "nature."  Hence we need a new name for "nature" that captures this inclusive relationship, and the obvious choice is "Gaia"--the ancient Greek Earth goddess, a name that has been recycled more recently to refer to the systemic view of the biosphere (including humanity) as a Complex Adaptive System. So this is the first pillar of Permaculture--a new understanding of ourselves as Gaians--as part of, rather than apart from, the biological world we inhabit.

Ethics: This new Gaian understanding of nature as a complex adaptive system, and of ourselves as a part of that system, subject to its production rules, leads directly to the second pillar of Permaculture: ethics. According to its founder, Bill Mollison, all Permaculture design is rooted in three core ethics: Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share. The first, Earth Care, takes priority: in every decision a Permaculture designer makes, he or she must first consider the effects of that decision on the larger systems of which his project is a part--above all, the biosphere or Gaia. Whenever two or more design options are available, the mandate is to choose the design option that has the least adverse effect--or the greatest potential benefits--to the ecosystem and the bioregion we inhabit--and by extension, to the entire living planet. People Care, the second Ethic, begins with the assumption that we are part of nature, not apart from it, so that in taking good care of our ecosystems, we are also taking good care of one another. 

The third core ethic, "Fair Share" is more problematic. Various permaculturists have proposed alternatives like "Future Care" or "Reinvesting the Surplus" as alternatives, but I prefer the original term that Mollison suggested. It does not, however, mean communism or redistributing the wealth by any coercive means!  Rather, it refers to reinvesting the surplus yields we get from practicing Earth Care and People Care into more of the same; it can be thought of as the replicative function of the three core ethics, sharing not only produce and other surplus yields, but also newly acquired knowledge and skills. In short, it a mandate to not only to learn Permaculture design principles, but to teach them as well, and to make use of these principles to heal our landscapes (and our planet) and to create new patterns for symbiotic cohabitation with our living planet, rather than parasitic exploitation.

Ecology is, of course, the biological science that lies at the foundation of Permaculture as a practical discipline. In fact "applied ecology" can be thought of as another concise definition of Permaculture design. So understanding ecosystems at all levels--topsoil, biota and their interactions, climate. population dynamics, plants and animals, landscape forms, watersheds, and ecological succession--are all prerequisites of Permaculture. 

Energy the final, equally fundamental basis of Permaculture design; another short definition of Permaculture is "an energy audit," for patterns of energy flow are at the foundation of everything we do in a landscape. Thus, in conceiving of, and laying out a design--whether for a household, a landscape, or a city, Permaculturists first look at energy flow, including seasonal climate patterns based on latitude and altitude, gravitational water flow, slope and solar aspect, human exertion patterns, microclimates, and external influences beyond our control, both natural (e.g. fire vectors) and human (traffic flows, noise, pollution or "invisible structures" such as laws and ordinances, attitudes and behavior of neighbors, etc.)

These four pillars--Epistemology, Ethics, Ecology, and Energy--form the foundation of Permaculture as a design discipline, but also as a way of life, a way of thinking, that could ultimately lead toward our final asymptotic goal as Gaians: to shift our collective gift of human intelligence from its current parasitic and destructive relationship with our living planet to a symbiotic and healing relationship--before it's far too late. May it be so.

Who will survive the next evolutionary bottleneck?

 An evolutionary bottleneck is a metaphor used by evolutionary biologists to refer to an apparent acceleration of genetic variation in a species due to a catastrophic reduction in its population. Unlike the normal processes of natural selection, which are driven by "fitness" or the adaptive benefits of a given allele (variant within a specific genotype) within a given ecological niche, evolutionary bottlenecks tend to result in the rapid proliferation, in a recovering population, of random alleles that may or may not confer reproductive advantage.  If they do not, the population may quickly go extinct, due to a loss of adaptive fitness; conversely, if they are lucky, a random allele may confer a benefit that gives them an edge over competition or over their prey, and enables them to rapidly proliferate, taking over one niche and expanding to others. 

A currently popular theory in human evolutionary biology is that one or more evolutionary bottlenecks--disasters that nearly eliminated our hominid ancestors but left a small remnant to survive and proliferate--may have, through this evolutionary process, conferred upon us the selective advantage that resulted in our taking over the entire planet: our unique aquisition of digital language, which enabled us to communicate not just nonverbal relationship information (e.g. dominance/submission, sexual interest, or parental guidance) but actual concepts and propositions, invented and shared as needed--a communicative intervention that gave us a decisive evolutionary advantage over all other complex species--plant and animal alike, and that led, through a familiar process of positive feedback, to the expansion of our frontal lobes that enabled us to process this vast and growing array of information.

The results today, of course, are entirely predictable from an evolutionary perspective.  As biologist Lynn Margulis once observed, "Humans are an extraordinarily successful species, but extraordinarily successful species never last long." This is true because such species, no matter how versatile, quickly outgrow the carrying capacity of their ecological niche--even if that niche comprises the entire planet.

And that is exactly where we are today.  There are far more humans alive today than all of our ancestors combined, and most of us--especially in the global North--are using far more energetic, biological, and material resources per capita than our ancestors ever imagined. As a consequence, ecosystems are collapsing everywhere, topsoil is being depleted at a far faster rate than it can be rebuilt, our fisheries are declining rapidly, and of course the climate crisis is the wild card that could upend it all within the coming decades. The possible triggering mechanisms of global catastrophe are proliferating, almost daily: rapidly melting ice caps and glaciers at both poles and on mountains worldwide; an accelerating uptick in the frequency and severity of droughts, floods, violent storms, and wildfires; the potential collapse of the international political and economic order into warring authoritarian states ruled by thuggish despots (which could easily lead to the unimaginable outbreak and proliferation of nuclear conflicts)--the convergent prospects of global biological and civilizational collapse are all too clear, leading the most pessimistic of us to warn darkly of "human extinction" within the next few decades.

Extinction?  Possibly, but I doubt it.  But a great die-off of a huge proportion of humanity is probably inevitable--and it won't be pretty.  Imagine, for example, if  Thwaite's Glacier in West Antarctica, which holds back the huge mass of ice on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, were to collapse within the next few years, as many scientists predict. This could trigger a cascading collapse of the entire western continental ice sheet, raising the global sea level by three meters. (This is why it is often called the "Doomsday Glacier")  The result would be the inundation of coastal cities throughout the world, resulting in a surge of destitute refugees inland, spawning predatory gangs that survive by raiding shopping centers, then suburbs, then farms--and governments, despite their armed forces and brutality, would be powerless to stop them. Whole economies would quickly collapse, leading to mass starvation, yet more desperate refugees, more violence, more starvation...the mind reels at the horrific prospects worldwide.  And coupled with increasing drought, violent storms, and wildfires, the global death toll of humans and other animals would continue to spiral out of control.

But would we all die? I doubt it. The most likely survivors would be the most resilient: small bands of people with practical skills who form close working relationships--either for more effective predation (like our current urban drug cartels and criminal syndicates) or for more adaptive purposes. But if only thugs survive, they will eventually kill each other off, competing for supremacy. And who wants to live in a desperate, broken world of scattered thugs and warlords anyway? Not I.

So what might be "more adaptive purposes"? If we go back to past Dark Ages following catastrophic collapses (e.g. the Eastern Mediterranean collapse of the 12th Century BC, or northern Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire, we see long periods of rival warlords and clans, holing themselves up in defensive battlements and fighting endless power struggles--but we also see a "saving remnant" of scattered communities with higher, regenerative goals--like the monasteries which preserved and disseminated literacy and both classical and biblical texts, or even the nomadic Bedouins who carried the Qu'ran to the far reaches of Asia and Africa; like Buddhist communities in war-torn India and central Asia, or Confucians and Taoists in the wake of the chaotic Warring States period in China.

Could something similar-- small, scattered communities of Gaians that preserve the best of the past along with a more adaptive, aware, and compassionate way of living within, and regenerating, our biological support system--happen again after the coming global catastrophe?  I don't know--but it is an ideal worth living for, and worth passing on to our younger generations. For now, our best bet is to propagate Gaianity by growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness.

Reimagining the Future

 "...and where I used to see orange groves out the window of my plane, today I looked down and saw...Houses! Shopping centers! Progress!  And I want to see a lot more of it." --Richard Nixon, ca. 1950.

As a dominant culture, particularly here in North America, we have always been oriented toward the idea of "the  future" or--as Nixon called it during his first Senate campaign in 1950, "progress." This optimistic future focus coevolved with the Industrial Revolution of the 19th and 20th Centuries when, for the first time in our history, vast improvements in technology, in lifestyle, in creature comforts, in general affluence, and in available goods and services became apparent between one generation and the next.  To take one simple example, my grandfather was born in 1877 and died in 1966. When he was born, his world bore a closer resemblance to the world of John Adams--or even Julius Caesar--than it did to my world as a youth--the world in which he died. In 1877, there were no cars or airplanes, no electric lights or appliances, no plastics, and of course, no mass media other than newspapers. The fossil-fuel age had begun with coal, but railroads with steam engines were the only available form of industrialized mass transportation over land, while steam ships were still in the process of displacing sailing ships at sea. Yet by the time he died, the world was substantially the same as it is today--minus, of course, the digital revolution of personal computers, cellphones, and the internet.

When I was growing up, during the explosion of unprecedented affluence following the second World War, futuristic fantasies abounded, particularly among the youth, as the global market economy and technological revolution expanded around the world. In fiction, in advertising, and in movies (like the Star Wars series) and television series (like Star Trek), my generation was immersed in fantasies about the future as a technological wonderland of space travel, robotic servants, flying around in our personal jets just as we drove around in our flashy new cars, traveling to distant planets, and of course, building bigger and better suburban mansions than those we grew up in. And to a large extent, our educators and mass media continue to propagate these fantasies among our youth as ideals to strive for, so that they will continue to work hard and get good grades at school, get college and graduate degrees, and work for--or establish their own--multinational corporations, and get rich.

In recent years, however, this aggressively promoted narrative of endless growth and progress has been tarnished by growing awareness of frightening trends that have darkened our collective horizons--above all, the climate crisis. And accordingly, our familiar fantasies of a bright, affluent, technologically advanced future have been increasingly displaced by dystopic or apocalyptic fantasies and disaster movies. Yet our educational systems are still rooted in the endemic optimism of the industrial era: "Work hard, boy, and you'll find/Some day, you'll have a job like mine..." as Cat Stevens once sang.  Greta Thunberg rose to instant fame simply by calling the bluff of the entire global educational establishment, rather like the little girl in "The Emperor's New Clothes," by posing the question, "WHAT future??"

What future, indeed? There is no shortage of dire scenarios to choose from, but I see no point in belaboring these. The one certainty is that a global market economy that depends entirely on the endless expansion of production, consumption, and population is fundamentally incompatible with a finite biological support system like Gaia, our living planet. And the waste product from the fossil fuels that have driven this expansion--excess carbon dioxide--has already started to heat up and destabilize our climate patterns enough that rising global temperatures will soon render large areas of our planet uninhabitable for humans and other complex life forms. The likely result will be mass migration, starvation, pervasive conflict, and upward concentration of wealth into fiercely defended islands of wealth, privilege, and armed power amidst a growing sea of poverty, violence, and destitution, culminating in a global die-off of unprecedented proportions. The future has become an image of Hell itself.

Given this grim reality that has become all too apparent, what should we tell our children? That is the huge question facing today's parents and teachers alike. Here are a few suggestions:

First, remind them that the present is all there is. That the past is just a memory, and the future is unknowable, except in broad trends. Yet the world we all share--and the future we all shape--is the collective consequence of decisions we each make every day.  So if they are terrified of the future (as they have every right to be), they can take refuge in the present moment--first, by breathing, observing, and letting go; then by being well, doing good work, and keeping in touch. This is basic mindfulness practice, to which they can always return, no matter how stressed out or depressed they become.

Second, while they have no direct control over the disintegrative future of the world at large, they can still take control of the present moment right where they are--by growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness. 

Finally, they can let go of the vanishing industrial utopia of the "old" future, and instead plant the seeds of a post-apocalyptic Gaian future--whether or not they live to see it--by learning Gaia, teaching Gaia, healing Gaia, and creating Gaia. Learning, that is, to see themselves as a part of, not apart from, nature, and acting accordingly by the study and practice of Permaculture design; teaching others to do likewise; healing, by these practices, their own portion of the living planet we all share; and creating new, relocalized ways of living, new appropriate technologies, and new eco-social ethics, as a foundation for regenerating whatever is left of our living planet after our global market economy finally collapses.

This Gaian future--if it happens at all--will be very different, of course, from the suburban techno-fantasies that most of us took in with our mother's milk. It will be more labor-intensive, to be sure, but also, it could be more convivial--although resurgent tribalism will always be a danger. But if rooted in the practice of mindfulness and compassion, of earth care, people care, and fair share, it may also be a better life altogether than the alienated, endlessly distracted techno-fantasy of modern suburbia. So let's give our children a realistic, yet hopeful and empowering vision of a postindustrial Gaian future; and as for the proliferating horrors all around the world between now and then--keep in mind this line from Neil Young: "Don't let it bring you down/It's only castles burning/Just find someone who's turning,/And you will come around."  So may we all "come around" to growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness!

My Agenda

     I have occasionally been accused of “having an agenda”—a phrase which has acquired bad connotations in recent years, since people often equate “agenda” with “hidden agenda”—that is, some nefarious or conspiratorial plan to gain money, power, or influence over others—or worse, to deceive, exploit, or harm them for one’s own benefit.  To such charges, I plead innocent. 

But if we take “agenda” in the original sense of the word, it is actually a neuter plural of the Latin word “Agendum,” which is a gerundive meaning “things to do” or “things worth doing.”  It derives from the Latin verb “ago, agere” meaning simply “to do”  So properly understood, an agenda is a list of things to be done.

And I have something to be done, to which I have devoted my life for as long as I remember. When I was a kid, it took the simple form of wanting to save animals from harm. But as I grew into adulthood, my agenda became more complex, and more philosophically elaborate. Prior to Earth Day 1970, I was a passionate “conservationist.”  After that watershed date, I became a passionate “environmentalist.”  And then, a decade later, after I first encountered Dr. James Lovelock’s visionary and scientifically rigorous “Gaia” hypothesis, I became a passionate Gaian, and have remained so ever since.  I define a Gaian as one whose first allegiance is to the living Earth, and who fully understands what most people have long forgotten: that humanity is a part of, and not apart from, “nature” (or Gaia), and that “nature” (or Gaia) is a complex adaptive system of which we humans are a part, rather than a “resource” with no value at all until it is transformed into commodities.

  In the 1990s, I encountered the luminous Buddhist teachings of the eminent Vietnamese Buddhist monk and teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, who led me to embrace Buddhism. As a practicing Buddhist, I am committed to the Bodhisattva Vow:  to take care of everyone and everything, and to abandon no one and nothing—and to resist, as best I can, any impulse to pursue my own ego-interests at the expense of others.

So as a Gaian Buddhist (which is the most accurate label I have yet adopted), I came upon the most recent watershed event in shaping and clarifying my life agenda, right into old age: my discovery—and wholehearted embrace--of Permaculture in 2015 or thereabouts.  I had heard of Permaculture many times before, but had assumed it was not really for me because the writings of Bill Mollison seemed to be intended for a target audience of practical-minded small-scale agrarians, or what we used to call “back-to-the-land” types. And as an urban college professor with no practical skills whatsoever, I saw little personal use for this line of inquiry. Philosophy was my “thing.”

But then I happened upon a YouTube clip featuring Geoff Lawton, a prominent Australian Permaculture teacher (and the student of Bill Mollison), which was entitled “Greening the Desert.” It was about a project he led on a 10-acre plot he had procured in the parched semi-arid deserts of Jordan. And with contagious enthusiasm, Lawton showed exactly how he and his crew of volunteers had transformed their dry, hard, empty desert plot into a rich and bountiful garden, which captured, retained, and slowly distributed the small amount of annual rainfall so that the garden was largely self-sustaining. Suffice to say I was blown away by this!  So I dove into Permaculture, reading everything I could get my hands on, and my enthusiasm just kept growing.  

Once I retired and my wife and I moved to Oregon in 2017, I first signed up for training with the Marion County Master Gardeners (since a thorough basic knowledge of gardening is a prerequisite to the study of Permaculture), and then, in fall of 2018, I signed on for an online Permaculture Design Certification course at Oregon State University, with the incredibly gifted Andrew Millison as the instructor—one of the best Permaculture teachers on the planet today, with a brilliant gift for succinct and beautifully crafted instructional videoclips on YouTube.  I quickly came to realize that Gaian theory is useless—just an intellectual exercise—without Gaian praxis, and Permaculture is the essential Gaian praxis: Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share.

Hence my life agenda: From now on, until I’m dead, composted, and pushing up the daisies, I will devote my life to Gaianity, which I broadly define as the integration of Dharma practice, Gaian consciousness, and the practice and propagation of Permaculture. And my most recent watershed moment was only a month and a half ago, when I hatched a new idea that struck me immediately as the ideal vehicle for propagating Permaculture (and thereby, Gaian consciousness)  as widely and quickly as possible: my Garden Guild initiative.

A Garden Guild is a voluntary association of contiguous neighbors, who live within walking distance of one another, to collaborate in growing and sharing vegetables, herbs, fruit trees, shrubs, and flowers, and also in sharing ideas, skills, and tools for growing these more efficiently and responsibly. And the purpose of Garden Guilds, as expressed in the slogan, is to “grow gardens, grow community, and grow awareness,” each leading to the other and reciprocally reinforcing each other. And so, in this sense, I would define Garden Guilds as the seeds of a Gaian future, which now may be our only alternative, both individually and collectively, to no future at all.

Hence my specific agenda for 2022 is as follows: to use the  32 (sometimes 33) Gaian holidays as times of convergence, conviviality, and conversation for fellow Gaians (and anyone can be a fellow Gaian, as long as you breathe air, drink water, eat food, and care about your children’s future). What are these holidays?  The Eight Solar Holidays (solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days) and the 24 (sometimes 25) Lunar holidays (new and full moon dates, with a blue moon (twice a month) on rare occasions).

How so?

1.      On or near each of the eight Solar holidays, when possible, we can arrange to meet in person (with masks, if necessary) for a “Gaia Walk” at some convenient local park or natural area.  Here we will practice formal walking meditation in the first part of the walk (going out) and an ordinary, sociable walk on the second (coming back). Our purpose, in keeping with the first of the Twelve Permaculture Principles, is to "observe and interact."

2.      On New Moon days, those interested can meet (on Zoom or in person if possible) for a Dharma Gaia Circle, an ecumenical Sangha (meaning “gathering” or “meditation group”) based on study and practice of the universal Dharma (as manifested in any or all wisdom traditions) as a principle, a precept, and a practice.

3.      On Full Moon days, members of the Garden Guild Network (and anyone else interested) can meet (on Zoom or in person if possible) to read, watch, and discuss instructional video presentations or book chapters on Permaculture, in order to strengthen our gardening skills and stay in touch with each other.

The purpose of these meetings?  You guessed it: to grow gardens, grow community, and to grow awareness. And to encourage one another to continue learning, teaching, healing, and creating Gaia.  So be it.

Imagine...

 Imagine all the people/Sharing all the world..." --John Lennon

When we take an honest look at what is happening in our world today, these words from John Lennon's iconic song may seem like a bad joke. As the idiot Lennie says to his keeper George at the end of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, "Tell me about the rabbits, George!"

But let's engage our imaginations anyway, but this time grounded in the grim reality we can no longer avoid: the incremental erosion and collapse of Glomart, our fossil-fuel-based global industrial civilization and money-based market economy, coupled with the ongoing, fossil-fuel-driven overheating and destabilization of Gaia, our vital biological support system. So again, imagine...

=if suburbanites and small landholders everywhere started reaching out to each other to form neighborhood Garden Guilds, where they met periodically in convivial gatherings (e.g. potluck dinners or work parties)  to share local knowledge, skills, and ideas about growing their own food and other ways to increase the resilience and collaboration of their own neighborhoods;

--if these Garden Guilds, from the outset, were jointly sponsored by Master Gardener organizations, disseminating research-based knowledge from land-grant universities about best gardening practices for each particular bioregion, and by local city governments, through their public (i.e. non-exclusive) neighborhood organizations--to enable information-sharing among Garden Guilds and to enforce guidelines that ensure inclusiveness and promote and social and ecological awareness and responsibility (i.e. the three ethical foundations of Permaculture design: Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share);

--if, within these Garden Guilds, special efforts were made to inculcate and practice universally recognized core ethical values, such as compassionate sharing of surplus with the needy, elderly, or landless population, and tolerance of religious, political, and ethnic diversity--

What would be the beneficial consequences for societies as a whole? These migt include the following:

• less isolation and paranoia within urban, suburban, and rural communities;
• greater food security for everyone;
• lifelong education with intrinsic rewards for children and adults alike (e.g. new friendships, fresh, home-grown vegetables year around, greater awareness of the natural world, less reliance on Glomart consumerism ("You are what you own") and more on personal empowerment ("You are what you do");
• contiguous clusters of well-organized neighborhoods, already accustomed to cooperative efforts, to provide mutual aid in response to climate-related catastrophes and to fend off external threats such as predatory drug gangs, crime, or deranged militias as the larger social infrastructure becomes more and more chaotic, authoritarian, and fragile; 
• the proliferation of a life-affirming ethos of Earth Care, People Care. and Fair Share to offset growing divisiveness and hate-mongering by opportunistic demagogues in the service of corporate oligarchs...

None of this can be imposed from the top down without creating resistance and resentment (which hateful demagogues will only too readily capitalize upon, as long as isolated suburbanites remain glued to commercial television and social media).

But the seeds of such a future can--and must--be sown in the ground under our feet, both literally and figuratively.  So I invite all of you to join us in the Garden Guild Network, as we collaborate to grow gardens, grow community, and grow awareness.

--

-

The Lunar Society, Revisited

In the 18th Century, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution--and hence at the dawn of modernity--a group of brilliant, accomplished, and forward-thinking men started meeting monthly, on the full moon, to discuss ideas and innovations that would dramatically transform society, including many of these in which they themselves were at the forefront. They called themselves the Lunar Society,These included (1) Matthew Boulton, a prominent industrialist who first introduced workers' insurance schemes and sick pay; (2) his business partner James Watt, the visionary industrialist who transformed the steam engine (originally invented by Thomas Newcomen to pump water from coal mines) into a serviceable mechanism for all other manufacturing; (3) Erasmus Darwin, poet, inventor, and botanist (and grandfather of Charles Darwin); (4) Josiah Wedgwood, the father of English pottery, whose company mass produced ceramic ware, making it affordable, for the first time, to the masses; (5) Joseph Priestley, the chemist and Unitarian preacher who isolated oxygen and discovered Carbon Dioxide. Overseas correspondents to this elite group included Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. For further info, here is a link:

https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/The-Lunar-Society/

A pretty amazing group, to say the least! 

These guys were living at the dawn of the industrial era, and sharing their thoughts about the implications of these profound socioeconomic and technological changes in which they were all eminent participants. 

And now, whether we like it or not, we are drawing toward the end of that same industrial era, due to the fundamental contradiction between (1) an economy based on the infinite growth of fossil fuel-driven production, consumption, and population, and (2) a finite biological support system (the Earth). 

Here in the suburbs, most of us, for obvious reasons, are in total denial about the imminent collapse of our comfortably affluent way of life, since it is all we have ever known. And for those of us who are more keenly aware of what's coming, our tendency is to oscillate between denial (business as usual) and sheer panic and despair about the future.

There is a third option, however, far more adaptive than either denial or panic. And that is intelligent planning--which is just what the Lunar Society was doing-- as a new, vastly different way of life was rapidly upending the stable, predictable society they had always known. 

The difference, of course, was obvious: while they were looking forward to a future of hitherto unimaginable economic growth, technological innovation and general affluence, we today face the far more daunting challenge of downsizing and relocalizing, if we are to avoid a hellish descent into chaos as our global market economy collapses all around us.

This is, of course, the theme of David Holmgren's new book, Retrofitting Suburbia, which I am proposing as the first reading of my monthly book club for my Garden Guild Network.  But whereas the original Lunar Society met at the Full Moon, we will meet at the New Moon, when all is in darkness. Because at present, none of us can possibly know what a post-industrial future on a superheated, ecologically degraded planet will look like--or whether there will be a future at all. In the darkness, all we can do is hope for the best, but plan for the worst--by growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness.

Glasgow Post-Mortem

 “Don’t let it bring you down; it’s only castles burning/Just find someone who’s turning/And you will come around…” –Neil Young

To nobody’s surprise, the COP 26 Climate Conference in Glasgow, just ended, was largely an exercise in futility. After intensive negotiations and trade-offs, world leaders made the usual watered-down pledges to reduce carbon emissions and phase out deforestation, but these unenforceable pledges fall far short of what is necessary to avert global climate catastrophe by mid-century, or to give our children and grandchildren a future worth inheriting, rather than a hellish future we would not wish for our worst enemies. If the whole charade makes you feel despondent, you are not alone. At such times, I often recall the above refrain from Neil Young’s song, “Don’t Let it Bring You Down” from his 1970 album, aptly titled “After the Gold Rush,” which came out when I was in college. For that is exactly where we are these days—after the gold rush. This global “gold rush” was triggered by the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels, starting in the late 18th Century, which provided a seemingly unlimited source of cheap net energy that drove the Industrial Revolution, and hence the unprecedented explosive growth of production and consumption of commodities, population, technological innovation, and affluence that has landed us exactly where we are today: a thriving global economy on a dying planet. For that growing production, consumption, and population depended entirely on plundering the planet for nonrenewable resources; transforming diverse, productive ecosystems into vast, sterile monocultures that exhausted the topsoil and drained aquifers while depending on external inputs of (fossil fuel-derived) chemical fertilizers and pesticides; paving over vast tracts of arable land with suburban sprawl to accommodate both exploding populations and rising affluence; and—throughout it all—burning vast and growing amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas, and emptying billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into our global atmosphere where they are now rapidly heating up and destabilizing our global climate, with catastrophic consequences for all of us. This is not a problem that can be solved from the top down. For those same global leaders at the Glasgow conference represent nations who are competing with one another to “grow” their economies in order to maintain the support and approval of their populations—and without cheap net energy, no such “growth” is possible. We often hear politicians promising to phase out fossil fuels by creating a “renewable energy infrastructure” based on solar, wind, or hydro power—in order to maintain “growth,” of course, so that everyone can keep getting richer, find jobs, build houses in the suburbs, buy new toys, and so forth. But such promises overlook one embarrassing fact: rebuilding the energy infrastructure, to be economically viable, requires a huge initial investment of cheap net energy to provide the raw materials, manufacturing facilities, transportation, and installations necessary for such a transition. And there is only one feasible source of this net energy: fossil fuels. (You cannot build windmills with wind energy, solar arrays with solar energy, nor dams with hydroelectric energy!) In short, we cannot expect those with an overwhelming vested interest in the industrial status quo of endless growth—political leaders or the energy corporations whose support they need—to agree to scale down the systems from which they derive their money and power, and on which their populations depend for their own livelihoods and aspirations. So if we cannot expect our political and commercial leaders to face reality and adapt accordingly, what can we do? The second line of Neil Young’s prophetic song gives us a clue: “Find someone who’s turning/And you will come around…” This simple advice has far-reaching implications. As Bill Mollison, the founder of the Permaculture movement, once said, "Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple." So what is this simple solution? What does it mean to “turn,” to “come around”? My answer to this is…embarrassingly simple as well: Grow Gardens; Grow Community; Grow Awareness. 1. Growing Gardens: The minute we start to grow our own food—even if it is just sprouts in a jar for salads—we have started to reduce our dependence on the vast fossil-fuel and money-based industrial and commercial infrastructure that is destroying the planet, the system for which I have coined the shorthand “Glomart” (for “Global Market Economy”). And as we gradually expand our backyard gardens, we learn more and more about the techniques of self-reliance and ecological stewardship. We save money (and energy) by recycling our food wastes into nutrient-rich compost, and we learn by doing as we rebuild our topsoil, so that rather than sending our “yard wastes” to the city dump, we can recycle them in place and return them to the soil as mulch. Small electric chipper-mulchers can help with this as well—or else, if we have the youth and the energy, we can simply chop and drop our “yard wastes” in the fall and return them directly to the garden. All such tasks and skills are easier if we use our garden time to strike up conversations with our neighbors, who may know things we don’t, and who may have tools we can borrow, rather than buy. And all of these reduce our dependence on Glomart, as we master and diversify the skills we need to grow, harvest, diversify, and preserve our own delicious, home-grown, organic fruits and vegetables. And through these chats with our neighbors and with passersby, we have taken the first step to… 2. Growing Community: Our industrial-commercial infrastructure—Glomart—has enabled us to lead far more isolated lives than ever before. Since we rely on that infrastructure—the electrical grid for communication and our gas-guzzling cars for transportation—to connect with friends near and far, most of us have not even bothered to get to know our neighbors. Yet this isolation has made us extremely vulnerable to power-outages and supply cut-offs due to (increasingly frequent) natural disasters, such as floods, droughts, wildfires, and ice storms—or larger socioeconomic crises such as supply-chain disruptions, economic downturns, or runaway inflation. All of these stresses can be alleviated by getting to know, and work with, our neighbors, as well as reconnecting with our faith communities and civic or philanthropic organizations. In all of these ways, we strengthen our collective resiliency in the face of our changing climate and other socioeconomic, political, and environmental stresses. And hence, through growing gardens and community alike, we are collectively 3. Growing Awareness: This process, likewise, starts in our gardens: becoming more keenly aware of seasonal weather patterns as they change from year to year. But also, we grow awareness by growing community—by working with our neighbors and others to address the challenges our community faces from the increasing fragility of larger systems, such as our civil order, our democratic institutions, our economy, and—of course—our planet. And conversely, our growing awareness helps us become better citizens and better gardeners as well! So in short, we can best “find someone who’s turning” by getting to know our neighbors and getting involved in community organizations, and we can best “come around” by becoming more locally self-reliant, by relocalizing our economy, and by learning, teaching, healing, and creating.

The Two Worlds: Glomart and Gaia

Whether we know it or not, we all live in two worlds, simultaneously. By “worlds” I refer to complex adaptive systems, for which you can find a useful definition on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system

Self-organizing complex adaptive systems can be found in all sizes, from individual cells to organisms to ecosystems to our entire planet. And within human society they are equally common, including entities like cities, nation states, the electric grid, the internet, and even “invisible systems” like cultures, subcultures, financial systems, political systems, and religions.  But the “worlds” I refer to are larger, all-embracing complex adaptive systems comprising all of the above.  They are so large, in fact, that we don’t even have names for them.  The conventional names are “the Earth” and “the World” or “Nature” and “Man” but these are fundamentally misleading, so I have adopted one name, already in currency, and invented the other.

The adopted name is “Gaia,” which is not simply “nature,” but rather, the complex adaptive system consisting of humanity-within-nature. The name “Gaia” therefore overrides the false (and fatal) dichotomy we conventionally posit between “mankind” and “nature.”

My newly coined name is “Glomart,” which refers not to humanity per se, but more specifically, to the Global Market Economy, which originated with the rapid expansion of trade after the Agricultural Revolution, some 10,000 years ago, but which accelerated exponentially after the Industrial Revolution of the late 18^th and early 19^th Century, and now spans the entire planet.

Glomart is the world we have made; Gaia is the world that made us. We depend utterly on both: Glomart for our livelihoods, Gaia for our very lives.

Complex adaptive systems evolve according to a specific set of production rules. And herein lies the root of our current global crisis: the production rules of Glomart are fundamentally incompatible with the production rules of Gaia.  To show how this is true, let’s compare them:

1.      GLOMART:  More is always better.  GAIA: Enough is enough.

 The first production rule is the master rule—the major premise for all the others. Glomart runs entirely on the inherently arithmetical logic of money, which is ultimately nothing but arithmetic. And just as 1 + 1 always equals 2, it follows necessarily that in economic systems governed by the rules of money, more is always better—no exceptions. Glomart, that is, runs on a logic of maximization.

Conversely, Gaia—the biosphere—runs entirely on a logic of optimization: too much or too little of any value is toxic to the system, or to its subsystems. If we eat too much, we die; if we eat too little, we die. The same holds true for all other biological values: body temperature, blood pressure, body mass, food or water consumption…or in the aggregate, population size per carrying capacity, predator/prey ratios, etc. These two foundational production rules—maximizing and optimizing, are diametrically opposed; hence, Glomart is a cancer on Gaia, not as a result of any human choice, but by its very nature as a money game, where more is always better. On a finite planet, such a game of endless growth cannot go on without destroying its biological support system.

 

2.      GLOMART: You are what you own. GAIA: You are what you do. 

Since the Glomart system depends entirely on the endless growth of production and consumption, it has evolved a culture of consumerism, where pervasive advertising continually persuades us that our human worth depends on our possessions. This addictive consumerism is essential to maintaining the endless growth of production and consumption demanded by the intrinsic money-based logic of Glomart. Hence, every government on Earth relentlessly pursues “Growth” as its overarching goal—meaning growth, again, of production and consumption of commodities per capita. Yet this endless production, consumption, and resulting population growth relies on endless extraction of finite resources at one end, and pollution at the other. It also relies on continually converting complex ecosystems into monocultures sustained by external inputs of fossil-fuel based fertilizers and pesticides. The net result has been the ongoing deterioration and destruction of vital ecosystems worldwide: our oceans, forests, rivers and streams, topsoils, biodiversity, and even subterranean (and nonrenewable) aquifers, coupled with pollution of our land, air, and water, and, above all, the disruption of our global climate system by excess CO2 from the fossil fuels upon which Glomart entirely depends.

 In Gaia, conversely—and in the earlier, indigenous human cultures everywhere that were fully aware of, and celebrated, their participation in the Gaian web of life—the core value was “You are what you do.” That is, the value of any individual within an indigenous culture derived not so much from their possessions as from the role they played in serving and supporting their community, their tribe, and the larger biological systems that sustained their tribe. And this was largely true of agricultural society as well—hence the proliferation of surnames based on specific trades (e.g. “smith,” “baker,” “cook,” “miller” “butler” etc.).

Likewise, in the nonhuman parts of Gaia, species are valued by ecologists entirely based on the niche they occupy within their ecosystems—by what they do--whether as predators, grazers, or scavengers—or in the plant, fungal, and microbial realm, as nitrogen-fixing bacteria on legumes, colonizing annuals, herbaceous and woody perennials, and so forth. “Ownership,” in Gaia, means nothing; the hole excavated by a woodpecker for her nest may subsequently—and often simultaneously--serve as the shelter of numerous other species.

 

3.      GLOMART: Nothing has value until it has a price. GAIA: Value derives from relationships.

Throughout our global market economy, nothing has any value until it becomes a commodity; therefore, the ongoing core agenda of Glomart is to transform nature into commodities as quickly as possible: forests into board feet; fisheries into fishmarkets; minerals into manufactured products; land into real estate; and citizens into consumers.  Nothing can become a commodity until we draw a boundary around it and cut it out of its supporting matrix; only then can we put a price on it to sell it on the market.

Conversely, in Gaia—in all ecosystems worldwide—the value of any element (mineral or biological) depends entirely on its network of relations with all the other living beings around it. A tree, cut down as board feet, has only one value—its monetary value as a commodity for sale on the market.  Alive (or dead) in the forest, a tree has multiple values—as habitat for a host of species great and small; as shelter for plants and animals, whether from summer’s heat, autumn winds, or winter’s rain or snow; as topsoil builder, as water retainer in its biomass, and as cloud-forming agent of evapotranspiration, creating and sustaining its own microclimate. And so it is for all other elements of Gaia, our unique and miraculous biological support system.

      GLOMART: The Bottom Line is the bottom line. GAIA: The survival and propagation of Life itself is all that matters.

This is the final, most profound difference between the production rules of Glomart and Gaia. The sole ultimate purpose of every business enterprise on the planet, from the smallest local merchant to the largest multinational corporation, is to maximize return on their investments. The basic (arithmetical) rules of the money game make no other purpose even possible, lest they be outcompeted by a rival enterprise who is able to undercut their price. And there are only two ways of making a profit: socially adaptive ways, and socially maladaptive ways. Yet corporations have no vested interest in distinguishing between them: profit is profit, and all that ever matters is the next quarterly return.

Socially adaptive ways of making a profit are no problem, and should be encouraged. They include, above all, making and selling useful and innovative products,  providing employment for others, and providing investment opportunities for investors. Socially maladaptive ways include, above all, exploitation of labor (the “race to the bottom”), externalization of costs to the public (pollution), as well as deceptive advertising and political corruption (i.e. buying off politicians with campaign contributions to prevent regulation in the public interest). The challenge, therefore, for any government is to find ways of encouraging socially adaptive investments in the private sector, and discouraging or prohibiting socially maladaptive approaches to profit maximization.

For Gaia (and for all pre-industrial human cultures that understood themselves as a part of Gaia), the only “bottom line”—the only ultimate purpose—of their behavior, individually or collectively, was (and is) to propagate and perpetuate their own kind, and the ecosystems that support them, from one generation to the next. This is the value that, most fatally, has been lost by Glomart’s relentless colonization of Gaia: the utter abandonment of future generations in pursuit of their own immediate, ever-growing short-term profits.

So what can we do about this fundamental incompatibility between our (maximizing) Glomart socioeconomic order and our (optimizing) Gaian biological support system? Pessimists, of course, will say “Nothing. We are doomed.” I sometimes incline that way, but then I step back and reconsider, simply because I am still alive, and as William Blake once said, “Everything that lives is holy.” So here is one attempt at an answer:

Imagine what could happen if, starting from the ground up, people were inspired to make a conscientious effort to shift from Glomart values to Gaian values? That is, from “More is always better” to “Enough is enough;” from “You are what you own” to “You are what you do;” from “Value = Price” to “Value = Relationship; and from “Maximizing the Bottom Line” to “The survival and propagation of Life itself” as their ultimate goal? And then—starting where they are—they devoted the rest of their lives, young and old, to growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness? Who knows?  As Shakespeare’s Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale puts it, “There may be matter in it.”  Glomart is dying; long live Gaia!

Things Dying, Things Newborn

 In Act III of Shakespeare's late romance, The Winter's Tale,   Antigonus, an elderly agent of the obsessively jealous King Leontes of Sicilia, arrives on the "seacoast of Bohemia," carrying Leontes' newborn child Perdita,who has been condemned to abandonment on (false) suspicion that she is the bastard child of his wife Hermione with his lifelong friend Polixenes, King of Bohemia. As a dangerous storm gathers overhead, Antigonus mourns his fate, as he abandons the child--until he is frightened away by a bear (hence the famous stage direction, "Exit, Pursued by a Bear"), while the highly vulnerable child is left alone onstage, amidst the gathering storm...

Then, in a comic twist, an old shepherd enters, discovers the child, and speculates darkly about her origins, until his clownish son appears, and breathlessly reports and conflates two catastrophes he has just witnessed: a shipwreck offshore, and a bear tearing into the flesh of the doomed "gentleman" Antigonus. (The ship, of course, was the one that carried Antigonus to shore with the child.) When the clown finishes his report, the old shepherd answers as follows: 

"Now bless thyself: thou mettest with things dying, I with things newborn."

Somehow, this iconic line has lodged in my head of late, for obvious reasons: the "things dying" are everywhere to be seen these days: our coral reefs, our forests, our polar ice caps and glaciers, our fisheries, our aquifers, our endangered species, even our insects...but also, it seems, our democracy itself and the social consensus necessary to preserve it, amidst the toxic divisiveness of our politics; science and truth itself, amid a welter of lies propagated on social media; our collective decency and compassion in the face of waves of refugees fleeing north from war-torn and drought-ravaged lands--and so on ad nauseam. 

So where, amidst all this dying, is the "thing newborn" to be found, who will redeem our broken world?

To begin, let me steal one more line from The Winter's Tale: 

Yet nature is made better by no mean

But nature makes that mean: so, over that art

Which you say adds to nature, is an art

That nature makes. 

Can art (i.e. human artifice) so "mend" nature? Or only change it--for the worse? 

In contemporary usage, "nature" is generally set in opposition to "humanity." For economists, engineers, and industrialists, "nature" is nothing but a "resource" with no value whatsoever until it is transformed into commodities for sale or "development;" for environmentalists, poets, and vacationers, "nature" is a refuge--somewhere "out there" (or on TV),  well away from the crowded, polluted world they inhabit most of the time. 

For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, however, "nature" had a far more spacious and inclusive meaning than it does for us today. In their understanding, "nature" denoted what the Greeks earlier called "physis"--the physical world, inclusive of the sun, moon, and stars, but also of life, humanity, and our innate dispositions. This was also the common understanding of indigenous, pre-agricultural peoples worldwide, who did not even have a word in their vocabulary for "nature" exclusive of humanity. 

And this, I would suggest, might be the "thing newborn" amidst the "things dying" all around us, in both our modern industrial civilization and our ailing biosphere: the dawning rediscovery that humanity is a part of, not apart from, "nature," and that "nature" is a complex adaptive system of which we are a part, not a "resource" for us to exploit at will. 

This awareness first arose intuitively among the counterculture in the Sixties and Seventies, and was rendered explicit by Stewart Brand in the Whole Earth Catalog, but it is now seeping into the cultural mainstream, especially the younger generation. On one hand, it is the awareness that what we have done to the Earth, we are doing to ourselves--but on the other, it is the awareness that, as Brand put it, "we are as gods, and may as well get good at it"; that nature itself makes the means by which nature can be mended.

This dawning awareness of our oneness with nature, as a cultural phenomenon, does not yet have a generally accepted name,  so I, along with many others, propose that we call it "Gaia," and that those, like myself, who wholeheartely embrace this new understanding, call ourselves "Gaians."

Names are powerful. Once a cultural phenomenon has a name, it can catch on and spread quickly, if the time is ripe for it. "Gaia"--the ancient Greek name for the Earth as primordial mother-goddess, has been recycled, by James Lovelock and now by many others, as a kind of shorthand for the systemic view of the Earth as an integrated holobiont, in which the processes of life itself--photosynthesis, microbial interactions in topsoil, the water, carbon, and nitrogen cycles, etc.--create and sustain the conditions that in turn propagate, diversify, and sustain life. It is this complex adaptive system, above all, that has been badly disrupted by the excessive dumping of CO2 back into the atmosphere from the worldwide burning of fossil fuels.

But Gaian theory, so conceived, can be understood only by scientists. And due to their habitual aversion to mythic thinking, most scientists have renamed it "Earth Systems Science"--which is exactly the same thing, stripped of its mythic resonance. Meanwhile, a few avant-garde intellectuals, like Fritjof Capra, William Irwin Thompson, and Ken Wilber, have seized upon "Gaia" as a luminous metaphor, while environmental activists have embraced "Gaia" as an icon of their mass movements against climate disruption and environmental degradation. 

At the same time, the resurfacing of the mythic name "Gaia" has been eagerly embraced by the new-age, neopagan, ecofeminist contingent, with little to no understanding of the rigorous science behind it, while born-again Christians excoriate "Gaia" with fear and loathing, and entrepreneurs have trivialized "Gaia" for their own purposes, to sell video games or body lotions. 

Thus many meanings of Gaia have arisen--whether as myth, model, metaphor, or movement. But still, the concept thrives mostly on the margins of society; most in the cultural mainstream either don't know the Gaia concept at all, or have already formed simplistic, stereotypic ideas about it, whether as dangerous resurfacing of paganism or a frivolous example of magical thinking.   What is generally lacking is a Gaian praxis that, once conjoined with Gaian theory, could give the Gaia movement the traction it needs to become a culturally regenerative force in our dying and despairing world. 

Fortunately, such a Gaian praxis already exists, and is already catching on, worldwide, albeit mostly under the radar of mass media: Permaculture. At the start of his magnum opus, Permaculture: A Designer's Manual, its founder, Bill Mollison, explicitly cites Lovelock's Gaia Theory as his inspiration for his Permaculture design system: 

"Lovelock (1979) has perhaps best expressed a philosophy, or insight, which links science and tribal beliefs: he sees the earth, and the universe, as a thought process, or as a self-regulating, self-constructed and reactive system, creating and preserving the conditions that make life possible, and actively adjusting to regulate disturbances. Humanity, however, in its present mindlessness, may be the one disturbance the earth cannot tolerate." (p.2)

And like the academic renaming of Gaia Theory as "Earth Systems Scence" to keep the theory intact while stripping it of its "new age" mythic overtones, Mollison's "Permaculture" concept has been stripped of its countercultural overtones, in recent years, by renaming it "regenerative agriculture."  But both "Earth Systems Science" and "regenerative agriculture" signify the attempted absorption, into mainstream discourse, of the transformational insights of Gaia Theory and Permaculture.  And that could be good news--especially for us Gaians.

So what is a Gaian? I have at few definitions to offer--I'm sure there are others. The first is the broadest:

(1) A Gaian is a resident of Gaia, the (renamed) Third Planet out from the Sun--one who inhabits, and participates in, a living planet powered by the sun, where the processes of life use the influx of solar energy to turn minerals into topsoil, CO2 into free oxygen and stored carbon, and salt water into filtered, fresh water. By this definition, we are all Gaians already; nobody has to "become" a Gaian.

(2) A conscious Gaian is one who is aware of, and acts upon his or her awareness of, his or her interconnectedness with all of life. Unfortunately, conscious Gaians are as of yet, a small subset of all Gaians, but our mission, above all, is to awaken all our fellow Gaians to consciousness of their true nature and responsibilities as Gaians.

(3) A practicing Gaian is one who has translated, or is translating, his or her Gaian consiousness into a life purpose (such as Permaculture design) that enable them to devote their time and energy to learning Gaia, teaching Gaia, healing Gaia, and creating Gaia.

How might this healing occur, on our dying planet? Imagine...

--people forming Garden Guilds, or Gaian Guilds, within their local communities to grow gardens, grow community, and grow awareness;

--schools and colleges developing Gaian curricula, based on a theoretical grounding in Gaia theory and a practical grounding in Permaculture design, from Kindergarten to Graduate School;

--Gaian groups starting within religious organizations (since Gaia is not a religion per se--there is no Gaian theology--and Gaian consciousness is entirely compatible with every authentic religious tradition on the planet). I am a Gaian Buddhist myself, but I have known and corresponded with Gaian Christians, Gaian Jews, Gaian Muslims, and Gaian Hindus.

So it is just possible that this "thing newborn," Gaian consciousness, could, like baby Perdita (whose name means "the one who is lost") could grow up to regenerate, and redeem, the only living planet we will ever know.  So be it.

The Rain in Spain

 In March of 2018, my wife and I were traveling in and around Sevilla, in the south of Spain. During our entire week in this gorgeous, historically rich area of Andalusia, it rained...an incessant downpour, with intermittent thunder and lightning. (So much for "sunny Seville!"). And on the day when we took a bus tour to the magnificent Alhambra palace, our Spanish tour guide looked ruefully up at the stormy sky, and said "We are killing the Earth."

She didn't know how right she was.  Now, only a few years later, her words seem prophetic, as everyone who pays any attention to science and to reality knows. We are, indeed, killing the Earth, for the simple reason that the maximizing, zero-sum logic of our global market economy ("Glomart") is fundamentally incompatible with the optimizing, positive-sum logic of our biological support system (Gaia). S o all the negotiations in Glasgow are just arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. But the ship has already hit the iceberg, and we are slowly sinking.

The "iceberg" in this metaphor is simply our total dependence on fossil fuels. Their discovery and systematic exploitation of fossil fuel energy--coal, then oil, then natural gas--starting back in the late eighteenth century and spreading worldwide ever since--has been like a feeding frenzy, as generally happens when a rich motherlode of easily accessible energy suddenly becomes available for any species. And as Lynn Margulis once pointed out, we are a highly successful species due to our unique gift of linguistic communication, but highly successful species never last long; their very success leads inexorable overshoot and collapse. And so our sudden, seemingly endless supply of cheap, easily transportable energy through fossil fuels has led, equally predictably, to an explosion in population, in per capita resource consumption, and in ecological devastation.

All the techno-optimism we hear about creating a "next industrial revolution" based on a fossil-free renewable energy infrastructure--wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, ethanol, nuclear, or whatever--overlooks one basic fact: available net energy, which is the energy you have left after the energy you invest to get that energy, is the very foundation of any economy, industrial or otherwise. And the net energy available from fossil fuels vastly exceeds the net energy of renewables (which, when you add in the embodied energy needed to build out these facilities, store, or transport that energy, generally dips into the negative numbers). You cannot use wind energy to build windmills, or solar energy to build solar arrays. All these new infrastructures, in short, require a vast initial investment of net energy. And the only readily available source of net energy is...fossil fuels. Yet fossil fuels, as we now know, are killing the Earth, whether through floods, hurricanes, droughts, mass die-offs of whole ecosystems, heat waves, deforestation, or depletion of aquifers (pumped, of course, by yet more fossil fuels).

So our whole global industrial infrastructure--on which our vast and growing global population depends--is collapsing, at first slowly enough to enable the current patterns of denial (for most people, but especially among Republicans) or bargaining (as in Glasgow). But the pace of collapse will accelerate inexorably, turning denial to panic, and bargaining back to denial (and panic) and of course, rage--especially among the young, as they realize that their very future has been stolen from them.  It won't be pretty, especially as our overstressed civic institutions  that maintain social coherence are strained to the point of collapse, followed by chaos and starvation...

So what can we do? Cultivate the art of dying.  I am not being facetious here; there are many spiritual traditions, especially in the Far East, that can help us learn to embrace impermanence, yet still act with wisdom, diligence, equanimity, and compassion to take care of everyone and abandon no one.  These disciplines can--and should--be taught, especially to the young.  So I would like to share a poem by Robinson Jeffers called "The Answer" that I myself have found useful in coming to terms with the impermanence, not only of myself, but also of my community, my civilization, and our magnificent, life-sustaining planet. 

Then what is the answer?- Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.

Thoughts on Glasgow

 The latest international climate conference, COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, gets underway this week. Once again, international leaders converge on the conference center in their gas-guzzling limousine motorcades to pontificate about the urgency of the crisis and their renewed commitment (yet again) to reduce carbon emissions, while angry young protesters amass in public squares, with signs aloft, (surrounded by armored police brandishing their shields and nightsticks) to vent their rage and frustration at the empty promises of the leaders and their utter failure to take meaningful action to reduce our collective dependence on fossil fuels while our planet slowly but inexorably heats up and burns…

It will all be, yet again, a grand exercise in futility. The reason is simple: this is not a problem that can be solved from the top down. The power elite throughout the world—both politicians and the business moguls who underwrite them—have an overwhelming vested interest in the status quo; that is, in a global market economy based on the endless growth of production and consumption that props up their own wealth and power. Yet that endless growth requires more and more resource extraction at one end—which means more forests clearcut, more mines gouged out of the landscape, more suburbs built out from crowded urban areas, more land cleared and planted with monocultures, more fertilizers and pesticides, more oil, gas, and coal drilled and burned for energy—and at the other end, more pollution and devastation of land, air, and water. And above all, more carbon emissions pumped into an already stressed atmosphere, and more money spent in a vain effort to put out the fires, rebuild flooded areas, and cope with the rising tide of destitute environmental refugees from the dry, torrid south to the overcrowded north.  If any political leaders tried to change any of this commitment to economic “growth” at any cost, they would face entrenched opposition from their constituents, both rich and poor.

The reason is that all economies depend, ultimately, upon available net energy—which is the energy you have left after the energy you expend to get that energy. And the net energy from fossil fuels—from oil, gas, and coal—is astronomically greater than the net energy we can ever expect from solar or wind. You can never build a solar array with solar energy, nor a wind farm with wind energy; nor can you use the electrical transform of these energies to build electric cars or mine the rare earth metals to build the batteries to operate them. All of these primary infrastructure technologies—solar arrays, wind farms, hydroelectric dams, nuclear plants, batteries—require an enormous investment of readily available and transportable net energy to provide the building materials, the manufacturing facilities, and the transportation needed to assemble and install them. And there is only one source of the vast amount of net energy needed for that initial investment in a whole new “renewable” infrastructure: fossil fuels.

So is there any hope for our future? Collectively, probably not. Our industrial global market economy is utterly dependent on the net energy from fossil fuels, whether we like it or not, and all of us in our industrial civilization depend on that economy for our life support systems (e.g. water infrastructure and food dependent on industrial agriculture), our livelihoods, our transportation, and our communication (via the electrical grid). When prices of fossil fuels rise (as they must if their rate of extraction is reduced worldwide), so will the prices of everything else. Yet if we don’t reduce the rate of extraction and consumption of these carbon-based fuels, our climate will become more and more chaotic, at an accelerating rate, with unimaginably horrid consequences for all of us, starting with the poorest and most vulnerable.

So what can we do? My only answer to this is what has become my mantra—the slogan of the Garden Guild initiative I have undertaken: Grow Gardens, Grow Community, Grow Awareness. To unpack these a bit, let’s look at each in turn.

Grow Gardens:  As anyone who has tried it knows, growing our own fruit and vegetables is not easy. It requires a basic knowledge of soils, of different kinds of plants, shrubs, and trees, their growing seasons, and their respective needs for sun, soil, and water, and so forth. Further, to make growing our own food more economically viable and healthier, we need to reduce as much as possible our dependence on external inputs, such as commercial fertilizers, soils, additives, and pesticides. We can do this by practicing good ecological stewardship—growing pollinator beds, providing habitat for predatory insects, learning the life cycle of pests, using compost and mulch to boost organic matter in our soils and to preserve moisture during the dry seasons, and so forth. All of these skills take time and effort to master, but they can all be facilitated if we simultaneously…

Grow Community: Our dependence on the global market economy (which I call “Glomart” for short) has dramatically reduced our need to get to know our neighbors. And since we do not choose our neighbors, they are strangers to us, and they can often be irritating—so we have largely stopped building front porches on our houses; instead, we surround our homes with privacy fences or dense shrubbery to make our neighbors and passersby as invisible as possible.  This is fine as long as we don’t need our neighbors for anything—as long as we can use our cars to visit friends, go shopping, or go to work, and our internet connections to communicate. But this suburban alienation has enormous hidden costs as well. It means that we are more isolated, more paranoid, more hostile and fearful of others. However, gardening gets us out in our yards, where we are more likely to strike up a conversation with our neighbors, or with passersby. And such conversations can form the seed of community. Furthermore, if unexpected disasters occur—whether wildfires, floods, earthquakes, or power outages—it helps to know our neighbors, so we can turn to them for help—or offer help ourselves. In such contingencies, the neighbor you know can be your best friend. Conversely, if things get really desperate, the neighbor you don’t know can be your worst enemy.  My Garden Guild initiative is entirely based on this insight—if neighbors who live within walking distance get to know each other, and collaborate on sharing gardening skills, tools, ideas, and produce during ordinary times, they will be much better prepared to work together for their common good during emergencies or disasters. Yet even without such contingencies, they will benefit from sharing these skills by growing better gardens and producing more food to share with their neighbors and with the less fortunate as well.  And in this way, growing community can enable us all to…

Grow Awareness: Besides improving the aesthetic appeal and ecological health of our own yards, gardening immediately increases our awareness of the natural world we inhabit, as we observe the seasons come and go, the birds and other wildlife, the insect pollinators visiting our flowers, the flow of water across our landscapes, and the interactions of all of these.  And growing community—through chatting with our neighbors or forming local Garden Guilds—further expands our ability to grow our own and others’ awareness of how the changing climate is affecting our gardens, and what we can do about this, both in personal practices and in community engagement with policymakers and local merchants.  Getting together with neighbors who may differ entirely from us, yet share an interest in gardening, can also open us to whole new domains of knowledge and experience that we would never get if we associated only with those we choose as friends. So all these kinds of awareness—awareness of the rhythms and patterns of the natural world, awareness of our surrounding community, awareness of others’ interests and skills, and awareness of the political decisions that affect us, can be enhanced by growing gardens and growing community. All three injunctions—growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness, mutually reinforce one another. So while there is little to nothing we can do at the global level to stop the climate catastrophe, we can nevertheless plant the seeds, right in our back yards, from which to grow a new, relocalized, post-industrial civilization to displace the dysfunctional Glomart economy that is collapsing all around us.

Spontaneous Remission

 As anyone familiar with it knows, cancer is lethal: once a tumor spreads beyond its origin, whether on the skin, in the internal organs, or elsewhere, and gets into the bloodstream and lymph nodes, it quickly metastasizes throughout the body, and we die. But in rare cases, for reasons yet unknown, terminal cancer will go into spontaneous remission--a phenomenon widely attested in the medical literature, but very poorly understood.  Current estimates suggest that fewer than 25 out of 1.5 million cancer patients have spontaneous remission. So it is possible, but highly unlikely. 

One possible explanation for spontaneous remission could be some version of the "butterfly effect," a familiar phenomenon in complex systems where small changes in initial conditions can lead, through escalating feedback effects, to unpredictable large-scale global changes in the system as a whole. The name was coined in the 1960s by meteorologist and complexity theorist Edward Lorenz, who showed how tiny "butterfly-scale" changes in his computer models for weather systems could tilt the whole system unpredictably, through interrelated runaway feedback loops, leading from tiny perturbations (like a butterfly flapping its wings) to large scale weather phase shifts, such as thunderstorms, tornadoes, or hurricanes. This effect can likewise be found in all other complex adaptive systems besides our weather--including our politics (e.g. how two geriatric fascists--Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump--have poisoned the well of public discourse in our country, undermining the social consensus that is, in turn, a prerequisite to a healthy democracy).

What happens if we apply this understanding as a metaphor for our global crisis today? The metaphor fits, as it turns out, very precisely. Our global market economy today ("Glomart") has clearly become a cancer on our biological support system (Gaia), and this cancer--a self-accelerating feedback loop resulting from the vast surge of cheap energy made possible by fossil fuels, leading to the infinite growth of production, consumption, pollution, and population on a finite, living system-- has recently become terminal. Like our bodies, our biological support system itself--Gaia--is breaking down altogether, and with it the (cancerous) industrial, social, and political infrastructures that support us all. 

So is spontaneous remission of the terminal Cancer of the Earth on a global scale even possible? I have no idea; the odds are heavily stacked against it. But I don't count it out. It is still possible--however improbable--that some new initiative on an individual scale could "go viral," leading to entirely unpredictable, mutually reinforcing feedback loops, resulting in a phase shift of the entire system--toward the rapid proliferation of Gaian consciousness, by which I mean nothing more than a shared sense of ecological awareness, understanding, and responsibility, and of our global interconnectedness, not only with each other, but with Gaia herself--our unique and irreplaceable biological support system.

How might such a "butterfly effect" happen?  I have been mulling over this question for many years--most of my life, in fact. And of course, I still don't know, nor does anyone else.  But I have recently hit on my best candidate yet for an initiative that could trigger such a "butterfly effect."

I call it the "Garden Guild" initiative--which has quickly become my all-consuming obsession. Imagine a group of neighbors within a small radius--about a square mile or so--forming a Garden Guild, where they meet once a month for convivial potluck dinners, to share dishes and recipes grown from their backyard vegetable gardens, as well as gardening tips and suggestions.  Then imagine that they work with local neighborhood organizations and city council to disseminate their model to other neighborhoods, and they use the tools of the Internet--databases, communications, social media--to disseminate their model further afield...soon the idea goes viral, and everyone, everywhere, is forming Garden Guilds--growing their own food, meeting and collaborating with their neighbors, solving problems and managing emergencies collectively.

The basic structure of Garden Guilds--all homes within walking distance of each other--is the key to their potential success. For this renders them largely immune to catastrophic disruptions in the global infrastructures we all depend on for our basic needs (food, water, shelter), our lifelihoods (the money system), the electrical grid (which enables heating and cooling, long-distance communication, and news), and our circles of friends (whom we mostly need cars and gasoline to visit at all). If any or all of these were disrupted by a catastrophe, whether natural or socioeconomic, Garden Guilds would be able to keep in touch, and help one another adapt and survive.  But even if nothing awful happens, they would make neighborhood life much more healthy and enjoyable, with friends all around--in contrast to the mutual isolation and paranoia most of us live with today. And equally important, they would cultivate an ethos of caring, compassion, tolerance, and ecological stewardship, and render our communities far more resilient in an increasingly chaotic world.

Again, I have no idea if my Garden Guild initiative has all the necessary conditions to trigger a self-accelerating feedback loop and go viral. But it is the best idea I have had yet, so I plan to pursue this idea until I am pushing up the daisies!