We're termites gnawing at the foundations, are we?

I met an acquaintance in the Home Hardware today from about 2009 who attended Peter Bane’s Urban Permaculture weekend at the farm.

Well, I have kept on with this hopeful track, mainly because it is so practical. No false promises or groundless illusions, just scalable actions we can each and all take at the household level and up. One household in each block, one block in each neighbourhood, one neighbourhood in each settlement and on it goes. Unstoppable.

I have just come back from a wonderful permaculture teacher training course with Peter Bane. The outcome: three of us are planning to run a basic permaculture course here next summer. I will want to talk with many of you about how to leverage the local networks we’re a part of. So please, if you feel the urge, get back to me pronto.

(If you’re at the ‘so what’s permaculture anyway stage, I suggest you google ’primer on permaculture and pick one of many matches. Such as http://www.ibiblio.org/london/permaculture/mailarchives/permaculture-links/msg00137.html
or
http://www.bigskypermaculture.ca/node/30

On a large thought scale…

These two excerpts from a long essay by Albert Bates on his blog, http://www.peaksurfer.blogspot.ca/ are a good thumbnail of a possible future.

(Just got Eliz May’s fundraising letter. Same assessment of the situation.)

George Lakey in his 1976 Manifesto for Nonviolent Revolution <https://www.warresisters.org/revisiting-manifesto-nonviolent-revolution> laid out a five-stage strategy for nonviolent revolution:

Stage 1. Cultural Preparation or “Conscientization:” Education, training and consciousness raising of why there is a need for a nonviolent revolution and how to conduct a nonviolent revolution.

Stage 2. Building Organizations: Affinity groups or nonviolent revolutionary groups are organized to provide support, maintain nonviolent discipline, provide a coherent vision, and recruit and train people into networks.

Stage 3. Confrontation: Organized and sustained campaigns of picketing, strikes, sit-ins, marches, boycotts, die-ins, blockades to disrupt business as usual in institutions and government.

Stage 4. Mass Non-cooperation: Similar affinity groups and networks of affinity groups around the country and world, engage in similar actions to disrupt business as usual.

Stage 5. Parallel Government: Developing parallel institutions to take over functions and supplant former practices of government and commerce.

Like Naomi Klein, whose This Changes Everything <http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2014/10/this-changes-nothing-naomi-kleins.html> was long on dirty laundry and short on detergent, Stewart Brand (in new book rEVOLution)breaks down the things that stand in the way of real change: fiat money manipulation, dollared democracy, incest between the government, media and banking interests. What we’re left with, Brand argues, is “a man-made system designed to serve us, an ideological machine. It has gone wrong and is tyrannizing us. We wouldn’t tolerate that from a literal machine. If my vacuum cleaner went nuts and forced me to live in economic slavery … I’d chuck it out the window.”
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/Russell-Brand.jpg>

Brand and Klein are both at Stage 1. The Transition <http://www.transitionnetwork.org/> movement has already moved on to stages 2,4 and 5. It skipped stage 3 because confrontation was viewed as unnecessary, and Transition’s stage 4, non-cooperation, is very selective. Like Permaculture’s David Holmgren, <http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2014/01/charting-collapseniks.html> Transition’s Rob Hopkins <http://www.transitionnetwork.org/blogs/rob-hopkins> is making revolution without breaking glass.

They are termites, gnawing at the foundations of death-wish winner-take-all dying empire, while drawing up blueprints for the giant earthen mounds that will replace the crumbling plastic and tinfoil edifice of globalized consumer civilization.

“We are having a revolution here, make no mistake. But it is going to be non-violent.” – Peter Schweitzer, Forty Years on The Farm <https://vimeo.com/20679416>

Right, now I hope to hear from you, right here on this blog.