It is a major weakness of any cause if it must rely on the resources of its opposition. Our reason and sense of justice however well-articulated and impassioned, is reduced to pleadings. For all its merits speaking truth to power has shown not to be all that efficient.
But is it all we can do to complain about the money system, their system, then turn around and use it? We see the digital cage coming in around us and then post our protests on their networks (Andreeson Horowitz substantially own Substack). The quality of our food supply, our kids’ education and our ‘health care’ are all of a deteriorating standard served up by those who would further centralise power.
Pitchforks on Martin Place might arrest the decline but the general population is too apathetic and there is little hope we can raise either the awareness or the stomach. Neither do I think it would necessarily bring about the opportunity for something more sensible.
From this point disintegration seems certain. However, all is not lost. If disintegration means returning to a simpler social and economic order then perhaps the arc of civilization will give us the very things we ask for. The question is how best to live in such a world. The answer lies largely in the assembly and maintenance of stable polycultures. Gardens. This is something we can work on now.
Bill Mollison of Permaculture fame neatly frames the solution.
The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.”
It is no coincidence that the works of Mollison and C.H. Douglas were beside each other on my parents’ shelves. While they seem to deal with different problems the fountainhead of both movements is the same. In The Big Idea Douglas wrote, “There is only one sound basis for co-operative society, and that is individual and personal responsibility.” And what is the “Prime Directive of Permaculture” on page one of Mollison’s Designers’ Manual? “The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children. Make it now.”1 His starting question “what does this person, or land, have to give if I cooperate with them?” as the attitude which leads to “peace and plenty” is very near Douglas’ concept of the “increment of association.”
When we associate with nature in the spirit of cooperation there is also an increment. An increase in benefit out of proportion to the effort made. It is an increase that, unlike in closed mechanical systems, defies entropy. Hugh Lovel in his book Quantum Agriculture writes about ‘syntropy’, an increase in order, organisation and complexity in natural systems over time, the antithesis of entropic chaos.2 Mollison quotes Koestler on this unique aspect of biological systems:
All living organisms… are ‘open systems’ ; that is to say, they maintain their complex forms and functions through continuous exchanges of energies and materials with their environment. Instead of ‘running down’ like a mechanical clock that dissipates its energy through friction, the living organism is constantly ‘building up’ more complex substances from the substance it feeds on, more complex forms of energies from the energies it absorbs, and more complex patterns of information… perceptions, feelings, thoughts… from the inputs of its receptor organs.
Take this description of a typical kitchen garden in Honduras from The Designers’ Manual:
Close to the house and frequently more or less surrounding it is a compact garden-orhard several hundred square feet in extent. No two of these are exacatly alike. There are neat plantations more or less grouped together. There are various fruit trees (nance, citrus, melias, a mango here and there, a thicket of coffee bushes in the shade of the larger trees)… There are the tapioca plants of one or two varieities, grown more or less in rows at the edge of the trees. Frequently there are patches of taro; these are the framework of the garden-orchards. Here and there in rows or patches are corn and beans. Climbing and scrambling over all are vines of various squashes and their relatives; the chayote (choko) grown for their squashes, as well as its big starchy root. The luffa gourd, its skeleton used for dishrags and sponges. The cucurbits clamber over the eaves of the house and run along the ridgepole, climb high in the trees, or festoon the fence. Setting off the whole garden are flowers and various useful weeds (dahlias, gladioli, climbing roses, asparagus fern, cannas). Grain amaranth is a ‘sort of encouraged weed that sows itself.’
Or for something with a more temperate vibe Boythorne’s garden (fictional though real enough) painted by Dickens in Bleakhouse:
He lived in a pretty house, formerly the Parsonage-house, with a lawn in front, a bright flower-garden at the side, and a well-stocked orchard and kitchen-garden in the rear, enclosed with a venerable wall that had of itself a ripened ruddy look. But, indeed, everything about the place wore an aspect of maturity and abundance. The old lime-tree walk was like green cloisters, the very shadows of the cherry-trees and apple-trees were heavy with fruit, the gooseberry-bushes were so laden that their branches arched and rested on the earth, the strawberries and raspberries grew in like profusion, and the peaches basked by the hundred on the wall. Tumbled about among the spread nets and the glass frames sparkling and winking in the sun, there were such heaps of drooping pods, and marrows, and cucumbers, that every foot of ground appeared a vegetable treasury, while the smell of sweet herbs and all kinds of wholesome growth (to say nothing of the neighbouring meadows where the hay was carrying) made the whole air a great nosegay.
Besides their beauty these systems have enormous productive power and no waste.
These descriptions are of gardens without animals which are another dimension again. Permaculture design always integrates animals for their high quality products (meat, milk, eggs, honey, manures) and their role in system management. Depending on the system’s size and situation bees, chooks, ducks, goats, sheep, pigs, cattle etc. are typically resident in Permaculture systems.
In contrast industrial agriculture fights this natural tendency for abundance because it can’t integrate diversity and complexity in machined broad-acre systems. Its ideal starting point is the blank slate — ground cleared, tilled, shaped and sprayed out to control water and exterminate whatever might eat or compete with the monoculture. This project is extraordinarily resource expensive especially when soil and eco-system destruction is counted in the cost. A cost which the consumer is made to eat in the deteriorating quality of food, the environment and price inflation.
In my experience the motivation of the food gardener is neither commercial or fear driven. I’m not a ‘prepper’ (though it’s never a bad thing to be prepred) and I’ve no time for selling things. Giving them away is a far better system; it encounters no sales resistance so wastes no energy on ‘marketing strategies.’ In addition to the material benefits gardening is the obvious way to interact with the creative life-force that is the defining charateristic of our planet. I consider it an approach to God. There is something miraculous about natural abundance — light to food and other marvels. It was C.S. Lewis who observed that Christ’s miracles (water to wine, loaves and fishes, healing people) were not so much a violation of natural processes but an acceleration of them. So it is that I consider much of industrial agriculture to be a sort of vandalism or desecration. We should consider how our association with it causes moral injury.
I have thought a lot about something T.S. Eliot wrote in his essay on The Idea of a Christian Society:
In its religious organisation, we may say that Christendom has remained fixed at the stage of development suitable to a simple agricultural and piscatorial (fishing) society, and that modern material organisation — or if “organisation” sounds too complimentary, we will say “complication” — has produced a world for which Christian social forms are imperfectly adapted.3
I wonder why?
Shifting from consumption to production in our gardens is the individual’s method for developing their own real economy. It reduces a family’s dependence and material demands on the wider community. In this sense it is perfectly aligned with the central objective of Douglas Social Credit that is “to free the individual from group domination.”4 To cease depending on the inferior offerings of centralised power, their food, their drugs and their “education,” seems to me the most immediate method for slowing and reversing its development. “I teach self-reliance,” Mollison once said, “the world’s most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.”5
Charles Ferguson who first used the term ‘social credit’ wrote an interesting interpretation of the fall. Man’s original sin, he said, was that he “would not dress and keep the garden and so get wise in the divine and vital way by daily contact with real things, but would eat wisdom and ruminate upon it. The original sin was the rejection of the real world and the flight to dreamland.”
If the dreamland is this emergent digital squalor I’ll stay here to dress and keep the garden. Naturally we’ll teach our children to do the same.
Philosopher-gardeners, or farmer-poets, are distinguished by their sense of wonder and real feeling for the environment. When religions cease to obliterate trees in order to build temples or human artefacts, and instead generalise love and respect to all living systems as a witness to the potential of creation, they too will join the many of us now deeply appreciating the complexity and self-sustaining properties of natural systems, from whole universes to simple molecules. Gardener, scientist, philosopher, poet, and adherent of religions all can conspire in admiration of, and reverence for, this earth. We create our own life conditions, now and for the future.
Bill Mollison
1. Mollison, B. 1988. Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual. Tagari, NSW.
2. Lovel, H. 2014. Quantum Agriculture: Biodynamics and Beyond. Quantum Agriculture Publishers, U.S.A.
3. Eliot, T.S. 1939. The Idea of a Chistian Society. Harrcourt Inc. London
4. Douglas, C.H. 1947. The Development of World Dominion. Bloxham and Chambers, Australia
5. London, Scott. 2005. A Quiet Revolution: An interview with Bill Mollison. Available from: https://scott.london/interviews/mollison.html#:~:text=Bill%20Mollison%3A%20Yes%2C%20it%20was,So%2C%20yes%2C%20it’s%20seditious.