This article is now online here and here.
The “organic digital society” may be a mythical topic to some, but to an increasingly pivotal trans-local community, such matters of online coordination for ecological transformation have become their bread and butter. Between the contemporary paradigm shifts of Web3, whole systems design science, and a critical mass of post-millenium voices thirsting for ecological reconnection, this self-aware movement began to germinate in a niche between worlds. Its fundamental evolutionary trait: to design our interactions with the world, with care and mutual respect — together.
At the core of this shift was an ability to reshape the way we exchanged value with each other; to take account of (and be accountable to) how we exchanged and interacted with our natural habitats; and creating the time to enjoy being with one another and with the fertile elements around us. This transactions platform began nurturing our almost forgotten way of being, bringing us back from the brink of debt extraction.
Life creates conditions conducive to life. Our attention, our thinking and our coming together: this is a garden which can be grown. With care, with growing awareness of social permaculture, this garden may be cultivated: to liberate ever more members and companions of humankind into a deep-world society based on living systems. Everything gardens. Every dream, every discussion, every task, every lesson… and every choice we make, grows.
[image] Russ Grayson, “Towards Permaculture 3.0”, 2015
Over the years there have been numerous surveys, reports and opinion pieces written about the even more numerous attempts to accelerate the impact of permaculture. There is huge potential for practitioners, educators and allies to respond to our simultaneous environmental, social, cultural and spiritual crises both with practical action and transformation of consciousness.
Those who resonate with the concept of permaculture often connect their practice with other disciplines to effect change in a specific way, such as in refugee camps, city councils, classrooms, or desert biomes.
A permaculturist designs from the awareness that ecology and society are interconnected; however, many of the loudest voices applying the term to their practice are mainly focused on growing pesticide-free food, leaving gaping holes in the movement’s ability to have an impact on fundamentally related issues such as migrant exploitation, land theft and divesting nation state capital from fossil fuels into community-owned power.
Those who take a special interest in the social and societal aspects of permaculture (my colleagues and I included) specialize, evidently, in “social permaculture”.
The systems we design with can include education, economies, policies and decision-making, ownership, healthcare, childcare, elder care, project design, operations, preventing activist burnout, and so on.
Various campaigns for social justice and brands of social innovation relate, give platform to, and inspire our work. Hopefully this pollinates both ways, especially as the number of people turning social permaculture design into a profession rises. The Permaculture CoLab is one such area where viable careers in social permaculture are incubated.
What makes permaculture design somewhat unique in the Social Change space* is the acknowledgement that pro-social design must also integrate environmental conditions. We depend on having a healthy relationship with air and water, local biodiversity, and having access to wild spaces; which means consciously exchanging with living beings and ecologies for food, medicine, energy and materials.*Although let’s recognize that it was a western man’s study and integration of indigenous practices which led to permaculture’s thesis. We will further explore issues of multicultural and especially indigenous visibility in subsequent articles.
[image - scale-linking by design]
Source: Daniel Christian Wahl, Designing Regenerative Cultures (2016)
Now that humanity co-exists in cyberspace, we can start applying the permaculture meme of “appropriate technology” to the complex information networks powering our contemporary societies.
Whether we improve our designs and decisions by having access to data; resist the exploitation of corporate software giants; or build online spaces which incubate radical collaboration, entering the world of “tech” from a permaculture state of heart-mind exposes us to questions and possibilities of exponential proportions.
Following developments in the Web3/dWeb scene can inspire many insights about how emerging technologies could improve our economic and governance systems.
We can co-design across cultural barriers, filtering information by trust and relevance like never before; we can learn from each other, support each other and invest in local projects as a global community without the old tendencies for wealth and/or power to concentrate in the hands of a few. We can mitigate corruption, losses via monopolistic middle men, the optimization of capital toward or at the expense of unhealthy goals; and make the alleged ‘necessity of exploitation’ obsolete.