Read Part One of this series here.

Listen to David reading this piece here:

The 12th Australasian Permaculture Convergence (APC) was the first to be held in Tasmania, the birthplace of the concept, if not the movement. With Bob Brown, Tasmania’s most famous environmental activist giving the Welcome Dinner speech, the subject of permaculture’s role and relationship to environmentalism more generally was on participants’ minds. 

In the keynote address, ‘Permaculture activism in the Brown Tech Future’ (no pun intended with Bob’s name), I addressed a commonly-made critique of permaculture by environmental and social justice activists this way:

While the support for permaculture and positive environmentalism in general has grown stronger in recent years, there is also a pushback from those committed to the top down and oppositional strategies. The argument is that composting your garden may be good for you but it does little to help bring about the necessary structural changes in society that, it is argued, can only come through big processes such as:

1. corporate capitalism making big bucks doing good,
2. top-down policy reforms driven fearless political leaders or 
3. mass movements threatening revolution to force change at the top.

Those committed to these pathways argue theirs is the best. Often the pathway of changing the world by changing ourselves is ignored or denigrated as self-obsessed navel gazing.

In the permaculture movement the value of this DIY approach is taken for granted but permies often have difficulty in articulating to others why this approach is at least as important as the other three in shaping a more positive future for ourselves, humanity and nature.

I went on to articulate why permaculture activism could be the best use of our time to change the world for the better:

Activism that is good for our bodies and our minds, is fun and empowering, and makes us more self-reliant and resilient in the face of uncertain futures, is a much easier sell than activism that involves self-sacrifice for some larger collective good. In this sense permaculture shares some common ground with green corporate capitalism’s focus on rewards as a motivation even if the rewards are primarily non-monetary.

If our experiments in DIY self-reliance are successful, others without as much innovator tenacity can copy what we do without having to make so many mistakes. The issue of whether our solutions are scalable beyond the non-monetary household and community economies to the monetary economy, let alone corporate capitalism is less important than whether our solution can replicate virally to achieve scale in numbers

…

What we do in our own households, with our family and informal community networks is simple and small scale so that it largely can occur:

1. without the permission of the banks who – through their lending – determine what does and what does not happen in the credit driven monetary economy,
2. and without the knowledge of the corporate competitors who stand to lose market share,
3. and mostly under the radar of the government regulators whose function is to secure the market for bank financed corporate investment.

These and other explanations of permaculture as activism were part of my efforts to project permaculture as a form of positive activism, analogous to the shift to supporting renewable energy rather than simply opposing fossil fuels. The renewable energy rollout did include an unexpected and disruptive uptake of rooftop solar by households in Australia wanting to shift from irresponsible consumption to responsible production, even if it did start by spending and taking advantage of subsidies to buy shiny new tech. Permaculture provided much more diverse and self-directed ways to shift from irresponsible consumption to responsible production, but for more radical activists, it was seen as less worthy than trying to stop the mad, bad stuff.

While the focus of permaculture has always been on grounded, positive solutions, it has been informed by quite a dark view of the state of the world. More than just a big list of bad shit, my own interest was always in systems understandings of the way the world works. This perspective was never detached intellectual knowledge, but was always to inform strategic interventions supporting, adapting, retrofitting and replicating small-scale design solutions that we find in nature and society for emerging contexts.

Geopolitics viewed through the macroscope

Like everything else, geopolitics is usually understood and explained, if at all, by listening to specialist ‘experts’ on this or that country. By their culture and career success, these experts use their particular lens, just like reductionist scientists have used microscopes to reveal the building blocks of life. For example, while the history leading to the Gulf Wars (1991 & 2003) is of course complex, I remember how experts interviewed on ABC Radio National Drive Time at the time waded around in some of this complexity, but never considered the strategic interests beating the drums of war from the USA and vassal states such as Australia. It took a working-class Aussie phoning in to ask the expert ‘But it’s all about oil, isn’t it?’

In science, Howard Odum spoke of the need for the ‘macroscopic’ view to discern the big-picture patterns in ecological and other self-organising systems. Obviously foundational in permaculture, and finding expression in the principle Design from Patterns to Details, this more holistic understanding is something different from simply getting various specialists (reductionists) to talk to each other. It is about rediscovering ways of understanding our forebears took for granted but that have withered away in the face of the triumph of reductionist science and now reductionist arts and humanities. I believe it is possible to see connections that the specialists ‘staying in their lane’ tend to miss (or choose to avoid because it would be bad for their careers). Geopolitics, in original meaning of geographic politics, as well as the more commonly understood vernacular for great power politics, is well suited to this big-picture pattern thinking.

Ever since the turn of the millennium, I have deepened my lifelong interest in geopolitics through an energetic lens. At that time I imagined 9/11 would trigger either a rapid implementation of a repressive state justified by the ‘war on terror’ or, alternatively, the equally rapid unravelling of the western world as our ‘empire of lies’ fell apart, including the fairy story official version of 9/11. Neither of those extremes eventuated, but elements of both processes have, in my view, come to light more slowly over the succeeding decades. 

Firstly, as the fear value of Islamic terrorists lost some of its punch in nudging society into a series of regime change wars, the long-standing historic bogeyman of Russia was resurrected as the new threat, despite the lack of any deep ideological divide that had sustained the fear of communism through the Cold War. The infrastructure for an authoritarian surveillance state, extraterritorial rendition and open use of assassination outside international law were tested and improved. Over the years I continued to track the soft power regime change efforts by our empire, especially in eastern Europe and the Middle East. Much of it used the new power of social media to trigger change that appeared on the surface to be fully grassroots-driven such as the Arab Spring.

I interpreted the Neocon strategy was to dismember Russia and then deal with China to maintain full spectrum dominance as outlined and planned by Zbigniew Brzeziński in his book The Grand Chessboard (1997). However the re-emergence of ‘resource nationalism’, not seen since the Whitlam government tried it in the 1973 oil crisis (see Part 1 of this essay series), especially by Chavez in Venezuela and Putin in Russia, on the back of higher oil prices heavily undermined the Neocon strategy. 

My study of Peak Oil, building on my life’s work with permaculture and the lineage of my parents’ radical leftist analysis of the wider world that informed their local activism, led me to see these global events as connected, without the necessity for some hard mechanical grand global conspiracy unfolding with clockwork like precision. Instead, I saw an ecosystem of self-organising processes, where more powerful actors and systems formed alliances, formal and informal, and conspired successfully and not so successfully to work the shifting tides and currents to gain advantage and survive future challenges. While the co-operative, even symbiotic, relationships were powerful in furthering system evolution, I also saw that the conflict, parasitism, predation and monopoly power (at least temporary) by various elite actors were powerful and perhaps critical factors leading to progressive systemic dysfunction. While ideology and ethics played a role, geography, ecology and energetics were more useful ways to understand what was happening.

In the afterword of Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability I wrote: 

There is abundant evidence that September 11 was an outcome of these shadowy coalitions, which link global energy corporations, US foreign policy, the global ‘intelligence community’, Islamic fundamentalists, arms dealers and the illegal drug trade. Discussion of this bizarre symbiosis remains beyond the pale of mainstream media in Western nations partly because of the blanket agreement that conspiracy theories that could affect the highest levels of global affairs are, ipso facto, invalid. This is the best example of the paralysis of public discourse due to an absence of language to comprehend top-down thinking and bottom-up action as a new mode of power.

I articulated ‘top-down thinking and bottom-up action’ as being a new mode of power in Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability under the principle Apply Self-regulation and Accept Feedback, and I suggest that it may be the single most important concept in that book. However it is little understood and barely referenced beyond being a generalisation of the environmental slogan ‘think globally, act locally’. In the same way that I thought public discourse about the environment, economic and politics would be enhanced by a shared understanding of Odum’s eMergy accounting methods, I thought more generally that the spread of top-down thinking and bottom-up action could diffuse and democratise decision making in the world. I assumed this would follow on from what happened when reductionist science (bottom-up thinking) had allowed elites to initially increase their top-down application of power, until this way of thinking and action became more universal and so drove a democratisation process in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

It is hard to explain this lineage of thought without quoting great slabs of Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (or perhaps elaborating on that initial effort to articulate the concept), but instead I can say the concept of top-down thinking and bottom-up action strongly informed my understanding of global politics and especially geo(graphic) politics. One of the regions of tension I was closely studying was the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, including the Maidan Revolution against the elected government of Ukraine in 2014. I saw this as a not-so-soft power coup by the Western empire. 

In the build up to the 2016 USA presidential election, I became more worried about nuclear war between the capitalist democracies of the west and Russia, another capitalist democracy. I saw clearly how the Neocons who drove regime change and millions of deaths around the world under the Bush administration would be back in the driving seat of a Clinton administration and that crushing Russia would be their focus. From my understanding of Trump’s populist and isolationist policies and his business rather than empire visions, I told friends and colleagues that I hoped Trump would win. 

Emergent woke ideology

The earnest way in which people told me I would be misunderstood as variously supporting crass populism, white consumer privilege, sexism, racism, and ‘the far right’ feels predictable in hindsight, but in those years I still had more faith that the robust exchange of ideas was possible. These discussions had more gentle echoes in feedback to some parts of the RetroSuburbia draft text, especially from some younger colleagues who strongly supported a range of emerging political issues (identity politics) that collectively were celebrated, or alternatively demonised, as ‘woke’ values. Despite the fact that I had lived my life by many of these values that were now gaining recognition and wider adoption, my sense of being out of kilter with my cultural community was as strong as ever. The importance of the devil’s advocate role I had played so often in environmentalist and even permaculture circles motivated me more than ever. 

My upbringing and history precluded me from ever experiencing a dramatic loss of faith in mainstream media, but the souring of regard for my childhood source of news ABC Radio National, and the more recently accessed The Guardian newspaper, matured after 9/11. The gathering consensus of the so-called progressive media in cancelling any evidence challenging the 9/11 fairy story, the blocking of any serious discussion about peak oil, the deplatforming of anyone with views considered unacceptable, and especially the reputational destruction of Julian Assange, consolidated my dismissal of the consensus reality as manufactured. Through its role in the Assange affair, I came to see The Guardian as the most powerful mouthpiece of the CIA/deep state/empire in influencing the progressive left intelligentsia. After its reputation as the most radical mainstream media in criticism of ‘the empire’, The Guardian, more than the Murdoch Press, became the spear tip in demonising Julian Assange that in turn gave social licence to one of the most public punishment beatings of a journalist in the western world. 

In my 2018 opinion piece about Assange, ‘Permaculture, Collected Writings and Julian Assange’, I compared him to Mollison as a great Australian. Just as I knew Mollison’s personality flaws up close, yet remained steadfast in my regard for his mind and his influence on me and the world, Assange’s supposed personality flaws (highlighted or fabricated by the media) did not detract from my assessment. Some cautioned on even comparing these two Australians, such was the odour that had developed around Assange in progressive (woke) networks. At the same time most of my friends and peers were judging the Clinton-Trump contest of that year in terms of the new woke orthodoxy. 

I noted at the time that one of the reasons people were so shocked that I could ‘support Trump’ was his dismissal of climate change. Surely nothing was more important and existential for humanity than climate change. My reply of course was that the threat of nuclear war is a more proximate and consequential threat than climate change. Most people I spoke to at the time thought the nuclear threat was an old story from the Cold War and since the West had apparently won the Cold War, we had moved on to climate change as the new existential threat.

Dividing partnerships and strategies 

At the same time the very productive partnership between Nicole Foss and Raúl Ilargi Meijer also broke apart over Trump. Foss saw him as sowing conflict between people when community level cohesion was essential to survive the coming energy descent triggered by financial and geopolitical factors. Meijer saw the rise of populist voices against the empire of lies as an inevitable and necessary process after the economic and cultural punishment beating of ordinary folk by financial and political elites of the West hiding behind a veil of diversity, equity, inclusion and green solutions. His connection to, and support for, the Monastiraki Kitchen in Athens, a soup kitchen feeding the down-and-out suffering from the punishment beating meted out by the global elite to the Greek population, seemed to shape his view that Trump was a necessarily hard spanner in the works of the current global system.

My regular readings of both Energy Bulletin (rebranded resilience.org but still edited by Adam Fenderson / Grubb’s co-editor Bart Anderson) and The Automatic Earth were my main sources of news and commentary that covered my fields of interest with articles and links to both mainstream western and foreign media, web blogs, social media and other alternative sources. Over time, these platforms expressed the same division of understanding and interpretation of the world. 

At The Automatic Earth, some links to articles and comments could be negatively characterised as anti-Left, anti-Green and anti-Woke. For example, I became aware that the reputational, lawfare and finally detention of Julian Assange were mirrored by the attacks on Alex Jones at the other end of the political spectrum. At the time I saw little or no merit in what I understood about Alex Jones, but I did recognise this as a pincer movement to discredit and cancel dissident voices that the establishment saw as emergent threats. At the same time, it had the effect of softening up the public for the necessity of wider censorship of anything that has since been taxonomically classified as Misinformation, Disinformation and Mal-information, the last being the Orwellian concept of truth that the public should not be able to know.

At Resilience.org I saw there was generally more inclusive language, but there was a perception that socially conservative people who didn’t accept the green woke agenda were ill-informed or worse. I fully respected Bart Anderson, the editor who, like Adam before him, had done a permaculture course with me. He came from the same green left political lineage as me and reposted some of my articles. Over time however, I found fewer readings at Resilience.org that challenged my thinking, and more writing proclaiming what I found naïve or actively playing into the green tech shiny future sold by the corporations, which I had no need to hear in that forum because The Guardian and the ABC were full of it. Increasingly, at The Automatic Earth I found expressions of socially conservative, libertarian and religious thought that creatively challenged some of my assumptions, even near-and-dear ones like the limits of resources and necessity/likelihood of energy descent futures. 

Publishing 470 and Earth Restorer’s Guide to Permaculture

My exposure to socially conservative and climate sceptical thinking didn’t dampen in any way my enthusiasm in 2019 for publishing 470: Love and hope in the climate crisis, a novel by permaculture author Linda Woodrow set in her home territory of the Northern Rivers region of NSW. A ripping yarn about near-term energy descent futures informed by climate science, 470 (parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) is very much in the cli-fi genre, but I was attracted to the gritty realism and sense of hope in difficult circumstances in combination with charting the successes and failures of the counterculture in laying the groundwork for creative responses to energy descent. However our efforts to leverage positive household and community informal responses to unfolding energy descent through this novel didn’t gain much traction. The Northern Rivers region has since been subject to floods, fires and floods again that highlight the climate change narrative of increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters but the number of locals who read Linda’s story never reached a critical mass necessary to trigger community-wide discussion.

A much bigger and more financially risky project was supporting Rosemary Morrow in her greatly expanded Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture (now Earth Restorer’s Guide to Permaculture). For Melliodora Publishing, Earth Restorer’s was the book that would complement RetroSuburbia. While RetroSuburbia was unashamedly local and focused on the household level, with a slightly subversive tone of libertarian resistance, Earth Restorer’s is global in its vision and scope with UN Sustainable Development Goal branding and definitely appealing to those inspired by Rowe Morrow’s tireless work around the world supporting the most disadvantaged with permaculture education. It is strongly focused on both the individual and community levels. I will return to this different characterisation of these publishing projects and my own journey in relation to the climate question.

Doubts about Extinction Rebellion, Stop Adani and the School Strike

Another example of potential conflict between my own views and those of colleagues was the long-standing issue about environmental activism trying to stop large bad actors (mostly corporations) in their projects to grow and make money, damaging nature and depleting resources in the process. Although I had always given some support to this type of activism, but more typically around the issue of Australia’s participation in overseas wars, my main focus had always been to articulate permaculture as activism. In permaculture activism, we are the guinea pigs in our own experiments to demonstrate creative design responses to the larger networked and nested crises, which I saw distilled as the ‘Limits to Growth’. Over the decades, I had seen and worked with so many colleagues who came to permaculture after disillusionment and burnout in oppositional activism and it has been a recurring theme in my writing over decades, perhaps most dramatically in ‘Crash on Demand: Welcome to the Brown Tech future’. 

However, because of my respect for many friends and colleagues who focused at least some, if not all, their energy on trying to stop bad shit, and perhaps because of my own family lineage in oppositional activism, I rarely challenged friends and colleagues about the downsides or value of effort in such activism. I was mostly more diplomatic although with the right audience I would sometimes descend into polemic critique.

Extinction Rebellion, Stop Adani and the School Strike for Climate provide interesting examples related to the climate question. In relation to Extinction Rebellion (XR) I repeated my claim from many years before that ‘there is no precedent for a mass movement shouting for consuming less succeeding’. Further, if XR founders believed their demands to stop fossil fuelled development in its tracks would not create chaos and destruction, then they were as deluded as the majority of the population about energetic realities. 

Alternatively, the movement could be a new potent expression of that thread of environmentalism that saw humanity as the problem, to be reduced in numbers, by turning off access to resources. Under this logic, if the populace could somehow be persuaded on mass to support policies that switched off their own life support, then the Earth might be saved from the sixth mass extinction event. I never put it in such brutal terms, although I have since heard many on the socially conservative right, forthrightly portray environmentalism in general as a suicide cult trying to get humanity to exterminate itself. 

I saw the preparedness to contribute in symbolic actions to shut down city centres, even for limited periods, and face police violence and arrest as possible because of the sense of solidarity and an expression of self-sacrifice for a noble cause. I interpreted the desire to gather with large numbers of likeminded others as a natural, and perhaps essential, form of solidarity by which activists feel the collective energy. This is what my parents gained from participation in anti-war demonstrations in the 1960s, which then allowed them to go back out into the community and workplace to do the real, often lonely and quiet work of changing hearts and minds. In the process they recruited others to do the same and/or join the front lines in being arrested.

However when the demands are not simply for Australia to reject inducements from powerful allies into overseas wars, but instead require the population to accept a top-down switch off of the current economy as if we face an existential threat of outside invasion, then this is a much harder sell. 

This comparison of the climate emergency to an invasion has been widely articulated but it is logically problematic. If we sacrifice to defeat an invader (even at the scale of the Soviet Union’s loss of 27 million defeating the Nazi invaders), our victory stands even if other countries succumb to domination. However in the case of GHG induced climate change, the tragedy of the (global) commons means that any degree of collective sacrifice will not give us a safer climate or avoid any climate change driven species extinction. In addition, it may just encourage nations who see the cost-benefit differently to take advantage through increased burning of more readily available fossil fuels. The logical response to this problem is to assume, and then demand, that global governance measures are put in place, which will force compliance by nations (and people more generally). 

This creates two problems. Firstly, nationalist governments in the countries with the resources can shift toward more self-reliant economies based on their own resources even if that is less efficient than fully globalised trade interdependencies. At the time, it was already evident to me that Russia (with twice the fossil fuels and other natural resources of any other country) was a fair way down that path and that global warming, at least from some perspectives, could be to Russia’s advantage. Canada was another energy superpower that might be seen to benefit from climate change while most assessments suggested Australia as an energy superpower would lose badly from climate change. 

To override the incentive for national states to avoid a climate-driven version of the ‘rules based international order’ would have required a much more severe ramping up of the ‘full spectrum global dominance’ that the western powers, led by the USA, had attempted through the regime change in multiple countries, all covered by the ‘War on Terror’. 

Reflection

I saw that regime change unfolding in Ukraine at least from 2014 and even if it didn’t have a climate emergency cover story back then, a decade down the track, climate could yet well emerge as one of the reasons we need to defeat Russia. But I am getting ahead of myself. Back in 2018 it just seemed incredibly naïve that you could enforce climate emergency regimes worldwide, let alone do so without the most severe forms of ecofascist global governance to enforce it on the inevitable large minority, if not majority, around the world who would resist. 

RetroSuburbia as a radical systemic strike against the machine

Instead of tearing down the rationale for XR using the above logic, I focused most of my energy at the time (in presentations and interviews around the country) on the logic of Retrosuburban radical action to transform the suburbs one household at a time, where necessary breaking social norms and laws, but never demanding that neighbours follow our lead. By focusing on our own rights to bail out of the consumption madness to the extent of our own capability and willpower, as well as the rewards we gained in the process, we would not be directly obstructing or threatening the future way of life for the majority, at least directly. While spooks investigating fringe threats to power might understand that RetroSuburbia is economic treason and so attempt suppression on behalf of their masters, I believed the general public would at the least accept our actions as more or less our own business, and if that business provided non-threatening opportunities in exchange, then the general public may, over time, make their own enlightened self-interest changes to bail out of the systems that both enclose us and destroy nature. 

I believe that, unlike XR and other forms of oppositional activism, RetroSuburbia and similar strategies informed and guided by permaculture ethics and design principles are non-threatening because they accept that others have the freedom to make their own choices, even if we fear those choices might amount to (collectively) crimes against humanity and the planet. 

For power elites, responding to XR and similar non-violent direct action, has become a mixture of good cop and bad cop routines: the theatre of harmless expressions of democratic dissent and arrest alternating with the fist of police violence, agent provocateurs and inside informants all nicely focused by the activists’ need for collective public action to provide the essential experience of solidarity.

In contrast, when practitioners of RetroSuburbia and similar forms of enlightened self-interest lose the social licence from neighbours, whether due to their own poor judgements or not, and that cascades through the complaint mechanism of local laws and regulation, any breach of the rules can see the practitioner cower in submission or engage in loner resistance without a support network to provide solidarity. In my RetroSuburbia talks I would reply to timid questions about ‘What are we allowed to do in our own homes and backyards?’ with ‘Don’t worry about the legal licence, and if necessary plead ignorance and apologise to those with the responsibility to enforce rules in response to complaints, but make sure you have the social licence from neighbours and any others potentially affected’. Some of the folk asking these questions looked like they might be candidates for locking down in XR action in front of police in riot gear. Why were they so timid then about what they might do in a rental property, one they owned with the bank or even their own freehold home property? I figured it was the lack of any solidarity from their peers, especially neighbours or those within walking distance, and/or regular contact through wider networks. 

Beyond this feeling of being alone, I think many people understand the wider environmental and social good that can come from their actions of enlightened self-interest, but they feel others will judge their actions as only for personal benefit or as ineffective in the face of big issues, thus not worthy of solidarity, let alone any active mobilisation to defend the individual and household from the exercise of power (mostly by local government officials). This is particularly true on the political left, where any idea of personal gain from an action is seen as suspect. Instead, we are expected to sacrifice ourselves for the noble cause. Any taint of personal, let alone entrepreneurial, benefit such as blogs, tours, sales and other outcomes of retrosuburbian activity turns off the mostly young unattached activists. This enlightened self-interest from positive activism is in stark contrast to various forms of oppositional activism attempting to stop what others are doing, involving some degree of risk or self-sacrifice, being generally seen as heroic and worthy of financial, logistical or at least moral support by a much wider constituency. 

In strategising how we would gain traction with RetroSuburbia we aimed to:

• firstly, survive financially so we can
• secondly, continue to extend our work in the community and around the world, and 
• thirdly to reward with status at least the pioneers of RetroSuburbia who were prepared to document what they were doing, the first step in any out-there activism, 
• fourthly to mobilise networks of support that could, when push comes to shove, help defend the home territory from at least the most petty intimidations by local authorities and
• fifthly generate greater acceptance and further action that is self-sustaining. 

We managed the first three steps to some degree but didn’t get very far with the tough later stages. When I looked at the passion, time and money spent in the oppositional realm, I wondered what could be achieved if that passion, time and money was well-targeted in the opposite direction, creating the world we want, one household at a time but with the potential for viral replication, amplification and mutual self-defence. 

Adani debacle

Back in 1983, I had warned that the great win in saving the Franklin River from hydro development would set back the Tasmanian environment movement a decade after the activists took the campaign to the middle-class suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney. And so it did. Maybe that cost was worth it given the Franklin was saved (as a result of a timely national election and a High Court decision). In the case of the Adani mine, I similarly reasoned the idea of southerners from Brisbane, let alone Sydney and Melbourne, travelling to north Queensland to tell locals that their hopes for their families through investment by India’s largest industrialist was a crime against nature and humanity, was always going to get a ‘fuck you’ in return and entrench the characterisation of the activists and their supporters as being parasites on the wealth created by miners, farmers, loggers and fishermen.

There is always collateral damage from any action that moves the political, let alone cultural, compass but as I have indicated, I wished my friends and colleagues would be more aware of, and honest about, what they are prepared to trash and for us to collectively lose, especially when we fixate on a solution to a grand but inherently abstract noble cause.

When permaculture colleagues who had been part of the RetroSuburbia story, and had well and truly heard my ideas about the positive activism that started permaculture, joined the Stop Adani convoy, I had to bite my tongue especially because of their brilliant work in communicating permaculture including BEV, the biosphere emergency vehicle that was part of the convoy to north Queensland for the protest. I accepted that while my perspectives were influential, they were small in the larger wave of green left progressive activism, especially when it came to the climate question. The convoy, lead by my old colleague and almost-neighbour in Tasmania, Bob Brown, was, by most assessments a flop and maybe in hindsight might be seen as the peak of the climate movement in north Queensland, if not Australia. 

In relation to the School Strike inspired by Greta Thunberg, I was more inclined to think well of young people getting fired up about the future and their role in creating it, but I thought the idea of the school strike was a bit problematic. It invited the usual criticism that students were not withdrawing their labour contribution to society but simply shooting themselves in the foot by missing school. Again it was cast as a form of self-sacrifice for the cause (Greta’s ‘I shouldn’t be here, I should be in school’), even if the leaders and organisers did gain significantly from the experience. It reinforced demand for the system at the top to do something to fix the problem.

If instead, students had resigned from school and, with their supporters, restructured their own self-education in self-reliance to adapt to the climate emergency and other aspects of energy descent under the assertion that most of school will be irrelevant, then I would have been an enthusiastic supporter. Ironically, I think such a bail from the system, even if symbolic, might have been more effective in achieving the goals of the Strike. Instead, the movement appeared to function as a training ground for the next generation of global activists who will fly to climate conferences and do backroom deals with powerbrokers, in the process diluting their idealism with a greater dose of top-down command governance to force the recalcitrant lower classes to get with the program. 

On the other hand, I did have a sense that an increasing but still small minority of young folk are bailing out of, or not going to school and university in the first place. Instead they focus on building their personal skill set for energy descent and their ability to make a practical contribution to their family, peers and community and thus provide a basis for livelihood in a world of limitations. And so I continued my positive focus on the solutions with Our Street, a kids’ version of my Aussie St soap opera told by Beck Lowe and beautifully illustrated by Brenna Quinlan to inspire kids to transform their street, with or without the help of the adults. 

To provide an outlet for my angst, I poured my heart into writing an essay modelled on the Rudd Apology to the Stolen Generations: in ‘The Apology: from baby boomers to the handicapped generations’. I even got to read a cut down version to the Newcastle contingent of the School Strikers who were participating in a two-day sustainability event that featured my Aussie St presentation. 

That event was one of many on the RetroSuburbia Roadshow of 2019 in which Su and I combined a string of events in different parts of the country, interspersed with time in the bush camping and recording in words and photos a blog of impressions of the country and communities responding to the challenges of climate and economy in real time.

I think there are many observations and insights recorded in that blog relevant to the themes raised in this work around weather, climate and its changes. As an example, ‘Armidale to South Australia’ charted our journey through some of the most severely drought affected landscapes of 2019 through to the emerald green of prime grain country in South Australia.

In Western Australia we spent time at Ecoburbia, home of Shani Graham and Tim Darby, getting a taste of how RetroSuburbia was playing out in my home town of Fremantle.

Marketing RetroSuburbia and Earth Restorer’s Post Covid

Despite everyone at Melliodora Publishing putting their hearts and souls on ‘mates rates’ remuneration bringing Rowe Morrow’s Earth Restorer’s Guide to Permaculture to life, there was a huge blowout in the budget and for Melliodora Publishing it was not a success. It overlapped with a change in the business ownership structure and lots of other challenges for the book publishing industry generally.

While others were responsible for spending limited funds researching marketing strategies, I had my own mad ideas on how to capitalise on the weird zeitgeist of the Covid hangover. Rowe and I had ended up on opposite sides of the Covid divide but managed to remain both business-like and personally respectful despite the difficulties of 2021. However in the long slow process of Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture turning into Earth Restorer’s Guide to Permaculture (ERG) there were substantial differences in our respective approaches and therefore prospective readers, and consequently the marketing strategies. While RetroSuburbia was unashamedly local, ERG was global in its scope; RetroSuburbia was written to appeal to householders focused in the home patch, ERG was written more to appeal to young idealists wanting to do good in the world. RetroSuburbia definitely had a subversive edge while ERG has branding from the UN Sustainable Development goals and so on.

So I thought, in the post-Covid divided world, RetroSuburbia could be subtly branded towards the alienated and more socially conservative associated in the US with the colour red, while ERG could be subtly branded towards more progressive woke folk with the colour blue. RetroSuburbia was a lighthouse of red light helping those in the fog of uncertainty to find a safe harbour in permaculture. ERG was a blue lighthouse guiding worried progressives to the same safe harbour. I imagined that once inside the bubble of permaculture, both groups would find a multicoloured universe of mutual acceptance. For me, it was an attempt to send a message about maintaining the lines of communication across the widening gulf of world views within permaculture networks that I had articulated in my Covid coming out essay ‘Pandemic Brooding: Can the Permaculture movement survive the first severe test of the energy descent future?’ published on September 11th 2021, a date of symbolic significance.

Rowe and I did the photo shoot with our respective books and coloured clothes. I used the photo in some presentations, including to conferences in the US for people getting up to speed on self- and collective-reliance in the wake of the Covid Shock but it was never taken up by colleagues at Melliodora Publishing. The idea of openly marketing the books in this way, especially RetroSuburbia effectively to Christian preppers and Trump supporters, was probably a bridge too far and may have just accelerated the problematic meme about us ‘marching with Nazis’. But as they say in marketing, any publicity is good publicity. Anyway in the context of my growing doubts around the climate question, this publicity angle could be seen as another marker of my changes of heart.

While the 20th anniversary of 9/11 marked an intense focus on weighty and worldly matters, the previous few years also included our own brush with climate challenges on home territory at Melliodora.