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FEATURE ‘Facebook as God’ Mark Furlong
Mark Furlong lectures in social work at Deakin University.
Gifting Economies Patrick Jones
Patrick Jones is an artist, poet and essayist, food and water activist and assistant under 11s soccer coach. He is currently undertaking doctoral work on poetics and ecology at the University of Western Sydney. He lives in Daylesford, Victoria.
08 2012–09 2012 Nº 119
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Gifting
Economies
Patrick Jones ........................................
Modelling alternative economies at the grass roots Non-market socialism means a money-less, market-less, wage-less, class-less and stateless society that also aims to satisfy everyone’s basic needs while power and resources are shared in just and ‘equal’ ways. Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman, Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies Until I became a permaculturalist and a keen student of traditional Aboriginal economics, I probably would have dismissed the sentiments expressed in the quote above as utopian wishfulness. In a highly urbanised and prosperous country with so many expressions of material entitlement life without money seems a flaky ideal. It is, however, little wonder that despite its Australian editors and focus, Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman’s international anthology, which features strongly the Australian concept of permaculture, found a willing publisher in London. In the United Kingdom over the last decade numerous towns and cities have been modelling new socioeconomic alternatives, including new forms of currency (the Totnes pound is the most celebrated example) and nonmonetary exchange. Having driven the industrial revolution full steam from the outset, ignoring Malthusian logic, that country now finds itself an economic basket case. Within just 300 years it has overextended and overpopulated its land base to such an extent that it is now dependent on global imports for almost every resource, most notably food, making the mastermind of industrialised countries extremely vulnerable to global economic and climate crises, especially in an era that marks the end of cheap fossil fuels. As a result of the United Kingdom’s poor economic status, the Transitions Towns movement has been promoting the idea of resource relocalisation, which necessarily includes ecological restoration, community food systems, community-owned renewable energy and the slow dismantling of the dominant economic hegemony. In developing the Transition Towns concept in the 1990s, sustainability pioneer Rob Hopkins was influenced by permaculture co-originator David Holmgren’s
work, namely his text Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability (2002). Hopkins understood from Holmgren that it was in the household and community economies that resilience to global crises could be found. Holmgren’s work has been published in many countries and has influenced ecological and social sustainability practices across every continent. In Australia, however, it remains largely selfpublished and undervalued. Despite permaculture being arguably one of Australia’s most significant intellectual ‘exports’ of the past forty years, there is almost no understanding or acknowledgement of it in Australian mainstream publishing or media. Again, this is due in part to material entitlement―a never-before-seen and never-tohave-again comfort zone―and what I call hypertechnocivility: the total investment in technology at the expense of ecological knowledge. My household has been practising what Holmgren calls ‘voluntarily living within a depression economy’ for many years, reducing waste and spending, applying permaculture principles and living a form of creative frugality on less than a taxable income. I therefore find the main premise of Life Without Money―building fair and sustainable economies―not at all wishful in a pejorative sense, but manageable, achievable and critically necessary in preparing for the unavoidable and ensuing crises: economic contraction, climate change, energy descent, greater social division and aggregating ecological ‘overshoot’ and estrangement: in short, the results of hypertechnocivility, or progresscapitalism, peaking. It is important to note that in Life Without Money the editors give equal weight to theory and practice. The first half of the book is dedicated to more theoretical works and the second to more practical responses and experimentation. The editors stress, ‘All of the theoretical discussions are quite practical. Scholars who are also activists have written them’. As a movement of both theory and practice seeded at the time of 1973–74 global oil crisis, permaculture features strongly throughout the book. In a recent discussion with Holmgren I asked him whether a remarriage of theory and practice is necessary.