How to Safeguard Ecological Movements from Far Right Infiltration and Co-optation
“THE TRAGIC REALITY is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them.
“We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.” – Bill Mollison
If ever there was a political and communitarian call to implement permaculture then it is this made by Bill Mollison – Terry Leahy
The term permaculture originally came from “permanent agriculture” in reference to the long term fertility practices found in China, Korea, and Japan by Dr. F.H. King. It was later adjusted to mean “permanent culture”, incorporating social aspects. The term was coined in 1978 by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who formulated the concept in opposition to modern industrialized methods instead adopting a more traditional or “natural” approach to agriculture.
As anarchists we can already begin to see some red flags with this talk of tradition and “nature”. Both being as poorly defined as permaculture itself, and as colonial in it’s view that certain times or places are more natural or wild than others. A view that results from the racist interpretation of ancient or indigenous cultures as “primitive” or less developed than contemporary European cultures. These cultures were often seen by colonial forces as being unorganized and undeveloped, not practicing any governance or horticulture. In most instances this was a misunderstanding of systems so advanced and sustainable that the Europeans hardly knew what they were looking at.
The term anarchy is from the Ancient Greek “anarkhia”, meaning “without a ruler”, composed of the prefix an- (“without”) and the word arkhos (“leader” or “ruler”). So that is the knowledge that humans lived in societies for millennia without formal hierarchies before the establishment of formal states, realms, or empires. Anarchist posit that if we did this once, we can do it again. Anarchism is the political philosophy and movement that promotes anarchy by being skeptical of all justifications for authority.
Separately these two terms refer to a culture of permanence that is sustainably producing all it consumes, and a method by which humans have self governed themselves for thousands of years. Taken together they refer to the permanent self-ruling cultural movement that can maintain the reproduction of itself without detriment to the planet. This may seem obvious to many in the field of permaculture, but we stand at a point in the development of permaculture where something needs to be done about the politics of this movement.
There has arguably been much more fascistic infiltration into these spaces than I would like to see. In this article I will endeavor to convince you, the avid permaculturalist, to reject this trend towards the right and embrace a politics of inclusion and anarchy going forward. For, as many other subcultures can attest, if we don’t deal with the Nazi problem resoundingly and thoroughly, then you will loose your community to them before you know it.
For the anarchist reader I hope that you find common ground with this movement that has been pushing for a more sustainable and caring world for years. The cross over between the two is fertile territory for collaboration. In this article I will try to show you the areas in which we stand to gain from working with the permaculturists. Additionally I hope to build to an introduction to my own new concept, the blending of the two, Anaculture. I would urge my fellow comrades to consider what they can do to implement permaculture principles in their own organizing, perhaps under the new moniker.
Permaculture’s lack of explicit politics has left it open to this attack. It is time we develop a theory of cultural development that includes politics and is willing to take stances on important political issues. In a world where everything is political, we cannot afford to ignore the terrain because it seems daunting. If we are to save permaculture then it needs an injection of political consciousness from the left. It is up to the leftists in this community who care about the earth and its inhabitants to guard against this influx of far right actors and their influences in our spaces.
Racism in the USA
There have been multiple controversies in the sustainable farming community in recent years, with some of the more prominent and in some cases foundational figures in the field mixing with the anti-science crowd during the pandemic. Meanwhile white farmers have been making racist remarks, denying the holocaust of indigenous people and the eviction of many Black farmers in the earlier part of the century.
For example, Joel Salatin made a racist attack on a Black agricultural activist who questioned Salatin’s model of small family farms being the way forward. While Salatin hasn’t explicitly used the term permaculture, his writings and teachings have been received positively by many permaculturists. Permaculture leaders in Australia and the USA condemned Salatin’s racism in Facebook posts and opinion pieces. But Joel’s views on white identity politics are more concerning than just one remark, and demonstrate a rising trend in the ecological movement space.
For almost twenty year Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface Farm (ironic much?), in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, has been a celebrity in the sustainable farming community. He was featured in a few relatively famous books written by Micheal Pollan on his farming techniques in regards to the sustainable food movement. After this he has been promoting his ideas through various blogs, articles, and speaking gigs.
Salatin inherited his land from his wealthy father, who worked at major US petroleum company in Venezuela. The job paid well and they eventually cornered the poultry market after buying a 1,000 acre farm for the family. This capital is the basis for his current success, a fact seemingly lost on him.
Salatin promotes what is referred to as an individualistic Jeffersonian attitude towards farming, maintaining that small family farms are the way to go. What he misses is the fact that many people of color are unable to financially afford to buy enough prime farmland to make farming an economic reality as a small family enterprise. In a blog post on Medium Newman published a piece entitled, “Small Family Farms Aren’t the Answer.” Newman argues that it is not a surprise that the approach promoted by Salatin hasn’t challenged the grip that large agribusiness has on the farming industry in this country since it is, in fact, an outgrowth of it.
Chris Newman once respected and followed Joel. Several years ago he was a DC-based engineer who wanted to retire and farm with his wife, Annie. The plan was to raise bison and grow heirloom corn for local seed savers. Through this production of old varieties of corn native to the region the couple were continuing the heritage of Chris’s father, who was a member of the Piscataway Conoy Tribe, a people whose lands include present day Washington DC and Baltimore.
Newman cited US Department of Agriculture data showing that the local-food revival heralded by Salatin remains severely limited: Small operations selling food nearby still account for less than 3 percent of the country’s “household calories” and just 1.5 percent of agricultural production by cash value.
Whereas people like Salatin like to hark back to the Jeffersonian notion of individual yeoman farmers—glossing over the slavery that underpinned it—Newman looked further into the past of this continent to more collective inspirations:
America’s oldest farmers—Indigenous people—generally regarded the soil as a commons and worked it cooperatively. Many Indigenous nations, along with a number of religious and ethnic communities, continue the practice to this day. But the notion of the private farm, be it a pair of greenhouses or tens of thousands of acres, is what came to dominate American farming, and it’s taken particular hold among the farm-to-table cohort.
Joel Salatin responded to this article in his own blog post called, “Whining and Entitlement.” Even though Newman’s article didn’t go so far as to mention Salatin by name, he was clearly angered by Newman’s critique of his approach saying, “The idea that entrepreneurs, as individuals and families, cannot be successful is to fall prey to a victimhood mentality,”. This language erases the plights face by small BIPOC farmers by downplaying their legitimate concerns.
He continued,
“The problem with disagreeing with Chris is that I’ll be called a racist. That’s unfortunate. Is it more racist to play the race card to anybody who dares disagree with you than it is to actually be a racist? I’m bringing this up because all races need to understand that when you use that term, it shuts down all communication. So I’m going out on a limb here in saying anything negative about someone who is not white. For non-whites to assume the default “racist!” accusation fits most circumstances is to stall forward progress. Period.”
He then used a metaphor of Native Americans persecuting the white settlers saying that leadership “requires someone to leave the fort first, maybe take some arrows, lead into the frontier.” He ended his piece with a bizarre tribute to William Cody, also known as Buffalo Bill, as a role model for youth today. Cody is famed for his role in land-grabbing wars against Indigenous peoples in the 19th century.
Newman concluded that Salatin is a “great farmer, but somewhere along the way he got convinced that he can’t be a great farmer without being a bigot.” To most growers in the younger generations this habit of sweeping the struggles of Black and Indigenous people under the rug is not appealing.
Subsequently Mother Earth News, a long time standard publication of the environmental and sustainable agriculture crowd, ended their relationship with Joel Salatin. He had a regular column for them and gave keynote speeches at events hosted by the magazine. Recently, Newman denied an invitation by the publication to contribute articles to an attempt to diversify the voices the magazine promotes. This attempt by the publication was because of the repercussions for white America following the murder of George Floyd.
The reason Newman cited for his denial was Salatin’s ongoing publication with the magazine. “Salatin penned an appallingly racist screed about me in response to one of my essays on small farming back in November,” he wrote in an email to a Mother Earth News staffer. “Until and unless this is addressed, I must assume Ogden’s [MEN’s parent company] endorsement of the above and cannot pursue this further.”
While the magazine took it’s time in responding to this debacle, Newman voiced his complaint in the comments of their Instagram posts, with many others joining in. The initial response was for Mother Earth News to delete the posts, effectively silencing Newman and the complaints about Salatin. In a further move of cowardice and deflection, the magazine blamed this response on “staffing reductions”.
Next, Clara Coleman, a Maine farmer contacted Mother Earth News and extolled the publication for it’s treatment of Newman and the subsequent deleting of his comments and not taking a public stance on the underlying issue of it’s relationship with Salatin.
Getting word of this, Salatin then emailed Coleman to confront her for what he perceived as her criticisms of him. “It’s come to my attention that you are calling me a racist,” he wrote. “I did not personally attack you or call you a racist,” Coleman replied to Salatin; rather, she wrote, she had “called out Mother Earth News” for deleting comments on its Instagram posts related to Newman and his controversy with Salatin. Coleman allowed her friend, Vermont farmer Kate MacLean, to publish the correspondence on her blog, and embed it in an open letter to Mother Earth News, signed by more than 230 farmers and sustainable food activists.
Salatin’s response to Coleman was to double down on attacking Newman for his race. “I would suggest that the BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] folks who feel America offers them no opportunity should give up all modern conveniences and return to their tribal locations and domicile,” he said. He also defended his settler colonial metaphors saying, “The fact is that historically people out of the fort first did receive arrows. That is not racist; it is a fact of history and works well as an instructive metaphor about leadership savvy.”
In an email to Mother Earth News publisher Bill Uhler, and forwarded to Coleman, Salatin aired his ideas on “the failure in the Black community” saying,
“For the record, we do not believe America is systemically racist. There are racist individuals, for certain, but we elected a Black (I’m told to capitalize it from now on) president for goodness sake. We tend to agree with Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington (I encourage you to watch their takes on this) that the failure in the Black community is dysfunctional collapse in the family: 75 percent of Black boys grow up without a father in their lives. That’s not racism; it’s fundamental social breakdown.”
The statement about “dysfunctional collapse” is an old racist trope. It’s also worth noting that his statistic is incorrect. Only after these emails went public did the magazine sever their relationship with Salatin. Once faced with building financial consequences Salatin wrote, “[my blog] routinely offends Big Ag, bureaucrats, big pharma, etc, on purpose. But I never intend to offend people due to their race, religion, culture, gender, or creed and I’m sorry that this post [his original attack on Chris Newman] did.” He added: “In 2020 hindsight, and in current cultural context, I can see that some references I used can be offensive.”
At the start of the 20th century recently freed Black farmers owned 20 million acres of land, a full seventh of all farms. But after a century of structurally racist policies they were forced off of their land to where today they hold only 1.7 percent of the countries farms, a 90 percent reduction in land ownership. Salatin’s views on the rugged individual doesn’t offer young BIPOC farmers anything of interest and many are turning another more collective direction, including Chris Newman. Salatin uses his wacky persona and political libertarianism to cover up the underlying racism and white settler colonialist mentality that allows for the continued white domination of land ownership and the economy as a whole.
Recently he has been denying masks outright, and in November of 2020 he hosted 30 people at his farm. They wore no masks during the event he said and that participants turned off their cell phones, a reference to the conspiracy theory that he subscribes to that COVID is cause by the roll out of the 5G cell phone network. He says the pandemic may be a “result of too much EMF radiation”. As for the concept of viruses themselves he called them “garbage collectors to grab junk and take it out of our cells and to run around in the body warning ‘something bad’s coming; get ready’”. During the height of the pandemic this man used his substantial platform to express dangerous views and even far right conspiracy theories that call into question where he is getting his news from.
In 2014 a working group at the USA Permaculture Conference developed an action plan for making permaculture more inclusive. They suggested a list of actions be taken when holding permaculture events.
- Insist on anti-oppression training sessions for permaculture convergences.
- Seek understanding about permaculture ideas that have their origin in Indigenous cultures and give proper credit.
- Facilitate separate social spaces in permaculture gatherings so people with a shared background can get together.
- Acknowledge when permaculture events are taking place on land stolen from Indigenous people.
- Seek invitations from Indigenous representatives.
- Give scholarships or reduce fees for people from Black or Indigenous backgrounds.
Unfortunately we see here that most of the advice given is not action oriented but symbolic, with representation and acknowledgments being among the chief concerns. While many of these are great suggestions, action must be taken if this community is to achieve it’s lofty goals of bringing about a system of care that meets the needs of all people. Community organizing is needed to bring political awareness to the ecological movement.
Anti-science in Australia
Another example of this trend of the far right mixing with the permaculture movement happened in Australia in November of 2021, when permaculture co-founder David Holmgren and his partner, Su Dennett, attended a rally put on to protest the Victorian government’s proposed COVID-19 safety protocols. A photo of the couple at the rally stirred controversy as they were representing the name permaculture on their banner and this upset many in the community who saw this as a rejection of science and an embrace of far right talking points by a supposed leader of the movement. Reports were that the far right in Australia were not present at this particular rally but that they had been present at previous ones.
Two days later, another permaculture celebrity, Geoff Lawton, weighed in on the matter posting “Immunity is one of the many health benefits of a permaculture lifestyle”. He didn’t bring up the virus by name but with the context of the situation it was taken to be a tacit approval of David and his anti-science beliefs. Apart from being associated with these far rights beliefs and appearing at events that they could co-mingle at, David has also engaged in the media bashing and scapegoating associated with the right.
The structure of the system of permaculture is open sourced knowledge, it has no formal leaders, only founding texts written by a few charismatic individuals. David is one of those founding individuals, and therefore holds sway over much of the dialogue that goes on in this community. He has this intellectual and cultural power as a result of his work with co-founder Bill Mollison at the end of the 1970’s. The two coined the term and the overall system of design at that point. David now continues to make money by speaking at events and writing on the subject. This is why he has been viewed as a de facto spokesperson for the movement after Bill’s passing in 2016. His fan-ship is devout to the point of fervor, and his positions are rarely questioned or critiqued.
The reputation of permaculture is therefore at stake when he attends rallies like this and associates with far-right communities. It will make people question the supposed anti-political stance permaculture has maintained for itself for so long. This perception has always been a mistake since the very root of permaculture is calling for system change just like the calls for system change from the left. Except the left calls for abolition of “capitalism” whereas permaculture calls for the abolition of “industrialization”. There is no neutrality in the face of oppressive systems, and permaculture can no longer afford to attempt to sit on the fence in the political arena.
Conclusion
At the very least the proximity of the far right to the perceived leaders of the permaculture movement call out for an analysis of power. This is an analysis that has been well documented in anarchist literature. There is much that can be learned by both sides by coming together. Many are starting to question the ability of leaders to speak for the movement, while the anarchists call for their abolition altogether. It is time to expand what permaculture is, beyond the white cis hetero-normative men who founded it, and their narrow and perhaps bigoted worldviews.
What does this association of the far right with permaculture mean for the reputation of the movement? Can the movement survive this moment of fascistic infiltration? If permaculture doesn’t take care to guard itself against this far right incursion then it will be destined to wither and die as the political trends shift and the far right move onto some other sub-culture. If so, then I say let’s make something new from it’s ashes. Something that resembles the many faces of the movement today, something diverse and inclusive.
Sources:
King, Franklin Hiram (1911), Farmers of Forty Centuries: Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan
Birnbaum Fox, Juliana (9 June 2010). “Indigenous Science”. Cultural Survival Quarterly. 33 (1) – via Indiana University.
Holmgren, David (2007). “Essence of Permaculture” (PDF). Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability
Accounts (11 March 2021). “Permaculture for Sceptics”. The Permaculture Research Institute. Retrieved 22 July 2021.
Bates, David (2017). “Anarchism”. In Paul Wetherly (ed.). Political Ideologies. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-872785-9.
https://medium.com/permaculture-3-0/on-november-20-2021-a-controversy-erupted-in-the-australian-permaculture-network-3e43da52b363
Dennis Altman, “The Counter Culture: Nostalgia or Prophecy?” in Australian Society: A Sociological Introduction., ed. A.F. Davis, S Encel, and A.M. Berry, 3rd Edition (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1977), 450.
Hemenway, Toby (2009). Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture (2nd ed.). Chelsea Green Publishing. pp. 5. ISBN 978-1603580298.
Introduction to Permaculture, 2011, Mollison, p.v
Margaret Smith and David John Crossley, The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia (Melbourne: Lansdowne, 1975), 2.
Andrea Gaynor, ‘Antipodean Eco-Nazis? The Organic Gardening and Farming Movement and Far-Right Ecology in Postwar Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 43, no. 2 (2012): 269.
Zimmerman, Michael E. (2008). “Ecofascism”. In Taylor, Bron R. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Volume 1. London, UK: Continuum. pp. 531–532. ISBN 978-1-44-112278-0.
Corcione, Adryan (30 April 2020). “Eco-fascism: What It Is, Why It’s Wrong, and How to Fight It”. Teen Vogue.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/11/injecting-poison-will-never-make-you-healthy-how-the-wellness-industry-turned-its-back-on-covid-science
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/20/how-do-you-argue-with-anti-vaxxers-who-believe-theyre-on-a-noble-mission
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/22/leftwingers-far-right-conspiracy-theories-anti-vaxxers-power
Thank you so much! Glad we could help. Solidarity!
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