So I’ve been busy launching and working with my friends Dan, Paul and Nathe on our new business: Very Edible Gardens (VEG).  Dan is the founder of permablitz and Paul has designed more properties for blitzes than anyone else, and Nath has been into permaculture since the early 90s.  We’re running courses, doing consultancies and designs, and selling raised vegie beds which we can fully install including timers so people can water legally without getting out of bed at 6am.  We’re still all heavily involved in the permablitz movement in a mostly volunteer basis.  We want to provide meaningful employment for people keen to gain skills in urban permaculture design, implementation and maintenance, and help the city transition to a far more sustainable place which means dealing with a lot of our needs more locally.   Lots is happening at the moment, and there will be updates on the VEG site soon!

I made the website, which I hope is my last one ever! Check us out at www.VeryEdibleGardens.com

What are permablitzes all about? How did they begin?
A permablitz is basically a permaculture-inspired backyard makeover where people come together to share knowledge and skills about organic food production in urban gardens while building community and having fun.

The basic idea is that by converting their lawns into organic food producing gardens, people will be able to back away from a dependence on industrial agriculture and the shipping of food back and forth across the world. At the same time, it makes organic eating accessible to more than just the upper-middle class. 

The whole permablitz thing started with a group called Codemo (Community Development Multicultural Organisation), a local community group composed primarily of South American immigrants. A permaculture geek named Dan Palmer started hanging out with the Codemo crew and after hearing him rave about the wonders of permaculture and the joys of having a backyard full of practically free organic vegies, and going round to see the amazing and beautiful permaculture system Dan and his housemates, Cat and Adrian, had created in their infamous Thomas Street backyard, some of them expressed interest in growing food in their own backyards.

The first permaculture backyard makeover was held in Dandenong at the home of Vilma from El Salvador. And permablitzes have been spreading all around Melbourne since.

Do you think permablitzes and similar DIY projects have the ability to enrich local communities and culture?
Definitely! Permablitzes involve a combination of learning, practicing and socialising. I'd say the social community-building aspect is just as important, or even moreso, than the garden makeover itself. In our socially atomised suburbs, with our tall fences separating our yards from our neighbours', its rare to get to know those living closest to us.

The permablitz I had at my place last Sunday gave me an opportunity to introduce myself to the old Greek couple next door and invite them round to share some of their gardening skills. A guy down the street who has a concrete yard has even been dropping his food scaps over so i could build up the castings in my worm farm in preparation. And a local lawn mower was dropping off his clippings at my place for the compost building workshop. On the day itself, I met quite a few local people for the first time who had heard about the blitz through the grapevine. On top of this, because it was Codemo who seeded off the permablitz concept, they have also offered fantastic opportunities to meet and spend time with a fun and diverse bunch of people – 76 year old Willie from Chile, for example, has been one most regular blitzers.  He's also one of the hottest dancers of the 'permasalsa' — most of the Codemo permablitzes end with drink and a dance.

After hearing about the permablitz idea, the coordinator of Jika Jika, a community center in Westgarth [an inner Melbourne suburb], has also requested a mini-permablitz be held in the gardens of a local public housing estate. The people who live there are supposedly pretty socially isolated so it will be interesting to see what comes out of holding a blitz and building a community garden with them. [I went along to this, and the tenants rock and are keen to get some tomatoes in, and we're going back to work with them some more next weekend. -AF]

Do you think it's important for people in urban areas to have an engagement in food production and learn how to grow their own food?
Living in a 'modern' society promises that we shouldn't actually have to think about our food, or any other basic necessity. We've 'developed' to the point that we now get to spend our time thinking about modern issues like ring tones and tax returns. So today the majority of the food we eat is grown by a handful of huge agribusinesses and sold in a handful of supermarket chains. Through this process, aside from disconnecting us from our food and all that its been through to get to our plates, we have also become completely dependent on multinational corporations for our basic necessities, and therefore have lost the very foundations of political autonomy.

I think that growing food, along with rebuilding community (to counter the individualisation and social atomisation faced in this corporate-driven society), are some of the most important and subversive activities we can do today.

“Political independence and the ability to engage in society has a lot to do with from what position of autonomy do we stand. And if we stand totally dependent on a one or two or three day food supply chain we don't really have any position of political autonomy.”
— David Holmgren, Permaculture co-orginator (quote taken from greening the apocalypse)

"If your experience is that your water comes from the tap and that your food comes from the grocery store then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on that; if your experience is that your water comes from a river and that your food comes from a land base then you will defend those to the death because your life depends on them. So part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it and it's very difficult physically for us to live outside of it."
— Derrick Jensen

Where's permaculture at at the moment? As a movement is it as vital as ever?
To be honest, i'm only just starting to learn about permaculture after having been working on issues around trade in food and agriculture so I don't think I can really give much insight here. Personally, though, while searching for alternatives to the global industrial agriculture system, I've become excited about what permaculture and food localisation (producing and consuming food in the same area) have to offer. But then when adding peak oil and climate change to the mix, and the likely consequences of these on today's food and agriculture systems, it looks like food localisation using permaculture principles and design is going to offer more than an 'alternative' — it will become a necessity.

Do permablitzes attempt to take permaculture out of institutional settings and straight into our homes?
From what I understand, the permaculture movement has made a conscious effort to be taught and shared primarily outside of institutional settings. The idea of permablitzes, though, is to make permaculture more accessible to those who live (and rent) in an urban environment, rather than just those who own a couple of acres of land out bush. The message is that as long as you have a yard (even if its covered in concrete), or a verandah, or a rooftop then you can produce food, and that by using permaculture principles and design, it can be reasonably easy.

Are permablitzes also about getting permaculture into, not only the backyard, but also the front manicured lawn, the medium strip, the roundabout?
Yes yes!! I'd love to see more edible front yards, nature strips and roundabouts! Di from Box Hill held a permablitz at her place, which was held mostly in her backyard, but that was because her whole front yard was already brimming with vegetables and chickens. It was designed really beautifully with lots of different coloured vegies making it seem like an ornamental garden until closer inspection (and until you heard the squawkings from the chicken dome in the corner)… who needs daises eh?

Favourite pick of the crop this season?
We didn't have a very happening garden until the blitz last sunday so the only things ready to eat at my place at the moment are the green leafies – rocket, spinach, different lettuces, silverbeet, and the herbs. Post-blitz, though, i'm probably most looking forward to the raspberries and strawberries, ooh and sweet corn.. and snow peas… and capsicum… water chestnuts… passionfruit… mmm… basil… we even planted some watermelon seeds… i think i'm mostly looking forward to being able to wander around my garden and just bite at random plants.

She coined the term 'permablitz', a contraction of permaculture backyard blitz. (Backyard Blitz is the name of popular gardening and lifestyle show in Australia involving rapid backyard makeovers).  Dan defined it thusly:

Permablitz: A informal gathering involving a day on which a group of at least two people come together to achieve the following:

• create or add to edible gardens where someone lives
• share skills related to permaculture and sustainable living
• build community networks
• have fun

At a recent peak oil and food security conference in Melbourne with David Holmgren and Richard Heinberg, the permablitz concept was one of the most enthusiastically talked about ideas amongst participants.

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The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil is absolutely must-see doco on Cuba's transition into a lower energy society. Richard Heinberg, peak oil guru and recent visitor to these shores, said:

"Everyone who is concerned about Peak Oil needs to see this film. Cuba survived an energy famine during the 1990s, and how it did so constitutes one of the most important and hopeful stories of the past few decades. It is a story not just of individual achievement, but of the collective mobilization of an entire society to meet an enormous challenge. Lest the point be missed, I will underscore it: this particular challenge – the problem of energy scarcity is one we will all be facing very soon."
Richard Heinberg, author, The Party's Over, Powerdown, and The Oil Depletion Protocol

Incidently, Richard's book The Party's Over was recently read by Bill Clinton who reportedly left it "full of underlinings and what looked like the most serious undergraduate’s markings, with lots of exclamation points."  So by implication I think it's fair to say that Bill Clinton recommends this as the best and most important movie he hasn't seen yet.

So 'Eat The Suburbs' screened it a couple of times in the city (Melbourne) recently with good crowds and good times. 

It worked really well with a 15 minute excerpt (the last 15 minutes) of A History of Oil by comedian Robert Newman, as a warm up vid.  It's brilliant comedy, bringing the message of peak oil with equal parts sugar and medicine.  You can watch the whole thing online at google video.

The wonderful Pamela Morgan who has worked in Cuba for a several years in urban agriculture/permaculture efforts, joined us for the second screening on 7th September. She was a little emotional, seeing so many friends in the film. The Q&A with her afterwards was really enlightening, and not a single person left after the film and hung around to hear it.  Her insights into the Cuban culture and structural systems really fleshed out the film.  I've recorded an interview with Pamela which I'll post on the site soon.  Pamela also set up the wonderful Collingwood Children's Farm starting in the late 70s with a single cow and a paddock.  It's now a functional urban farm with community garden plots and lots of educational stuff for kids.  It's probably the nicest place in Melbourne to escape the urban gloom.  She's heading back to Cuba soon, and also going to Argentina to look at some Havana-like urban agriculture projects there, and how they work within a capitalist system.  Very important research!

Anyway the film is a great way to show that peak oil doesn't have to be a total disaster, nor do the solutions have to be big, centralised and polluting.  One of the Yarra City Councilors came to the first screening, and now Yarra is doing their own screening at the Richmond Town Hall, that and other event details below. 

More info and ordering The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

The following are also FREE events hosted by City of Yarra

‘Don’t reinvent the wheel’, lessons from Europe and North America for sustainable transport planning by Susie Strain (Metropolitan Transport Forum) and Chris Loader (Bus Association Victoria).
Monday 16 October, 6.00pm – 8.00pm at the Richmond Town Hall.

‘The Power of Community’ – How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (DVD 53 minutes) kindly provided by local resident Glenda Lindsay – www.communitysolution.org/cuba.
Monday 30 October, starting at 6.00pm at the Richmond Town Hall.

‘End of Suburbia’ – Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream (DVD 78 minutes) – www.endofsuburbia.com
Monday 20 November, starting at 6.00pm at the Richmond Town Hall.

I just watched A Century of the Self – Happiness Machines.

It's really one of the best doco's I've seen and that's just the first part of 4.  (You can download the whole series at archive.org) It's made by Adam Curtis who made the equally wonderful history of fear-based politics, The Power of Nightmares.  I like how Curtis treats the origins of a lot of nasty, even terrifying businesses such as the neocons and the public relations industry, as having been based on some understandable (if not entirely agreeable with the benefit of hindsight) ideas and concerns initially — and traces the path of their corruption.   The creators of the PR industry, he argues, wanted to control the dangerous sides of human nature, to prevent unconscious desires being unleashed as barbarism, as witnessed in WWII, and earlier in Germany. 

The film is a history of psychoanalysis, propaganda, group psychology and the creation of consumerism.  Apparently Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew, creator of the PR industry and one of the most influencial men of the 20th century, seems to have considered most people, and certainly the masses, 'stupid'.  He and those others who have treated the masses this way have been quite successful over the last century, manipulating our emotional needs to create conformity (where it counts) and tying self-expression to consumer choice. 

So what does this mean for energy descent planning?  How do we approach people, enable people to act in a way which better benefits themselves and the wider society? It seems perverse to ask, but what needs does consumerism currently fill, which can be filled instead by relocalisation efforts?  (Perverse because consumerism presumably filled — or promises to fill — voids left by the loss of community which came in part with the car and consumerism itself.)  

I wonder if perhaps what works at a mass level can be overcome to a large degree at a local level, where we have direct human contact, and can express ideas and passion, which can be more powerful than even these sophisticated mass marketing methods.

* * *

So people that treat the public as stupid have been very successful at manipulating them/us/me.  But is stupidity something innate or something created? 

At a recent seminar I heard an international healthy cities promoter say that he had to unlearn his medical training to understand health.  Richard Douthwaite, author of Growth Illusion once told me he is a "recovering economist".  He described economics as a "disabling discipline".  Could it be that all institutional schooling has some similar effects on us, makes us stupid from an early age?

I just came across this book which is available online.  I imagine it's actually quite well known: 'The Underground History of American Education' by John Taylor Gatto, who wrote it at the end of a long and distinguished career as teacher.  In fact he was New York State Teacher of the Year when he quit and started writing this book.

In the prologue (I've copied a section from it below) he talks about creating 'dumbness'.  He writes that, historically, until the formal school system, there was no concept of 'adolescence'. Young people were considered mature, and given meaningful ways to engage in society much earlier than they generaly are today.  He believes schooling stunts our psychological and intellectual growth, keeps us immature our whole lives.  Ie. schooling makes us stupid, not smart.  And he has lots of stark evidence that it is designed to be that way.

For instance this from first mission statement of Rockefeller’s General Education Board (1906), who were putting more money into public education in the U.S. than the government:

In our dreams…people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple…we will organize children…and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

That's just a sample.  The book is really mindblowing, each page a revelation.  Like Curtis, Gatto doesn't portray the creators of this system as evil, simply responding to conditions — namely the problem in the U.S. of ruling of a nation of libertarian individuals in an industrial age where acceptance of fairly meaningless jobs was a necessity for business.   Like the creators of the PR industry, they believe they might make people happier by taking away their responsibilities, freeing them from too much thought. 

We could think of schooling as industrial, energy ascent culture.

I can't help but think of the blue eyes / brown eyes experiment performed by former teacher and anti-racism activist Jane Elliott.  She makes people feel and act stupid and inferior simply by treating them that way. 

Another point relevant to energy descent, Gatto talks about professional people, kept stupid in some regards, but tricked into thinking they must know something of worth.  I guess that's about knowing a lot about something narrowly, rather than holistically;  a false sense of completeness which keeps you closed to certain types of new information and perspectives.

This forced infantilisation doesn't stop at school.  The media treats people patronisingly, talks down to us as children.  So the system doesn't stop at schooling.  I don't know if any of you remember the Dole Army shenanigans on Today Tonight and A Current Affair.  (A group of folks — including me one night — pretended to live in drains, collect dole money, and feed the poor from dumpster diving, while complaining about the 'Toorak bludgers'.  The next day we came out publicly that it was a joke, to the embarrassment of the networks who had to go into damage control.)  But anyway, I remember watching channel 10 news the next night and the announcer said "Yesterday a group of teenagers played a naughty trick…"  Normally, I realise now, the commercial network news readers talk to you like you are about 12 years old.  But this was more like you were about 5 years old — so it really stuck out and I wondered how I'd missed it the whole time.  Talking to us like we're stupid, makes us stupid — or in this case keeps us infantile. 

So while lack of understanding and dependence are encouraged, one of the good points of childishness, playfulness, is discouraged — in children as Gatto explains, but especially in adults, who are almost defined as those who don't play.  But playfulness is a form of engagement and experimentation — active learning.  The Dole Army was playful engagement, so they were labeled 'naughty teenagers' (neverminding that no teenagers were involved).

A friend of a friend in Italy is an artist who used to go into shopping centres and push toy cars around, making broom broom noises.  People would act really concerned and eventually the security guards would often drag him out!  The main form of play not being with the cars, of course, but with this convention. 

Anyway, this from Gatto:

The New Dumbness

Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. It’s a religious idea gone out of control. You don’t have to accept that, though, to realize this kind of economy would be jeopardized by too many smart people who understand too much. I won’t ask you to take that on faith. Be patient. I’ll let a famous American publisher explain to you the secret of our global financial success in just a little while. Be patient.

Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.

Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly:

Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment….The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by…the word of experts.

The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.

Ellul puts it this way:

The individual has no chance to exercise his judgment either on principal questions or on their implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not comfortably exercised under [the best of] conditions…Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared or have atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda is suppressed…years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore such faculties. The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another, this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis a vis some event without a ready-made opinion.

Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can’t do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways easily exploitable by their knowledgeable elders.

“The goal of Peak Oil education is to bring about change in people’s knowledge, attitudes, and practices,” Berney said. “To do so they must take ownership of the problem, and develop their own solutions.”

She added that adults learn best when they feel respected as responsible and self-directed learners, their knowledge and experience are valued, and they see how the information is relevant to their lives. 

Some wise advice.  And the outcome is not just that we learn more, but that we are approaching the issue in a way in which we can take initiative on developing responses.  As much as trying to get policy makers to respond to Peak Oil, writing an EDAP is about inspiring grassroots, organic, and unexpected responses.

I don't think it's necessarily the easiest thing to present information on Peak Oil, and inspire people to start working on solutions.  Sometimes I've felt like I've left people thinking 'oh he's the expert, I'll leave it with him to worry about,' or worse, that the whole issue is a bit overwhelming and depressing!  

I'm sure there are some workshop techniques, or interview methods which present open questions to stimulate us think about the problem and possible solutions from a personal perspective and our areas of expertise. 

Berney is one of the first graduates of the “Peak Oil Workshop for Community Leaders” organised by The Community Solution. Megan Quinn is the group's Outreach Director.