Change Here Now: Permaculture Solutions for Personal and Community Transformation

465 Pages·2017·8.29 MB·English

by  Adam Brock

CONTENTS
Titlepage
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Permaculture and Pattern Literacy
Part 1: Vision for a Permanent Culture
1. The Long Game
2. Biophilia
3. Interdependent Communities
4. Commoning
5. The Right Size
6. Relationship Zones
7. Subsidiarity
8. Dethroning the Antimarkets
9. Zones of Autonomy
10. Going Home
11. The Edge of Change
12. Multitudes of Knowing
13. Fear Burns Bright, Hope Burns Long
14. Design Tool: Creative Process
15. Design Tool: Sector and Zone Analyses
16. Design Tool: Network Analysis
Part 2: Patterns of Justice and Resistance
17. Decolonization
18. Telling the Story
19. Sankofa
20. Ritual and Ceremony
21. Stewardship
22. Humanizing the Other
23. Slow Cities
24. Citizen Governance
25. Infrastructure Commons
26. Creative Destruction
27. Nonviolent Struggle
28. Solidarity
29. Arts of Resistance
30. Disrobing the Emperor
31. Coordinated Noncompliance
32. Truth and Reconciliation
33. Breaking Bread
34. Letting Loose
35. Rites of Passage
36. Gadugi
37. Intimacy through Adversity
38. Practicing Grief
39. Design Tool: Power Analysis
Part 3: Organizations That Live
40. Nurtured Networks
41. Consensual Hierarchies
42. Human Polycultures
43. Nemawashi
44. Streams of Engagement
45. The Right Way to Decide
46. Converge and Disperse
47. Leadership from Within
48. Regenerative Management
49. Naming Norms
50. Skilled Facilitation
51. Circle Dialogue
52. The Caucus
53. Calling Out, Calling In
54. Restorative Justice
55. Document the Process
56. Measuring Success
57. Design Tool: Team Analysis
Part 4: Envisioning the Ecommony
58. The Gift
59. Heirloom Currencies
60. Financial Ram Pumps
61. Debt Forgiveness
62. Household Economies
63. Small Business
64. Import Substitution
65. Regenerative Enterprise
66. Xeric Enterprise
67. Community-Supported Enterprise
68. Employee Ownership
69. Dynamic Pricing
70. Design Tool: Capital Analysis
71. Design Tool: Business Model Canvas
Part 5: Training the Sacred Warrior
72. Sacred Activism
73. Right Livelihood
74. Spirals of Abundance
75. Know Your Community
76. Actions, Not Intentions
77. iSites
78. Unplugging
79. Commitment Pruning
80. Reduce the Need to Earn
81. Personal Mythology
82. Design Tool: Personal Vision
Endnotes
Index
About the Author
Change Here Now
Permaculture Solutions for Personal and
Community Transformation
Adam Brock
with illustrations by Holly White
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Adam Brock. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review,
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For
information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
Berkeley, California

Cover design by Jasmine Hromjak
Book design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama
Printed in the United States of America
Change Here Now: Permaculture Solutions for Personal and Community Transformation is sponsored and
published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an
educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural
perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and
global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our
website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brock, Adam, 1986– author.
Title: Change here now : permaculture solutions for personal and community transformation / Adam Brock
; with illustrations by Holly White.
Description: Berkeley, California : North Atlantic Books, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016047448 | ISBN 9781623170646 (trade pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Community life. |
Community development. | Social change. |
Social ecology. | Permaculture--Social aspects.
Classification: LCC HM761 .B76 2017 | DDC 303.4--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/201604744

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Printed on recycled paper OR Printed on 100 percent recycled paper
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my ancestors, who struggled so that I could
thrive.
Preface
In the year 2000, when I was in eighth grade, my teacher handed me a copy of
Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and, with a straight face, gave me the assignment of
writing a paper on what human society would look like in a million years.
Needless to say, the assignment left me a little bewildered. Science and
technology was progressing faster than ever. How was I supposed to predict
where we’d be in even a century, let alone a million years?
The book didn’t seem to help much either. I was expecting a sci-fi novel set a
million years in the future, but instead found a kind of Socratic dialogue between
an everyman narrator and a wise telepathic gorilla. What’s more, Ishmael
appeared to be focused squarely in the distant past, with the whole thing
amounting to a critique of agriculture and the civilization that sprang from it.
The agricultural revolution, claimed the gorilla, was the beginning of a spiral of
rising population and exploitation of cultures and ecosystems that continues to
this day—and which was now bringing us to the brink of societal collapse.
All of which was kind of interesting to think about, but a little too much for
my pubescent brain to handle. I wound up turning in a paper that hemmed and
hawed about uncertainty and space travel for several pages, and then I promptly
went back to obsessing about muscle cars and grunge music.
Still, my teacher had planted a seed. What if our society of limitless
abundance really was a dead end? As the cornucopian 1990s segued into the
paranoia of 9/11 and the war in Iraq, that possibility seemed to become more
real. During my undergraduate education at New York University, my professors
seemed hell-bent on blaming society’s ills on the evils of modern-day capitalism
—a critique that became harder and harder to refute. As scientists began giving
ever-more dire warnings about climate change and the economy was brought to
its knees by the robber barons of Wall Street, the narrative of a culture spiraling
out of control began to feel a lot more realistic than one of limitless progress.
Looking for some kind of solution to all this doom and gloom, I stumbled
upon permaculture design—and all of the sudden, everything came into focus.
Tying together indigenous wisdom and modern science, permaculture seemed to
offer a common-sense, coherent framework for digging ourselves out of our
destructive feedback loops. After spending my college years wringing my hands
over ecological apocalypse, hearing my permaculture teachers claim that humans
weren’t an inherent scourge on the landscape felt like coming up for air after a
long, deep dive. I learned that with a combination of love, patience, and
intelligent design, we could actually improve the natural and human
communities around us. Here, finally, seemed to be the radical solution to
Ishmael’s radical challenge.
And the examples I learned about sparkled with promise. Gorgeous homes
made of clay and straw that could somehow heat and cool themselves using the
energy of the sun. Desert gardens that produced bushels of unique and delicious
crops with nothing but the rain that fell from the sky. Outdoor showers that kept
their water warm by burying pipe in a large pile of wood chips.
It was all the more frustrating, then, once I started to realize that few of these
examples were actually being used in the real world. It wasn’t that the
technology was wrong or too complicated to implement. Instead, the failures all
seemed to come back to much more prosaic stuff: personality conflicts, business
plans, and the like. I met a mountain farmer who was a genius at working with
plants—but who couldn’t manage an intern to save his life. I learned of an
organic food co-op—years in the making—that failed in six months due to a lack
of business acumen. I saw many a nonprofit that wanted to lift low-income
communities out of poverty, only to find themselves drawing the scorn and ire of
the very residents they were trying to serve.
What was the deal? Was this world-changing movement really going to wither
and die because of petty infighting and bad financial decisions? It was only as I
dug deeper into my studies of permaculture that I began to understand that these
challenges were also within the ability of the designer to solve. My mentors
showed me how the same tools that we used to design homes and landscapes can
be used to design businesses, economic systems, and community groups.
As I deepened my permaculture journey in my hometown of Denver, I saw no
shortage of opportunities to begin thinking about designing these so-called
invisible structures. As a budding educator, I used my understanding of
permaculture to devise more effective and engaging workshops. As a member of
a collective house, I used my knowledge of healthy ecosystems to think about
creating a healthy community of housemates. I became involved in starting a
nonprofit, with all the requisite legwork of raising money, forming a board, and
running programming. The nonprofit happened to be based in an isolated and
polluted Latino community, and part of our aim was to empower that community
through developing a local food economy. And so I began a journey of
understanding my own privilege and applying permaculture to dealing with