“Those who make us believe that anything’s possible and fire our imagination over the long haul, are often the ones who have survived the bleakest of circumstances. The men and women who have every reason to despair, but don’t, may have the most to teach us, not only about how to hold true to our beliefs, but about how such a life can bring about seemingly impossible social change. ”
― Paul Rogat Loeb
When I think about Permaculture as a holistic whole and its possibilities for generating a future world of well being, it is really the conscious reawakening of human beings as resourceful and mindful entities fully integrated back into the natural world. This is in direct contrast the prevailing consumerist service culture where the need to be resourceful is put on somebody else’s shoulders, as capitalism’s predatory specialization worked its way into every corner of human life and made a market for everything that we do. Permaculture is the worst nightmare for the current Neoliberal economic model as it offers both ecological and social justice underpinned by ethics that are mindful of all human life. 
Passive consumers
We de-skilled ourselves as the service industries took hold and people bought into the idea of convenience and buying what was previously made by earlier generations. The idea that we could phone a number and order something and have it delivered made us the little Lords of our own individualist consumer world. This has resulted in a de-humanising effect, when we consider that work is one of the primary human activities and within work we have made and produced things and provided for ourselves and our communities for thousands of years. When I say work I am referring to a person interacting with and shaping something from the natural world into something that is useful. I am not referring to ‘employment’ which is something that we have been conned and bullied into since the enclosures of common land here in the UK. Through accepting and engaging in consumer culture we are handing over an awful lot of power to corporations. This has meant for most of us a form of benign slavery in the form of debt and low pay where we are too busy working to worry and think anything else. We are taken in by the need to upgrade, upgrade being a much softer and less loaded word, that is easily digested by willing purchasers than the term built in obsolescence.
The never ending party that’s about to end
An abundance of fossil fuel has allowed this reckless model of throw away consumption to spread like a virus across of the surface of the planet. For the sake of nature and our own sanity and survival as a species there is some gladness mixed in with worry, in the knowledge that we are running out of oil at a rapid rate. I make no bones about the fact that oil running out will carry with it a catastrophic effect if transition measures and low impact infrastructure are not put in place. This is a problem as the world is run by greedy self interested man who actually believe that resources and economic growth are infinite. So we need to create our own transitions and move away from the waste and ethical squalor of global capitalism. We can do this by pulling back from the system and become local producers using local resources, with the most important aspect of our transition is doing it with our neighbours.
Re-designing the future
Thankfully in human existence civilizations and empires fall, this is always inevitable because it is built into their way of doing things. Just as industrial capitalism designed and developed its systems of ruthless resource extraction and locked in economic slavery, we will redesign and develop local systems of natural resources in line with the specific ecology of each given town and city. There really is no other conceivable way of working with our changing climate and peaks in resources and now permaculture is spreading round the globe with the same ferocity as capitalism’s piggy back on fossil fuels over the last century. I am not talking about theoretical stuff here or musing philosophically, permaculture is right at the forefront of providing workable solutions to many of the problems that we and other species are facing because of our actions and this is why it has spread across the globe and must continue to spread into every town, city and village on the planet.
Steve