Hegemonic Freedom through Sustainable Agriculture
Sustainability. It's a new word for an old concept — green power, green party, green movement; a pleasant and innocuous word that elicits no conspicuous and intolerable counterpart against which to be pitted. Unless, of course, one considers sustainability's counterforce, the inability to survive, or sustainability's philosophical opposite, hegemony, defined by Encarta Dictionary as: "control or dominating influence by one person or group over others, especially by one political group over society or one nation over others."
Contrary to initial estimations, freedom and hegemony have everything to do with sustainability. But while there is no easy solution to the problem of hegemony and sustainability, there is an alternative way of living that holds hope for the future. This alternative is permaculture (permanent agriculture).
Millions of Americans have seen Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth; we're aware that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has publicly released myriad studies verifying the rapid deterioration of local and global resources, as well as the disquieting recent reduction in biodiversity; we're even aware of the controversies surrounding possible governmental tampering with scientific reports pertaining to global warming. As a result, "greenhouse gas" is a household term.
The alarm has been sounded, but markedly little has changed, because the decisions that must be made in order to preserve our planet and our species are no longer the purview of the people; these "global" decisions ultimately reside with the CEOs and Boards of Directors of a few massive corporations whose primary purpose is profit. According to Robert McChesney's "Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy," this power elite has more influence over the lawmakers than we, the people, ever will. As a result, a significant amount of freedom has been stripped from the people who constitute this democracy.
Hegemony is a theory of social control developed by, among others, the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci asserted that capitalist systems offer the illusion of personal freedom, thereby allowing systems to maintain discrete control over citizens, exerted via the enforcement of social norms manipulated by the power elite.
Using this twisting of perception, the power elite appeases a nation's citizens by dangling the dream of a perfect (i.e. free) life just out of their reach, never permitting such a dream to come to fruition. The creation of the illusion of freedom gives the people little reason to question it, simplifying the task of persuading them of who they should be, where they will fit into society, and how to censor themselves for these societal norms.
Prolific author on the subject of American hegemony, Noam Chomsky described America as an imperialistic giant that will stop at nothing to gain more hegemonic power: "The goal of the imperial grand strategy is to prevent any challenge to the 'power, position, and prestige of the United States,'" wrote Chomsky, quoting Dean Acheson. We have lost our way as a result of hegemony, and its progeny, globalization.
An alarming side effect of globalization is the hefty collateral damage that resource extraction has upon the environment. Vast quantities of resources are required to fuel the world's ever-expanding "need" for new possessions, and this need is so entrenched in the cultural consciousness that it, unfortunately, will not be easily extracted.Revolution without the force of firearms is a tricky business. So long as the whole of American society believes that they are free and that life is all about attaining more and more material goods, it will prove onerous to compel them to demand extreme change simply to be able to breathe in 30 years.
Hegemony begets hegemony; no sooner does a revolution of thought take place than a new hegemony is created and new systems of societal control put in place. However, revolution itself is a necessary part of human existence, and periodic revolution allows humankind the opportunity to institute positive change.
Permaculture offers the opportunity for such revolutionary change. A holistic approach to everything, permaculture has a particular focus on food production. Within a permaculture system, old problems are evaluated from new angles, and no possible solution is dismissed due to its privatives. The small, self-contained communities that emerge can sustain themselves, while simultaneously liberating community members from the shackles of perceived needs and the subtle prison of hegemony.
Permaculture, a term coined by Bill Mollison in 1959, is defined by Toby Hemenway as "a set of techniques for holistic landscape designs that are modeled after nature yet include humans." The primary focus: the ability of humans to sustain themselves without damaging the environment with which they coexist.
Permaculture, like sustainability, strives to meet the needs of the present without compromising the needs of the future. By acknowledging the need for development of new technologies and new suitable areas for habitation, permaculture stands apart from typical "anti-growth" forms of green activism. Instead, permaculture focuses on creating a sustainable system that can support itself without relying on external inputs, and that does not have dwindling returns.
Current forms of agriculture are unsustainable for these very reasons. The immense quantity of energy required by a modern farm, operated by fossil fuels and other unsustainable resources, far outweighs that required by a permaculture site in regard to efficiency of output. In conventional farming, the soil is depleted of nutrients, the runoff accumulates, and the damage to the environment ramps up with every passing day. As existing fields become less productive, more are hacked out of the landscape. In South America, Africa and beyond, this is done by burning and clear-cutting jungle and forest, eliminating biodiversity and causing erosion in the tropical climates. Rather than consider that perhaps current methods of choice are not the best choices for our planet, farms "stay the course" toward ecological destruction.
Permaculture is a promising solution to the dangers of over-consumption and ecological failure. The danger may not be within this decade, or even several decades, but the evidence suggests that the danger is imminent and a solution must be sought. Hegemony has presently locked society into this cycle of environmental destruction, and continues to thwart attempts to create a sustainable future. The only prospect of a sustainable future requires freedom from the hegemonic power. This freedom can be germinated by sustainable living through permaculture.