The question has been asked: ‘What are the new emerging worldviews that underpin sustainable communities?’ A difficult question, but a useful one. I have been cataloguing my library of books, many published 20 years ago, and no less relevant for that, especially since they predate the current obsession with the twin threats of Climate Change and Peak Oil, so they look at what damage has been done through having readily available energy to power machinery. I have been making a few notes on each book, and on ‘emerging worldviews’, this relatively recent one is relevant:

Amory Starr, Naming the Enemy: Anti-Corporate Movements Confront Globalization ( London: Zed, 2000) Describes three types of social movements opposing fundamentals of market capitalism:

1. those trying to constrain corporate power through democratic institutions and direct action;
2. those attempting ‘globalization from below’ in which corporations will be re-shaped in service of new international structures which will be populist, participatory and just; and
3. those seeking to delink their localities and communities from the global economy and rebuild instead small-scale societies in which large corporations have no role at all.

Starr assumes that one worldview all of us radicals take is ‘anti-globalization’, and sustainable communities’ are part of a social movement (Starr’s third) opposed to that. But one can see globalization in positive terms, as a worldview focused on an emerging global network of sustainable communities, supporting each other and helping seed new ones. I see what Tagore, Geddes and others were doing in the 1930s in those terms: rural reconstruction plus ‘world in one nest’ universities, opposition to nation states and top-down rule generally. Another possible worldview that’s not actively ‘anti-globalization’ is the interconnectedness thing: never mind what everyone else is doing, do what you see as ethical where you are and it will catch on and become a global epidemic.

In an article in New Internationalist on ‘The ethical heart of permaculture’ (NI 402 July 2007, p.6), Maddy Harland, Editor of Permaculture Magazine, says that the combined presence of the ethics ‘has a radical capacity for social transformation’, and that we cannot and should not ‘design our own private Eden’. As I have explained elsewhere, my problem with permies, at least the ‘early adopters’, was that they seemed to resist or inhibit the growth of the movement, maybe from purist motives. Surely the first ethic has to be both ‘earth care’ and ‘Earth care’: look after the soil and the planet, as Maddy says in her NI piece very clearly. That means we need a politics, not just a grassroots micro-politics, but a worldview deliberately and energetically growing the movement, and ethically obliged and determined to do that.

Murray Bookchin’s The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia: New Society, 1986) is good on the reinstatement of an ethical stance after ‘the toxic legacy of realpolitik’ and the ‘era of moral relativism’, which for me means forget about Starr’s 1 and 2. But one thing Bookchin is clear about is that it is not enough to talk and write about ethical social change, it has to be tested empirically, hence ‘sustainable communities’ are crucial, which doesn’t make the talking and writing about it useless, because how else can it spread fast enough to fulfil the ‘Earth care’ ethical goal?

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