Seems like there’s a new affliction amongst some segment of permaculturalists these days, maybe we could term it collapsicosis or collapsitis. This peculiar and apparently growing meme goes something like this: We in the permaculture community are doing everything right, and the evil people who care about evil things like money and competition are destroying the world with their globalized corporations, fiat money, agricultural subsidies, and cheap oil. Trying to compete with or displace their system is a wasted effort, and certainly using any of their methods for converting resources into products and services is akin making a deal with the devil and will taint the moral purity of permaculture. Anyway, this whole system is on shaky ground, billions of people are going to die, so let’s just wait for the fiat money house of cards to crash and burn, and then we can get around to the real business of doing permaculture.

What I am proposing, however, are permaculture enterprises that are scalable based on pooled efforts and resources. As I have already said, economies of scale are basically natural law. Failure to execute is our own fault. Lack of good business and economic data, our own fault. A scarcity of polyculture input-ouput models, our own fault. Undercapitalized permaculture enterprises…yeah, that’s partly our fault too.

I am offering a concrete solution that reflects the reality of the world we live in today. And this solution is directly within your locus of control right now. We don’t have to ask permission, get a government grant, or wait for the collapse of fiat money to create worker-owned permaculture production cooperatives. Any other arguments that are not based on strategies of direct social action are only so much white noise.