#BlackLivesMatter & Permaculture – A message from Ryan Rising

“Organizing is all about relationships; about creating relationships that can advance a vision of shared power…”  This is what we’re hearing in the dialogues taking place across the country as people begin to focus on issues of racism and how these issues intersect with policing–issues which were brought to light following the killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, and the grand jury decisions to not press charges against the officers responsible for their deaths.  Also interesting is the intersection of these same issues with ecology, and with permaculture, both of which are rooted in relationships – the relationships between people and plants, the relationships between mycelium and bacteria, the relationships between water and soil heath, and so on.  Permaculture teaches us to look at how symbiotic relationships between plants, animals, insects, and other organisms create a diverse and resilient ecology.  We also see through this lens that people are part of nature, and we too can relate to each other in ways that create mutual benefits, overall health, and wellness.

Read here and sign the Solidarity Statement from the Permaculture Community with the recent movement that has popularly expressed itself through the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter: http://blackpermaculturenetwork.org/solidarity-statement/

Is is through building relationships that we will stand together in our efforts to build a better world with one another.  Standing in solidarity with people of color, and with those adversely affected by police violence in a discriminatory way, requires building real relationships with those affected.  It is hard work, but it is of the utmost importance in moving forward the aspirations that have been brought up through the recent #BlackLivesMatter movement.  How are those around us affected?  State violence goes far beyond police killings of unarmed black people.  State violence is seen in the thousands of households in Detroit that have had their water privatized and cut off this year, in the disproportionately high rate of anti-LGBTQ violence affecting transgender women of color (http://www.avp.org/storage/documents/2014.10.3_ncavp_ma_aniya%20parker.pdf), in the concentration of industrial pollution in poor neighborhoods and communities of color, a phenomenon termed “environmental racism.”

Pandora Thomas (http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-12-22/responding-to-the-prison-industrial-complex-with-permaculture-and-resilience), one of the co-authors of the Solidarity Statement from the Permaculture Community, reminds us that permaculture is largely based on principles and patterns.  Permaculture is built on people care as one of the three central ethics that create its foundation; and a pattern that we are seeing played out is one of disproportionate loss of life and discriminatory violence perpetuated by a system, a system that is proving itself to not be life-affirming.  Systems are designed, and when systems are not designed to affirm life, situations like those of Michael Brown and Eric Garner are the result.  Permaculture teaches us to design systems that affirm life, and in doing so, we must not only design how we grow food, how we catch and store water, and how we build topsoil, but we must also design the way our systems facilitate relationships between people.  Let us look at the pattern of how police are interacting with certain groups of people.  Has our social ecology been constructed (https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the-police/) to maintain this pattern? If so, why?  How can we redesign a system that fosters a diversity of life, and take actionable steps to implement it here and now? ”

-Ryan Rising
Permaculture Educator & Organizer