Governance

I was kvetching to Rhonda about Bloomington's silly Naturalized Lawn policy, which basically puts the professional arm of the City Government in the business of landscaping of your front and back yard.

"Just to play devil's advocate," said Rhonda, "what if the City's zoning ordinances required each homestead to submit and follow a permaculture plan?"

"The problem with that," I replied, "is that it's the wrong scale for good permacultural decision-making. At the City scale, people just abdicate their political power to a faceless authority. The government acts in loco parentis and people live without a sense of responsibility to their immediate surroundings. The government can never be as present as householders in zones I-III and so it can't manage them effectively. That's a recipe for negligence, apathy, massive taxes, helpless citizens and punitive policing. No thanks. Even my neighborhood (Green Acres) is too big for good governance. It should split into two or three villages small enough for effective decisions involving Zones II through IV. Also, I would not want leaders selected by competitive election, which invites paid influence, elitism, cronyism and corruption. Instead, they should be assigned by lot from the village, with short, overlapping terms. Even then, leaders would not decide, but would mediate transactions, facilitate consensus and administer back-up voting, schedules and performance review."

I forgot to add that in each decision, someone should be assigned to learn from and speak for the land and its more-than-human inhabitants (perhaps in some cases under the tutelage of knowledgeable mentors). Also, when it comes to Zone V and net flows into and out of villages, they should convene inter-village councils (again by lot and consensus) to set policy. All of which must be absolutely transparent to all residents. No Closed Doors. No Paid Influence.

Rhonda (who is a very talented permaculture teacher) then described how an Indianapolis neighborhood of about 700 houses managed something similar to what I described.

Now we're getting somewhere! Too many environmentalists sound like old-school communists to me. Global warming and global shortages would seem to require global decision-making to solve, but really, they require people to start living much more efficiently. To do that, they must re-use and stretch local resources and depend far less on extraction and imports. They must understand and work with the regenerative power of natural ecologies around them. They must step up to the task of governance at a radically local level, and act with much greater accountability to their immediate neighbors.