Alternative Cultures Are Beautiful and Important. They're Also Not Enough.

"The conscious destruction of a competing ethic” and the need for organizing and direct action

Extraction, then and now. Left: Man stands on top of enormous pile of buffalo skulls; another man stands in front of pile with his foot resting on a buffalo skull; rustic cage is at foot of pile. Handwritten on back: "C.D. 1892 Glueworks, office foot of 1st St., works at Rougeville, Mich." Public domain photo. Right: An Allseas engineer inspects the more than 3,000 tonnes of polymetallic nodules stored in the hold of the deep sea mining vessel Hidden Gem (2022). The Metals Company press release photo.

There’s something wrong with modern life. We all know it. Lonely, isolated, and often purposeless, our lives are tightly controlled by laws, clocks and schedules. Work rules our day-to-day, we have little sense of political agency, and worries about debt, savings, and medical costs drive increasing numbers of us into addiction to alcohol, drugs, work, shopping, internet browsing, gaming, pornography, and other forms of self-harm.

Most of us are far more attuned to our smartphones than to our own souls, let alone our communities or the divine mystery of the world. And meanwhile, the ecological crisis accelerates, the climate breaks down further, more species are driven extinct, and our sense of doom grows.

So we seek alternative ways to live. Ecovillages, Transition Towns, community land trusts, housing cooperatives, intentional communities, and shared living spaces are all increasingly popular. I myself live in a sort of not-commune communal living situation in rural Oregon. Just get me the hell out of a nuclear family, suburban, white-picket-fence lifestyle! This is a beautiful and important trend, and I want to support it. But I also want to question one of the fundamental premises that often goes unmentioned in these communities: that these alternatives, in themselves, will change the world.

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The argument is simple: by building alternative ways of life, we can demonstrate to the people that living simply in communal, ecological homes and villages built with natural materials, and using subsistence methods, is just a better way. As understanding and awareness grows, it’s inevitable that people will migrate away from the urban life of 9-5 jobs and coffin-like apartments, and this will drain capitalism of the labor that fuels it.

I can’t disagree that this is a better way to live. My rural home means that rather than dealing with traffic jams, concrete, and crime, I have a daily relationship with birds, deer, and frogs. I watch them year-round, and know specific individuals based on their appearance, habits, and preferences. Living where we do, my friends and I gather wild foods, maintain a small garden and orchard, and share many of our possessions and tools. Our lifestyle is cheaper, more social, less stressful, and easier than urban life. It’s not perfect (it’s often 45℉ in my cabin when I wake up on a winter morning), but it’s far better for me than the alternative.

But to believe that demonstrating alternatives to modern industrial capitalism will result in the end of that system is to ignore power.

Power is the fulcrum on which industrial civilization rests. Most obviously, powerful vested interests — like the owners and renters of real estate, banks that provide loans, and all the rest of people in the food chain (from real estate agents to governments that derive their budgets from property taxes) — don’t want affordable, communal, ecological housing to be available. Their interests are much better served by expensive housing, a growing market, and demand that outstrips growing supply and keeps prices rising. That means big square-footage, fancy design trends, and lots of building permits.

But the problem goes beyond this. Permanent cultures living in sustainable, small scale, and localized ways are nothing new. There are countless examples historically, and a shrinking handful still present today. Some are and have been hunter gatherers, others horticultural, some pastoral, and others crossing these boundaries. The problem is this: whenever the dominant culture we live in (call it whatever you want: industrial civilization, capitalism, modernity, the culture of empire, etc.) comes into contact with these cultures, it destroys them.

When Columbus first landed in the Caribbean, for example, the Taino and Arawak and Lucayan people he encountered were practicing something similar to permaculture, if we consider permaculture not to be a “gardening technique” as it is popularly understood, but rather a cultural design system for deliberate sustainability. They were living in place for thousands of years in what was an ecological paradise.

They were also living in equitable, fair, and healthy communities. As Howard Zinn writes in A People’s History of the United States, the “Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were [at the time of Columbus’ arrival] much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable for their hospitality, their belief in sharing.”

Columbus himself, on the other hand, represented a profoundly different ethic based on hierarchical control, extractive economics, and violence as a tool for power. He wrote in his letters: “As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.” Whatever there is, to Columbus, meant gold, and millions would die to him and his men in their ruthless quest for it.

This ethic extended to growing European colonies in what they called “the new world.” In 1607, the first permanent English colony in North America was established at Jamestown, in what is now called Virginia, on land of the Powhatan Confederacy and the Paspahegh Nation. Within twenty years there were English colonies up and down the eastern seaboard. They were harsh places: strictly hierarchical and puritan, each operated as a corporation to maximize profit. The first slaves arrived in 1619, although the trade didn’t accelerate significantly for nearly 200 years. Many colonists were indentured servants not much better than slaves themselves. Food was scarce. Europe was more than 200 years into the witch burnings, an explosion of patriarchal-religious violence which crossed the Atlantic.

The native people, meanwhile, lived very differently. They had better tasting and more abundant food, superior medicine and hygiene, more comfortable homes, and they weren’t burning women alive. By almost every measure, the nearby tribal nations were living an objectively better lifestyle (and of course, they were living sustainably, too).

It’s no surprise, then, that some of the colonists ran away to join the indigenous nations. Hector St. Jean Crevecoeur, a Frenchman who lived in America for almost twenty years, wrote about how children captured during the Seven Years' War and raised among the tribes would later refuse to leave their new families. He said, "There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to anything to be boasted among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans."

Luther Standing Bear, a Lakota leader, once said that "Only to the white man was nature a wilderness and only to him was the land 'infested' with 'wild' animals and 'savage' people. To us it was tame, Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery." He’s describing the ethos of a permanent culture.

Within four years of the establishment of the Jamestown Colony, the Paspahegh nation was destroyed.

Within 50 years of the first colony on Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), less than 0.1% percent of the indigenous Taino people remained alive. More than a quarter million were dead.

These permanent cultures, which had survived in ecological balance for thousands of years, were conquered militarily. Disease and other things played major factors, but colonization was a process whereby empires colonized, privatized, and outright destroyed the vast majority of permanent cultures on the planet — despite the fact that they were living in an objectively better way (happier, healthier, more egalitarian, sustainable, etc.).

I live on occupied Kalapuya territory. This land was taken by conquest from a permanent culture that lived here for thousands of years. Small but significant portions of the landscape here were carefully tended and managed by humans who had an ethic of reciprocity and respect.

The colonizers did not care about this. They came and they destroyed.

We all know the catalogue of atrocities: the Trail of Tears, concentration camps, smallpox and biological warfare, the destruction of the buffalo, residential schools, massacres, bounties placed on the scalps of Indians in northern California, the Nez Perce war, the Puget Sound war, the Snake War, and on and on and on. The governor of Minnesota, Alexander Ramsey, said in 1862 that "The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state." He proceeded with this war of extermination and presided over the largest mass execution in U.S. history, hanging 38 Dakota men three months later.

Chris Hedges has called the genocide against indigenous people “the conscious destruction of a competing ethic.”

What he means, of course, is that empires cannot allow alternatives to exist. If they do, they represent a threat. This is part of the reason why the West has systematically engaged in a pattern of coups, military interventions, and regime change operations targeting Global South governments which attempt to create financial and trade independence.

If we think that permaculture can simply win over people by being a better way to live, we are deluding ourselves. To a limited extent, it can. But when that threatens systems of established power, they will strike back. I’m not trying to be a naysayer, but we can’t make good decisions without being able to observe a situation honestly. That’s why the first principle in permaculture is “observe.” You can’t make a new way without observing what has come before.

The conclusion that I reach from all of this is that alternative cultures must also be cultures of resistance. We can’t be content with repair, restoration, permaculture, rewilding, conservation, creating alternative communities, and building a new story, although these are absolutely essential. But they can’t by themselves stop this culture’s headlong rush into disaster. To stop the flow of oil, for example, we’ll need to stop the flow of oil. Not just ride bikes. Not just build alternative energy systems. Not just live locally. We’ll need to stop the pumping, shut down the pipelines, prevent the refineries from operating. And we’ll need to do so actively, by working against forces that want to keep the oil (and profit) flowing.

While we’re going about the beautiful and important work of building alternative ways of life, the ruling class is going about their business. The US military is running special operations and drone campaigns throughout the world. The CIA is clandestinely toppling governments and the FBI is undermining movements for change. The World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund are waging economic warfare against poor countries. Mass media corporations are brainwashing hundreds of millions of people with advertising and sophisticated public relations campaigns. Carbon emissions and human population are rising. And the planet is spiraling deeper into crisis.

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Alternatives are beautiful and essential. There is a growing global tapestry of them, a pluriverse of degrowth-oriented lifeways and communities. But our beautiful alternatives have little to no impact on the ruling class. While we’re building beautiful lives, they’re industrializing Halmahera Island for nickel mining. They’re investing in oil extraction in Guyana. They’re behind the forced disappearances and murders of activists in the Philippines, in Colombia, in Mexico, in Pakistan. In other words, alternatives — at best — allow us to hold some small pieces of ground while conceding elsewhere. They allow us to maintain the status quo. They are shaping actions, strategies that allow us to slightly slow the rate at which the destruction continues. They are defensive.

We can say the same thing about most activism that we see in this country and throughout the Western world. Whether we’re talking about Standing Rock, or the fight against the Shell drilling in the Arctic, which I was involved in— these are defensive struggles to stop expansions in infrastructure and industry. Look at the fight against Line 3, against Keystone XL, against Mountaintop Removal mining. They’re defensive struggles. I don’t mean that as a bad thing. It’s incredibly honorable to draw your own line in the sand and say, “not here. Not on my watch.” That’s what we attempted at Thacker Pass. But it’s not sufficient.

That’s why I believe we must move from building alternative cultures to building oppositional cultures. Permaculture movements, Transition Towns, ecovillages, and community land trusts can and must be cultures of resistance. They can be places where militant direct action against the industrial system is discussed and celebrated — where an offensive movement that actively dismantles the global industrial economy is born. They can be schools where movements learn tactics and organizing skills, and study history and security. They can be refuges, underground railroads, places where resisters go for food, material support, and safety.

In this context, their value as alternatives is far greater. As the combination of ecological breakdown and resistance makes the industrial food system and energy grid unreliable, we will all need alternative ways of living. This work is far more difficult than simply building community, gardens, and ecological buildings, but far more consequential.

Imagine a world in which we’ve won these struggles — a world where we never hear the hum of an internal combustion engine ever again. Where we never see another car operating under it’s own power. Imagine a world where the salmon come back, and the dams come down, and the old-growth forests start to return. Imagine a world where people are living in balanced, localized, sustainable communities. This is the world we are fighting for.

The world we’re heading for now is lifeless. David Brower, founder of Earth Island Institute, Friends of the Earth, and former director of the Sierra Club, once said “All I have done in my career is to slow the rate at which things get worse.” This can’t go on. Those species who are being driven extinct right now — 200 of them today alone — they are my kin, and I will fight to defend my family. We need to do more than slow the rate at which things are getting worse, we need to actually stop the destruction. And that means going on the offensive.

Permaculture is often talked about as a revolution disguised as gardening. I think it’s time to drop the disguise.