A lot of us in the Permaculture movement and aligned movements such as Degrowth and Deep Adaptation, have been assuming there would come some sort of “corrective crash” that will “reset” the economy and society.
Many of us are starting to realize that while it may happen, we can’t count on that. A lot of times, what ends up happening is that money and resources get concentrated into fewer hands each time it seems there’s going to be some kind of corrective thing happening with the economy. As one example, the housing market never really seems to crash, such that people at the low rungs can afford to buy a house.
And really, there are lots of examples throughout history. For example, even during the Great Depression, some people got richer even while huge swaths of the population were in dire straits.
And besides, a thing I thought of a few years back is that wanting a crash is basically wishing ill on a lot of people who are not the bad guys. For example, I used to really wish the stock market would crash bigtime. But that would just cause so much suffering among people who are not the culprits of the big problems. Far healthier to wish for a vibrant economy that is beyond the financial sector.
Mike Hoag made a good comment on this thread he started in the Transformative Adventures group. I’m quoting his comment here, and pasting my reply.
I was a big advocate of the Permaculture ‘crash on demand’ strategy (as Holmgren put it.) This was the idea that one of the main mechanisms of Permaculture was leveraging de-consumption to crash some of the most destructive parts of the economy. I’m now re-evaluating my thoughts on this post Covid. We had a major world-wide economic blow and governments borrowed heavily and taxed the common people heavily to avoid a collapse. It worked! And while atmospheric carbon and other forms of pollution took a major short-term hit, the governments heavily subsidized other industries like single-use plastics, to make up the shortfall, and a whole new major pollution problem arose. The sorts of economic corrections that governments allow to happen now are very clearly planned events that shore up the economic status quo, and redistribute ever more money to the ruling classes. After about 25 years of expecting a major economic collapse, I’m not sure it’s the leverage point I once thought.”
— I too have started to notice that some kind of healthy corrective crash never really happens. My version of the constructive crash now is that those of us who are able, we voluntarily start to be able to thrive near the “bottom” so that we minimize the amount of work we have to do in servitude to destructive entities. And maximize the proportion of our work that goes into the land, our neighbors, our communities, restoring planetary cycles & ecosystems.
And actually, in permaculture design class, we did learn a lot about the concept of basically constructing a grassroots parallel economy that was not directly trying to take down the big mainstream economy. And did not need to. I think the more attention we put on this emphasis, the better off we will all be.
Further Reading:
• I highly recommend Mike Hoag’s books, Beauty in Abundance and Growing FREE. (Full disclosure: I am a contributing author to the latter.) And the Transformative Adventures group, of which he is the founder and admin. Visit Mike’s website here; it will lead you to his other platforms as well.