Applying Bill Mollison’s Teachings to OUR Struggle
One of the greatest myths of modern civilization is the idea of self-sufficiency in isolation. The lone wolf, the rugged individualist—these are fairy tales peddled to keep people from seeing the strength they hold together. True resilience, as nature shows us time and again, is not in isolation but in intelligent interdependence. Any permaculturist worth their weight in compost knows this.
Look to the forest. No tree grows alone. Beneath the soil, mycelium weave intricate networks, passing nutrients and information between roots, ensuring that the whole system thrives. The tallest trees support the understory, and the leaf litter of the past feeds the future. This is not charity; this is design—nature’s design. And it’s the same principle that must guide us in times of struggle.
Interdependence as Strength
A failing system, whether a monoculture plantation or a collapsing government, always demands submission to a singular authority. It replaces diversity with uniformity, autonomy with dependence, and knowledge with compliance. It hoards resources and doles them out sparingly, always ensuring that those who receive remain subjugated to those who control the flow. The antidote? Mutual support rooted in diversity, adaptability, and shared abundance.
Let’s take food as an example. The industrial system has spent the better part of a century convincing people that food comes from a shelf, wrapped in plastic, its origins irrelevant. They have severed the link between people and their sustenance, making them dependent on fragile supply chains that can be interrupted at a moment’s notice. But those who grow together, share seeds, cultivate backyard food forests, and build local networks of exchange are immune to this manipulation. Their systems don’t collapse under pressure—they shift, they adapt, they thrive. This is resilience.
Progression Through Design
The answer is not to withdraw from society but to out-design it.
A degraded landscape is not a sentence; it is a challenge. With the right interventions—swales, companion planting, water harvesting, and stacking functions—wasteland becomes abundance. The same principle applies to human society. A neglected community, fractured and downtrodden, is not beyond repair. It simply needs strategic intervention: skill-sharing, cooperative resource management, and the empowerment of every individual to contribute to the collective resilience.
If the system is designed to extract and exploit, we must design systems to regenerate and support. A garden provides more than just food; it creates security, it heals, it builds relationships. A community that controls its own resources—water, food, shelter—is a community that cannot be controlled. Each system we build, whether a food forest or a self-organized cooperative, is an act of defiance against centralized dependency.
Preserving Resources and Retaining Resilience
One of the core principles of permaculture is to observe before acting. Those who hold power rely on people reacting without thought, burning energy in meaningless opposition. But observation shows us where the weaknesses lie, where energy is wasted, and where we can design solutions that render oppression irrelevant.
Consider water. Governments and corporations seek to control it, bottling it, damming it, restricting access. Yet rain falls freely, and with the right catchment, a household or an entire village can be water-independent. The same applies to energy. A decentralized power grid of small, local solutions—solar, wind, micro-hydro—removes the ability of centralized forces to dictate who gets power and who does not.
This is true in human relationships as well. A person isolated is vulnerable; a person connected to a network of skills, resources, and support is unstoppable. In times of struggle, it is not those who hoard that survive—it is those who share wisely, store intelligently, and ensure that no resource, whether physical or intellectual, is wasted.
Final Thoughts: A System That Cannot Be Broken
The beauty of a well-designed system is that it doesn’t just survive pressure—it thrives under it. Every crisis presents an opportunity to grow stronger, to refine, to expand. The great lie of empire is that it is permanent, unshakable. But nothing unnatural ever truly lasts. Nature reclaims. People adapt. The monoculture of control gives way to the polyculture of liberation.
If the goal is to build a future that is not just survivable but abundant, the answer lies not in waiting for solutions from above but in planting them, growing them, and sharing them. When one node of the web is attacked, the others strengthen. When one community is threatened, others come to its aid. This is how forests persist through fire and storm. This is how people endure.
Build networks, not dependencies. Cultivate knowledge, not obedience. Grow food, not fear.
And most importantly—never let them convince you that you are alone.
