In a way…

Tthey have diminished us, taken us away from our traditional values and led is into a cage whose bars are debt. And not just individuals and families, but whole nations using their rates and tax revenues to “service” their National Debts, which is why there are electricity blackouts and the grid will not be fixed, water will become scarcer and all state monopolies will fracture and quite possibly break.

So in a way the Monopolists, who were thrown of the temples of Rome two thousand years ago and from the United Kingdom just eight hundred years ago, have ‘won’. They have finally succeeded in taking over the world’s money supply and everything they touch turns to gold, sorry, debt.

With insurmountable debt comes a sense of futility, of life without any other meaning but to say, “sorry Saint

Peter, but I can’t go. I owe my soul to the Company Store.

In the sixties great thinkers were beginning to publish extrapolations of trends at that time and seeing peak oil, peak everything(!) overpopulation and the rest. One of them, Marshall McLuhan, offered a solution he called The Global Village. These, he saw, were the future of the human condition – a planet full of small, self-sustained villages (called suburbs today) of around 2000 people. Each Village had a butcher, baker and candlestick maker, widget crafters and poets.

But also community gardens around which the residents lived ‘off the grid’.

 Each village harvested its own solar and wind energy, collected rainwater and grew their own food – Earth, Air, Fire and Water are all still available from Nature’s cornucopia of bounty.

We do need to return to our common human toots, rediscover and nurture the Gift of Giving and sharing the fact that we are part of the living skin of the planet, the symbiotic interconnected biosphere, a closed system of nutrient trading – oxygen for carbon dioxide bound by nitrogen-fixing bacteria without which we could not survive.

Let the Monopolists pile up their gold.

King Midas starved to death; but he died very rich.

(N.B Permaculture was once known as the Garden of Eden -Tom Dennen)