Dr Terrence Leahy

Permaculture is an environmental movement that makes us reevaluate what it means to be sustainable. Through innovative agriculture and settlement design, the movement creates new communities that are harmonious with nature. It has grown from humble origins on a farm in 1970s Australia and flourished into a worldwide movement that confronts industrial capitalism. The Politics of Permaculture is one of the first books to unpack the theory and practice of this social movement that looks to challenge the status quo. Drawing upon the rich seam of publications and online communities from the movement as well as extensive interviews with permaculture practitioners and organisations from around the world, Leahy explains the ways permaculture is understood and practiced in different contexts. In the face of extreme environmental degradation and catastrophic climate change, we urgently need a new way of living.

Reformist critics of globalisation see global governance as the solution to poverty relief in the developing world. Marxist critics see this poverty as an effect of global structures. Yet governments and NGOs continue to construct local projects. How do these projects fit a global analysis of power? Most projects seek to integrate the poor. This article asks whether projects might work better by detaching participants from global capitalism. Focusing on the landless poor, the second part of the article examines common strategies for localised interventions in the developing world. Examples come from fieldwork in Egypt and Sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper traces the ontogenesis of a specific environmental campaign in Indonesia. A highly effective struggle to save the local city forest was instigated by young activists in Bandung who had previously been involved with Greenpeace Indonesia. The data comes from interviews, a focus group and ethnographic fieldwork. The paper illustrates the point that when youth get involved in a highly structured environmental protest movement like Greenpeace, the skills, network resources and confidence they gain there can later be deployed to great advantage in a local conservation campaign. That phenomenon can be understood using the notion of radical habitus derived from the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu. Its creation was reinforced by the dispositions developed through the young activists' previous involvement in Greenpeace training and activism. In the end, the development of the radical ecological habitus of young activists is formative for shaping a radical disposition, which can be deployed in the domain of protest.

The mainstream environmental movement has tended to accept the continuation of capitalism and the growth economy. A de-materialization is hoped to follow from limits on the use of natural resources. Eco-Marxists have opposed this strategy, claiming environmental problems are intrinsic to capitalism. More recently a tendency which I will call "radical reformism" has been gaining strength. Radical reformists argue that a growth economy is not compatible with environmental limits. They look to regulate capitalism to prevent growth. The overall intention is for a peaceful transition within a broadly capitalist economy. The eco-Marxist critique of mainstream environmentalism can also be applied to radical reformism. While radical reformists may have some answers to this critique, these answers bring further problems.