Rampant inequality may define our world, but I hold firm to my belief about privilege. Let’s not mistake narcissism, entitlement, consumption, distraction, and arrogance for privilege; or self-pity, victim consciousness, manipulation, despair, and desire for a lack of privilege. These are all illnesses of the soul.
In America, the transition to this vision will involve a severe disruption of our present way of life. In other countries where people still practice small-scale farming akin to modern permaculture, the transition might be much smoother. They can leapfrog the 20th century directly into the 21st, without repeating our ecologically and socially devastating mistakes. People in other lands can adapt the principles of permaculture to their own specific environmental and social circumstances. This is not about clever white people inventing a new model and imposing it on someone else. (Indeed, many permaculture techniques have been adopted from indigenous farmers around the world.) It is about everyone learning from everyone else, all guided by the ideal of wedding agronomy to ecology and fostering bioregional food self-sufficiency.