A morning with Ernesto Sirolli
Ernesto Sirolli… he inspired permaculture practitioners in the 1990s with his hands-on approach to livelihood creation and local economic…
Explorations in permaculture…
A morning with Ernesto Sirolli
Ernesto Sirolli… he inspired permaculture practitioners in the 1990s with his hands-on approach to livelihood creation and local economic initiatives. His work focused on local possibilities. It indirectly connected to earlier attempts to take control of the economic forces that shape our society, what they produce and how they could be redirected towards socially useful production. Let’s take a look at Ernesto’s inspiring work and how it links to earlier initiatives to reshape the economies that shape how we live.
IT WAS MORE than a decade ago now. I was working for City of Sydney as their Landcare and Community Gardens coordinator when Ernesto Sirolli did a talk for staff. I came away inspired.
Ernesto was a middle aged man with thick, wavy hair and a strong Italian accent despite his years in Australia. At the time of his talk he was living in the US. Dressed in his suit and tie, he looks like someone who has just left a business meeting. That might not be an erroneous assumption, for his work with the Sirolli Institute was in training people to set up businesses as a means of making things happen, whether for-profit social businesses or not-for-profit social enterprise (a social business is a for-profit enterprise that directs some of its profits to social programs; a social enterprise is a business established to directly support an organisation’s social program, such as a charity might set up).
I first encountered Ernesto in the ’90s through his book, Ripples in the Zambezi. I have an idea I bought the book at the Permaculture International Journal office when it was based at Lismore City Farm. Like the city farm, the Journal is long gone. It was a print magazine. Its last edition was in 2000.
The book and the idea
But, Sirolli’s book. It was published in 1995 by Institute for Science and Technology Policy at Murdoch University in Western Australia. It soon became popular in Australian permaculture circles. Why? Because it offered a fresh, grassroots approach to community economic development. There was interest in that among some in the permaculture milieu of the time. The back cover blurb puts it this way:
(the book) suggests to the reader why, when considering economic development, we should shift our focus away from from formulae and macroeconomic strategies and return to the focus of innovation and endeavour, mainly in the human hearts, head and hands.
For Ernesto, it started in 1975 when he picked up a book by an English economist. This book, he explained, was about a human-scale economics. It changed how he saw the world. It changed his life. He acted in it. By the time he reached the last page his life was set on a new course. What book was this that could change lives so easily? None other than EF Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful.
Disillusion triggers rethink
Ernesto tells the audience of how disillusion can be the first stage of change. It starts in Africa.
They plant the tomatoes in the soil by the Zambezi. The Italian international aid workers worked hard and felt good about it. They had come to help.
Morning comes.
The plants are gone.
Not damaged. Not trampled. Gone. Ernesto stands in the early morning light with the other aid workers, trying to understand it. No tracks. No sign of theft. Only the river, moving quietly… and small ripples spreading across its surface. Ernesto watches the water. It moves. Dark shapes emerge, slow and heavy. Eyes break the surface. Wide mouths open and close. Hippos. Fat and slow, looking the way animals do when they have eaten well. Now, the aid workers know where their tomatoes went. No one had asked the locals about the diets of hippos. The incident will later give Ernesto the title of his book.
The tomatoes teach a lesson. The doubts begin. Ernesto starts to see the aid project as well-intentioned but blind to local knowledge. Foreigners arrive with plans and money and confidence. They do not arrive with questions. Disillusion came fast. He grows tired of people explaining to others what is good for them. Tired of experts who never listen. Aid, he comes to believe, is failing by design.
You don’t show up with a briefcase full of solutions when you do not know the problems…
The story of those ripples in the Zambezi was what Ernesto starts his Sydney Town Hall House presentation with. He expands on the aid theme. He warns against turning up in some lesser developed country and assuming you have the knowledge, the right, even, to start to tell locals what they should do for their own good. Who do you think you are to do this, he asks?
Ernesto speaks of the hippos. The room is quiet. Before you help, he says, two things must happen: you must be invited; and you must listen. This means disregarding any belief you entertain that you have the answers when you barely understand the problem. When people ask for your help, then you ask them how you can help. “You don’t show up with a briefcase full of solutions when you do not know the problems”. When someone asks for help, ask them how. Anything else is arrogance dressed as charity.
Someone asks how you get invited. Ernesto smiles. His eyes sweep over the audience seated in front of him. “You do something good where you live,” he tells them. “You do something here in Sydney. You do it so well that others ask you how. People in other cities will call you and ask how you did that. Then they will say ‘please come and teach us’”.
start by helping yourself in your own country before dashing off imagining you can help people in less-developed countries…
I sit listening to Ernesto. His message about starting aid work at home, where you live, resonates with me because I have heard it before, years ago, though not all that many years ago. It came from the late Badri Dahal, at the time the manager of the Nepalese NGO, the Institute for Sustainable Agriculture Nepal (INSAN). Badri was a can-do sort of person. Practical. Knowledgable. Quietly spoken. Adaptive. The sort of person who could take an idea and turn it into something on the ground.
INSAN was one of those largely forgotten initiatives that had an association with permaculture. It took traditional Nepalese farming systems and plugged permaculture ideas into them. The organisation’s work was pioneering. It had an impact of those of us who met Badri. I still have the manual on sloping land agricultural technology he gave me. It is about agricultural terrace construction and growing crops on steeply sloping land, like they have in Nepal. INSAN attracted interest in permaculture but like other projects and ideas, it came into the permaculture milieu and then it went. You don’t hear much of it within the permaculture scene now. Those who were active in the movement at the time will remember. We found it inspirational.
The manual on sloping land agricultural technology was a how-to for cultivating Nepal’s steep hillsides.
What Badri said was similar to what Ernesto told the audience that day: start by helping yourself in your own country before dashing off imagining you can help people in less-developed countries. It was a warning against assuming the limited knowledge imparted by a permaculture design or some other course is sufficient to start teaching people in other places what they should do. Especially where there is little practical work to develop knowledge and skills after the course. It’s like the cliche says: a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Ernesto put it this way: “If people don’t want to be helped you leave them alone. This should be the first principle of aid”.
Following his disillusion with the aid industry and long before he landed in Western Australia, Ernesto went to study in South Africa. There, he came under the influence of thinkers like Maslow, Rogers, Fromm and others who influenced [Humanistic Psychology](http://Humanistic Psychology). Coming to Australia, he was supervised in his PhD, itself influenced by Schumacher’s ideas, by the noted urban planning educator and author, Peter Newman. Newman has written extensively on planning and sustainability, including the book, *Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change*. Among other topics, the book highlights the limitations of permaculture-influenced notions of decentralised self-reliance at the household scale being applied to cities as whole systems.
Ernesto’s studies led him to the belief that people have a wish to improve themselves, to be a better person. This, he says, is not culture-specific. It is universal and is to do with self-actualisation.
He tells the audience the story of his enterprise facilitation work in Esperance where he helped set up small businesses. The town was headed full speed on an economic downhill run following government limitations on the tuna fishery. That put people out of work. It was a cascading disaster, as he tells it. Catch limitations meant fewer fish. Fewer fish flowed into the fish processing plant where it trigger redundancies. That flowed on to the other businesses in town. Suddenly, once-employed people found themselves in poverty. They couldn’t sell up and move to Perth because their properties lost value as the town’s economic prospects dissolved.
Council staff and other social gatekeepers explained to Ernesto that people in Esperance didn’t want to help themselves and, anyway, ” …no one wanted to do anything. The government employment service said I would make a fool of myself… people in Esperance didn’t have any ideas of their own”. In the end, it was these gatekeepers who proved to be devoid of ideas and imagination when Ernesto facilitated new small businesses among people who had lost their livelihoods.
It is not ideas that change the world, according to Ernesto. It is passion. And you find this even in ghettoes.
Looking back to look forward
Social entrepreneur Nic Frances describes the evolution of his thinking and work in his book, *The End of Charity: Time for Social Enterprise*. His argument is that traditional charity alone cannot solve issues like poverty and inequality. He advocates for social entrepreneurship in which businesses incorporate social and environmental values into their operations. They use some of their profit to fund community work. His work and that of Ernesto Sirolli link back to an idea that caused something of a stir among economically literate community and organisational activists during the 1980s.
LEIs. Local Economic Initiatives. The idea formed something of a movement at the time. LEIs were a grassroots response to economic changes that were leading to deindustrialisation in the West and rising unemployment. LEIs tapped into community activism to rebuild local economic capacity. It was a shift in thinking, a new economic manifesto. Economic development was no longer seen solely as the domain of private markets and government. Social goals could blend with economic pragmatism to create livelihoods for local people.
LEIs experimented with a range of ideas: cooperatives, social enterprise. We can see how their appeal to communities that wanted greater autonomy in shaping their own economic futures would also appeal to the economically, socially and politically literate among permaculturists.
In the LEI’s we hear a distant echo of the ideas of Fritz Schumacher, the English economist who wrote Small is Beautiful. The book argued that economic systems should operate at the smallest appropriate scale. They should privilege human needs, local knowledge and community control. Schumacher popularised the idea of intermediate technology (later known as ‘appropriate technology’): more efficient than traditional technology; more locally affordable and maintainable than hi-tech. Schumacher’s Intermediate Technology Development Group (now Practical Action) promoted tools and technologies that were affordable, locally maintainable, ecologically sensitive and that were not labour‑displacing.
The idea segued into the LEIs, although not always explicitly. LEIs embraced similar principles: small workshops, repair‑based industries, local manufacturing using simpler machinery (intermediate technology) and training programs to built practical, transferable skills. The idea? Technology should serve communities. It should not displace them. Schumacher provided the intellectual and ethical scaffolding. LEIs built the practical experiments. The ideas flowed into Ernesto’s work.
Lucas Aerospace: worker-led innovation
LEIs were not the only alternative economic initiative around that time. The Lucas Aerospace workers’ *Lucas Plan* (and here) was a worker‑led industrial conversion proposal. It began in the mid‑1970s and its influenced continued into the 1980s. It was not formally part of the Local Economic Initiative scene, however it shared philosophical and practical affinities with it.
It starts when Lucas Aerospace announces major job cuts across its UK production facilities. The move stimulates the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Committee, a cross‑union body, to start work on their own alternative industrial plan. Two years of research and consultation follow. The worker‑designed plan that comes out of it proposes that the company shift from military production toward socially useful products such as public transport, medical equipment and other technologies. The Plan is truly innovative and potentially transformative. It is decades ahead of its time.
A note about the magazine cover in the graphic: Science for the People was an influential radical science organisation of the 1970s and 1980s. It blended antiwar activism, labor politics and critiques of scientific institutions. A network, it published a magazine. It was originally called Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action and was based on the idea that science is not neutral because it is shaped by political and economic forces, and the idea that scientists have a responsibility to oppose oppressive uses of science.
Despite its technical sophistication and public support, the Plan is never implemented. Neither the UK Labor government nor the national union leadership apply enough pressure on Lucas management to adopt it.
The Lucas Plan was entrepreneurial. It pre‑dates the LEI movement and was not organisationally part of it. It emerged from workplace organising within a single corporation. Its value lay in challenging top‑down economic decision‑making and in seeking to retain skills and jobs in declining industrial regions. It showed that industrial skills can be redirected toward social needs. The Lucas Plan became an influence on industrial democracy, green technology and worker‑led innovation. It was precursor, inspiration, intellectual fellow traveller to the LEI movement. It showed that workers could imagine and design a different kind of economy rooted in social need, local capability and democratic control. Those were core LEI beliefs.
Across cultures, Ernesto learned, people want to grow. They want to become more than they are. For Ernesto, the realisation went back to Small Is Beautiful. Ideas can be the start of changing the world, he says. Passion makes them happen. Passion like that behind the Lucas Plan.
Watch the video: https://youtu.be/C-3lZYT3izI. Source: Labour Heartlands.
The permaculture connection: tenuous but real
There was something of a buzz around LEIs among those searching for social alternatives during the 1970s, mainly among people with some economic and political knowledge. Information about what was happening overseas, such as the Lucas Aerospace worker’s Plan, came in bits and pieces. We see vestiges of the cooperative spirit of the times in Victoria’s co-building scheme. Participants would assist three, I think it was, earth construction, usually mud brick, projects and then become eligible for their own co-build. It was precursor to the permaculture movement’s ‘permablitz’ scheme of later decades, a group self-help, mutual assistance initiative for building edible home gardens.
Permaculture did not exist at the time LEIs were in formation. Although many in permaculture would have never heard of LEIs, it is a reasonable assumption that spitit of the LEI movement indirectly carried over into permaculture.
Australian permaculture people weren’t just designing gardens in the 1980s and 1990s. They were experimenting with alternative economic forms such as permaculture’s Earthbank initiative, in which Robert Rosen played a key role, and the work of Damien Lynch in starting August Investments, an early social investment business that put funds into socially useful enterprises. Damien later started August Ecoforest, a commercial forestry operation with an exemplary permaculture-designed plantation in NSW (Clarification: I was the media person for August Ecoforests).
In the late-1980s and into the 1990s, Michael Linton, who developed Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS) in British Columbia, developed close ties to Australian permaculture networks during his time in-country. Following that, Australia became one of the global hotspots for LETS uptake. This was often the work of people with connections to permaculture. In at least one instance in Australia and in another in New Zealand, LETS set up local currencies. The basis was the permaculture ethic of fair share, a structure through which people could access goods and services without cash. It was mutual credit rather than monetary accumulation and it favoured trade in local skills and goods.
LETS currency.
During those decades there was interest in some Australian permacuture circles in worker cooperatives as means of creating livelihoods and of coopeatively combining member knowledge and skills; producer co-ops such as around seed saving; small scale agriculture; and food co-ops. As the popularity of initiatives like LETS grew, some established themselves outside of formal permaculture organisations. A more intensive form of organisation and management was required.
These early initiatives influenced the later Transition Towns movement. Many Australian Transition organisers had permaculture backgrounds. They fed the contemporary interest in food sovereignty, community gardening and community energy systems.
Needed: authentic entrepreneurship
Ernesto says it is necessary to understand the difference between entrepreneurship and management. The two groups see the world differently. They act differently in it. “Entrepreneurs are the pioneers, the explorers, the adventurers. Managers are the settlers who come with their seeds and herds”. You need both.
“The word ‘entrepreneur’ has been hijacked. It is not necessarily to do with business. What it really means is an entrepreneur is someone with initiative, someone who seeks opportunity”. Ernesto says that in organisations, let people do what they love. “Form the team”, he tells the audience. “Don’t force people to do what they don’t like”. This suggests the wisdom of allowing specialisation.
we need to facilitate, not regulate…
To help people make things happen and to fulfil his proposal that “the more of us that create the future the better we all are”, Ernesto offered the Enterprise Facilitation model of training. In urban development, he says, he would like to see ‘urban hubs’, centres for enterprise facilitation in new developments where we can help each other find what we need”. This would be a convivial intervention in the urban environment. “People get to know each other”.
Addressing a question about urban development of a council staffer in the audience, Ernesto said he ” …despairs of rules set up never to be changed… planners are the people who stop things happening… rules are made to be changed… we need to facilitate, not regulate… use your power in your work to do this”.
The economy and the language of economics has been co-opted and we need to democratise it, according to Ernesto. He spoke of cities designed to help people meet and build together. He spoke against rigid rules, against planners who stop things instead of helping them happen. Facilitate, he said. Do not regulate life out of existence. At the end, he urged us to reclaim the economy.
And my own work? Any solution?
In the question time following his talk, I ask Ernesto about my work. How could someone working in local government do some of what he talks about? Entrepreneurship is associated with business, not government. His reply? “Think of yourself as a civic entrepreneur. Help communities do what they want to do.”
Afterwards, I try to do what Ernesto suggested, to think like a civic entrepreneur. I didn’t have to go out and create new projects. People in the community already have them in their heads. I start to facilitate them… working around the red tape, providing small grants as startup capital, hiring trainers run workshops in basic skills so as to make a start. I find that in negotiating with other staff it matters how you frame things. Terms, language, framing, they affect for they think. I show people how to context their ideas within the long-term city plan. Show how their proposal implements parts of it. Then you have a better chance of it being accepted. I also take the broader view of how projects fit within the urban environment. The public health and safety angle. Potential links with other initiatives and civic institutions: the network effect (the value of a network is proportional to the number of active nodes within it). How they build knowledge and skills in the community. People proposing a project usually focus on getting it started and then maintaining it. Council staff have to see it within the broader picture of the city.
It isn’t always easy. The structure of local government militates against that sort of approach. It is the world of regulations, of control of the civic sphere that it is reluctant to share. Even where staff want to do something they are hamstrung. Staff, too, can be a block. Some disregard the knowledge of the community they ostensibly serve. They assume they know best and, as we know, that can be far from the reality. I find that one or two have contempt for community initiatives. Others, though, are more supportive.
Lineage
Ernesto… Schumacher… they have been inspirational. And let’s not forget that iconoclastic researcher, thinker and doer whose working life and ecological insight laid the foundations for the permaculture design system: Bill Mollison. I like to think of them, and of others too, as a lineage of innovative and unorthodox thinkers who were not afraid to challenge the orthodoxy. In doing so they left us with ideas that we can take and make something worthwhile from. Their ideas and lives flow like a river carrying inspiration from the past into the present, and on into the future.
The question, I realised, is not ‘why?’. It is ‘why not?’. Once you ask that, you are already questioning. And now, things start to look different.
Our forgotten history… permaculture’s economic initiatives of the 1980s…
More of our little-known story…
For too many people coming into the permaculture design system over recent years, permaculture is a practice without a history. Let’s plug a few of the gaps…
[embed][It’s been 40 years
- September 2019. It is 40 years since the second-ever book on permaculture was published…*medium.com](https://medium.com/permaculture-3-0/its-been-40-years-99dd792ad5de)
More permaculture history here:
Available from: https://au.permacultureprinciples.com/product/permaculture-pioneers Source (right): holmgren.com
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