Well, of course, it doesn’t say that. In fact, I doubt those who are arguing for the GND have ever heard of permaculture. Nor, if Mike Adams is right, have they really understood the implications of the GND for our eating habits in the U.S.A. And by that, I’m not just talking about all the soft drinks that seem to line every supermarket basket hauled by obese folks looking for their next sugar or fake sugar fix (this image is fresh in mind, having just gotten some organic veggies from a local supermarket and followed an obese couple’s basket loaded with soft drinks and processed “food” through the line); I’m also talking about the way food — both organic and poisoned — is hauled across the country in big trucks. In fact, it’s that fact, the way food production and distribution works here in the U.S., that first put me on the track towards permaculture, having watched the movie, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil  in 1991, when the trucks and tractors and cars all stopped moving due to the oil tankers from the former Soviet Union no longer reaching that island.

That was in 2003. I started to look around, and realized what Mike Adams outlines  in his fear-mongering post:

ANALYSIS: How AOC’s Green New Deal would unleash a catastrophic food collapse and Venezuela-style mass starvation across America

He’s right. Everything depends on cheap fossil fuels. At least now it does, and for the foreseeable future. Mike has great fun talking about how many solar panels it would take to power one of the giant tractors currently used by Big Ag. Those panels would take 70 square feet, and tip the whole contraption over  in the slightest wind.

But Mike doesn’t know about permaculture either, apparently. He just makes fun of the GND without offering the obvious alternative: scale down Big Ag to small farms, in fact to tiny, intensively cultivated plots, the kind of farming I remember seeing from my train window in Thailand six years ago. The kind that used to percolate throughout this country. Mom and Pop farms.

But then, how do we scale down? Confiscate the land now owned by Big Ag? Have Big Socialist/Communist Government move in and just take the land over? I imagine that AOC, if she knew about permaculture, would salivate over this idea, say say yes, that’s what to do! After all, that’s what Communist China did, remember? And confiscated people from their usual occupations — academic, medical, artistic, and so on — as laborers for big collective communist farms. How well did that work out, eh?

I think not. Instead, what we need is real life education, at all levels, starting with little kids, and we need many more small experimental templates for how we could be doing things differently, if we scale down to our own localities. Many more places like Green Acres Village, for example, which practices both social and land-based permaculture; we need much more support for farmers markets, CSAs, urban farms, back and front and side yard gardening. Food stands on every block. Zoning changes to encourage these transformations. And especially, we need to both change our food habits, to focus on what’s fresh and local, and learn how to live together again, rather than so separately. Cooperatively, rather than in competition. And to do this voluntarily. Get to know our neighbors! Start cultivating the land between our houses together. Start seeing green lawns as poisoned wastelands, ripe for planting! Start eating together once in a while — without cell phones! Real food, food that we grow. On and on. There’s so much ferment in the air right now, and it’s high time we started to act on our desires for local autonomy, local authority, local sovereignty.

I write this on Valentine’s Day. Happy Valentine’s Day! And you know? The strangest thing happened to me last night: A dream, of a man, grey haired, wrinkled, average stature, and with a calm, wise, precise nature that is thoroughly compatible with my adventurous spirit; in fact, he knows me, and I know him! How? I can see and feel him dear and clear as day, even now. And yet I have never met this man in waking life. So Happy Valentine’s Day to me! For, like all of us, I inhabit many realms, one of them in the dreamtime, where my Valentine appeared!

But I digress. What I really wanted to mention was the fact that Chiron, the wounded healer, after a long sojourn through soft, dreamy Pisces — that began in February 2011 and offered either compassion or escapism and distraction as the antidote to the rough and tumble of the Uranus/Pluto square that dominated this era — will now cross into action-oriented, wham-bang Aries, on February 18, to remain there until April 2027. That’s over eight years!

During these eight years, Pluto will move back and forth over its own natal place in the U.S.A. chart for the very first time, so you know damn well that we’re going to have to learn how to work with Power in a whole new way. Rather than lording it over others, the swaggering, forever adolescent hegemon, I suggest we recognize the immense power buried in the land, and buried in our own bodies’ connection to the land. Pluto rules the primal life force that powers both, and with Uranus about to move into earthy Taurus in early March for seven years, this human connection to Mother Earth herself will become more and more blatant, especially as Earth begins to move and sway and erupt with her bottom up Uranian power that can also move through us. Bottom up power of and through We the People. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

Okay, now that we see the larger picture, with the new Uranus sojourn in Taurus coupled with Pluto about to engage in a process of conjuncting the U.S.A. natal Pluto for the very first time, let’s go back to Chiron.

Remember, Chiron’s cycle is slightly over 51 years. So if you haven’t lived that long, then you have no idea what Chiron is about. However, if you have lived that long and longer, then try to remember back to that time: what wound that had been festering for years — maybe even since you were a kid! — actually began to heal then? Not because you did anything drastic about it, though you might have, but because you began to see it differently, feel it differently; even, to take responsibility for your part in whatever went “off” so long ago,  and with that enlarged understanding, slowly began to heal.

Chiron’s move into Aries will feel subtle at first. You might not even notice it, except perhaps, as an increasing willingness to take chances, to risk your reputation and your money, your stuff; to get going, off the couch, sipping your last Coke or Diet Coke and switching to something less sweet, more nutrient rich. (You might look into Cho-Wa! I’ve let go of coffee entirely due to this amazing beverage.)

What is yours to do? To start? To experiment with? What do you want to accomplish before you die? Do that, start that, now. And hopefully, many of us will start both changing our diets (i.e., taking charge of our health!) and growing our own food, and especially in community with others nearby. Now that would be the real green new deal.