Foreword

by Vinay Gupta

For years, we've waited for the practical guide.

Actually transforming your life to be less vulnerable, and less a part of the problem, is difficult.

A lot of us get caught up in the maze of spending 5 or 10 years trying to understand what is happening in the world, and working through successive phases of engagement: personal, then political, then communitarian, then personal again as we try and fail to find a leverage point from which to fix the world.

Bob stayed home, and built. He went through the process of orienting, of finding out what mattered in his life, and found a way to be in his community and in his person that made sense to him, with the big picture on the outside matching the action on the ground. He squared global awareness and local activity, and he built.

iPermie reminds me of Synergetics, Buckminster Fuller's magnum opus. Like Synergetics, iPermie frames a novel way of looking at the world and your place within it. Unlike Synergetics, iPermie is accessible to common-and-garden humans: the radical rethink it proposes feels natural and rightly ordered, rather than proposing a world of dihedral angles and interlocking prisms. But it is the same scope, the radical root-and-branch redesign of the world that's held in mind, the difference being that a person of modest means and due discipline can actually implement iPermie.

If society is ready to hear what Bob has to say, there will be real changes. Every generation of diggers and dreamers wonders if the time has come, if now is the time for the sword to be beaten into a ploughshare, and for the shovel and honest labour to displace the internal combustion engine, and all the war, warming and lies that go with it. I think there is strong evidence that the tide has turned, and the time is now. Let me talk about two examples.

Detroit hit the end of the road as Motor City, as the great car-export capital of the world. While urban blight ravaged some areas, graceful reinvention took hold in others, as farms and collectives and communitarians came back, dug in and started to use the opportunity of the city (cheap real estate and few other options) to live and then showcase their values — in action! It's too early to say where that municipal transformation will go, whether it will fizzle-and-bust or whether it'll be the seed for a New America, but the point is that there is hope from the Green Ideal in an environment where — literally — all else has failed.

Then there is the grave matter of Sandy where we saw, in no uncertain terms, how quickly seven million urbanites in the world's premier city could be left shuddering cold apes in lightless caves. Nature does not often give us such a warning, but we are coming to blows with the ecosystem without a doubt, and the wrath of the sea has always been among humanity's primal fears with good reason. King Canute ordered his throne put on the shoreline to prove to his courtiers and subjects that he was not a god, that the tide would rise, and there was nothing he could do about it. Our current generation of potentates expect to be out of office by the time the water reaches the White House, but it is still rising, whether they are on the shoreline to meet it or not. In an increasingly trying age, with increasingly large gaps left by the State and its services, facing what is likely to be a century of paying for 20th century excess, we can only look to each-other and to the soil for support.

It is not that civilization is finished, but the boom of the 20th century, where military victory and cheap oil hoist America shoulder-high above a still-starving planet, is over. We must all rejoin the real world, and that means knowing who grows our food personally, not relying on a faceless machine to connect us to them, and triple the price on the way through for the privilege.

The book is huge: a thousand page door-stopper that starts at first principles and covers everything that I am aware of, from first political principles through to detailed instructions on sourdough culture. The price you pay for completeness is comprehensibility — if you start at the beginning and read to the end in a few sessions, you won't be able to integrate what you've seen. Rather, I recommend reading the first few chapters, the framing, the overview, the vision and then letting your interest and the table of contents guide you, gradually opening up perspective in new areas as you go. Implement small steps — start with bread, if you don't bake already, or perhaps the ever-present garden. Do a little, read more, do a little more. Weave together learning and activity. Read with friends, share projects, build communities. Practice, and put plans into practice. It is not a book to sit on a shelf for a rainy day, it's a book to plant like a seed in your life, to water, care for and grow until something very different is created: life whole, with the grain.

I don't know how long we have before the sweeping changes which are engulfing our civilization will bite hard enough to bring tears. If you are under 25, you've seen your future mortgaged away to pay off banks and usurious student loans as rentiers in real estate and education attempt to ensure their middle ages will be fat and happy. If you are old, you witness the crumbling of health insurance and (in socialist countries) the decline of the welfare state. The center cannot hold, because in truth it was never a whole center, never a real wholeness — our system, our civilization is the last dregs of imperialism trying to hold on to unwarranted privilege and military power at a time when neither is sustainable. We cannot afford a space program, but somehow there's always more money for weapons. When that machine stops, and each nation has to live on its own income, rather than enslaving its neighbours through free trade at gunpoint, there will be changes to the way we live which go right to the heart of things, make no mistake.

But that change is not the end of civilization, only the end of exploitation. What Bob is teaching you to do is to be a free citizen of a fair world, where we live by the sweat of our own brow, rather than through the oppression and exploitation of other nations, other people, and other species. It is a radical change because exploitation is the norm, and fairness an expensive exception, but as the whip hand of capitalism weakens, in a fairer world, we will all have to pay our way.

This, then, is the path: free citizens of a fairer world, one day at a time, together. There's no better travel guide than this book, and I recommend it whole-heartedly.

Vinay Gupta, UK 20 November 2012