A small subset of participants in the Live Oak community met on a weekly or biweekly basis and plant seeds and young plants in typically fallow areas on both private and public property. Although this was an illegal act, the guerilla gardeners believed that leaving the land fallow was more problematic then trespassing or hijacking the space for their own social agenda. The guerilla gardeners gathered just after sunset, each bringing seeds or plants from their personal store and basic hand tools. They typically rode bikes to their target locations and wore dark clothing in effort to be inconspicuous. When I asked the guerilla gardeners how they anticipated the plants would grow and the food would get harvested, they explained that a successful harvest was secondary to making a social statement. Many of the plants would not grow well enough to produce a bountiful harvest because the plants are unmanaged -they do not have consistent irrigation, only rainfall, nor are growing in properly amended soil. Also, some of the sites were fenced, and most citizens are unlikely to trespass beyond a fence for fruits and vegetables of questionable origin. Instead, it was their goal that someone would notice that food was growing in once vacant, fallow space, that the local society would learn that food could grow in unusual places in an urban and suburban environment, and that the local government would notice that its citizens want more local, sustainable food production. However, when collective action creates a noticeable effect, government and industry retaliates and explicit resistance is born .Unlike the acts of quotidian insubordination, plastic garden container appeals for institutional change were not anonymous and were meant to be noticed. For example, the Live Oak sustainable agriculture community appealed to the local government regarding the right to grow food in front yards.

This began when a gardener in Live Oak was cited by the city for not having appropriate ground cover in his front yard as instead of grass, he had a garden . This and similar events motivated individuals to lobby for new and changed city ordinances, run for local office, or run for their HOA board in order to change the institutions they were living within. On several fronts, the Live Oak sustainable agriculture community was successful. For example, in the last five years several counties in Live Oak have started programs to help people raise chickens in their suburban back yards . I witnessed similar forms of striving for institutional change by the Manzanita community. One participant petitioned against the use of pesticides on school grounds from her children’s district to the state . As more community members began installing gardens in their children’s schools, the movement to ban pesticides on school grounds became a community effort. Although the group’s effort was unsuccessful, the community’s awareness surrounding the issue has increased.Participants used ITs in their practice to address problems of sustainability, particularly in the context of agriculture. Participants depended upon ITs in three contexts: design of infrastructure, coordinating design projects and community events, and independent learning. Participants used ITs during the permaculture design process. They used online plant databases for determining the flora components of a design. Some participants used 2D and 3D drawing software to refine their designs. Participants also used word processors and spreadsheet applications for office and business management. Participants found that ITs improved their work by helping them accomplish tasks faster, more accurately, and at lower cost.

One student in the Manzanita PDC explained how he was able to reduce the time needed to accomplish a task using IT: “We are able to get a great understanding of weather over a year without observing for that long.”Another explained how ITs provided them with data essential to the design process:“Satellite images provide accurate top-down perspectives of the site and surrounding area that we wouldn’t otherwise have.” Participants used email, phone, text messaging, and instant messaging to coordinate with others. One participant used Survey Monkey to distribute client needs surveys. Several participants used Doodle polls and chat features in Google Docs to coordinate with peers or clients. Participants used Facebook, Meetup, and email to coordinate and share information at the community level. The Live Oak community had a periodic email newsletter and website for announcements and shared event information. Although participants used ITs to address challenges of sustainability, they had two philosophical misgivings in doing so: negative environmental impacts of IT manufacture, use, and disposal; and distraction from physical human and environment interaction. These misgivings are not, however, unique to these permaculture communities. ITs are known by HCI researchers to be implicated in the problems of sustainability and social isolation . In accordance with the extended values of the permaculture movement, participants preferred utilizing renewable and local resources to non-renewable or distant resources . However, non-renewable resources, often from distant places, make up and power IT. This misgiving can explain some of the intentional non-use of ITs that I observed. Some participants utilized and repaired old laptops and mobile devices with the intent of keeping the technology until it stopped working. Others focused on reducing operational energy from non-renewable resources. For example, one participant kept his phone powered off until he needed to make a phone call or was ready to check for messages. Many other participants in the Live Oak community owned small solar cells that they used to charge their small electronic devices, such as cell phones.

The second misgiving arises from the neglect of social interaction with people and other living things in the physical environment when using ITs. The extended values of the permaculture movement call for a “culture of place” that connects people to each other, the land, and nature . Participants believed that face-to-face social interaction is more effective for forming community than IT-mediated interaction because ITs pull attention away from the physical environment including people and nature. Thus, participants engaged in selective use of technology, a form of technological non-use as described by Baumer et al. . Participants believed that reducing or eliminating their use of ITs for a period of time allowed them to value social connections.The issues addressed by these communities – climate change, resource scarcity, societal limitations, and food security – are considered multi-lifespan problems. When exploring how to address these multi-lifespan problems, the community demonstrated three values: food sovereignty, regenerative design, and sociocultural equality. Food sovereignty for this community may be better described as critical resource sovereignty because the objective of permaculture is to obtain and managing all critical resources, also including energy and water, for sustainable human settlements . Altieri’s explanation of food sovereignty reflects the nature of these communities’ values of food sovereignty – food sovereignty emphasizes “farmers’ access to land, seeds, and water while focusing on local autonomy, local markets, local production-consumption cycles, energy and technological sovereignty, and farmer-to-farmer networks” . With long-term personal water collection and recycling features, and solar energy utilization, plastic pot both by strategically taking advantage of the sun’s path and by using solar cells, participants aim to achieve long-term local, and even personal, autonomy of critical resources. Specifically, the communities’ long-term food sovereignty values encourage the formation of an agrarian society in place of the industrial society we have now.Regeneration denotes breakdown, evolution, and growing anew. On the surface, regeneration could counter the “permanent” in permaculture. However, participants did not value permanence in the sense of unchanging. For participants, permanence required the ability for something to change with and adapt to slow, multi-lifetime changes and problems, such as climate change and resource scarcity. Participants applied the value of regeneration to the community itself – evolving its goals and values to global and local changes and fostering the arrival of newcomers and the passing of old-timers. They also applied the value of regeneration to renewable and non-renewable resources – facilitating the regeneration of natural resources, like using earthworks to sink rain and irrigation water into the ground, and chemical exchanges, like amending soil with biochar for carbon sequestration. Furthermore, they applied the value of regeneration to infrastructure – creating agricultural systems that function as ecosystems, like sustainable polycultures, and using waste to create energy, like breaking down organic material in bio-digesters to create biogas. Finally, participants applied the value of regeneration to technology, indicating an interest in hardware components and power sources that could grow and decompose. Socio-cultural equality, as described by these communities, entails a society of people who have equal opportunity to participate in the formation and possession of sociocultural capital, knowledge, critical resources, infrastructure, and traditions.

Achieving equality is contingent upon socio-cultural equity, which entails providing all people with the resources they need to be successful. Broadly, participants view the current industrial society as one that fosters inequality and disenfranchisement. They envision a future sustainable agrarian society that disaggregates and disperses wealth and provides people with the opportunity to have direct engagement with their community and its economy. They believe long-term collective action can transition their communities from the current industrial society to a future sustainable agrarian society. Although most participants shared these long-term values, they disagreed on the likelihood of future societies representing these values. One participant described these ideals as “probably unrealistic” and “utopian in nature,” but never-the-less longed for food sovereignty, regeneration, and equality in society. Another participant challenged that assessment, pointing out that most of the participants had already agreed that some sort of collapse was likely to occur. If society collapses in thirty years, he posited, in every moment up to and through that point, they should be laying the foundation for a more just and sustainable society. In summary, community members shared long-term values but envisioned the future in which they would be practiced and the effect they would have differently.The emergent resistance, technology, and long-term values, though not explicit in permaculture literature or instruction, are influenced by the core and extended permaculture values. Growing food, fighting for rights to grow food, guerilla gardening of vacant spaces, and designing long-term solutions in the form of sustainable polycultures for clients and the community are all motivated by the permaculture value to “look after self, kin, and community.” The permaculture value of “rebuilding natural capital” – where natural capital denotes the worlds natural assets such as air, water, geology, soil, and all living things – and “set limits to consumption and redistribute surplus” motivates how participants engage in these activities. For example, in contrast to common annual gardens that quickly degrade soil and utilize chemical fertilizers and pesticides, participants’ annual gardens incorporated bio-intensive methods, such as deep soil preparation, the use of compost, close plant spacing, and synergistic combinations of plants, with the goal to encourage long-term soil health, reduce resource consumption, and preserve genetic diversity. As an example, the guerilla gardeners’ spare seeds and plants were “redistributed” to the community and other living species for food and habitat. Given the extent to which participants mindfully incorporated the permaculture values into the ways they engage with the world, it is important that the information systems that are designed for them support this intentionality. Very often, designers build information systems that uphold their own self- or organization-serving values and goals, such as popularity by way of mass production of short-lifespan products , profit by way of aggregating value from free labor , innovation by way of Earth’s natural resources , or social change by way of mass adoption . Sometimes those self-serving values are in conflict with stake holders’ values, and so stakeholder values are set aside. Sometimes technology evangelists create a system that has inherent designer-serving values and then persuade a critical mass of people into adopting that the system, thus implicating them in supporting the designers self-serving values or goals even if potentially at a cost to themselves . Many permaculture participants abandoned technologies that were implicated in a social or environmental issue, such as certain brands of smartphones, laptops, and other devices that have rechargeable lithium ion batteries containing coltan and the ecological and human security impacts mining that coltan has had on the Congo . Since participants were willing to forgo ubiquitous technologies or technological services because they were in conflict with their values, it is imperative that technologies designed for these communities are in support of, and certainly not in conflict with, their values.