Collapse? Permaculture

designing a movement

So the book Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, ‘How Everything Can Collapse, A manual for our times’ has made it’s way from the French into the English language, thanks to the Substack author Chris Dixon for the heads up.

The book has been circulating around France since it came out and has had a certain success. A claim made by the authors is that there are a lot of books about one thing and another concerning the environment, the climate etc but none with an interdisciplinary approach. The authors claim that their book, fills this gap. This claim is untrue and surprising as Servigny, one of the authors, recounts that he was much influenced by Rob Hopkins and the Transition movement. So he knew about Permaculture yet feels he can make said claim, I’m not sure why except that a lot of people confuse Permaculture with some sort of gardening.

Published 1988

It is good to let people know about the problems and dangers that we face, as Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens set out to do. That said these type of books and the hundreds of newspaper articles on the same theme tend to dis-empower people and bring about bad-news burn out. Deprived of a way to act and loaded down with bad news people tend, at best, to do the ostrich and hope that it will all go away. At worst people simply vote for the next populist who shouts the loudest about the so-called solutions they pretend to have up their sleeve.

I became a Permaculture designer because I wanted to move away from reacting to ecological destruction and become active in doing something about it. That is to say stop protesting and start rebuilding. Permaculture design is also about strategy, figuring out the best way and moment to stimulate change, I thought I would present how things evolved in France from 1999 onwards and what the strategy behind it all was.

Don’t forget that :

Permaculture is an integrated system of ecological and environmental design

A Movement or a movement?

Let us go back in time to 1999. I moved to Brittany and we started to build our micro-farm and house, I set up a coppice orchard, the first in the world, the whole place is now a hamlet with several people living there full time. After a couple of years I started to get people asking me to run a Permaculture design course (PDC). The course went well and I started to get more demands so I carried on, and on, and on, and on. Sometimes I was leading 10 PDC’s a year which is 720 hours of teaching plus travel, not just in France but all around the world. Those were early days and Permaculture was almost completely unknown in France despite the efforts of François Couplan who managed to translate and get published Permaculture 1 & 2 by Mollison and Holmgren. And despite the efforts of Emilia Hazelip who organised the first PDC’s in Europe in France with the collaboration of Andy and Jessie Darlington.

So I found myself with a big open space in front of me and I decided to work up a design for Permaculture in France. I am after all a Permaculture designer. Step by step, and of course first off we needed to :

Analyse the situation.

• Everything fast running off a cliff and more and more people shouting about how we need to do something but few people actually proposing anything different. The main player and a big star at the time in France was Pierre Rabhi who founded a Movement called Terre et Humanisme who’s efforts were/are to promote a form of agro-ecology and a sort of happy degrowth.

• Most movements are started by some pioneering people who are often militant and activist. They will eventually, sometimes quite quickly, be replaced by people who are a lot less pioneering but good at administration. The Movement will then often become a machine for asking for donations and a good percentage of the donations are used to cover the administrative costs of asking for donations.

• Permaculture, when it arrives in a country, will often become rapidly associated with a technique. Herb spirals, forest gardens or, as was/is the case in France, raised bed gardening. The holistic design system is subsumed to a technique.

• Permaculture, when it becomes known in a country, tends to be appropriated by some people who don’t know what it is but pretend they do. Books, videos etc will be produced that portray a reductionist image of what Permaculture is.

• It happened in the UK and in Germany, a programme on the TV presenting Permaculture, the sudden public interest was too much for the fledgling movements in the said countries and the opportunities passed by.

• Movements can become associated with one person who becomes a sort of megastar and gets the major share of media exposure.

• Slowly and surely works better then rushing in and scaring people. When people discover the Permaculture approach to designing resilient and ethical systems it can come as some really really good news in an ecosystem flooded with daily bad news. It is necessary to introduce people to designing change in a calm way.

An interesting thing about Permaculture is that we are often simply guiding systems towards a desired configuration. The question for me was how to do this for Permaculture in the French speaking world and especially in France.

Then design :

• Create a system which avoids the possibility of someone becoming The Megastar of French Permaculture. This was accomplished by the simple fact that the early pioneers, such as myself, refused to let ourselves become ‘stars’.

• Create a movement and not a Movement. Basically to avoid, as much as possible, any centralisation of Permaculture and make it as dispersed as possible.

• Ensure that people are Permaculture designers first and foremost and teachers second.

• Avoid, for a certain time, any mainstream media and let the movement grow until it would be sufficiently robust and able to handle any such exposure.

• Permaculture has always been about developing robust, resilient, ethical and interconnected local communities. Note Mollison’s “Principle of responsibility” So the ideal way forward would be to simply train as many people as possible and then encourage them to lend a hand redesigning and rebuilding their local communities.

• Continually repeat the message that Permaculture is a holistic design system that includes but is much more than just food production.

There was a bit more to the design than all but that will do for now. I called the whole thing “the same planet, a different world”.

Then implement.

Around 15 years ago Pascal Depienne, after attending a PDC I led, set up a Permaculture network called Brin de Paille. It isn’t a National Association it is a nationwide network. The year after I set up the Université populaire de Permaculture (UPP) whose mission was to promote Permaculture training and manage a Diploma system. The design was that after a certain time the UPP would fade away and be replaced with dispersed local Permaculture training and demonstration sites, this was to avoid any organisation like the UPP becoming a centralising force or a focal point.

All that done and going well I persuaded some people to help set up a Permaculture festival (2008). Quite a few people told us that nobody would come but in the end it was sold out. The festival had 3 main objectives, 1. get us all together so we could have a laugh, meet each other and take some time out. 2. stimulate interest in Permaculture in the local area and 3. be the occasion to invite people from the French environmental Movements to a round table to organise how we could work together and cooperate. The first two things worked really well, the third not so well and I am still not sure why.

I had a lot of help from a few people and then from quite a few people, difficult to launch something like this on your own. Sometimes difficult to find people with a shared vision. I’ve been lucky, both with the South-east London Permaculture group back in the 1990’s and since 2000 in France.

Today Permaculture is widely known in France and we have managed to pass on the message that it is not just about gardening. This despite the fact that a lot of books have been produced by uninformed people promoting a sort of gardening isolated from the more holistic approach of real Permaculture. I have personally trained several thousand people and I’m no longer alone, since 2008 there is a network of other designer/teachers now busy designing and teaching others to be designers. We have long lost count of the number of Permaculture inspired projects in France. In 2020 I launched an “Encouragement” (rather than a Movement) called ‘my community in action’. It’s main objective was to encourage Permaculture trained people to stand in the local elections. For a first attempt it worked pretty well.

There are a few French Youtube mini-stars but apart from that we have succeeded in avoiding having A Permaculture Mega Star.

To continue the work I have had two books published. The first is an update to the Designers manual and adapted to France, the second is a manifesto that shows how, step by step, we can change our systems, agricultural, economic, industrial etc and how we can redesign the existing status quo to rid ourselves of all that destroys and pollutes and replace it with systems that work well, that are ethical, ecological and just.

I must admit that I have a third book coming out this spring which is about Permaculture and gardening, but of course there is a strategy behind it! The publishing house that commissioned the book have access to a different market than my previous publisher. I seized the opportunity to explain to people how we are being poisoned by industrial food and what we can do about it.

One of the things I love hearing from students is how, after a course, they feel equipped and capable of going back to their communities and start repairing the Earth. Which is what Permaculture is all about after all.