Permaculture 2023

things have changed

I went through a dark period recently, the unceasing bad news about the state of the planet wore me down. I lost the optimism that had kept me going and I felt like giving up and finding myself a cave somewhere to hide in. Then I started working with some brilliant young people in Guinea and in France and the sun came back out and I thought to myself ‘we can sort this stupid mess out, let’s get on with it'.’

People sometimes accuse me of being overly biased towards Permaculture which is probably true. That said I have always had my eyes open in case something better comes along, it never has, at least not yet.

When I met Bill Mollison back in the early the 1990’s I was quite impressed, he seemed to be as angry as I was about the mess things had got into. I had read his book, the Designers manual, and I read it all the way through which took a bit of time and I said to myself well why not? So I took a PDC in 1990 and then set out to become a Permaculture designer. Since then I have designed dozens of projects and I have taught thousands of people around the world and trained them to become designers themselves.

From 1990 until recently the message I was promoting was that we could act and avoid catastrophic climate change. We could change our agricultural, economic and social systems and build a world that ‘cares for the Earth and people’. These changes would mean that our impact on the biosphere and on ourselves would be positive and not, as then and now, profoundly negative. The good old days, filled with optimism and action.

Our efforts over the decades haven’t been in vain but we weren’t able to shift things sufficiently nor quickly enough. Humanity is now fully in a polycrisis period at a global scale. False solutions are promoted by all political factions and governments simply don’t seem to understand how deep the mess is, or if they do they simply don’t act. Promises are made and then not respected, industrial lobbies continue to exert too much influence and greenwashing is rampant.

We have continued to pollute, destroy and make things worse, we are a species that knows it is damaging that which it needs to survise and yet continues to do so. Something which is probably not the best idea, especially as we know, in the main, how to sort things out. Changes to soil management and increasing soil carbon storage could absorb around 31 gigatonnes of carbon. Changes to how we build can take us to zero emission houses and buildings or even to a housing stock that absorbs carbon. Whilst some industries would have to disappear many others could be transformed to become greenhouse gas sinks instead of sources, pollution could be eliminated. Social changes could lead us to fairer more just and equitable societies. And so on and so forth.

All of that said today we have to face up to a harsh reality, a lot of climate change is now locked in. We can, indeed must change our ways, but we now have to learn to live with the consequances of our inaction. For decades the oceans have been absorbing heat, NASA estimates that the oceans have absorbed 345 (± 2) zettajoules since 1955. The oceans are now warmer than before, which might seem a good thing for a shortsighted tourist, for a climatologist it is very worrying. We don’t actually know what the consequences will be, whether they will be catastrophic or simple very complicated to deal with.

Today, when I design or lead courses and train people, my message has changed. Yes me must continue to create abundant systems that draw down greenhouse gases and that are equitable but we have to focus more and more and how to make them resilient. Building such systems has always been the case for Permaculture designers, the word ‘permanent’ is in the name. Today however we are having to design for increasingly unpredictable changes.The idea developed in the 1980’s that climate change is non-linear and will lead to increasingly severe and more frequent storms, droughts, heatwaves and all the rest still holds true. We now understand that all of this is happening much, much faster than early projections had forseen.

This brings us face to face with some practical design difficulties. When, for example, designing an agroforestry system in areas where heatwaves are now an annual occurence coupled with changes to rainfall patterns, what types of trees should one plant? A tree planted today should live for decades and will suffer from heat and water stress. So which varieties will have the best chance to survive? The same is true of the crops that we plant, farmers need to start planting different crops, but which ones? The building industry continues to build homes that are totally inadapted to current and future climate change, so how do we design and build houses that will be climate resilient? We have to radically change how we manage our landscapes and our cityscapes, how can we bring this about?

Permaculture designers are working more and more frequently with local authorities and local community groups, which is a good sign. We are managing to encourage people to take a longer, future generation inclusive, view of things. This is helping us promote approaches which to many non-permculture people seem radical but which are essential. Destructive wildfires are becoming much more frequent and impacting areas where they were virtually unknown before, this is making people sit up and start listening. Holistic landscape management with integrated wildfire avoidance and management systems are being designed by Permaculture designers and installed by local people and their local authorities. The agricutural world is highly conservative but faced with crop failures, low yields, changes to rainfall patterns and the lack of water for irrigation farmers are being forced to adapt. Helped by Permaculture designers they are putting hedges back, they are moving slowly towards improving their soils and moving away from deep ploughing and towards practices that don’t destroy the soil. They are no longer just blindly continuing to plant the same crops but are opening their minds to crops more adapted to current and future conditions.

The word in the street, in the fields and in the cities is now ‘resilience’. Fortunately there are people who have been working, testing and developing the tools and approaches that we need today. Even more fortunately the people doing this have a holistic point of view, one which takes into consideration all aspects of any given system. Food, housing, energy, sewage, the economy, governance, the biosphere and all the rest. This holistic approach is essential if we want to mitigate what is coming and leave a world in a much better state for future generations. We cannot continue with piecemeal, patchwork ersatz solutions, time is running out.

It’s not for nothing that the title of Mollison’s major book is titled ‘Permaculture, a practical guide for a sustainable future’.

In the next article I intend to explore in more detail some of the important aspects of Permaculture design.