Permaculture political party

a good or bad idea?

Permaculture is a system of assembling conceptual, material, and strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all it’s forms.

The philosophy behind Permaculture is one of working with, rather than against nature (and human nature), of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless action; of looking at systems in all their functions … Mollison

I often get asked why, if Permaculture is about social reconstruction, designers don’t seek political representation. I’ve frankly got no idea except that most designers are ‘land based’ and the next harvest is maybe a higher priority than getting into politics!

Would creating a “Permaculture party” be a bad idea? I would say yes because too many people think that Permaculture is some sort of gardening.

Would creating a political party (PP) inspired by Permaculture and based on it’s ethical and design principles be a bad idea? Actually it’s a good one.

So why would a PP inspired by Permaculture be a good idea?

• Today’s world crises need a holistic response, Permaculture is profoundly holistic to it’s core. The current seesaw, where a simplistic ‘solution’ simply makes another problem rise up can’t continue.

• The old left, center, right political division is not viable as it doesn’t reflect the fact that, in general, people’s ideas and opinions are much more nuanced. Permaculture is based on scientific ecology (amongst other things), and there is nothing more nuanced than natural systems. This means that Permaculture is more about continuums, gradations,complexity and subtlety. This not only reflects natural systems but also human nature.

• The right does left stuff, the left does right stuff and the centrists do a bit of both. It’s all got confusing and alienating for most people. Permaculture is none of the above as it is a design system, this means that ideas, theories, policies etc are stripped of their political colours and examined in themselves to see if they are adapted to dealing with whatever it is.

• Permaculture is based on two* main ethical principles. Care for the Earth and care for people. Having these ethics as benchmarks means that all propositions are filtered and only the ones which help us care for the Earth and people are considered further. *(the original third one was ‘limit consumption and population’ which was deformed into ‘fairshares’ which philosophically sits quite happily with ‘care for people’)

• Permaculture is prosocial and this best reflects the underlying nature of people.

• Permaculture puts great importance on encouraging people to take responsibility for their local area and local communities. This is the most effective way to represent people’s individualities and diversity and the most effective way to bring about social change.

• The Permaculture design approach scales with no problem at all, it can be used to design a garden, a farm, a village, a city or a country.

This is the original quote from Mollison’s Designers manual :

A policy of Responsibility (to relinquish power):

The role of beneficial authority is to return function and responsibility to life and people; if successful, no further authority is needed. The role of successful design is to create a self-managed system.

It seems likely that a political party based on Permaculture ethics and design principles would be a way forward and a different approach to those that humanity has tried up to now.

Given that Permaculture is about creating sustainable human communities it would seem that Permaculture designers have an obligation to become politically engaged. Founding a political party, become a government and enact prosocial policies that give function and responsibility back to each one of us and our local communities is, in all probability, the best way to get us out of the cycles of crises that we are stuck in and which the current political parties are unable to resolve.