The great global Permaculture conspiracy

Permaculture is gardening

Back when Permaculture was relatively unknown in France we decided to boost things up and ‘spread the word’. The first step was to design strategically how this should be done and how to guide the process. In this phase we identified certain threats and most particularly the appropriation and over-simplification of Permaculture by different actors. This would involve fixating on ‘Permaculture as gardening’ rather than ‘Permaculture as a means of bringing about socio-economic change’.

Things got off to a good start and Permaculture started to get much better known and a few years later we started to see a flood of books being produced. As predicted these books, predominantly written by people untrained in Permaculture, present a completely simplistic version of the design science, reducing it down to a handful of gardening techniques. Then we witnessed a flood of short films on Youtube that went the same way. This has happened on a global scale and the social reconstruction part of Permaculture design as envisioned by Mollison has been hidden behind a jumble of gardening techniques.

Many people think it is a way of producing food which cares for the Earth and people. This is true, but Permaculture is, and always has been, much more than that.

Permaculture is about human beings and how we can live together on this planet without destroying it, and us.

Permaculture is about doing things for ourselves rather than asking governments to act for us.

Permaculture is about designing and developing sustainable, equitable and ethical human societies.

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Permaculture is misunderstood.

One of the major strengths of Permaculture design is the ‘integrate rather than separate’ principle. As I often mention, today’s complicated crises need complex integrated solutions. This is what Permaculture offers. The idea that has permeated everywhere that Permaculture is about gardening is wrong and hinders us in our objective of creating sustainable, equitable societies.

Is there a conspiracy? Has the current system used it’s lobbies to hide and deform the Permaculture social change paradigm? I don’t know, but what I have witnessed over 30 years as a designer is the growth of the now dominant idea that Permaculture is all about gardening. This is frankly a shame and a waste.

For those people who haven’t read Mollison’s opus majeure Permaculture, a designers manual or those who didn’t read the later chapters here is a quotation :

First we must learn to grow, build, and manage natural systems for human and earth needs, and then teach others to do so. In this way, we can build a global, interdependent, and cooperative body of people involved in ethical land and resource use, whose teaching is founded on research but is also locally available everywhere, and locally demonstrable in many thousands of small enterprises covering the whole range of human endeavours, from primary production to quaternary system management; from domestic nutrition and economy to a global network of small financial systems. Such work is urgent, important, and necessary, and we cannot leave it to the whims of government (always short-term) or industry as we know it today.

We know how to solve every food, clean energy, and sensible shelter problem in every climate; we have already invented and tested every necessary technique and technical device, and have access to all the biological material that we could ever use.

The tragic reality is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy, and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them. We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.

Mollison goes on to present how we can change our political, economic and social systems and put into place one’s which care for the Earth, people and are abundant. For most of my peers it was this part of the vision that resonated with us, active as we were in fighting for social change.

Food production is, of course, vital and changing how we do it urgent. That said, changes to the agricultural world go hand in hand with changes to our economic, industrial and social systems, it cannot be otherwise. Permaculture is a holistic approach in which ALL aspects of a given system are taken into account. For example Permaculture in an urban context includes food production but as part of holistic urban reconstruction. We have to work out how we can reduce the flight from rural areas towards already overburdened cities and towns. We have to restructure urban areas so that they are adapted to us as people, ensure that cities and towns are free from pollution, where flats and houses are healthy and economical to run and much more.

Complicated situations need complex, integrated solutions it’s as simple as that. If we zoom out and look at our current systems all we see are industrial, agricultural and social activities that bring on crises. Modern democracy has created political elites who stumble for one short-sighted policy to another, root causes are rarely addressed and sticking plasters are put on the worst of the symptoms. It’s not working, it’s inefficient and we are wasting precious time, the crises are getting worse, we are being poisoned, damaged and killed. The same is true for the biosphere itself. Gains in reducing poverty come at the cost of increased pollution and resource destruction. Efforts to reduce food insecurity have led to a food industry that ruins the land and produces considerable quantities of non-foods. The resources essential to modern agriculture such as oil, phosphorous etc are being depleted at an alarming rate.

It doesn’t have to be this way, there is another path and it involves adopting many of the understandings that come from scientific ecology and many other scientific disciplines and applying them to our current systems. This is what Permaculture is all about. A good designer studies a system in it’s totality, housing, energy, waste management, economy, people, food production, resource creation and management. This involves analysing each aspect of a system, working out how to improve them and then integrating everything together in a network of harmonious flows. Doing a complete design takes time, we take into consideration future generations with the intention of passing on productive, aesthetic, equitable systems and improved resources. Designing involves including as many people as possible in the process as we are designing with people not imposing something on them as is too often the case today.

To lose this fundamental part of Permaculture and reduce it to gardening is a tragedy. I have searched and so far I have been unable to find something else which is as fundamentally holistic and integrated as Permaculture design. Nor something else which is based on practical ethics, and which is accessible to everyone so effective.

Caring is the key word in Permaculture, caring for the Earth and caring for people is what it’s all about. The current systems that we have inherited and which we keep going took centuries to put into place. They have evolved into something which is destroying our biosphere, people built these systems, we can change them and create something else. We have the solutions, we know how to do what we must do. The approach presented by Permaculture design is our most powerful tool to get these solutions into place and integrate them together.

The same planet but a different world.

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