Where did Permaculture go wrong?

I went along to the Town Hall the other day, the Mayor had asked me to get involved with some stuff they are planning for the National Nature and the National Gardening Weekend. They suggested that I present some stuff to the local people. The mayor’s idea was that I could, briefly, present Permaculture to the village people. I told her that I was prepared to present something, but that I wouldn’t identify it as Permaculture.

A few months ago, I was invited to give a conference on regenerative hydrology to a bunch of farmers. The organisers suggested, strongly, that I avoid using the word Permaculture.

So what's going on? I’ve been a working Permaculture designer, engineer, and teacher since 1990. Why is it that, today, I and so many others don’t self-identify as a Permaculture designer in many situations?

Permanent culture, that’s how it all started off in Permaculture one. It was all about growing food by developing permanent systems. Today, we’d more likely use words like regenerative, robust, or resilient, but we’ve got what we’ve got.

Mollison expanded the concept of what PmC is in Permaculture Two and then even more so in his opus major, The Designer’s Manual. The ‘culture’ part of the word went from describing growing food, as in ‘to cultivate’, to ‘The arts, beliefs, customs, institutions, and other products of human work and thought considered as a unit, especially with regard to a particular time or social group.’

Bill made Permaculture a holistic design approach that concerns itself with every aspect of human life and the biosphere in which it exists. “The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems that have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.” Bill Mollison.

This has given us both a design and an engineering discipline that is vast in its scope. It has also given us a ‘problem’, it is so vast that it scares people, and they go through a 'reductio ad absurdum’ process until they get something they feel comfortable with. We aren’t educated in a way that helps us understand holistic approaches or complex systems.

This approach, which leads to people saying things like ‘I have a permaculture garden,’ is obviously flawed. They are talking about a garden in which they have used a bunch of techniques they associate with permaculture, or a system that has come to be linked to Permaculture. Forest gardens, for example. They could say, ‘I have a Permaculture-designed garden’ if this is the case.

Some people have shredded the ‘people care’ aspect of Permaculture to develop something they call ‘Human Permaculture’. An obvious tautology. They have followed the same reductio ad absurdum approach as above. What they promote is, again, a bunch of techniques and ideas separated from the holistic, integrated design approach that is Permaculture. In the same way as the ‘permaculture garden’ people, they tend to have a one-size-fits-all view of things. ‘This is what Human Permaculture is,’ they maintain, whilst promoting something detached from personal and cultural differences.

This reduction process is highly problematic. Permaculture, as an integrated design and engineering discipline, is complex. It has simple methods and principles that, when used appropriately, lead to complex systems. Simple rules lead to complexity. Reducing the discipline down to a basket of techniques fragments it we lose both the holistic approach and the evolution towards complexity.

Anyone who gets seriously involved with the discipline starts, or continues, to deepen an understanding of complexity. Our societies are complicated, not complex. Studying ecosystems and Permaculture broadens our minds. We become increasingly capable of comprehending the vast webs of interactions and interdependencies that make up the biosphere.

The ‘people care’ part of the discipline helps us develop a capacity to see things from many different points of view. One might not agree with someone’s particular point of view, but we become capable of understanding where it comes from.

Some people maintain that Permaculture is ‘very spiritual’ or ‘it’s a philosophy of life’. It would be better to use the word ‘way’ as in a path that can lead to a more profound understanding of us as people and the biosphere in which we live. It’s not a passive ‘way’, one could make parallels with some martial arts, Aikido for example. The founder of Aikido insisted that it was a path to ‘enlightenment’ and not a simple self-defence approach.

Designing for a client means understanding their point of view and vision. It also means understanding the ecosystem and socio-economic situation in which the design will unfold. Both help broaden and deepen the designer’s experience and comprehension of both people and the biosphere.

The ethical base of Permaculture pushes us to develop our understanding of complexity. We can use poisons to control a ‘pest’ population; we have to work out the role of the ‘pest’ in the ecosystem. We have to understand its nature and needs, and then design to make the system more complex and self-regulating.

It didn’t. The holistic and ethical design and engineering discipline that is Permaculture is intact. It has never been appropriated by industries to greenwash their activities. What has gone wrong is how it has come to be perceived by far too many people. This is where we have work to do; we have to change this perception and position our discipline as being the best tool we have to get us out of the mess we’re in.