Critique of Permaculture

People in Permaculture have a certain tendency to be a bit glib, mystical, and anti-scientific or anti-technological, and yet they have an amazingly practical ability and desire to roll up their sleeves and try things to see what really works. I'm reminded in some conversations of the writer D.H. Lawrence being quoted as saying that it - it didn't make sense to him that the world was round, because he simply couldn't feel it - at a solar plexus level.

What we feel at a solar plexus level does matter, of course, along with what we're aware of in our heart and senses and brain and overall sense of things. What is very core about Permaculture is its attempt, at least, to be truly holistic in - how we design - how we live.

Some one said that Buckminster Fuller first came up with the phrase, "Design Science". A few years ago an artist - designer - television celebrity told me that all design - is design - has certain essential qualities. Permaculture attempts to design for convenience, ecology, resourcefulness, and integration of where we get our food with where we live and work and have fun and have our time in Nature. It is antidotal to the rush-rush of postmodern posturban civilization, overwhelm and overpopulation.

There is a longing, for better or for worse, I think, for a much simpler time. Perhaps in some ways the 19th Century was the very pinnacle of culture - politeness was important, handcrafts and tools were commonplace, and people looked after themselves, then shared what they could.

Or maybe the Stone Age for that matter, before all these knives and swords and sharp lines about everything.

Regardless, Permaculture is a high-food-yield, use-what-works, save-water, save-energy approach to things. People in Permaculture sometimes say they're "on the cutting edge of 10,000-year old technology". Which means, in part, that if technology today works for a holistically designed system, use it, otherwise, use what works centuries or milennia ago.

Agriculture, for example, that's more like that practiced by Native Americans or Kalihari Bushmen. Which Europeans and European-Americans have mistaken for primitive foraging, and hunter-gathering, without discerning how discriminating, inventory-aware, and proactively-managing these approaches have been.

Lawns from English artistocracy and Rows from row gardens and factory farms - may not be the most efficient or beautiful ways to do things. Permaculture offers up dense planting which provides amazing variety, and in combination with dense planting, sheet mulching helps keep weeding down drastically. You get to build your soil and grow your garden, not spend most of your time doing battle with some enemy, either on your hands and knees or spraying chemistry. In Permaculture, you cultivate life, for food first, but also for variety, aesthetics and an abundant way to live.
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One Permaculture teacher has told me that within the context of food gardening alone, John Jeavons' biointensive method may work somewhat better. But within the specific contexts of food gardening and temperate climates. Permaculture addresses water and soil and seed, plus all the world's climates and microclimates, this teacher told me, more completely, more comprehensively, one might say, more world-holistically.

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