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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Permaculture Books

Here are four books that you may find to be - highly-readable and easily accessible - to start understanding more about what Permaculture is and how Permaculture works:

Permaculture in a Nutshell

Description at Albris Online:

"Permaculture in a Nutshell is a concise and accessible introduction to the principles and practise of permaculture in temperate climates. It covers how permaculture works in the city, the country, and on the farm and explores ways in which people can work together to recreate real communities."

Author is a leading Permaculture teacher in Europe and has written three Permaculture books total; Nutshell is a brief, concise book that people new to Permaculture seem to really appreciate for its quick overview of Permaculture's key ethics, elements and design principles.

The Basics of Permaculture Design

Description at Alibris Books online:

"'The Basics of Permaculture Design'," first published in Australia in 1996, is an excellent introduction to the principles of permaculture, design processes, and the tools needed for designing sustainable gardens, farms, and larger communities.Packed with useful tips, clear illustrations, and a wealth of experience, it guides you through designs for gardens, urban and rural properties, water harvesting systems, animal systems, permaculture in small spaces like balconies and patios, farms, schools, and ecovillages. This is both a do-ityourself guide for the enthusiast and a useful reference for permaculture designers."

Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

Description at Alibris Books online:

"Permaculture is a verbal marriage of permanent and agriculture. Australian Bill Mollison pioneered its development. Key features include: use of compatible perennials;non-invasive planting techniques;emphasis on biodiversity;specifically adaptable to local climate, landscape, and soil conditions;highly productive output of edibles.Now, picture your backyard as one incredibly lush garden, filled with edible flowers, bursting with fruit and berries, and carpeted with scented herbs and tangy salad greens. The visual impact is of Monets palette, a wash of color, texture, and hue. But this is no still life. The flowers nurture endangered pollinators. Bright-featured songbirds feed on abundant berries and gather twigs for their nests.The plants themselves are grouped in natural communities, where each species plays a role in building soil, deterring pests, storing nutrients, and luring beneficial insects. And finally, you--good ol homo sapiens--are an integral part of the scene. Your garden tools are resting against a nearby tree, and have a slight patina of rust, because this garden requires so little maintenance. You recline into a hammock to admire your work. You have created a garden paradise.This is no dream, but rather an ecological garden, which takes the principles of permaculture and applies them on a home-scale. There is nothing technical, intrusive, secretive, or expensive about this form of gardening. All that is required is some botanical knowledge (which is in this book) and a mindset that defines a backyard paradise as something other than a carpet of grass fed by MiracleGro."

Introduction to Permaculture

Description at Alibris Books online:

"Topics include: energy efficient site analysis, planning and design methods, house placement, design for temperate, dry-land and tropical regions, urban Permaculture garden layouts, land access and community funding systems, chicken and pig forage systems, orchards and home wood lots, how to influence micro-climate and a large section on selected plant species with climatic tolerances, heights and uses. Abundantly illustrated with detailed diagrams and line drawings throughout. Includes a listing of useful Permaculture plants with descriptions and uses, and a further species list in useful categories. The book is set out as a step-by-step introduction to Permaculture with detailed instructions."

Permaculture Agriculture Culture

I studied French dynamic biointensive gardening informally with a friend in the Midwest in the mid 1970s. Solar was starting to emerge as a known technology, hippies were going back to the land, and Earth Day was in full swing, inspired in large part by photos of the 'whole earth' from space by astronauts.

More recently, after hearing a lot about peak oil - the prediction that consumption demand would accelerate just as production capacity would greatly drop off - I got interested in studying Permaculture - an acronym meaning 'Permanent Agriculture' but also 'Permanent Culture'. The idea being that we as humans are the most appropriate and capable agents of restoring ecosystems, having for centuries and milennia being the most active agents of destroying ecosystems and planetary life support.

It started in many ways as a reaction against post-World War II practices of agriculture - the so-called 'green revolution' that fed a lot of people but did so with industrial methods that pumped pollutants into the air, soil and water, has ravaged topsoil that took thousands of years to create, wrecked life systems that had gradually co-evolved, and generally made a mess of things.

Agriculture has become a petrochemical industry, has created efficient methods of animal confinement and cruelty, etc. Not a pretty picture the closer you look at modern farming.

Meanwhile engineers have diverted water in ways that are helping lead us to a massive international water crisis. By focusing on moving water quickly through concrete drainage systems, instead of the time-honored ways that streams and creeks meander into rivers that meander and build into lakes and oceans, they have bypassed and disrupted the way things naturally unfold in order to build these culturally and economically rich but artificial environments we call cities.

As a result, many involved in Permaculture more or less question professional approaches to things, and long to restore 'comon sense' and a closer relationship to nature. Of course, there are civil engineers who are into Permaculture. Modern technology and scientific thinking are not necessarily at odds with recycling, reusing, restoring and replenishing the planet. But there are a lot of fundamental - assumptions - that may merit - questioning, inquiry - given the current state of economic and ecological systems that many of us thought were doing OK and aren't.

Permaculture emphasizes a positive human role as a kind of honest broker in natural plant, animal and food, interrelationships. For Permaculture, humans have had the power, skill, motivation and methods to re-do everything and create a lot of havoc along the way, and people also have the power, skill, and responsibility to come up with ways to do things more in harmony, more in balance, more in care for the present and the future.

An experienced Permaculture teacher recently talked to me about the 'foodshed' as analogous to a watershed. He rounded a stick on the ground and illustrated out the way food and people relationships have become terribly dysfunctional and need to be changed.

Sure we can get a whole lot of stuff at the supermarket, and sure a wholistic supermarket is an improvement relative to one that is not, and our present food system of big stores and lovely restaurants, does give us comfort and convenience, variety and nourishment - but with all the pesticides, petroleum for agriculture and shipping, tearing up of forest land, diversion of water, etc. we're contributing rapidly to destroying topsoil, species, and the planet in general.

But if we restore self-reliance and cooperation in taking care of self and family and community, we rebuild natural relationships with our food and each other. We start having a connection again to where our food is coming from. There is nothing more basic to life than the way we obtain or cultivate or share - our food.

So Permaculture isn't just about food, it's about whole systems, but Permaculture is also very much about whole systems - towards which regrouping our relationship to food cultivation and distribution, making it more a part of our lives, is a 'prime directive'.