24 October 2004

After 20 years or so, how much progress have we made? Where did we think we were headed anyway? My hope was for a global land use revolution, the ‘permanent agriculture’ that Bill Mollison wrote of: permanent high-yielding agricultural ecosystems, so that humans can thrive on as little land as possible, thus leaving as much land as possible as wilderness, if necessary helping the wilderness re-establish itself.

In order to implement this global vision, we need local solutions, because every place on earth is different in local climate, land form, soils, and the combinations of species which will thrive. Not only does the land and its potential vary from place to place, but so do the people vary in their needs and preferences and their capacities. Every place and community requires its own particular design. Hence at the local level, permaculture designers often refer to permaculture as being about designing for ‘permanent culture’.

In Britain, the big challenge was to prove that high yields can be achieved in a temperate climate: reliably at least ten times those typical of conventional or organic monoculture systems. To prove this we needed access to land, and for me the best hope seemed to be to get permaculture established as the favoured approach of Britain’s millions of gardeners in city suburbs, in towns and villages, who have over a millions acres between them.

That is not the direction permaculture in Britain took. After those 20 years we are, I believe, in crisis. These are the problems:

• Poor ‘earth care’:
• The ‘permaculture is not just gardening’ gripe, which has meant too little attention given to proving yields and persuading/ impressing gardeners.
• Celtic fringes etc. smallholdings, attempts to live on scraps of green-field land, confrontations with planning authorities have dominated activism.
• Messy and neglected permaculture plots, with plastic ‘mulch’ and weed-ridden herb spirals.
• Attachment to training regimes for permaculture designers, a system more suited to Australia and New Zealand where people have large plots of land needing landscape designers, but unsuited to the British small back garden culture.
• No/ few publicly known and recognised examples of permaculture excellence.

Keeping something with the potential of permaculture exclusive to a small group is poor earth care, but I don’t suppose this virtual monopoly has been intentional. It has arisen, I think, because practitioners have formed a distinct group (see below), rather than permaculture being a set of useful practices adopted by pre-existing groups of activists with their own identity: socialists, greens, organic growers etc.

Poor ‘people care’:

• Sectarianism: ‘permies’: a group made up largely of ‘alternatives’, inheritors of the hippy, crusty, New Age traveller, Greenham Womyn types. Admirable people many of them, but dropouts with little or no access to land, and an image (conspicuously unkempt, ragged and dirty) with a self-satisfied attitude that puts off ordinary people. Very cliquey: talk of ‘people we like’. Live and preach an immaculately low impact lifestyle including fetishising low tech outdoor compost loos – and then fly around the world to permie gatherings.
• Cultism: Rev-evaluation Counselling (RC) being misused amongst permies. (My own experience was with another package of personal growth technique: ‘enlightenment intensives’ and ‘mind clearing’, like RC sharing origins with scientology, and I know what an activism killer that is; even when used properly and apparently helpful, it tends to result in dependency and ‘navel gazing’.)
• Fascination with flaky ideas and techniques linked to obscure belief systems and spirituality.
• Zone 00: permie-speak for the above.

PAB and organised permaculture:

• Struggles to survive.
• Suffers from stagnation and fixed attitudes.
• Low membership.
• Low paid supporters.
• Too little money.
• Too few poorly paid staff.
• Antagonism amongst sectarians towards ‘business’, ‘money’, ‘professionalism’.
• Inward-looking, self-satisfied, naïve optimism, immaturity, criticism (if any) taken personally.
• Dominated by few energetic people.
• Lip service towards ‘democracy’, especially voting.
• Anti-intellectual. Uninterested in building on history of ideas. Shun lengthy exposition in favour of diagrams and jargon. Non-political.
• Hold on to old grudges, especially ‘we shouldn’t have let go of our magazine’.
• Is there a solution?

Perhaps PIB needs to consciously divide into two: 1. the original ‘alternatives’ and people attracted to that culture: Zone 00, emphasis on caring for/ developing ourselves, exemplary low impact lifestyle etc.; and 2. a permaculture movement for mainstream people. (By mainstream I mean the masses, the working class, the producers of everything we need (or don’t really need) in any part of the world; not, as someone suggested, the parasitical trans-national corporations, military-industrial complex and state governments who put so much energy into getting the rest of us to do their bidding.) The mainstream permaculture movement could pick up and run with the original goal of a revolutionary change in land use, and be combined with socialism, ideas and politics. I feel that the high quality Permaculture Magazine with its continuing coverage of gardening, the recently published Earthcare Manual on temperate permaculture, plus an emerging interest in practical permaculture amongst socialists, green activists and eco-socialists could all contribute to the rise of a mainstream permaculture movement in Britain.

top