My Stance On Permaculture (WIP)

The text below is a condensed version of some of my thinking around permaculture as a field and a movement. It is a work in progress and also, transposing these ideas from french to english (which is my second language) doesn't always allow for perfect accuracy in expression/meaning. To further explore my thinking around these ideas, please take a look at my website (with a convenient translation tool if not a french speaker).

What is permaculture?

Defining such a vast topic as permaculture is no easy thing. As of writing this, there are probably as many definitions of permaculture as there are permaculture practitioners and enthusiasts. I personally have attempted giving my own definition of it several times, but haven’t found any satisfying formulation, yet. It invariably ends up being either too long or lacking specificity.

A definition of permaculture that I find interesting and informative enough (for now) is that given by Heather Jo Flores and Marit Parker in the Intro module of Permaculture Women’s Guild online PDC:

"Permaculture helps us figure out where in the cycle of life we fit in, and how we can help make things better for future generations, of every species." "A project becomes a permaculture only when special attention is paid to the relationships between each component, among the functions of those components, and among the people who work within the system."

I like the statement about reinserting ourselves in a bigger whole, of decentering homo sapiens and the emphasis on relationships within systems (introducing the idea of systems thinking).

Applying permaculture to permaculture

A key theme of permaculture is ecology, and ecology is all about systems thinking. Systems thinking requires us to move away from the reductionist paradigm industrial civilisation lives by to consider systems as more than the sum of their parts. It demands that we understand the foremost importance of interconnection of systems components. And also that we go down to the roots of the problems we are trying to address to find the appropriate healing strategy.

It seems to me that, despite permaculture did take that path early on, it stopped trying to ask the right questions ever since.

In Permaculture A Designer’s Manual (Bill Mollison, 1988) we could read:

«To empower the powerless and create a million villages to replace nation-states is the only safe future for the preservation of the biosphere. Let interdependence and personal responsibility be our aims. »
Preface - p. ix (emphasis mine)

However, most of the permaculture litterature I could read never question civilisation. I could not find anywhere a vision for permaculture as going beyond civilisation and capitalism, embracing the idea of actually, collectively, going back to living within Nature, which involves dropping high technologies such as electricity, Internet, and other globalised systems that cannot exist in a non-exploitative and non-destructive way. There is no regenerative way of mining or maintaining global structures.

It seems that permaculture gets stuck in the recycling consumerist non-sense and can’t move away from being a hobby margin space where middle-class go when they’re bored from business as usual but still keep its’ doors open, in case «things don’t work out».

I couldn’t find a long term vision for what we’re trying to do with permaculture. Where we’re trying to go. If we don’t know where to head, how can we ever hope to get there? Instead of being a path towards changing the deficient systems up until Care for the Earth, permaculture has become a parking space, a dead end.

I think permaculture can’t go on having no clear agenda. To me we can’t be serious about «doing permaculture» while advocating for mere reforms of civilisation, even less so when preaching for satisfying ourselves with existing aside it like some sort of parallel world. It is my belief that permaculture should bind with radical ecology and go deeper in analysing the problems we’re faced with, and go deeper in questionning every single part of our belief systems and habitual physical and social structures. Just as much as it is time for us to turn permaculture into a culture of resistance, preparing the ground right now for the after-civilisation and supporting those who actively work at dismantling the dire systems.

And keep in mind that:

"[...] the end result will be to release much of the landscape for the sole use of wildlife and for re-occupation by endemic flora."
- Permaculture A Designer’s Manual, p.9 (emphasis mine)

Permaculture ethics, revisited

Early on my permaculture path, I started to feel uncomfortable with how its ethics were formulated.

On the one hand, permaculture was presented as trying to shift «western» worldviews, decentering ourselves to focus on Earth and Life.

On the other hand, the mainstream representation of these ethics was putting «people care» on the same level as Earth care (despite the fact that Earth Care was initially intended as being central and that from which the others emerge), and no one seemed to agree on the third one, rewording over and over again some inoffensive and non restrictive, meaningless «something» - it looked more like trying to fill a third slot for the sake of it rather than supporting the ethical change permaculture seemed to be proposing.

These inconsistencies are very problematic to me, as they give contradictory ideas and directions on what permaculture is and what it is intended to, which eventually does not allow the expected and necessary worldview shifts to happen. In my opinion, this is a huge failure for permaculture.

I have spent a few years already reflecting on this problem and lately finally found a more satisfying way of wording permaculture ethics - which are since those I use.

For a complete and detailed explanation of how I came to the conclusions I am about to share, please refer to the article on my website (in french): Les éthiques de la permaculture revues et corrigées.

Instead of people care, I use Care of the Other. It allows for actually decentering humanimals AND self, and rather adopting an altruistic approach of permaculture, recentering the whole, the beneficial connections between all members of the web of life. It also makes visible the need to seriously reconsider all the layers of oppression within our humanimal societies: specism, misogyny, racism, etc. If we are, as a movement, to create permanent cultures, we have to actively challenge all of our current destructocultures, from capitalism to technology, from patriarchy to language, from our relationship to ourselves to that to those we call «others».

The third ethic emerged from a conversation with a permaculture designer friend, who suggested the idea of it as a way to connect both others, to move from the «second» ethic up to Earth Care. As I practice and see it, permaculture is, amongst other things, a way to reeducate ourselves to properly inhabit our common home, shared with all members of all species. And this reeducation, to be effective, requires a lot of reevaluation - asking the right questions. I think of reevaluation as a dynamic way to move from Care of the Other to Earth Care, slowly but surely shifting our worldviews and eventually «lead the most evolved life possible, and [to] assist in and celebrate the existence of all life forms other than humans, for all come from the same egg.» (Permaculture A Designer's Manual, p. 2)

Permaculture is about deep change, transformation and movement, and I think this should be reflected in its ethics.

My permaculture ethics are thus:

Care of the Earth - Care of the Other - Reevaluation

Anne-Sophie