Can permaculture ever become a truly global movement?
Open communication is vital to the spread of the permaculture design system. It is the lifeblood of permaculture’s structure as a distributed network that spans nations. With the emergence of authoritarian governments, is it time to reconsider whether earlier notions of permaculture becoming a global entity can now be achieved?
IT WAS SEEING A MAP claiming to show the countries where the permaculture design system is being practiced that triggered the question: Is permaculture really a global social movement and does the political context now exist within which that can happen?
The map was published by a reputable European permaculture organisation. It shows permaculture to be present in most countries. What made me curious was the lack of any criteria defining the practice of permaculture in a country.
I have heard the global permaculture claim before. It is one of those that resurfaces from time to time and every time there is no defining what constitutes the practice of permaculture in particular countries. Without this definition as a baseline, the notion of a globalised permaculture often seems to be based on the assumption that what may be a handful of practitioners or the presence of an organisation with permaculture in its name constitutes a firm and enduring presence.
Permaculture, in its fullness as a design system that has evolved these past 41 or so years encompasses the broad sweep of landuse, decentralised economics, social justice, open communications, resource management and grassroots democracy. Can introducing any single element, such as regenerative farming, in authoritarian states really be represented as introducing permaculture? Would doing that be dumbing-down the design system?
How do we identify if pemaculture is truly global?
Some in the permaculture movement claim that permaculture is present in most countries of the world, however we cannot place too much credibility on such a sweeping statement because:
- there is no accepted definition of what being ‘present’ means; does it mean a few people who have done a permaculture design course or read the permaculture books, does it mean the presence of an organised permaculture association or a minimum number of permaculture practitioners actively engaged in projects?
- claims that position permaculture as present in many countries do not say whether permaculture practitioners and course graduates are active or inactive
- claims do not identify what permaculture practitioners do in many of those countries; do they practice only a single or just a few elements of permaculture such as organic food production, or do they include other permaculture practices around community economics, what we now call ‘social permaculture’ and other elements of the design system?
The claim of being present in most countries inevitably raises the question: what constitutes the practice of permaculture?
Communications is the lifeblood of permaculture
To ask whether permaculture is or can become a truly global movement we need to look at the critical role of communications in establishing and activating the design system.
One of the first things any social practice that seeks to grow does is replicate itself by increasing participation by individuals and organisations.
A source of knowledge, a means of recruiting people and a means of communication are the three components of any idea which wants to spread and multiply itself.
Permaculture‘s early days: an example
If we look at the history of permaculture in Australia in the early 1980s, the co-inventor of the permaculture design system, Bill Mollison (David Holmgren is the other inventor) started replicating the design system and increasing the number of practitioners by offering courses at his home property at Stanley, Tasmania.
Then, in 1978, the year after permaculture was first fully articulated in the book, Permaculture One, Terry White, a social activist in Marybourough, Victoria, launched the first edition of Permaculture magazine. In the mid-1980s under the editorship of permaculture educator Robyn Francis it would grow into Permaculture International Journal. With the books and the magazine, permaculture gained the means to communcicate and spread its ideas. The publications were instrumental in propagating permaculture and recruiting early adopters.
The incipient permaculture movement now had the components it needed for replication:
- one or more knowledgeable people willing to share what they know — mainly Bill Mollison at first; these people formed the initial knowledge base for the design system and created its starting conditions
- a means of inducting new people into the practice who would go out to propagate it elsewhere, either by setting up local permaculture associations or through the first permaculture design courses; as they gained experience, graduates of the courses would add to the knowledge base; this horizontal spread was one of the ways by which the network model came to dominate the structure of permaculture and evolve into today’s distibuted network model
- a means of spreading knowledge of the practice — Permaculture magazine, Permaculture One and Permaculture Two; the books laid out the knowledge base as it then existed; the magazine fulfilled the added role of linking permaculture practitioners and sharing knowledge and news, and in doing so started to weave permaculture’s distributed network.
A source of knowledge, a means of recruiting people and multiplying, and a means of communication are the three components of ideas which want to spread.
Communications was critical to recruiting people to permaculture, to keeping them informed and to linking them across regions, countries and, eventually, across the globe. This is how permaculture grew into a diffuse network of practitioners, community associations and other organisations.
Communications is today the critical link between permaculture practitioners. We can think of permaculture books, websites and educators as the brain of permaculture; the workshops, courses and information-sharing on social media as the muscles powering the doing of permaculrture; and communications as the nervous system through which connection is made and the channels along which permaculture is communicated.
What enabled permaculture to emerge at this time?
Any consideration of whether permaculture can become an authentic global movement has to consider its origins in a particular social economy. Growing out of that social economy, a polity, permaculture imbibes some of its values and structures.
How is it that permaculture emerged where and when it did?
The answer is twofold:
- first, Western society at that time, the late 1970s, was primed for social and political change thanks to the questioning and disorganised search for alternatives emerging from the social ferment of the previous decade, the late-1960s, and which continued through the 1970s; social change was underway and pushing it along were technological and economic forces such as the computerisation of Western economies then getting started combined with a restlessness among society’s younger cohort stemming from the social experimentation and the ‘alternative’ subculture of the time; these combined social, technological and economic forces which reinforced the expectation of change and brought changes to working life and, later, to society itself; they created the social, political and intellectual basis for permaculture’s emergence and propagation
- the politico-social context that enabled the social change from which permaculture emerged — the freedoms of belief, expression, speech, access to information, publication and association present in Western democracies at that time; permaculture is the product of Western liberal democracy and it is difficult to see how it could have emerged from authoritarian states such as the authoritarian rightwing states and the communist bloc of the time; those types of states controlled the information their populations had access to and blocked the development of social movements, especially where they were critical of the state, such as permaculture was.
That leads us to two more questions:
- could permaculture have emerged from any other social system?
- in authoritarian states, can permaculture fully exist as an integrated, comprehensive design system as originally formulated?
It might be possible for elements of permaculture to be practiced in authoritarian states, such as organic gardening and farming and for that to be represented as permaculture, however those elements alone are not permaculture.
Permaculture is an integrated design system that focuses on the connection between things. Despite popular interpretations of permaculture as sustainable agriculture and home garden food production, the design system incorporates a wide range of properties supposedly exemplified by its practitioners:
- organic food production in home and community gardens
- regenerative farming
- natural systems restoration as in the Zone 5 of its landuse planning model
- community economic systems like Local Exchange and Trading Systems and other forms of distributive, peer-to-peer, community exchange economics
- the open, peer-to-peer exchange of ideas and mutual assistance (for example, the mutual assistance food garden design and construction scheme Permablitz, some permaculture social media, workshops and courses)
- participatory processes in decision-making and governance (known as ‘social permaculture’)
- a preference among some practitioners for alternative livelihood structures such as worker co-ops, platform co-ops and not-for-profit social enterprise with specific social goals
- distributionism, according to permaculture’s third ethic of sharing what is spare
- social justice, so all have opportunity
- the freedom for anyone to teach the design system, the informal and unenforcable agreement being that the teacher has completed a Permaculture Design Course
- open communications for the transfer of news, information and know-how
- alternative forms of governance such as participatory democracy.
All of these properties are of course not present in every permaculture initiative, however, permaculture’s ethics of peoplecare, Earthcare and distribution of surplus forms the ethical metasystem which defines what an authentic permaculture is.
Implementing the ethics takes permaculture practitioners into economic and political territory whether they are aware of it or not. Permaculture’s clash with the Landcare movement in Australia in the 1990s is an example. So are the forays of some permaculture practitioners in the fair food movement with its critique of the economics and environmental impacts of conventional food distribution. So was the critique of the work of some permaculture practitioners active in community garden development and farmers’ markets when they drew criticism from a national food industry lobby.
Communications was essential to permaculture’s gestation as a social movement and as a community of practice because it was the means of recruiting and linking people across a dispersed network. Open communication facilitated the transmission of know-how and news of what others were doing through regional, national and global networks. Communication remains a vital, core component of permaculture and the lifeblood of its structure as a distributed network.
Does permaculture’s change agenda exclude it from authoritarian states?
Some permaculture practitioners have taken elements of the design system into authoritarian states. They should be commended for doing this. Sometimes, they do it through their work for international development agencies, however with the agencies focussed on specific missions, that is seldom the means of introducing permaculture’s full spectrum of values and practice.
The challenge for permaculture seeking a toehold in authoritarian states comes because permaculture proposes change, whether that is social, economic or political, whether it is change in farming systems, the way goods are distributed or other things. Change is political. Authoritarian states like China, Russia, some Middle Eastern states and North Korea do not like their citizens engaging in politics unless they are the politics of the governing party. The governing party is often the only party.
Permaculture proposes alternatives to established systems. Its communications carry information critical and reformist of governments, economies, environmental management, wealth distribution, lack of social justice, food systems. That takes it into the realm of politics. In introducing permaculture to citizens of authoritarian states there is the risk that the regime might do a little research and realise that the home gardening or farming system being being taught in their conntry is really part of a design system that has a history of questioning and criticising government and economic systems. And this they might not like.
Promoting or teaching better systems challenges vested interests and can be seen as a threat. Thus, just as China, through its Great Firewall, already blocks Facebook (where much of the global permaculture conversation takes place), Instagram, Twitter and Western media sources as well as a slew of websites that transgress its censorship boundaries, so it could block critical voices in permaculture communications additional to those on censored social media. China and Russia are setting up their own internal internet structures which their government censorship apparatus can monitor and control. There is little likelihood of online sources being allowed the freedom to criticise government.
Potentially worsening the situation for the globalisation of permaculture are requirements in some states, such as Russia, that overseas organisations present there register as ‘foreign agents’. The government of India has proposed doing this to stem the influence of Western environmental organisations. Presumably, this would not stymie any local permaculture association unless it was perceived to be closely liked to foreign organisations. With permaculture being a supposedly global social movement, links might be seen where none of practical importance exist.
Permaculture relies on social media and the worldwide web for its dissemination. Censorship limits the potential of permaculture to spread globally.
Is permaculture possible only in Western democracies?
It is no accident that permaculture emerged from a Western liberal democracy and that it first spread through similar societies. The social ferment in Australia at permaculture’s dawn time fueled the open exchange of ideas necessary to starting a community of practice and a social movement.
The sad practice of authoritarian regimes in blocking open communications for their citizens raises the question about whether permaculture can fully thrive only in the type of social economy—here meaning the relationship between social behaviour, economics and government—it emerged from.
There is validity in the argument that the adoption of components of permaculture, like regenerative farming and home food production, has the potential to introduce an expression of permaculture into authoritarian societies. How far this would be allowed to go in societies that closely monitor their population, like China, is questionable. China and other regimes fear civil society organisations that gain numeric strength, as Falun Gong discovered.
Interesting is the case of Cuba. That, too, is a quasi-authoritarian regime although it does not appear to be monolithic as are China, North Korea and Iran. Permaculture gained an influence there thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviets supported Cuba economically with favoured prices for its farm crops. That arrangement crashed with the Soviet Union. A food crises ensued. A team organised by the Permaculture Global Assistance Network in Australia gained federal funding through AusAID, the Department of Foreign Affairs overseas development assistance arm, to teach urban food production in Havana using low-external input organic techniques. That was a limited introduction of permaculture that assisted Cubans and did not threaten the state or the economy.
There is no valid argument against introducing the limited range of permaculture practices that could survive in authoritarian regimes. They are worthwhile because they improve conditions. However, they are not a full expression of permaculture if we regard permaculture as an integrated design system that includes human rights such as freedom of speech, assembly and association, access to information and other characteristics that made it possible for the design system to emerge over 50 years ago.
Full or partly global?
Emerging first in the liberal democracies, permaculture grew out of their values and imbibed them, then started to spread first through English-speaking democracies, then into non-English-speaking countries.
The question is whether a full expression of the permaculture design system incorporating food security, resource-efficient building, efficient water harvesting and distribution systems, alternative economic models, community development, grassroots organisation and the open access global communication necessary to the free transfer of information (as is necessary to permaculture’s third ethic), and the values inherited from the liberal democracies it first took root in, can emerge in societies that do not share those values.
permacultureMore Permaculture 3.0
Why not follow PERMACULTURE 3.0 on facebook?
