Thinking about permaculture… and politics…
Defining permaculture’s position on the political spectrum
Ideology, belief, assumption, politics—they run through the social movement around permaculture like an underground stream. Sometimes surfacing but largely hidden below the surface, they are there all the same and have the potential to steer permaculture in particular directions.
MY PURPOSE in posting this comes from my interest in social movements, and you cannot look at social movements without talking about their politics.
Permaculture is interesting in this regard because its much-acclaimed diversity makes it home to diverse political attitudes. How they interact, negotiate space for themselves and how they mash together will influence the future form and reputation of the permaculture design system.
Defining a position on the political spectrum
Is it important to define a political position for permaculture? I think it is worth thinking about because permaculture is a social movement and the competition between political attitudes within it has the potential to influence its participants. They also influence the attitude of the public towards permaculture and the credibility they give it.
How many times have we encountered the claim that permaculture is apolitical? It has been a common attitude throughout permaculture’s more than 40 years of existence. It stems from the attempt in permaculture’s early days to create a point of difference to the sociopolitical mainstream. That permaculture sought a different trajectory was apparent with its first manifestation in the pages of Permaculture One in 1978.
In some ways, we can see permaculture as a parallel side road to the so-called alternative or counterculture movement of that decade. It is not surprising, I suppose, that it was people associated with that movement who were among the first to populate permaculture.
At best, permaculture has been ambivalent about politics… when politics is understood as the means of creating or diverting change…
Any countercurrent stemming from oppositional or alternative ideas creates friction with the status quo. Friction generates politics when politics is understood as the means of creating or diverting change. And proposing change was what permaculture was about from the start despite later assertions of its non-political stance. Change is inherently political whether or not people engaged in it think it to be so.
Claims about being apolitical were more about people creating a sense of separation to party politics which was viewed as merely the change of drivers of the socioeconomic bus. However, as the design system evolved over the following couple of decades, a critique of capitalism emerged when people saw how its workings were behind the environmental destruction they witnessed and, in recent years, how capitalism and the industrial systems of authoritarian nations like China and Russia drive global heating.
At best, permaculture has been ambivalent about politics. It has a history of criticism of conventional party politics that can be traced back to co-originator Bill Mollison. This is despite Bill trying to establish the Permaculture Peoples’ Party over 20 years ago. That failed in part because it would have offered little policy differentiation to the Australian Greens. The conversation around the proposed party at the time highlighted its contradicting permaculture’s supposed earlier opposition to party politics and to claims that it would take away votes from the Australian Greens, at the time the party most favoured by permaculture practitioners. It never happened because any political niche it might have colonised was already occupied and because of the ambivalence towards politics in the permaculture milieu.
Conversations around politics within permaculture circles strongly suggest alienation from mainstream parties although some commentators see value in the Greens and the Australian Labor Party. To contest elections, Bill Mollison’s Permaculture Peoples Party would have required equal scale and power, or would have had to devise asymmetric political tactics to leverage areas of vulnerability in the mainstream political agenda. There were plenty of those, however permaculture would have had to adopt policies to replace them, and it did not. Sure, the ethics, principles and theories of the design system implied an unarticulated politics oppositional to that of the mainstream Australian political parties and their agendas, but they were never made explicit. Even if there had been an attempt to do that, I can’t see it having been readily accepted within the movement. It would likely have generated a kickback about selling out.
The proposed Permaculture Peoples’ Party suggested involvement in pragmatic realpolitik rather than in the ideological realm. The idea was stillborn.
…permaculture is anti-political. There is no room for politicians or administrators or priests. And there are no laws either. The only ethics we obey are: care of the earth, care of people, and reinvestment in those ends… Bill Mollison.
At the time permaculture was increasing in participant numbers yet despite its implied opposition to the social economy it never evolved into a cohesive political lobby. To do this would have detracted from the development of permaculture as an applied practice — a practice of directly building alternatives which is how most, whose focus was more than the popular misinterpretation of permaculture as some kind of food gardening system, understood the mission of the design system.
Eschewing conventional party politics and critical of protest as a means of creating change, permaculture positioned itself as a third way. We are building the future we want, not simply opposing the future we do not want, was the message.
From the anti-Vietnam war protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s and on to the campaigns to prevent environmental destruction of the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrations were the manifestation of a growing public sentiment for change of the positive kind. As environmental issues came to the fore, especially in the nineties, campaigning took the more formal approach of electoral politics. Although anecdotal evidence suggests that permaculture practitioners saw the Australian Greens as their most favoured party, this was informal support as permaculture as a collective entity as well as permaculture associations shied away from expressing support for any particular party.
The notion of permaculture as a third way between the social mainstream and campaigning persisted with practitioners seeing themselves as building the things they wanted to see. Eschewing politics meant that no matter how exemplary the works of individual permaculture practitioners or their organisations, there was no collective way to scale them into a cohesive program. Permaculture, conceived as a grassroots approach to building a better world, remained at that level where it achieved success but did not catch the broader public imagination as might have a political program.
The logic of water
I see the popular permaculture approach to social change as akin to Edward de Bono’s water logic. de Bono used the analogy of water flowing in a stream. On encountering rocks or obstacles, the stream flows around them rather than expending energy in directly trying to move them. Over time its erosive energy eats away the obstacles. Imagine the stream as a permaculture that eschews mainstream politics by diverting around it, at the same time its growth and the structures it builds erode the rocks of business as usual. I haven’t seen permaculture’s mission described in this way, however I believe de Bono’s analogy captures the way that permaculture practitioners with political and social understanding see it.
Has this water logic approach worked? To a limited extent in some areas. Inspired by permaculture, people flow around the economy’s food production and distribution system like de Bono’s water in a stream by growing some of what they eat. Growing some of your food remains an easy gateway into the practice of permaculture and is a reason behind its popularity. To a limited extent, it removes people from market capitalism and affords a measure of limited self-reliance. DIY food production has seldom been politicised in this way within the movement other than by Bill Mollison, something I put down to permaculture practitioners distancing themselves from politics, in part because of its potential for divisiveness within the movement. Here is how Bill Mollison contexted DIY food production:
I teach self-reliance, the world’s most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it (permaculture) is seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.
For most home and community gardeners, however, growing food is not seen in terms of dissident politics. Those who do view the practice in political terms usually see it as a grassroots approach to food security, an informal popular front offering an alternative to corporate control of our food. Still, focusing on home gardening can create it own limitations. In an interview with Bill Mollison published in a 1983 edition of Permaculture magazine, Bill warned about DIY food production becoming an end in itself:
…I’ve realised… being a good gardener can be like being an ostrich with your head in the sand. You will inevitably die in your own good garden if you don’t pull your head out and see what is happening in the real world. Therefore, for us to continue to live on the earth, stop for a while from just being gardeners and look at what is happening and try and stop it.
I have seen no speculation about how the rise of the local food movement influenced permaculture practitioners’ perception of what they were doing. The idea of food localism can be traced to the second half of the 1990s after which, here in Australia, it blossomed into food advocacy organisations, lobbies that advocated in support of small scale regional farmers and alternative ways to the supermarket to obtain the food people wanted. The Sydney Food Fairness Alliance and its counterpart in the Illawarra, and in 2010 the formation of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance were pioneering organisations that emerged from the then-growing interest in food system alternatives. The participation of permaculture-trained people in these organisations was minimal, suggesting, perhaps, that earlier political differentiation between doing and acting in the broader political ambit of permaculture. This is something I have noticed in permaculture over the decades. Most practitioners focus on the grounded, hands-on aspects of the design system. Fewer engage with the more abstract social or political aspects.
Permaculture, we know, is about more than food production. From its earliest days it has taught the importance of providing as many of our life necessities as we can manage. Food, water and energy are critical needs and the major expenditures for urban householders, so it comes as no surprise that retrofitting homes and other buildings to make more efficient use of energy and to harvest and store the rain falling on our roofs have been important focal points for permaculture educators. That might be so, however there has sometimes been a failure to understand the limitations to achieving these things, mainly time, money and family priorities. Today’s cost-of-living crisis adds a deeper dimension to permaculture’s food, energy and water foci. Some within the movement have started to ask whether a focus on those things is being superseded by the financial difficulty people face in simply affording to buy a home. How relevant are water, energy and water efficiency if you cannot afford a home in the first place?
Permaculture courses and literature have made a difference not only to permaculture’s home-owning class but to others as well. Yes, the scale is limited and the idea often exceeds the implementation. It is evident in Australia that food and renewable energy are political and permaculture’s intervention as a community or practice in the politics around them continues to be distant.
Traditionally, permaculture peoples’ leanings have been to the green left position (anecdotal evidence comes from social media posts), however there are tendencies to the left and right of this position. I’m talking of permaculture in Australia here. Like the right, the left in Australia is not some solid ideological body, it is a spectrum. We see its range in Australian history from the far edges of communism, through varying tones of socialism and into the dominant social democracy. The Greens occupy a niche within this social democracy that pits them against some corporate interests and the worst excesses of capitalism, positioning them as a major party of reform rather than revolution. It was the socially liberal social democracy of the late 1970s from which permaculture was born and which I believe remains the political environment most conducive to permaculture’s development.
Is diversity always a good thing?
Thinking about the way that politics manifests within the social movement around permaculture raises the much-cited permaculture principle of diversity. Diversity is said to be a universally good thing in permaculture because it imparts resiliency to systems. As with other permaculture principles, this one deserves consideration to test whether it really is such a good thing.
The argument within the Australian permaculture movement over government moves to stem the spread of coronavirus and over vaccination during the pandemic raises the question of whether diversity—diversity of opinion in this instance—really does make the movement resilient or whether it risks doing damage. The question is about whether permaculture’s social and political diversity stymies the design system as a politico-social force. Does diversity create division?
…social media and permaculture bloggers and writers are all we have from which to infer patterns of thought within the movement…
The political diversity in permaculture does limit permaculture’s capacity to articulate a clear political line and even to define a general political direction for permaculture. It makes permaculture’s politics ambiguous despite the social media evidence over recent years of a dominant bias towards the policies of the Australian Greens and what I call the green left (that can include elements of Australian Labor Party policy). We would best regard that evidence as circumstantial because it represents only the opinion of those who inhabit permaculture’s social media platforms and only those motivated to post comments on them. They, however, carry weight because social media is where the permaculture conversation takes place today. In a social movement lacking a capacity to engage in self-examination such that would disclose descriptive data, social media and permaculture bloggers and writers are all we have from which to infer patterns of thought within the movement.
Compared to when permaculture emerged from Australia’s social democracy at the end of the 1970s — another time of social change — today’s social environment is more politicised and rift by the politics of climate change, identity politics (around gender, ethnicity, attitudes to public health, religion, science etc, plus an ongoing social class identity) and the associated culture wars. These are all issues capable of fracturing social movements working for change. Identity politics is divisive and creates conflict that detracts from the main task, which is reform of the political economy of which personal identity is a subset dependent upon an individual’s social class, economic opportunity and education. We need to keep the main thing the main thing, say those with a background in social change movements.
Just as some in permaculture accuse science of being reductionist, so identity politics becomes a type of political reductionism that shifts focus onto the individual rather than the collective body of practitioners. It fractures the holism of the design system by setting up internal differences around how individuals define themselves. That is because there is no organisation within permaculture with the mission or the capacity to properly address topics like this. As a decentralised practice, permaculture has no central authority, no head office and no governing body. Decisions made at the biennial permaculture converges carry no authority, in part because convergences are ephemeral events and are not attended by the majority of permaculture practitioners. They have little influence on how most practitioners practice permaculture. Permaculture Australia might have a national membership, however it has no authority over its members and what they can say about permaculture or the organisation itself.
The culture wars, the politics of gender, attitudes to science and to public health are all embedded in the social movement around permaculture, sometimes overtly, usually below the surface. What some, especially those on the political right, would call ‘political correctness’ — an element in the culture wars — has on occasion manifested in the tone policing of permaculture social media. The motivation for adopting those attitudes appears to be fairness in the treatment of people, something compliant with permaculture’s ethic of peoplecare, however at times they have diverted attention away from the main topic of online conversation. Beyond the permaculture bubble, in the world of information warfare, this is a tactic used as a tactic to distract conversations around important topics and to bog them down in argument, however I have seen no evidence of this as a deliberate tactic in permaculture fora.
As for how the politics of public health play out within the permaculture milieu, there have long been significant differences of opinion over conventional medicine and that around natural therapies, however it took the pandemic to turn what had been a civil discussion of these differences into polarised online conflict. As the extent and health impact of the pandemic started to become evident, differences of opinion over vaccination, vaccine science and the lockdowns introduced to stem the spread of the virus brought a fracturing of opinion in the permaculture milieu. This had also to do with differences in attitudes to science within permaculture.
We saw how this happened when David Holmgren, one of permaculture’s two originators, participated with other permaculture people in an anti-lockdown march during the pandemic. That triggered a split between those supporting David’s and friends’ actions and those supporting government actions (although that support was critical), and highlighted the split over scientific opinion about how to deal with the pandemic. It also indicated an unintended nexus with the political agenda of the far right. It was this overlap that raised the angst of some in permaculture at the time.
It remains to be seen whether Bill’s water logic approach to politics remains an effective strategy or even a possibility at a time when political differences have opened fractures in the movement. Sure, those fractures have been glossed over in the time since they were prominent, however they demonstrate that there are fundamental differences within the permaculture movement that could resurface, given the right stimulus.
A scientific basis
Scientific knowledge and experimentation played a significant role in the early permaculture. There was Bill Mollison’s environmental fieldwork in Tasmania and his time in academia teaching environmental psychology. There was the artificial horticultural habitats that John Todd experimented with. There was early adoption of renewable energy technology and botanical, soil and agricultural science continue to be held in high regard.
David’s comments on his blog critical of scientists is another instance of how politics plays out within the social movement around permaculture. In an alarmingly sweeping statement, David described scientists as “the priests of arcane specialised knowledge maintained by an empire of extraction and exploitation”. That is an extremely politicised statement that devalues science as much as it devalues the political economy within which science is done.
A criticism of science has been evident for some time among the permaculture cohort. We read comments that science is reductionist. That ignores the broader, holistic approach that sees a connection between things. This indicates a misunderstanding of how science works and of the value of reductionism. It is also wrong about science ignoring holism. We have a whole science around systems theory and network theory which is all about the holistic picture. The accusation about science is not new. It is decades old and suggests that those making it have adopted it uncritically. Bill emphasised that connections between components in a system are more important than the components themselves. We now have the science of network theory to highlight the value of connectivity and to verify Bill’s observation, a science in its infancy when Bill wrote.
Like universalist statements about diversity being a good thing, this criticism of science as reductionist has become something of a permaculture cliche that appears to be uncritically accepted at face value by more than a few in the movement. What it does demonstrate among those thoughtlessly parroting it is a wilful ignorance of the role of systems theory, systems thinking and network science in the work of researchers. It also ignores the proper place of reductionism in science. Reductionism and whole systems research both have valid roles. The inclusion of both is the holistic approach.
Attitudes to science might not appear political, however they are because they represent beliefs about a major social institution and they have electoral implications. They are political also because what is described as the anti-science movement is part of the package of beliefs and attitudes that are now incorporated in the agenda of rightwing political forces in Western societies. Included in this is the denialism of climate change and Covid and the belief that aircraft condensation trails are a covert chemical spraying agenda being carried out for unknown reasons (the reasons given are variable) by some nefarious organisation (which also has a variable identity depending on the source making it, or, more often, it has no identity at all). We see some in permaculture echoing themes, probably unknowingly, coming from those forces.
Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance… Neil de Grasse Tyson.
Is there any danger to the permaculture design system when its members repeat anti-science propaganda, denialism and other disinformation and misinformation? Yes, and it is this: among some within the movement and among the general public, permaculture could become seen as a ‘cooker’ practice (the term ‘cooker’ is a collective Australianism for people believing or promoting unverifiable conspiracy theories and disinformation — eg. the anti-science movement, climate change denialists, anti-vaxx, Covid denial, chemtrails, deep state etc — the term is a derivative of ‘having a cooked brain’).
David Holmgren said that in the absence of a severe crisis during which its usefulness would become apparent and during which it would be adopted on a wide scale, permaculture risks remaining a socially marginal practice. Let me add to that by saying that were it to become seen as a cooker thing, that would be a sure path to long-term marginalisation.
Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before — that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment… R Buckminster Fuller.
Social class and politics in permaculture
Social class is one of the determinants of political attitude. Looked at in terms of social class, permaculture remains largely a middle class social movement. None less that veteran Australian permaculture activist, Rosemary Morrow, has drawn our attention to this fact as has the political analyst of permaculture politics, the academic sociologist Terry Leahy.
Permaculture has attracted people from traditional working class backgrounds, however they are comparatively few. This accords with the shift evident since the start of the 1970s in the locus of social change moving from the working class to the middle class. The shift is linked to technological change and accompanied the economic growth of the period, the coming of age of the boomer generation and the computerisation of the economy. It can be partly explained by greater access to tertiary education, a legacy of the Whitlam Labor government which made tertiary education free at a time when the emerging economy required people with technical skills.
In the earlier Twentieth Century, social change in Western nations was at times a competition between electoral democracy, the communist movement and fascism. In economically advanced nations it was the work of trade unions as well as socialists and other reformist, leftist political forces.
The economic growth that started around a decade or so after last century’s mid-point and the higher standard of living it brought in Western nations brought a growth in the middle class, predominately an administrative and technical population wedged between the owners of industry with their access to capital and a traditional but now-smaller working class supplying technical services and labour to the economy. It coincided with and was a part of the Great Acceleration — the speeding-up of change of all kinds following the mid-1950s. Permaculture itself is a product of the Great Acceleration.
Permaculture is also a product of the growth economy of the 1970s that stimulated this shift in the locus of social change towards the better-educated and financially more secure middle class. It is one of the explanations for the scale of the adoption of the design system. That took place mainly among middle class people dissatisfied with the environmental, economic, political and social direction of contemporary societies, rather than those directly disadvantaged by it. Participation in permaculture and other forms of resistance is made possible by the availability of time, financial and personal resources afforded by the socioeconomic system. The dominant system created space for permaculture to germinate and grow. It is easy to see this as the system incorporating the seeds of its own destruction. That is wrong, however. It is more the dominant system containing the seeds of its internal change because permaculture in its contemporary form is reformist rather than revolutionary.
The dominant system is not a static thing. It undergoes its own evolution. It changes over time and it does this by tapping into ideas in society and adopting and adapting those it can absorb and incorporate without threatening its own demise. Capitalism is an adaptive complex system and behaves as such.
What does its reality as a middle class phenomenon mean for the future of permaculture? For one thing, it underwrites permaculture’s continuity as a practical approach to securing life’s basic necessities such as food, water, energy and resource-efficient housing. Permaculture now has the literature, audiovisual content, social networks and educational institutions necessary for its continuity. The late Sydney socialist thinker, Bob Gould, recognised this social changeover to the middle class as the locus of change. A man who inherited the traditional socialist belief that change came from the industrial working class, by the 1990s he was saying how political and economic power had passed to the “educated strata” in society composed overwhelmingly of the middle class.
Permaculture offers an avenue along which to direct middle class dissatisfaction with the socioeconomic system that avoids party politics, as well as political formations of the Twentieth Century such as fascism and communism. When seen as an approach beyond its common implementation in domestic food production it offers a sociopolitical path outside of confrontational social movements. It becomes a politically and socially safe avenue of change.
The risk here is that of permaculture devolving into its own comfort zone. “Only on the fringes of an ecosystem, those outer rings, do evolution and adaptation occur at a furious pace; the inner centre of the system is where the entrenched, non-adapting species die off, doomed to failure by maintaining the status quo.” That was Yvon Chouinard in his book, Let My People Go Surfing. The challenge for permaculture is to avoid those inner rings and becoming dumbed down and narrowly defined, and losing its potential as a social change technology.
Change: individual or social solutions?
In some ways, permaculture has forsaken its origin as a comprehensive system of design for sustainable communities. That is still there among those with time in the system, only it is now buried a little.
For example, permaculture’s early interest in economics has been ceded to specialist alternative economics groups. Perhaps alternative economics was too big a challenge for permaculture as it built its presence in Australia’s middle class milieu. Perhaps TV gardening programs share some responsibility for limiting permaculture’s potential by reinforcing the notion that, as practiced by members of permaculture’s land-owning class, permaculture is mostly about growing vegetables and keeping chooks.
The common permaculture practices of home and community gardening, household water harvesting and conservation, waste reduction and home renewable energy systems are all individual, not social solutions. They reinforce the individualisation of responsibility for dealing with the stresses of a complex world in which elements of the globalisation model so favoured by the neoconservatives of the 1990s are breaking down. They stop permaculture at the garden gate, although here we must recognise the work of permaculture people beyond the gate and out in the social sphere.
Promoting individual responsibility for reform and for finding solutions, rather than their being a social responsibility, has been noticeable in permaculture’s social movement. It is contested today thanks to the scale of the necessary changes needed to deal with issues like global heating and environmental degradation.
In her 2022 book, Reasons Not To Worry, on how she came to adopt the practice of Stoicism, Australian journalist Brigid Delaney discusses how she reconciled the way she lives with the big picture adaptation to global heating. It is the same solution that many in permaculture have adopted. They do what they can in their own lives according to the resources they have, then they walk out of the garden gate to join others in social action. This is the path to turn personal politics into social solutions. As the old sixties slogan goes: ‘the personal is political’. That applies whether you are complacent enough to continue business as usual or whether you are action-oriented enough to do something
The link with ideologies
Look at Permaculture One and Permaculture Two and you see that landuse forms a large component within the permaculture design system. It is visible at the individual level as the development of the detached home with its productive garden, and at the larger sc.ale in farming and large-scale landuse design.
Home gardening, intended to stimulate a degree of self-reliance in basic foods, segued into community gardening which was in existence well before permaculture came along, as well as into small-scale market gardening. This is all for the good, especially in the present confused state of the world where supply chains for a wide range of products, including food, have been disrupted and where they could be further disrupted by geopolitical conflict, blockages in the oil fuels supply chain and by the uncertain impacts of a warming climate.
The focus on home food production, household energy and water efficiency, and the craft production of household necessities has popularised the practice of homesteading. This is a traditional lifeway worldwide. In its current popular manifestation in the West, such as we see in permaculture, it can be traced back to the 1970s when it was a component of so-called ‘alternative lifestyles’, to borrow the popular description of the time. Some in permaculture have made a success of the homesteading lifestyle although some of those make a living by teaching permaculture as well as by small-scale farming. It has been said that this shows that the homesteading lifestyle is not viable, however an alternative way of looking at this is that it diversifies income streams.
The homesteading lifestyle comes with considerable cultural baggage to do with self-sufficiency, self-reliance and independence. And this, in turn, has made links with the political philosophy in which those things form part of the mythology: libertarianism.
Do we see threads of libertarianism permeating permaculture? We do. Do we pick it up in comments on social media and in the writing of permaculture bloggers? We do.
How does libertarianism relate to permaculture? Libertarianism emphasises individual liberty, limited government intervention and free markets. The frequent criticism of government in permaculture circles suggests a leaning towards limited government, and the attitude is understandable when it comes to some government policies and regulations. At the same time we see something of a contradictory countercurrent when permaculture people call for government intervention in things such as environmental issues.
In permaculture, libertarians might emphasise self-reliance, property rights and voluntary cooperation. Cooperation was postulated by Bill Mollison as being preferable to competition, yet competition is a core belief of libertarians, especially when it comes to markets. Self-reliance, too, has cachet among permaculturists, however there is a countercurrent to the idea at the individual or household level in the form of community self-reliance.
The libertarian mindset encourages tax avoidance. This renders any libertarian avoiding paying tax as a freeloader because they do not financially contribute to the social economy, yet they still rely upon socially-provided benefits like education, subsidised public transport, public health, pensions and all of the other collectively-provided social benefits.
Libertarians might advocate for minimising regulations that restrict individuals from practicing permaculture on their own properties or engaging in voluntary exchanges of permaculture goods and services. The illegality of setting up alternative currencies, which was experimented with in the 1990s including by some in permaculture, would be seen by libertarians as preventing engagement in voluntary exchanges at the regional level.
What about socialist thinking in permaculture? I am not talking about Marxism, more about the common socialist values of cooperation and action for the common good that are common in Western society and practiced by people who have nothing to do with socialism as a political ideology.
Socialists in permaculture might advocate for collective ownership and democratic control of resources to promote social equality and reduce socioeconomic disparities. We see this from time to time. Socialists might emphasize community cooperation, the sharing of resources and the equitable distribution of food and other permaculture products. The latter ties closely with permaculture’s third ethic of distributionism, the sharing of what is spare, to quote Australian permaculture designer Cecilia Macauley. They might encourage the establishment of cooperative permaculture projects or advocate for policies that support shared land ownership and resource management.
We can see how permaculture has little natural immunity to the political currents flowing through society, leaving it open to libertarianism, socialism and the generalised left and right. Once in the permaculture body politic, these strands cross-contaminate to produce the mishmash that is politics in permaculture.
