Thinking about permaculture…
Fractures and healing: how do we move beyond permaculture’s disagreement?
I have commented on David Holmgren’s writing before, not because I disagree with his take on how permaculture is being implemented but because of some of the things he writes and the language he uses in doing that. My focus has been its political implications and the effect on the public perception of permaculture. I do this in the spirit of friendly criticism, not attack. I have more in common with David than I have difference. Here, I respond to his latest blog on his website.
WHAT are we to make on this ongoing issue in permaculture? Some deny there was (still is?) a fracture in the movement but David’s blog posts acknowledge that it is real.
I think that most of its participants, myself included, want to see permaculture move on to deal with the real critical challenges our civilisation faces rather than those around medical science and public health and the associated politics that we have witnessed these past two or three years. To do that will require conversations about the issues including the disinformation that is part and parcel of them. In his blog post David speaks of the need for reconciliation around this and positions his article as a contribution to doing that. So, too, do I position this piece as a contribution.
I understand there were attempts made at reconciliation at the 2023 permaculture convergence, however convergences are attended only by a small number of practicing permaculturists, and in the absence of any detailed reporting of those discussions most of us have no idea of what went on and its outcome. All we hear are bits and pieces posted by people on social media. The conversations there may be relevant to those who attended but due to the lack of feedback they are largely irrelevant to those who could not attend. That is the contradiction of convergences. Resolutions and other matters made there seldom travel beyond and are lost to time.
As David says, there is a widely shared sentiment for permaculture practitioners to move on after the ructions originating with he and his friends attendance at a so-called ‘freedom movement’ rally opposing the Covid lockdowns. Maybe that will work if it is what most of us want, which I believe it is, however I do not think people will simply close the door on the public health and political aspects that emerged, particularly the political. They may well lay dormant, ready to reemerge in different form over some other issue.
I have forgotten who it was, but we used to show a short video when we taught permaculture, when my partner was working as a sustainability educator in local government. In it, whomever it was described grassroots social movements as society’s inoculation against economic disease and the other excesses of the system. I’m not so sure that is the reality anymore because we now have social movements with opposing objectives and some that support the system even if indirectly and unknowingly, and others that seek to generate distrust and to widen existing fractures. Rather than inoculating society they have divided it.
Permaculture is not immune to the political currents churning through society. While many assumed it would stand above them and remain immune from their infection, that didn’t happen and nor is it likely to happen in future. Why? Because of circumstances outside of its margin and how they influence thinking and exacerbate existing socio-political beliefs.
What are they? Here are some of the big ones:
- the long, post-World War Two peace between the superpowers is coming to an end with the rise of China, the multipolar rearrangement of the international scene and an aggressive Russia intent on reclaiming its Soviet era borders
- the conflict between the oil and gas industries and scientific and political moves to ameliorate global heating
- the ideological struggle between rational reality and disinformation spread both by state actors, organisations and individuals.
Now, the world, those things and others, is impinging on what was believed to be, but which was seldom expressed as permaculture’s unity stemming from its ethics, principles and characteristics. We all lived with that illusion until differences over the pandemic shattered it. David mentions this fracture in his blog.
In the past, the scientific paradigm reigned over the permaculture world. We could entertain aberrant beliefs, like the permaculture practitioner at a Permaculture North meeting of some years ago telling us that global warming was fake and was a conspiracy of the petrochemical industry. None of these differences of opinion grew to the extent that they could threaten a fracture in permaculture. I put this down to a shared belief in permaculture’s ethics and principles and how they would lift us above polarised points of view by offering an alternative course. They made pemaculture resilient at the time. Sure, in recent years some of the permaculture principles have been questioned as too general and insufficiently nuanced, but that assumption was still there. Now, something has happened. Now, it is different. Belief and opinion in permaculture are polarised as the ‘freedom’ march incident and social media posts demonstrate.
I am talking about those with a deeper interest and involvement in permaculture and who think about the design system’s future, not those engaging with the design system at a more superficial level such as gardening. Those people, and perhaps others coming into permaculture practice through workshops, courses or self-study, I hazard to guess would be confused by the controversies and avoid them when encountered.
Which brings us to David’s latest blog post. David’s post is listed as around a 40 minute read, so I am going to only pull out for commentary the pieces that stood out for me.
Has permaculture been co-opted?
David writes that:
The essay gives voice to my dismay at the way permaculture ethics and design principles failed to inoculate permies against being gamed in ways that threatened to both disable and divide our movement’s contribution to crafting a new story of ‘interbeing’ and creative energy descent at the margins of failing techno-industrial civilisation. Instead of contributing to this new story, I’m witnessing permaculture’s progressive enclosure and the co-option of permaculture ethics, principles and practices in the suffocating straightjacket of Brown Tech orthodoxy…
That’s quite a mouthful to take in all at once. As usual in David’s writing there is much to unpack and ponder. He is saying that permaculture’s ethics and design principles were not up to the job of keeping permaculture people from bring “gamed” by the system and divided. That is, the ethics and principles were not fit for purpose. He also writes that this co-option divides the movement’s ability to craft a different future. In other words, permaculture is no longer an effective system for social and economic change.
People are being gamed because they do not think the way David does? This comes across as just a little condescending towards the intelligence of permaculture practitioners. What David sees as being gamed would be seen by others as rational, evidence-based thinking and action.
Are people being gamed because they interpret events differently to David and, perhaps, don’t accept his model of the energy descent of the “failing techno-industrial civilisation” at face value? The model is not fully accepted within the movement and, as we cannot predict the future, it remains only a model dependent on the path dependency of current trends. That is not guaranteed.
David writes of the “co-option of permaculture ethics, principles and practices in the suffocating straightjacket of Brown Tech orthodoxy”. Stripping away the hyperbole we are left with the assertion that the mainstreaming of the permaculture design system that many want to see is nothing more than its capture and cooption by the “Brown Tech orthodoxy”. So, is permaculture to remain the practice of a subculture? A fringe practice on society’s margins? David’s statement suggests this is where he sees it at present, and that is a fair assumption. He sees it as crafting a new story from the margin, but the question then becomes how do we move that new story into society’s core?
Hold on a moment. Have not permaculture activists, myself included, been trying to move permaculture from the social fringe where David sees it positioned into the social mainstream? I did consultancy and policy work for local government to enable community gardening, and later became co-ordinator of community gardening and urban landcare for a central city council as well an urban landcare educator on a large urban fringe city farm. My partner, Fiona Campbell, worked for well over a decade as a local government sustainability educator, running a community resilience education program centred around permaculture ideas and developing a multiple-use, regional urban park with permaculture design ideas, and for the project cooperated with a landscape architect and an architect both of whom had completed permaculture design courses. Mainstream government body. Mainstream architectural people. Mainstream community. It worked. Seems to be just where permaculture should be. The truth of that was evident in the number of people coming through the centre. Without the visibility and credibility lent by the local government connection most of those people, the vast majority in my estimation, would not have encountered permaculture. They were well outside the orbit of permaculture groups and educators.
For years we worked with permaculture as a fringe thing but when local government felt comfortable enough to accept its presence we could suddenly expand the reach of the design system, bringing it to people who knew nothing of it. It was akin to the infiltrate-and-influence tactic used by political groups although it was done openly and without malicious intent.
This was once an approved approach in permaculture of bringing about change from within rather than tearing the whole thing down and rebuilding. It complied with Bill Mollison’s principle of “make the least change for the greatest possible effect,” as well as “the problem is the solution” — that is, if the problem is mainstream society’s institutions and ideology then they are also the solution to change for the better. That validates working within them. Let’s acknowledge the origin of this principle in the practical philosophy of Stoicism of 2000 years ago which suggests that we look for advantage within problems.
Back to David’s question of the cooption of permaculture. Maybe when it comes to this we might consider the example of a Victorian permaculture group possibly coopted by the My Space social movement. The movement comes across as folksy, espousing ideas that seemingly are at home in permaculture such as community, nature, localism, community gardens and local food. People join it ignorant of the far-right connections, the anti-semitism of its leadership and conspiracy thinking among its membership. This is the movement whose members have disrupted local government meetings over things like the trandgender politics around library reading sessions for children and the 15 Minute City town planning idea. It is interesting that some in permaculture find a home in My Space and that they fail to look behind the facade that movements like this erect. If permaculture really is at home in the movement then what does that say about permaculture, its ideological leanings and openness to influence and manipulation?
Was My Place to expand its presence in permaculture then we would have a more-lasting, deeper potential for fracturing the movement that would likely to see people walk away from it. How does this sit with David’s response to criticism in an earlier blog post that he is open to sharing permaculture with anyone at all? That is a positive sentiment but it assumes permaculture is somehow immune from co-option. I find it hard to believe David would leave the movement open like that.
Were the issues over the lockdowns and vaccination all part of the co-option of permaculture into the brown-tech mainstream? Are all we citizens willing participants in the brown-tech future? Given that we do not have the individual power to alter the future, then we may be. But, then, so is permaculture as a body of knowledge and as a social movement because it, too, lacks the power, strategy and know-how to change the societies it is embedded in. It might have the capacity to create a counter-movement in the form of a type of cultural revolution that attracts people (which is more or less what it is doing), however that would require scaling-up to deeply influence society.
How come? Permaculture is about cultural change rather than the politics of opposition. This is because it motivates people to take a different worldview and engage in practices that make them more resilient to the pressures coming through society. Speaking generally, people completing permaculture design and other courses imbibe the components of a more independent way of life, especially in the provision of basic life necessities of food, water and energy. At one level these are technical things, the infrastructure of living. At a contextual level they are political. In those courses that treat permaculture in its traditional social role students come away with an implied critique of the political economy, however in doing that they imbibe the notion of gradual change rather than abrupt socio-political change (abrupt change confronting widespread notions among permaculture people is why David and friends’ participation in the anti-lockdown rally and his consequent writings came as a surprise).
Politics and beliefs
Reading his blog, it seems David took a similar precautionary approach to my partner and I when news of the virus started trickling through in 2020. Fiona and I were living in our van at the time, in a low-key caravan park on the edge of a small beachside town on the southeast coast of Tasmania, our home from late-spring to the end of summer after coming off a longer road trip on the mainland. It was then, as news from Wuhan was starting to come through, that we realised how it could spread through the caravan park’s shared facilities were it to arrive on our island. We started to use hand sanitiser and to pay more attention to personal hygiene than we had. This was before masks became a requirement and before the virus made landfall in Tasmania, after which a prompt lockdown and masking succeeded in eradicated it from the state. We were travelling freely around the state without masks while the mainland was firmly locked down.
David writes that in his business he didn’t apply for government help during the pandemic. That is a proper course for an anarchist or a libertarian (David might disagree with that description) because, as he said in a past blog post (don’t recall which one), he avoids paying tax.
Our own journeys
We all have our own journeys in permaculture and they reflect our networks, our experiences in life, the influences we encounter and our values. We interpret the world through these, applying meaning to what we find.
It should be clear that while I agree with a lot that David writes about permaculture and its potential, I am skeptical of the politics and beliefs he puts on the table. My experience of the social movement around permaculture in teaching the PDC and shorter courses, in writing about it and in local government is clearly different to David’s permaculture life, however difference does not invalidate any particular experience. David co-created permaculture and then unleashed it, after which it took its own course with the unpredictability of a new force let loose in a system, and in so doing his deep influence over the movement started to loosen although he remains what sociology academic, Terry Leahy, calls the “charismatic authority”.
I have not thought this through, but I wonder if David’s and my understanding of events around the pandemic comes from his lifestyle as a rural homesteader and landowner and mine in working with mainly urban people whose lives are lived in the social mainstream. Does this suggest that David can afford to take a more idealistic position on social issues while I have had to take a pragmatic, incremental position? This might go some little way to understanding our attitudes to how government dealt with the pandemic (which is ongoing as I write) and to vaccination. Reading David’s blog, I have wondered whether his lifestyle leads him to place the freedom of the individual over the social wellbeing, whereas mine and others’ was based on the need for social solidarity in stopping the virus. We had that solidarity in Tasmania and it worked.
I read a number of things into what David writes. In it, I find a sometimes implied individualism that at times comes across as akin to what you find in right-libertarianism. I am not saying that David has swapped his anarchism (I don’t recall where he said that was his political belief) for a far-right sentiment. Far-right attitudes seldom work so abruptly. They are imbibed little-by-little.
I have seen this happen with a couple people in permaculture, one of whom was photographed with the past-coal mining industry consultant, climate change denier (he once described climate change as a scam), and one-time senator for the far-right fringe party, One Nation. This person described him as inspirational. How do you reconcile that with permaculture and its ethics? Another fully adopted the Q anti-vaxx, anti-Bill Gates, anti-5G, chemtrails, anti-globalist (a category the far-right seldom identifies) and anti-World Economic Forum conspiratorial mindset (there are more conspiracies in their catalog, many more), all of which are components of the diverse ‘freedom’ movement campaigning kit. Yet, this person continues to express permaculture sentiments. This leaves me confused, and points to a convergence of what we might call ‘green’ and political fringe politics that other social commentators have identified. Look through the permaculture social media channels and you find others reciting conspiratorial themes, including in the comments to David’s article on his website.
The far-right: concern rather than obsession?
David writes of an:
obsession with the Far Right that flared across permie social media following our participation (with a permaculture banner) in massive rallies against lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
Obsession or concern? While I defended David from charges of his deliberately supporting the far-right during that controversy, I think he is being defensive because of his surprise at the kickback he and others who participated received to what were later revealed to be rallies organised by the far-right.
It turned out that permaculture included diverse political beliefs, some of which were in direct opposition to what some might consider the orthodox political line in permaculture as articulated by its leading authorities. The accusations of far-right influence shouldn’t have surprised us because if permaculture is as diverse as what some say it is then that diversity contains in itself the seeds of dissension. And when that dissension is over a life-threatening event like the pandemic and the emergence of new political forces with a violent past that would victimise many, then it can lead to fracture. The fringe left knows this only to well thanks to its history of fracture.
I imagine that the permaculture movement will step over the far-right issue and walk on. As practitioners, my observation is that people see the events around the ‘freedom’ rally as a temporary aberration that will simply disappear. They see it as peripheral to the practice of permaculture. Yet, the presence of David at the rally and his consequent blog articles firmly embeds the politics and disinformation of the so-called ‘freedom movement’ in the design system. That sets it up for a slow fracture.
Regarding all of this, let us remember Voltaire who warned that “those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
The clash with modernity
David mentions his:
…observation that the sceptical distance within our networks from faith in mainstream medicine is mostly skin deep and when it comes to life-threatening stuff most people still do what ‘their doctor’ tells them.
Why is there an assumption of “skeptical distance”? I recall nothing of it in my permaculture education or practice following that. Is it a new invention or is it an assumption? Sure, permaculture suggests we question everything and, sure, there are other forms of medical practice but they and scientific Western medicine are all accepted within the permaculture movement. That is my experience, anyway.
Why would permaculture people not have faith in modern medicine? What is there in permaculture that precludes such faith? Does one have to discard mainstream medicine to practice permaculture? No. It just doesn’t follow. Once again, what I think we see here is a clash between David’s assumption of what the movement around permaculture should be and what it is.
The wide availability of very shallow knowledge has led to the illusion of profound understanding
Perhaps people utilise mainstream medicine because their doctors know more about disease and cures than they do. One of the sillier notions that has circulated within the permaculture milieu is that non-experts know more than people who have spent years studying and working in a field. This just makes permaculture look ridiculous. As author Paul Cornish said in his book, World of War, “The wide availability of very shallow knowledge has led to the illusion of profound understanding.”
Why would permaculture people not have faith in mainstream medicine when their and their family’ health and, possibly, their lives are at stake during a pandemic? We are talking about a survival situation here. In such a situation you do not discard something of potential value. That is as much common sense as it is standard survival behaviour. I am unclear what David would suggest as an alternative treatment to the virus when it comes to ‘natural’ cures (Ivermectin?).
Agents of the Brown tech future
David writes of:
talking to and staying with colleagues and increasingly finding the narrative and the same old reductionist science that was looking dodgy to me seemed to be strengthening for many, including those I respected for their independence of thought and action. Seeing some of those lining up enthusiastically for their first Covid jab made it clear the divides that I foresaw in my Brown Tech energy descent scenario could fracture the permaculture movement.
Hmmm. Fracture again… and does David say that those people he alludes to lack “independence of thought and action” because they see reality differently? Again, David’s “reductionist science” trope that we find in his other stories. No, not all modern science is reductionist as that which is complements science that takes a more holistic view. I am talking not about polar opposites but about a continuum of scientific approaches.
Does reality fulfil what David foresaw? Let’s be clear that nobody foresaw anything. Why? Because we cannot foresee what has not happened. We can imagine, estimate and guesstimate but that is all that it is, not the fulfilment of a prophecy. David’s Brown Tech energy descent scenario is a possibility, one among others, and like all foreseeing of the future it is made in ignorance of the unexpected changes and events that have a nasty habit of disrupting the imagined future of those bold enough to guesstimate it.
Let’s look at this a little deeper. The path dependency of extrapolating present trends into a possible future is easily disrupted by Nicolas Taleb’s ‘black swans’ — the unanticipated, surprise events that are all too often the real determinants of our future. For example, many of us saw permaculture as a unified social movement continuing its trend towards broader acceptance and to eventually influencing the political economy through positing a new vision of a better future. That was based on Everett Rogers’ ‘diffusion of innovation’ theory that used to be accepted as a model for the development and spread of permaculture but that is seldom heard of within the movement these days. But, then came the black swan in the form of the pandemic. The same applies to Europe. The EU’s imagined future has now been profoundly disrupted by the black swan of Russia’s war in Ukraine that has revived and expanded NATO and will likely see greater focus on weapons development in NATO, the West generally and in Russia (not a guesstimate — it is already happening). These examples are the repeated story of the anticipated future disrupted.
Was it David’s defence of the anti-vaxx sentiment and attending the lockdown rally that were the real cause of what he says is the fracture in permaculture? In his blog it looks like David is positioning all permaculture people who had the first Covid vaccination as agents of his Brown Tech scenario rather than classing them as part of the spectrum of diversity that permaculture so-often champions. One has to accept David’s scenario model of alternative futures (originally described in his book, Future Scenarios) to see themselves in this situation. Recent social media conversations show that the model is not universally accepted within the movement.
Divide-and-conquer in permaculture
Keeping on the track of what reads like David’s growing disappointment in what permaculture has become, and is becoming, he alludes to a:
divide-and-conquer process that showed that our network biases and grounded practise to trust in nature rather than pharma was little match for the forces involved.
What divide-and-conquer process is David talking about? Who is doing the dividing? As for trust in nature, well, nature cannot cure all disorders and “pharma” can cure some of the things that nature cannot. Why is there a problem with that? So, why is there a divide at all? Aren’t so-called ‘natural’ cures and modern medicine a continuum rather than polar opposites? When natural cures work we do not call them ‘alternative medicine’ or ‘natural medicine’. We call them ‘medicine’.
But, divide and conquer? I will resist saying that this sounds like an alleged conspiracy because it shares the characteristics of other conspiracies by being a bit thin where specifics are required, like who is doing the dividing and what do they want to conquer, and why? It is different to authentic conspiracy theories such as that of the oil and gas industry attempting to subvert the science of global warming and co-opt our politicians, or anti-vaxx operatives attempting to discredit the medical science for which there is ample hard evidence of its efficiacy. Yes. Some conspiracy theories are real.
Has permaculture created its own vulnerability?
Continuing David’s disappointment with permaculture practitioners and his earlier mention of the presence of the far-right, do the things he mentions — permaculture’s ethics, principles and practices — leave the movement open to infiltration and co-option? I am not implying a far-right conspiracy to infiltrate permaculture (although the tactic has been used overseas with other organisations, as well as by the fringe left, by Soviet operatives during the Cold War and in contemporary times by the Chinese Communist Party with its ‘elite capture’ of co-opting politically powerful and influential figures in Western and unaligned countries). Perhaps permaculture’s ethics are like motherhood statements (ie. very generalised sentiments few are likely to disagree with and which can be safely adopted by anyone) and the principles so general that they can be interpreted to suit different political agendas. We even have the example of American national socialists (aka ‘nazis’) co-opting permaculture ethics and principles exclusively for white folk.
Here we should look at what David writes about how permaculture has to accept the “constantly proliferating genders that are appearing in the sociopolitical landscape.” He goes on to remind permaculture practitioners:
that permaculture is a ‘broad church’ and they have to share it with people of different beliefs and understandings of the world in the same way that people of different cultures and religions (and no religion) are welcome to adopt and use permaculture.
I have no argument with this in general, however I do wonder about the utility of sharing permaculture with “people of different beliefs and understandings of the world” that are fringe political and religious entities like those American national socialists. Would this broad adoption by groups that might have opposing political and social agendas to permaculture simply confuse people and turn them away? Would groups not select the content they approve of from permaculture, ignore the rest and reshape it in their own image? Would this create a range of permacultures rather than a more-unified application of permaculture (are we seeing this now with the fracture David speaks of, between those sharing his beliefs and others taking a more evidence and science based approach)? Or is permaculture malleable enough to be adopted by people with opposing ideologies or, if not opposing, by groups whose ideas are so different that they sit uneasily with each other?
Here we have the risk of co-option by those groups and the consequent fallout in the pubic perception of permaculture.
In the earlier pandemic period the fracturing of the permaculture movement was a subset of the larger-scale fracturing of society that started more or less with the second year of the pandemic and was soon weaponised by the far-right here and in the US. The Americans had been primed for this by the Trump presidency and were already socially and ideologically divided, however at the time Australians would look on it as one of those weird American things and reflect on how Australian society was saner than the American, a belief I still adhere to.
I have participated in and informally studied social movements and have seen how the dominant social system influences movements and subcultures, despite their critiquing it and their attempting to distance themselves from the social and economic mainstream. That comes about because they have to live within the societies they seek to change. That permaculture should start to show the early signs of fracture as the disinformation pandemic (in which some permaculture people became propagators and combatants) spread through society like rot spreading through a fallen tree, came as no surprise. The existing critical attitude of people in socially fringe groups further opens them to influence by other critiques of the political economy to expose them to so-called ‘alternative’ ideas and to disinformation.
A time for rebuilding
Reading through David’s article I came to where he talks about the rebuilding of trust within the movement and the ability to creatively work together. He says it will require “more than tolerance of difference. It will require something akin to a truth and reconciliation process. While writings such as this are like position papers that invite measured responses on websites and online platforms that are not currently censored, such as Substack and Twitter…”.
And here I stopped. Abruptly. Is David ignorant of what Musk is doing with Twitter? Not only has he tweaked the algorithm to downgrade some commentators, he has allowed the haters to reenter Twitter such that there has been a substantial emigration to alternative social media like Mastodon and Tribel. So, it is okay with David to give voice to haters? Really? When was permaculture’s second ethic tossed into the garbage bin?
As for permaculture people having to tolerate difference, that might not go far enough. It would require the acceptance of difference. If so, then it will also require a means to navigate those differences.
Reading the comments that follow David’s article again raised David’s earlier statement about permaculture turning into its own distinctive subculture if significant changes do not occur within the medium timeframe. It is already a subculture based around its ethics and principles (of which there are two main sets), however most of its participants retain close connections to the mainstream world and economy because they derive their livelihoods from it. Without it, many would not have the financial wherewithal to practice and develop their permaculture. It is clear that David sees the resultant reformism as a bad compromise. He would rather see the mainstream wind down and permaculture or something like it take its place. The vibe I picked up from what David writes is of a deeper fracture that would give to permaculture participants a more-coherent and distinct sense of difference and belonging based on some kind of earth-centred worldview. Perhaps we should recognise this co-dependency with the mainstream that many in permaculture rely on while simultaneously developing strategies and tactics that create what we need to live in a more-sustainable and regenerative way.
While most of us would go along with that, the question for permaculture people is what would happen to society’s vulnerable in the chaotic wind-down period between the decline of the dominant socio-economic system and the emergence of something like permaculture?
Misplaced allegations of misinformation
David’s blog post is wide-ranging. In it he repeats his allegation of deliberate misinformation in official Covid record keeping, the incidence of adverse vaccine reaction, media blaming, in the number of cases and other allegations that have been effectively refuted by people who closely follow those issues. He resorts to tropes familiar from the anti-vaxx and so-called ‘freedom’ movement about “experimental jabs”, the “shutting down of debate”, censorship, “globalists” and how the lockdowns could be used to “destroy small business” (why would government want to do this? The implication is because it would benefit large corporate interests according to David).
As one who follows the plague of disinformation, lying and inveigle we see disrupting societies in the social democratic world, these are all old, familiar and tired allegations constantly repeated by those pushing discriminatory social programs and fringe and dangerous political agendas. As Lady Gaga put it: “I’m telling you a lie in a vicious effort that you will repeat my lie over and over until it becomes true.”
Is permaculture primed to fracture?
In the comments following his article and in David’s response to them, I have to say how disappointing it is to encounter those undefined allusions adopted (started?) by the fringe right about “globalists” and the other themes like Covid being more than accident, that they carry on with (Chinese Communist Party secrecy in its authoritarian state will never disclose whether that is true or not, however evidence from Chinese and Western investigators currently say it is not — and those in the West claiming to know otherwise merely exhibit their ignorance publicly).
Permaculture, when I started to become involved, was a rational approach to creating a better future that took note of the sciences and adopted from them. Now we have its informal leadership (not just David, but others with a track record in the system) repeatedly trashing them as reductionist (while accepting the benefits they bring) all the while ignoring the value of reductionism as a travelling companion to holistic science. Is permaculture becoming a dual-state entity based around its attitude to science and rational thinking while at the same time agreeing on the ethics and the principles articulated by David and Bill Mollison?
Sitting here in southeastern Tasmania, looking at David’s writing and comments made by others from a state where the brief lockdown succeeded and made it possible for us to freely move around the state while the mainland was still locked down, I see in his writing and the associated issues how social divisions in wider society impact on structures previously imagined to be free of them, structures like permaculture, and bring about a fracturing of the earlier consensus.
Is the fallout over Covid, vaccines, pharmacology and medicine an example of the unintentional clash stemming from too much diversity in the permaculture movement? Are we seeing the development of two strands in permaculture, one based around scientific understanding and mutual assistance for the common good evidenced by those accepting the Covid vaccine and complying, however reluctantly, with government attempts to deal with something we as a society have not dealt with before, and another stimulated by libertarian attitudes? Maybe. I recall David saying that if our future is not that of the brown tech scenario then permaculture may remain the practice of a subculture. There is no middle ground here. Either you do permaculture or you do the socioeconomic mainstream. I can imagine this happening, but of course I don’t know. But I do know that David’s latest blog post, supposedly intended as a basis for a healing conversation, might just as easily sever and solidify it.
I suspect the fracture and the ongoing conversation around these matters in permaculture fly over the top of most practitioners, particularly those who, fed by media coverage of permaculture and TV programs, understand permaculture only as a gardening system. That is a watering-down of what was a theory and practice with social change potential. That is still there but we await the unknowable future to see if it persists.
If we want a more unified permaculture and if we want to move beyond and heal what was the first and most substantial fracture within our movement we need to remind ourselves of what we have in common in our practice of permaculture. That won’t heal any wounds that might have been opened, any fractures that might have been widened, however over time it might produce a healing perspective on them and lead us to consider our actions in the name of permaculture.
Here is David’s article: https://holmgren.com.au/writing/covid-through-a-permaculture-lens/
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