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New book explores permaculture’s politics
Preamble
Having read the pre-publication copy of Terry Leahy’s book, The Politics of Permaculture, I set out to write a straight review. That didn’t work. As I read the book I kept finding overlaps with my own thinking on the topic and I wandered off on side trips exploring what he writes about. Finally I gave up on writing a straightforward review. Something longer was required, so I decided to write a combined review and commentary.
Writing from the pre-publication edition, it is possible that the published edition might differ in minor points. However, the pre-publication edition encapsulates the essence of Terry’s thinking about permaculture, whom and what makes it up, how it is perceived, where it might be going and the political ideologies, explicit and implicit, that guide it.
Is it time for a book on the politics of permaculture?
That is an easy question to answer: yes. For a social movement and practice approaching its 45th year, a little navel gazing is timely.
Envisioned as the people who make it up, permaculture is a mash-up of political attitudes held explicitly or implicitly. Implicitly? Yes. People import their preexisting political attitudes into permaculture, however the design system’s ethics and principles lend it an implied political bias that has the potential to push people to change their attitudes.
Like a small mammal on a dissecting table, Terry’s book lays open the innards of the permaculture design system. Some might not like what they see while others, knowing permaculture is an application-based practice, might think Terry’s book to be a bit beside the point.
How will readers accept the book?
Writing about politics in permaculture is a chancy business. The movement’s politics are varied and sometimes contradictory. The movement’s politics? That will sound contradictory to some. Isn’t permaculture non-political? Let’s just say that permaculture and its practitioners are influenced by trends and forces outside its ambit — permaculture acts upon the world but the world also acts upon permaculture. Likewise, the personal politics of its practitioners which are filtered through their values, beliefs, education and assumptions.
I’m sure some will write off Terry’s book as an unneeded and unwanted distraction from the main thing, which is the ‘doing’ of permaculture. Doing, however, involves politics even if that is how decisions are made between people in a permaculture organisation or a project. Furthermore, whatever it is that permaculture people do, it is done within the opportunities and limitations of the dominant socio-political system.
Politics, after all, is the process of how we as individuals, organisations, businesses and societies make decisions.
Isn’t permaculture anti-political? That is what some say, however it is not. Permaculture is about change, and anything which proposes changing either elements of, or the entirety of the dominant political economy is bound to be political. Politics, after all, is the process of how we as individuals, organisations, businesses and societies make decisions. Politics is built into being human. It encompasses how the practice, the organisations and the people who make up permaculture behave. We find politics in permaculture’s own organisations because people have their own vision of how things should be done and they have to negotiate an outcome which recognises the validity of other peoples’ ideas. This has not always been achieved quietly. There have been failures of due process and ructions within permaculture organisations.
Terry’s book is important for another reason. A social movement without a knowledge of its history or constitution risks ideological and practical drift. It’s like the old truism: those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.
Survey data + observation + theory = insight
Terry’s approach to his research for The Politics of Permaculture was to combined a survey of permaculture practitioners in a number of countries with empirical knowledge coming from decades as a participant observer of the permaculture movement. This he filters through the theoretical understanding of a sociology academic.
His survey included people practicing pemaculture at the grassroots level, although Andy Golding, chief executive of the UK Permaculture Association would be the exception. Terry avoided surveying what he calls the ‘charismatic authorities’ who are the movement’s thought leaders. Doing this allowed the opinions of those he interviewed to dominate,å rather than allow the main figures in permaculture to influence his findings because of the automatic and sometimes unquestioning credibility they are afforded by practitioners.
A pause for reflection
Terry’s intent is to place permaculture into its greater context of social movement activism and to provide a window through which the movement’s participants can gain an understanding of where their movement is now. Strands of activism that are fellow travellers of permaculture with either strong or tenuous parallels to the design system’s ideology include the environment movement in Australia. It evolved over the same time period as permaculture but, unlike permaculture, achieved significant political influence. The alternative/counterculture/back-to-the-land movement which attracted tens of thousands through the late-1960s-1970s influenced the early development of permaculture, which drew some of its early participants from it (a participant estimate numbering around 60,000 was made by sociology researcher Peter Cock in his 1979 book, Alternative Australia — communities for the future).
Terry sees his book as the opportunity for permaculture practitioners to take a “pause for reflection”. After 37 years of involvement in permaculture I, too, think a little reflection a good idea.
A pause for reflection? How seldom has permaculture done that? Individuals might on occasion, however the times that permaculture as a social movement has reflected on its existence can be counted on the fingers of a hand with a couple digits missing. One of those was a session at the 1997 Australasian Permaculture Convergence led by then-Sydney-based permaculture educator, Fiona Campbell, and professional facilitator, Maria Maguire from Unfolding Futures. A participatory event, it explored past and present influences on permaculture and harvested ideas from the crowd on where the movement should focus in future.
Does Terry achieve these intentions of placing permaculture in its greater sociopolitical context? Yes. They are what makes the book of value to permaculture pratitioners as well as to people outside the permaculture design system who might research it.
Not a minority of one
I admit to a feeling or relief when Terry told me of his book. I thought I was a minority of one when it came to divining the swirling currents of political ideology and thought within permaculture. My thoughts, those of a few years ago, anyway, I documented in an article: A state of confusion: Permaculture’s politics.
Terry’s terms of reference were different to mine although there was overlap. The political categories I used were different. Our starting points were different, too. Terry approaches his book through the lens of sociology — he is a sociology academic at a Melbourne university. His is a qualitative study analysing permaculture as a social movement. I approached my story through the lens of investigative journalism, as journalism was my profession.
I watched as the design system evolved over the years following its birth. I saw elements of political thinking from the times rising from and then descending back into the movement’s background. I listened as people said permaculture was anarchic in structure, as they said it was different to the environment movement because its focus was on building the things we wanted to see rather than engaging in confrontational politics, and as a few neoliberal ideas had a brief surfacing in the movement in the 1990s. This churn in elements of political ideology appearing and disappearing illustrates how permaculture is not politically isolated from the society in which, to paraphrase Mao Zedong, permaculture practitioners swim like fish in the sea. None of these ideologies stuck. Permaculture’s politics, it seemed, could best be descsribed as a melange influenced by socioeconomioc, political and environmental trends in society.
It was apparent that people were confused as to what permaculture really was. That was an observation informed by teaching the Permaculture Design Course through my partner and my PacificEdge Permaculture agency and at TAFE. Is it a design system as described in courses? Is it an approach to farming and gardening? Is it some kind of unorganised organisation? Is it a social movement? Is it whatever Bill Mollison described it as in his seminal 1988 book, Permaculture — A Designers’ Manual? In an attempt to think through the big-picture structure of permaculture I earlier mapped its outline using network theory: The Structure of Permaculture — understanding the network.
We can think of permaculture in abstract terms as an open platform of ethics and principles for the design of sustainable and regenerative systems upon which practitioners develop useful applications.
Other than a survey of members conducted by Permaculture Australia some time ago, the only attempt I know of to understand the design system as an cohesive entity was conducted a few years ago by the Next Big Step, an initiative led by Pemaculture UK to establish a global organisation for permaculture. That didn’t happen, however their survey disclosed valuable information mainly about the practice of permaculture and its make-up in Europe, the USA, Australia and a few other places. Here’s a report: NBS survey paints a tentative picture of permaculture as a global movement.
Defining permaculture: always a challenge
Tricky territory, defining permaculture. There are so many definitions of the design system that defining what we are talking about has become as much a barrier to newcomers as an explanation.
We can think of permaculture in abstract terms as an open platform of ethics and principles for the design of sustainable and regenerative systems upon which practitioners develop useful applications. Today, permaculture is often defined by a practitioner’s application of the design system. While such definitions are true in microcosm, they lead to confusion when people encounter different definitions. Terry points out that however permaculture is defined it is also “…a social movement, a body of people, their actions and the ways that they think about the world.”
In earlier years permaculture was dominated and led by the Permaculture Institute set up by Bill Mollison in the early 1980s. After the organisation lapsed we were left with only the Permaculture Research Institute, headed by veteran permaculture designer and educator, Geoff Lawton, and Permaculture Australia as national organisations. Neither organisation rose to the dominance achieved by the Permaculture Institute. It had first-starter advantage and defined permaculture through its early years, based initially on the first book on permaculture, Permaculture One, and subsequently on the ideas of Bill at Tagari Community in northern Tasmania and, later, by David at his Melliodora smallholding.
The rise of charismatic authority
Permaculture is guided, if that really is an accurate term, by the charismatic authorities who invented and initially developed the design system.
Let’s define what Terry means by ‘charismatic authorities’ because the term resurfaces throughout his book. Terry adopts Weber’s definition of charismatic authority as being “tied to an individual personality who is considered extraordinary.” They are regarded as authorities because what they say and write is regarded as true. It frequently goes unchallenged and is seldom subjected to critical analysis. They are charismatic because they attract a following.
There are other voices but they are not charismatic because they are not greatly influential in defining the theory and practice of permaculture. They may have influence but it is subordinate to that of the founding authorities. They add to a body of knowledge and practice that is already defined. They might produce iterations of the ideas formulated by the charismatic authorities but they seldom reinvent what is already there or anything new and revolutionary. Permaculture might be ‘anarchic’ in how practitioners and groups go about doing their own thing, however when we look at the design system we find it strongly influenced by the small number of charimatic authorites who are virtually unassailable in their dominance of the design system and the social movement around it.
The prime charismatic authorities are Bill Mollison and David Holmgren because they formulated the permaculture design system back at the end of the 1970s. In doing so they have first-starter advantage over others who came later. The idea of first-starter advantage comes from digital culture. It describes people and organisations which invent or significantly innovate an existing technology and in doing so gain competitive advantage through initially occupying the market segment. They have a period of technical and economic dominance until their invention is copied.
Springboarding off his role as an instigator of the permaculture design system, Bill became a charismatic authority because of his personal appearances and his books, especially his 1988 tome Permaculture — A Designers’ Manual. The book is a substantial work considered by some practitioners as the prime definition and description of permaculture and as the preferred text for permaculture design courses, although Bill’s 1997 book, Introduction to Permaculture, was preferred by some educators. The later book replaced the first two books on permaculture as introductory texts, Permaculture One (1978) and Pemaculture Two (1979). Bill’s assertive personality, his sometimes confronting statements, his iconoclasm and his presence on the speaker’s platform gave him influence as the leading authority on permaculture.
David’s rise as a charismatic authority came mainly after he set up his Melliodora homestead and published his reinterpretation of the design principles of permaculture in the 2002 book, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability.
Charismatic authority: the problem
“ … charisma creates a gulf between the charismatic leader and all others.” Terry raises the question about this inadvertent effect of charismatic authorities: does a leader, like David, for example, who occupies a prime position within the movement, inadvertently block others attaining a similar role?
David is a founding authority and it would be difficult for anyone to challenge him, even if anyone wanted to, on account of his history, knowledge, reputation and position in the movement. With David widely accepted as the leading voice of the movement, any new leadership would depend on reinterpreting and redirecting permaculture onto a new vector. That could happen although it is unlikely. What would it need? A significant incident or powerful new social trend affecting permaculture in some way.
We saw a hint of how this could happen when Rob Hopkins launched the Transition Towns movement. Transition Towns grew out of permaculture, attracted permaculture practitioners and saw the establishment of Transition Towns organisations at the grassroots level. Rob did not attempt to establish a new leadership of the social movement around permaculture although he assumed that role within Transition Towns on account of his being its most prominent spokesperson. Nor did local Transition Towns groups attempt to supersede local permaculture associations. What happened was that Transition Towns groups became partly occupied by permaculture practitioners due to their similarities and to Transition Towns offering a new vector for the practice of permaculture. In the end, Transition Towns was insufficiently differentiated from permaculture, which exerted its first-starter momentum as the established presence. Transition Towns in Australia faded as a social movement but did not disappear.
What about some new politial movement that has similar goals to permaculture? Is there a possibility that it could subsume permaculture ideas and in doing so partly absorb the social movement around permaculture? This did not happen with the Green movement although it offered a natural home to permaculture practitioners with its reformist aims and offered a political platform through the Australian Greens, the political party. An analogy explaining how a loose and diverse social trend can be subsumed by something new, powerful and better organised was the New Left of the late 1960s and how it incorporated the counterculture of the time, giving a social phenomenon a strong political context.
What about the far-Right? Recent years have seen the rise of a strand in far-Right political thinking which incorporates environmental ideas. At present it is small. An extension of it is the adoption of permaculture by a neo-fascist entity which reinterprets permaculture ethics and principles in racial terms. Whereas permaculture is traditionally universal in its application of ethics and principles, the organisation reinterprets them in favour of a single ethnic culture. Why has this happened? A reason is the spurious notion that permaculture is non-political. It is the political cost of permaculture’s avoidance of politics. In trying to seize the moral high ground by claiming anti-or-non-political status, permaculture vacated the political field and opened a niche into which the far-Right inserted itself in the way a virus infests a cell.
Permaculture’s association with farming and land ownership takes it into the ideological territory traditionally occupied by conservative politics, yet it shows no signs of becoming a force for conservatism. It remains more a reform movement rather than something revolutionary that would replace the political economy with something better.
The defning role of charismatic foundationalism
The first books or other articulations of an idea constitute its starting conditions as a body of knowledge and practice. Whoever writes them gains the first-starter advantage I have already mentioned. Permaculture One and Permaculture Two appeared at the end of the 1970s and defined what permaculture was (which has been subsequently built upon), establishing for the book’s authors, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, their authority and influence. This demonstrates the key role of what Terry calls ‘foundational texts’ or permaculture’s ‘canonical literature’ — books that are regarded as accurate and authoritative in defining what permaculture is.
“On the one hand, permaculture is a typical social movement with a horizontally networked and open social organisation. Ideas and new practices are locally initiated and developed. On the other hand, these practices, to be ‘permaculture’, must be tied to a canon consisting of key works of the two founders — a ‘charismatic foundationalism’.”
Definitions of permaculture evolved over time as new practices and content came into the design system and as permaculture adapted to changing global trends. For example, after the publication of the first two books on permaculture the definition expanded from having to do with permanent agriculture (meaning an agriculture dominated by perennial plants) to permanent culture. That happened because systems thinking started to trickle into permaculture, the understanding of how things are interrealted and mutually-influencing. Agriculture was not some isolated practice in the wider culture but was interactive with it, with what we call its political economy. Terry queries how systems thinking is understood in permaculture, however. “Exactly where is this science of systems theory? It is supposed to be foundational but is never explained — except in particular agricultural examples and folksy bon mots.”
The foundatinal texts Terry refers to are the books and articles of Bill and David, works that are regared as so authoritative they are seldom challenged. What the two have written or said is given an almost-automatic credibility by permaculture practitioners although not always by people outside the design system. Terry cites Bill’s Permaculture — A Designers’ Manual as well as David Holmgren’s Principles and Pathways… “likewise regarded by a fair number of practitioners as an unquestionable text.” There has been criticism of Bill’s 1988 book as now being dated. Similarly, David’s ideas around farming in the cities have been critiqued by a leading Australian urban planning academic.
The writings of Mollison and Holmgren are foundational. They define and explain what constitutes permaculture. “It is hard to imagine that any other author, now or in the future, could write a canonical work in permaculture. Even books which are widely influential in the movement, for example, Rosemary Morrow’s Earth Users’ Guide to Permaculture, are seen as commentaries, rather than as a part of the permaculture canon in their own right”, asserts Terry. David’s Retrosuburbia is itself a reinterpretation—in Terry’s term a ‘commentary based on the foundational text’—on permaculture. It is a new vector rather than a new canonical text although some treat it like one.
Rosemary Morrow’s two books construct permaculture as designing for agricultural sites, Terry writes, with a subsidiary emphasis on residential design. “If permaculture is a discourse related to a set of canonical texts, Morrow’s works are two of the five key texts.”
Yet, can there be only five? There are authoritative books from the UK and USA, like Peter Bane’s The Permaculture Handbook, a volume almost as substantial as Bill’s Designers’ Manual. Then there are works of Western Australian permaculture educator, Ross Mars. None of these are foundational as they build on topics already explored in Bill and David’s books. It is as though Bill and David have laid the foundations on which later authors expand the structure.
Canonical texts: the basis of social movements
Terry cites Dorothy E. Smith, who is well known in sociology, saying that discourse around canonical texts can create links within a social movement. In permaculture terms, conversations around the Bill and David’s texts reinforce permaculture’s distributed network structure. An example were the study groups established around David’s book, Retrosuburbia, however further examples are hard to find.
We can look to history to demonstrate the phenomenon of conversations around canonical texts building movements. When a Nineteenth Century economic philosopher wrote a book analysing the political economy of the time, who could have imagined how Karl Marx’s work would spark a revolutionary political movement? Who could have imagined that a scientist at the European Institute for Nuclear Research, which operates the big particle collider in Switzerland, writing a foundational text called Hypertext Markup Language would launch something called the Worldwide Web?
Many of the ideas Retrosuburbia contains have existed for decades prior to David’s writing. Ideas about remaking the suburbs as co-operative, socially and environmentally regenerative places that David explores were taught 30 years ago by Ted Trainer, the now-retired UNSW academic. I discovered that while working for Ted. The reason Retrosuburbia attracted so much attention was that David had a platform from which he could launch his book — the permaculture movement — and Ted didn’t. It was a ready-made market. David also had something else to springboard his book from which Ted did not have — the information-networking effect of social media and a cohort of friends and supporters ready to promote the book.
David’s book demonstrates what Dorothy E. Smith said, that discourse around canonical texts can create links within a social movement. The discourse becomes the driving force of the incipient movement. It is the task of authors, bloggers and social media commentators. Stimulated by social media, interest in Retrosuburbia led to workshops in how to teach the idea and to reader discussion groups. The ideas in the book became a potential recruiting ground for the permaculture design system as they attracted people who would not have been otherwise attracted, as did the Transition Towns movement. With its text, website and social media, Retrosuburbia amply demonstrates how a book can become a key text which expands into a new application. Retrosuburbia for a time started to evolve as a spin-off social movement born of permaculture, however the momentum seems to have stabilised much as it did with Transition Towns.
Is charismatic foundationalism really a strength?
Charismatic foundationalism can be a strength “…in so far as these works are inspirational and draw together ideas from a number of fields that work well in combination”, Terry writes.
With this comes weakness, however. It is a weakness in so far as it “…becomes a form of fundamentalism that fixes permaculture to a set of resources which date as time goes on,” Terry writes. That‘s the criticism levelled at Bill Mollison’s Designers’ Manual. It risks path dependency, of foundational texts so influential that they set the course for the future development of the design system. Terry warns that it is probably impossible now for anyone to produce a new foundational text on permaculture, raising the possibility that the design system is on an unchangable course into the future.
There are literary expressions of permaculture other than the foundational texts, however the first-starter advantage, the high regard in which permaculture’s charismatic authorities are held and documenting their ideas as books act as an invisible hand blocking others from rising to equivalent status, Terry suggests. David’s prominence positions him as the de facto spokesperson for permaculture although that is not a deliberate move by him. There are other spokespeople, however their status in the movement is less than David’s and their authority may be regional or specific to particular applications of permaculture. Thus, they do not rise to a similar status.
Terry continues… “…the definition of permaculture, the charismatic foundationalism that goes with a movement based on a canon of inspirational writings… these are problems that are not easy to address without calling into question fundamental structures that make our movement cohere.
“I am concerned that young people who might in the past have embraced permaculture are now more likely to join the dots to combine agroecology and degrowth to arrive at a position similar enough to permaculture without being caught up in ‘permaculture’ as a named combination.”
Is this happening? I’m not sure. What has happened over the past decade is a fractionalisation of what we could call the sustainability movement. Rather than agglomerate trends into a cohesive social movement such as permaculture, we see the appearance of movements around local food and small-scale farming, the natural environment, sustainable urbanism, new economic ideas, regenerative farming, social justice and other fractions of progressive thought. On the one hand, fractionalism allows for the evolution of these special interests. On the other, it blocks or slows the development of the type of cohesive social movement at the scale needed to wield social and political influence.
The rite of initiation: the PDC
The permaculture Design Course, the PDC, is like authentication by provinenance used for validation in the antiques business. It is a method of authorisation to practice permaculture although there is no legal requirement that a practitioner must do a design course to practice or teach.
“What is remarkable is the coherence of a movement based on a networked provenance-based system of certification”, Terry writes. “While the authorisation of PDCs is decentralised in current practice, provenance centralises this authority in an increasingly mythical past.”
The mythical past Terry refers to presumably means the ability of permaculture teachers to trace their own education through the timeline to one of the two instigators of the design system. It’s like who taught you to teach and who taught them and who in turn taught them.
Rather than bureaucratically enforced standards, it is the name and reputation of the teacher that is the key factor for prospective PDC students, according to Terry. This coincides with my observation that permaculture education is a reputation economy and that teachers who want to continue in their line of work should maintain high educational standards based on scientifically valid course content. Doing that, for example, was important to my partner’s work as local government sustainability educator in maintaining the integrity of her courses and council’s reputation as community educator.
Alice, a survey respondent living in the UK, had this to say about the PDC: “Quite a lot of growers (experience) this kind of irritation with people coming off PDCs and thinking that they, like, know everything, and tell people how to run their smallholdings that they’ve been running for years and years. What people are saying is that there’s a lot of woolly thinking and obnoxious know-it-all. Like, if you really want to be a grower, go and apprentice with a grower. You’re not going to be a grower by the end of a two-week PDC.”
“The PDC can be seen as an initiation into permaculture, a rite of passage that constitutes identity”, says Terry.
Permaculture: a cult?
We hear it from time to time. The dominance of the charismatic authorities make permaculture like a personality cult. The principles of permaculture design are akin to the Ten Commandments. Permaculture is a cult. As a sociology acedemnic Terry is well-placed to tackle this belief.
According to Terry’s reasoning, permaculture has features which make it similar to a cult. One of them is how authority in the movement is at least partially charismatic. So is its system of accreditation by teacher lineage, Terry asserts. We could add the authority afforded permaculture’s foundational texts in defining the practice as well. “It could be said that while many may be ‘participants’ in permaculture as a social movement, the only true ‘members’ of the movement are those with a PDC (Permaculture Design Course)… the teaching of the PDC informs the permaculture movement and possession of the PDC confers incontrovertible ‘membership’”.
Sociologists define cults as formations with a centralised organisational structure, rigid rules for membership and a top-down power hierarchy. “This does not imply that a cult is bureaucratic, the power structure may be quite loose and personalised. A cult attempts social closure, members constitute their social relationships with other cult members, typically organised around the charismatic authority of their founders.”
Bill Mollison could not exert authoritative control when he was alive and he has not been succeeded by anyone taking over where he left off…
Social movements are different. They are not closed-off from the outside world — participants continue to interact socially with people outside the movement — and the movement is held together by shared beliefs even though they may be interpreted differently by participants. They may have several leaders with a limited following and may adopt a networked structure. Unlike the leadership of cults, social movement leaders embody a movement as a whole and contribute to its collective identity through influence rather than command.
In permaculture, people can regard themselves as participants rather than members because there is no universally agreed-upon or legally enforceable process by which anyone becomes a permaculture practitioner, thus there is no exclusion.
Permaculture is a distributed network exhibiting a lack of formalised, central organisational structure focused on the charismatic authority of its founders. This is a characteristic of distributed networks. Their authority is carried by influence and reputation rather than any kind of formal authority. It is accepted by independent regional nodes within the network, such as by permaculture associations. By way of example, Terry writes that Bill Mollison could not exert authoritative control when he was alive and he has not been succeeded by anyone taking over where he left off, although there was an earlier notion that Geoff Lawton would fill that role. Instead, Geoff built his own organisation and his presence as a permaculture educator and consultant without attempting to control permaculture.
Likewise David Holmgren who, while he is what Terry calls a charismatic authority, has no organisational jurisdicion over permaculture as a body of knowledge and practice. Despite David’s ideological dominance of the movement and the credibily in which practitioners regard what he says and writes, other permaculture practitioners exert influence in specialised applications of permaculture. New Zealander Robina McCurdy, for example, a first-starter in developing what came to be known as social permaculture as well as permaculture in schools.
The conclusion Terry draws is although permaculture has cultlike features it does not qualify as a cult.
Defining permaculture’s politics
What political beliefs do permacultue practitioners hold? Through my own experience in the movement I see many, some of them confused, some held without knowing their origin in political ideologies.
Politically, says Terry, permaculture challenges the system. He does not say whether he refers only to the neoliberal political economy of the liberal democracies or to some broader system such as industrialism. Permaculture would not be permitted to challenge systems such as those of authoritarian China, North Korea, Iran or Russia, which is one reason it is not really a global movement despite occasional claims that it is. To guess by the evidence of social media commentary, it would be industrialism which many see permaculture as challenging, however what is less clear is what they would replace the present form of industrialism with. That is seldom explored or exists only as wooly notions.
It is no accident that permaculture has thrived mainly in the democracies. It was born in one. Permaculture is the product of Australia’s socially liberal democracy of the late-1970s, a time when younger people were actively seeking new ways and experimenting with them, and a time when new ideas were in the air as the political economy moved to adopt a new structure. The geographic locations of the design system’s main loci are the democracies because of their freedoms of speech, publishing, association and thought.
Here is Terry’s survey findings about political attitudes within permaculture:
- rejection of the state is not shared by all
- the strongest theme was that permaculture is about environmental sustainability
- permaculture can be applied to any aspect of life
- the ethics of permaculture are similar to those of fractions within the environment movement — ecosocialists, ecoanarchists, steady state economists, ecofeminists, postcolonial indigenous activists, the Green parties
- there may be problems in masking permaculture’s agricultural focus; it becomes difficult for newcomers to understand what is distinctive about permaculture
- Dave, UK: “I do feel it (permaculture) becomes a bit formulaic… there’s a danger that it becomes almost ideological”
- Natalie, who lives in Norway, was critical of the way some permaculture novices without adequate training believe they are experts on agricultural matters
- Andy, UK: “Conservationists ignore land ownership and have no class analysis. We need to ally with other movements working for similar goals”; Andy explains why permaculture needs to go beyond its previous anti-political standpoint. “It’s like, you take Bill Mollison’s approach of putting your own systems in place and basically create the alternative. Well, at the moment we need an alternative society. We’ve got to the stage where our organizing needs to work at this more societal level… we actually need to retrofit the entire infrastructure, to be regionally self-reliant.”.
Commonality with the Left
Terry takes up the story: “Permaculture shares the expectation of system change with many currents of the left. In permaculture this transformation is usually described as an end to ‘industrialism’ rather than an end to ‘capitalism’.
“The permaculturists I spoke with were divided on strategy to achieve system change. Quite a few praised permaculture as a ‘positive’ approach, a contrast to confrontational left politics. Others indicated that permaculture is moving away from an exclusively anti-political strategy. Some stressed the necessity for permaculture to influence regional and national policy. Some interviewees were participating in political lobby groups and supporting particular political parties. A common sentiment was the necessity to work on alliances with other groups.”
It may be that permaculture is moving away from its earlier anti-politics as the environmental crisis deepens, Terry speculates.
For Terry, the error shared by the permaculture founders and by some on the Left is a failure to see the market, money and capitalist ownership as social forces that operate to constrain alternatives such as permaculture and other socially progressive ideas.
“On the ground ethnography reveals these social forces to be quite real. It is a mistake to think that the only problem for permaculture projects is a failure to ‘take responsibility’ (a reference to a statement by Bill Mollison about individuals taking responsibility). This mantra foists the problems of a market economy onto the shoulders of those struggling against it.”
Terry rejects criticisms of permacuture made by leftists. Permaculture has a coherent and quite successful strategy of using the affordances of current society to create “hybrids of the gift economy and capitalism”. Affordances are opportunities in the social economy where interventions can be made, such as the implied right of free speech and association and the opportunity to start organisations and businesses.
Terry’s drawing analogies between the politics of the Left and permaculture will not be accepted by all practitioners. Many distance themselves from either or both Left and Right, believing permaculture to be an expression of a practice that is outside of political ideologies. Yet, the statements of permaculture practitioners in favour of ameliorating global heating, stopping environmental damage and restoring natural environments, in favour of social justice, renewable energy and other progressive social initiatives inadvertently position permaculture as leaning in a leftist direction. Few identify with the Right even though a tiny handful posted anti-vaxx, QAnon, News Ltd right-wing commentary and similar disinformation during the pandemic.
Permaculture as a political entity
What does permaculture look like when viewed as a social movement?
Defining politics as “about contests and collaborations that guide the direction of society”, Terry describes the movement’s politics:
- a belief in the inevitability of energy descent with implications for the direction of future society
- the localisation of energy supplies and production
- the emphasis on perennials, which distinguishes permaculture from much of sustainable agricultural science and the sustainable agriculture movement
- life in villages and rural homesteads and their replacing large cities with a more distributed settlement pattern
- bioregional associations providing basic needs
- villages and farms governing themselves.
Noting that the Designers’ Manual opposes centralised hierarchical states, Terry writes that “permaculture is closer to the bioregionalism proposed by Kirkpatrick Sale and to the energy descent writings of peak oil theorists. Other close companions to permaculture are some anarchists and degrowth advocates who also propose rural self-sufficiency and political autarchy. Going by the characteristics Terry lists, there is a streak of anarchism (anarchism the political theory, not anarchism as chaos) inherent in permaculture.
Some of the political ideas Terry lists reveal contradictions within permaculture. The belief that populations of large cities should decentralise to rural towns and villages stands in opposition to the ideas of sustainable urbanism which have become prominent over the past 20 years. Decentralisation to rural areas bring into question the essence of David Holmgren’s Retrosuburbia, which foresees city suburbs as places for sustainable living, even as ecologically and socially regenerative places. The idea ignores how what are now rural towns and villages would become much larger were people to quit the cities in significant numbers and how that would drive up rural property prices and push out local people who do not have access to capital to purchase property, a phenomenon we are already experiencing as the pandemic inspires capitalised people with the means to work remotely to leave the city.
There is also the reality that the smallholding or homesteading lifestyle popularised in permaculture is unattainable and often unattractive to the vast majority of people. It remains the privilege of the few who already own land and the necessary equipment, or have access to capital to purchase it, as well as the marketing know-how to sell what they grow and make a financially viable living. Some have been successful in doing this while others offer courses as either supplementary or as their main, rural-based income stream. Some find that they need to call upon the unpaid labour of volunteers or interns, although this can offer reciprocal benifits in the form of learning. Some commentators question whether reliance on unpaid labour really is a mark of smallholder success. It would have been enlightening had Terry looked at the politics of this controversial practice, however his book is more about permaculture’s big-picture political direction rather than particular manifestations of its politics.
The notion of bioregional associations providing basic needs is another questionable assumption. Were bioregions to do this based on their available resources, and without an inter-bioregion trading economy, the outcome could well be inequity across the regions. There are questions around how bioregions could provide for their own medical and educational services, energy systems and food supply, social support and pensions.
“Permaculture writing has a particular vision of what a sustainable society would look like. This vision implies that much of the environment movement is on the wrong track”, says Terry.
The place of agriculture
The centrality of agriculture was an early starting point in permaculture. In the form of domestic-scale food production it has been a focus ever since.
Although the design course spends a lot of time on farm design, few graduates of permaculture design courses take up a farming life. Could time be spent on food-related issues more directly relevant to permaculture students instead, such as how to obtain the type of food eaters in the cities (where most design course participants intend to keep living) prefer? That need not mean ignoring food gardening, however for big-city urban people that could focus more on small-scale intensive growing such as the biointensive method and growing in containers such as aquaponic systems.
Someone living in an apartment in a highrise building might not relate all that much to regenerative agriculture, however they do relate to the economics around food through their purchases. This is where the design principles can become useful, less for land management and more as a soft system approach to economic relationships such as buying food that is not only nutritious but that indirectly supports regenerative agriculturists, such as buying through food hubs and food cooperatives. Instruction in the establishment and operation of food enterprises like these might be more valuable for students in high-density cities than learning a lot about farming.
It seems that primary producers in permaculture face problems from graduates of permaculture design courses. One of Terry’s survey repondents, Natilie, expands on this:
“I grow a serious amount of vegetables and I take from organic agriculture, sustainable agriculture, agroecology, and weave that together with permaculture. And I find, like, permaculture people who might not know how to farm yet who constantly question me about why I weed. And why am I planting in rows, and why aren’t there mandalas? Permaculture doesn’t necessarily teach you how to grow vegetables. It’s a world view or an approach to begin to learn how to grow veggies.”
Commenting on one of Bill Mollison’s well-known statements — “Farmers don’t have a slug problem, they have a duck deficiency” — Natilie criticised permaculture for perpetuating folk myths not backed by agricultural science.
“Look, we need to be not just being anecdotal about things. If you’ve got research, do it and write about it. Have a control plot and have the options to be doing a scientific study. Permaculture has these folk myths that continue to exist among people. They do a PDC and that’s all they do. They don’t know how to garden. They have an idealistic idea about their garden.”
Andy from the UK also acknowledged a deficiency in technical capacity among permaculture practitioners. Speaking of how Transition Towns and the Solidarity movement share some of permaculture’s ethics, he said they are distinguished from permaculture by having a broader ambit than agriculture that includes the role of local industry and industrial cooperatives in local self-reliance, and that permaculture activists have neither the skills nor background to set up renewable energy systems. Doing that depends on industrial workers and engineers.
Terry maintains that agriculture is central to permaculture. “So, here are my suggestions. Permaculture teaches the design and maintenance of sustainable agriculture. In addition, permaculture teaches the basics of passive solar design for residential building. Permaculture is, accordingly, a part of a broader environmentalist movement that as a whole aims to move to a sustainable future. Permaculture ethics inform our approach to sustainability. Care for the earth, care for people, fare share. So, permaculture is about sustainability achieved through looking after all living species and all people.”
If permaculture is centred on sustainable agriculture as a core, it becomes less relevant to most people simply because most people live in cities and their daily concerns are about how to live well in those places. People aware of food issues might have some notion of sustainable or regenerative farming, however it is a distanced understanding because they see only the final product of agriculture — food. Their knowledge comes from media reports of farming practices and agricultural issues and from the fair food movement seeking reform of the farming system and food distribution. Participation in food hubs like Brisbane Food Connect and the food cooperatives that have appeared in Australia’s cities and towns these past four-and-a-half decades is as close as most get to farming and is how they can make a contribution to regenerative agriculture via its distribution channels.
Permaculture, to me, is primarily about people. It is anthropocentric. It is about how people live in their environment. It proposes a modest prosperity for all. In my partner’s and my livelihoods, both voluntary and paid, we worked with urban people in a big city. This is my basis for saying that permaculture needs be far more than sustainable agriculture. The design principles developed by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren are generalist. As some of Terry’s survey respondents said, they can be applied to things other than farming systems and land management. They are applicable to society’s soft systems — decision making, interpersonal and organisational relationships, economic relationships, adopting technologies and more. This is important because societies function through cooperation, cooperating necessitates making decisions together, decision making is a negotiated, political process.
Permaculture has approached soft systems through what it branded ‘social permaculture’. This is a welcome development as it recognises these ‘invisible systems’, as Bill Mollison called them, as valid components of the design system. Permaculture people pioneering this more-recent application of the design system developed their own sometimes folksy approach and largely ignored the existing body of knowledge around working with people and behaviour change that is found outside of permaculture. As one practitioner said some years ago, in her work with communities she could not use some of the permaculture approaches with socially mainstream people because they were too fringe.
So, where now?
Where does reading Terry’s The Politics of Permaculture leave us? For me, it provides no definitive answers about the politial direction permaculture could take to see its ideas realised. Terry didn’t write the book to do that. I can only refer back to my partner and my own work in getting our PDC recognised by UNSW as a general studies alternative and to having permaculture accepted and implemented in local government. The lessons of doing that? Permaculture’s politics works when it is adaptive to location and organisation and knows the limitations inherent in those things, when it has its eyes on the long term, when it accepts people as they are, when it does not alienate through the use of politically-linked jargon, when it avoids identity politics, when it understands behavioural change and applies the theory.
The author, Nassim Taleb, coined a term for what permaculture must become—‘antifragile’. It is more than robustness and resiliency, the capacity to remain cohesive and adaptable amid stress and uncertainly. Antifragile is the property of being able to do those things and to turn chaos and adversity into opportunity, to thrive amid adversity by being relevant to peoples’ needs.
Although first-starter advantage enabled permaculture to set a divergent but not separate course to that of the environment movement of its earlier years, it could be in a position to adopt the second-starter advantage of leapfrogging the flaws of the broader environment movement to offer something so politically and socially irresistible that it would be difficult not to adopt it in a society plagued by maladies of economic disease, political malfunction and inetitude, science and climate denialism (one latter a subset of the former), the disinformation virus and social drift. Terry’s book is a starter in doing this because it reveals what any system seeking to change things must do—understand itself first.
To hark back to the analogy at the start of this peice, what is it we see revealed of permaculture there on the political dissection table?
The Politics of Permaculture; 2021, Terry Leahy; Pluto Press, London. ISBN 978045342757.
Find The Politics of Permaculture
You should be able to pick up or order a copy of Terry’s book from your local bookstore, however with cities going into and coming our of pandemic lockdown, an internet purchase of Terry’s book might be faster and safer.
Hard copy and ebook
Hard copy
Publications mentioned in the story
Alternative Australia — communities for the future; 1979, Peter Cock; Quartet Books, Melbourne. ISBN 0 908128 09 6.
Permaculture One–A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements; 1978, Mollison B, Holmgren D; Transworld Publishers, Australia. ISBN 0908228031.
Permaculture Two — Practical design for town and country in permanent agriculture; 1979; Mollison B, Tagari Publications, Australia. ISBN 0908228007.
Permaculture — A Designers’ Manual; 1988, Bill Mollison; Tagari Publishers, Australia. ISBN 0908228015.
Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability; 2002, David Holmgren; Holmgren Design Services, Australia. ISBN 9780994392848.
Earth Users Guide to Permaculture; 1993, Rosemary Morrow; Kangaroo Press Ltd, Sydney. ISBN 0 86417 514 0.
Retrosuburbia; 2018 David Holmgren, 2018, Melliodora, Hepburn Victoria. ISBN 9780994392879.
The Permaculture Handbook; 2012, Peter Bane; New Society Publishers, Canada. ISBN 978–0–86571–666–7 (paperback), ISBN 978–1–55092–485–5 (ebook).
