PERMACULTURE: our new challenge
Permaculture has faced challenges before. Conspiracy theories and those who propagate them offer a challenge that contradicts the scientific basis upon which permaculture was founded.
AT A TIME when disinformation flows freely through our online channels, it surprises me how people I thought of as rational repost misleading information and continue to do so after it is exposed and debunked.
I’m talking about people I know on Facebook. Curiously, some are practitioner of the permaculture design system. Why this is curious is something I will get to soon.
What misinformation?
What disinformation am I talking about? Generally, anything about:
- Covid-19 and supposed cures
- 5G broadband and its claimed role in spreading Covid-19 (none have explained how a virus is actually transmitted on an electromagnetic radio wave) as well as other claims about the frequencies
- vaccination and the opposition to it
- the discredited plandemic video
- the dodgy claims of a group of American doctors whose spokeswoman believes in demons and assorted other imaginary beings
- the often-discredited people behind conspiracy theories about those things.
Take the American doctors who made a lengthy statement about Covid-19 during the height of the pandemic in the US. The video, later removed by social media platforms for going against their user guidelines on disinformation, was widely disseminated by social media users, including a number associated with the practice of permaculture. It was soon discredited as revelations about the strange beliefs of the doctor who was the spokesperson were revealed.
Then there’s the anti-vaxxers. They’re quick to respond with links to discredited or questionable information and, once again, they include some from permaculture. There was a theory not long ago that by ignoring them they would go away. They have only become more vociferous. Now, some pro-science people see it as a responsibility to challenge them when they post. Anti-vaxxers, 5G-Covid conspirators and the others have a right to hold those views, however when they post them publicly and others believe them they put people at risk but take no responsibility for the consequences of doing that.
Here’s an irony and a contradiction. Some cherry-pick the science they believe in. They disregard empirical, evidence-based, scientific medical information while at the same time accepting the science around climate change and, especially for the permaculture practitioners among them, soil science. They often cite papers and ideas about topics like vaccination that are outside the scientific consensus. That is something new information has to become before being accepted by peers. It filters out the results of flawed experiments and experiments that do not stand up to replication.
Of course, many outside the permaculture milieu who post spurious conspiratorial claims also disbelieve the evidence for climate change. It’s strange how permaculture people who support conspiracy theories about Covid and its supposed cures, 5G and vaccination have become their fellow travellers.
Why do they repost?
There are two reasons which explain why people who might consider themselves rational repost conspiracy stuff:
- to support the goals of conspiracy organisations in their culture wars against science, government and the medical establishment
- to inform people of what they see as the dangers of vaccination, 5G broadband, theories about the origin and treatment of Covid-19 and even its actual existence without intending to support the anti-science movement and the ideologies and organisations behind it.
What of permaculture people engaging in the conspiracy conspiracy? Even if they do not support the ideologies and organisations behind the anti-science movement and other conspiracy theories, they inadvertently support them and others allied to them such as the US president, Russian and Chinese quasi-government trolls and those using the pandemic to sell something.
Here’s the contradiction
This is where we find a contradiction. Bill Mollison, the co-founder of the permaculture design system, was a field researcher for the CSIRO (Australia’s government-supported scientific research organisation) and for Tasmanian government agencies engaged in wildlife research. He later tutored in environmental psychology at the University of Tasmania.
Bill’s work and his character as a skeptic and iconoclast situates him firmly within the scientific paradigm and its methodology. Many of those who learned from Bill and became educators and designers inherited his attitudes and practices to become evidence-based pratitioners.
Bill once described permaculture this way: It’s a design science that applies to everything.
If it is a science then it must be based on the hard, verifiable and repeatable evidence coming through applying the scientific method: observation > formulating a hypothesis about what is observed > running an experiment or trial to test the hypothesis > making deductions on the basis of the experiment or trial > confirming, modifying or disproving the hypothesis according to the experiment or trial’s results.
Applying the method
Plenty of permaculture practitioners employ the scientific method informally. An example was the trial carried out at the Permaculture Sustainability Hub in Sydneys Eastern Suburbs. The designers were familiar with lemon grass and vetiver grass, both clumping grasses that are used as border plantings. Faced with the problem of domestic dogs coming into the Permaculture Interpretive Garden, a part of the Sustainability Hub, and peeing and digging there, trial planting of both species were made, the results compared and a close-planted barrier of vetiver grass as a garden edge was made to exclude the dogs.
A minor example for sure, however it used the model of: observation (dogs pee and dig in the garden) > hypothesis (a barrier of lemon grass or vetiver grass could succeed in excluding the dogs) > running an experiment (planting both species as a trial) > making deductions based on observation of the experiment (vetiver grows into a stiffer clump and makes a firmer barrier when close-planted) > confirming the hypothesis and modifying it to favour vetiver grass.
Unqualified belief disempowers
Bill’s claim that permaculture is a ‘design science’, an applied science, that is, developed from scientific knowledge, observation and research into the traditional landuse and agricultural practices of various cultures indigenous and modern, excludes wishful thinking, religious, esoteric and spiritual ideas and ideologies that defy the evidence before us. Here’s Bill saying as much in his autobiography, Travels in Dreams:
As I have often been accused of lacking that set of credulity, mystification, modern myth and hogwash that passes today for New Age Spirituality, I cheerfully plead guilty. Unqualified belief, of any breed, disempowers any individuals by restricting their information.
Thus, permaculture is not biodynamics, nor does it deal in fairies, devas, elves, after-life, apparitions or phenomena not verifiable by every person from their own experience, or making their own experiments. We permaculture teachers seek to empower any person by practical model-making and applied work, or data based on verifiable investigations.
Those qualifications of what permaculture is surely suggest it is pro-science, even though Bill and other permaculture practitioners would be critical of some applications of science, such as that of resource exploitation, which he would have regarded as a waste of resources because they it does not build the infrastructure we need to deal with the ecological, economic and social systems humanity now needs to adapt to changing socio-environmental conditions.
With permaculture a design science, do permaculture’s propagators of conspiracy theories experience cognitive dissonance when they repost on social media the various conspiracies around Covid-19 and its treatment, vaccination and 5G broadband as a Covid vector?
…empowering people by practical model-making and applied work, or data based on verifiable investigations.
Warriors in the culture wars
Does the presence of an anti-science sentiment and pemaculture believers in conspiracy theories matter?
Not if they are not spreading disinformation. They are free to believe whatever they want. When they repost conspiracy posts, however, they become warriors in the culture wars and targets for pro-science people. That is why people respond critically when they repost stuff that supports conspiracy theories and puts the gullible at risk when they take it seriously. Whether that support is intentional or not, it is a reality. Things in society are connected. We live in a system. Even unintentional things bring collateral damage.
To ask whether spreading disinformation about Covod-19 denies permaculture’s second ethic of care of people would be to enter another controversy because those opposing vaccination, those promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment and others convinced Bill Gates is trying to inject some kind of personal tracking device along with vaccinations would claim that they are applying the second ethic. The question would offer another engagement in the culture wars.
What is sad about the intrusion of the culture wars into the permaculture milieu is that it is divisive at a time when fragmentation is the last thing the movement needs as it looks for a role in what we hope will be the post-Covid world. What is also sad is that it has already led to fractured friendships and a few permaculture practitioners blocking online friends whose opinions differ.
There have been low-intensity controversies in permaculture before. Some practitioners wanted to include spiritual content in design courses, risking the secular, and therefore universality of the design system. It was similar with the New Age movement in the 1990s. There was a more recent though not all that controversial attempt to set up a vegan version of permaculture even though animals are a traditional part of permaculture design and food production. Permaculture weathered all of these and remains a secular, logic and rationality-based system of supplying peoples’ basic needs.
I think the presence of conspiracy theorists at this time might be something permaculture will also get over. What conspiracy theories in permaculture do highlight, however, is that non-rational thinking and attitudes are now a reality in the design system.
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