Literary journeys in permaculture…
Permaculture: the literary adventure awaits
If we believe permaculture’s literature is all instruction and facts, perhaps it’s time to revise our thoughts. We’re going to walk the grassy pastures of speculative fiction and non-fiction to see what that is permacultural is grazing there, and what could be.
WHAT HAS SCIENCE FICTION got to do with the permaculture design system?
Plenty, if you are science fiction author, Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR). Permaculture pops up a number of times through his books. His website describes it this way:
Permaculture is a concept integrating an ecological approach to all aspects of human endeavours. It is a design system for sustainability encompassing agriculture, building, living and other aspects of human activities.
The web page offers an explanation of KSR’s affinity with permaculture:
Kim Stanley Robinson is a promoter of permaculture and has mentioned it repeatedly in interviews and in his works. He also sees it as a portmanteau of permutable culture as the concept would not imply a steady state but an ever-evolving culture that conserves sustainability in its core principles.
KSR: no unicorns, no wizards
KSR writes what is known as ‘hard’ science fiction. It is science-based. There’s no fantasy in his books, no wizards, no dragons, no fabulous empires, no magic, no unicorns. Just extrapolated reality.
Like some science fiction writers I prefer the term ‘speculative fiction’ to describe the genre because it can include writing about the present, past or future outside of the science and technology genre. KSR’s The Years of Rice and Salt and Shaman are about alternative pasts, alternative histories.
An influence: Life in Village Homes
KSR is an American leftist of democratic bent and an enthusiastic mountain hiker, what we in Australia would call a bushwalker. Interviewed by Christopher Lydon on Literary Hub in 2017 where he discussed capitalism, climate change and dystopia, KSR described his political education as coming “from Fredric Jameson and from the ’60s, ’70s American left, anti-Vietnam, California hippie. Also Gary Snyder and his Californian Buddhism”.
KSR’s life in the Village Homes development of 225 houses and 20 apartment units in Davis, California, has been influential. Jeremy Smith writes about it in January Magazine:
Bound together through the ‘warp and weft’ of committees, boards and potlucks, its residents govern Village Homes with a cheerful semblance of democracy.
Science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson has served on its elected board of directors, volunteered on the community’s horticultural committee and architectural review board, and written for its newsletter.
‘I moved into Village Homes in 1991,’ says Robinson, ‘and it strangely echoed what I had already written in my utopian novel, Pacific Edge, so that I felt I was coming home in a way.
‘Its strong sense of community, focus on children, volunteer committee work and agricultural work, and lives led outdoors doing a fair bit of vegetable gardening, [has] been the biggest single influence on my thinking in this last decade.’
Those in permaculture with a long enough memory will recall how in design courses Village Homes was put forward as a model of ecological planning, energy-efficient architecture, renewable energy, citizen decision-making and the edible landscaping of public space. It was an icon of the permaculture approach to urban development.
Affinity
KSR’s affinity with permaculture takes the design system into the unfamiliar realm of speculative fiction.
Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising when we understand speculative fiction to be the literature where ‘what if’ questions are asked and alternative futures are explored as a way of thinking about trends and decisions made in the present. Permaculture, after all, is about a particular type of desirable future that at scale remains largely fictional at this moment in our history.
Linking permaculture to the literary genre of speculative fiction might sound alien because the design system’s literature falls firmly into factual and instructional writing. Or does it?
Speculative fiction: its permaculture links
Science/speculative fiction authors often adopt the classic plot path that more or less follows the Freytag’s Pyramid model in which tension increases to a climatic scene after which things settle down. Margaret Atwood, the Canadian author of the 1985 dystopian novel, The Handmaiden’s Tale, follows such a trajectory. The story concerns a woman trapped in a servant/breeder role in a politically far-right authoritarian breakaway state of the US that is run as an oppressive theocracy. Like good speculative fiction, Atwood’s book is easy to read, the ideas segue into one another within the context of the dystopian society she describes. It hangs together by being firmly attached to the experience of the main character and follows a timeline. This accounts for its readability and is what makes it different to most works of non-fiction.
Closer to the permaculture sensibility is Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 alternative futures novel, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston. The book ran parallel in time and in attitude to the emerging environment movement and the alternative subculture or counterculture, and influenced green thinking. Like Margaret Atwood’s novel it is set in a breakaway state, this one in Northern California, but the future if offers is the opposite of Atwood’s.
Ecotopians do not reject the hi-tech that serves their society, nor do they reject politics, as that was the route to realising their ecostate. The book came from a time when younger people questioned the value of hi-tech and of the technocratic approach adopted by social policy makers and thinkers. Yet, it makes a place for hi-tech within the context of a society that has also adopted low-tech tools and lifeways. Decentralisation, renewable energy, living in extended families, green building and a plethora of alternative ideas find a home in Ecotopia. In some ways we might see it as a distant precursor of permaculture author David Holmgren’s 2018 nonfiction book, Retrosuburbia.
The social model Ecotopia poses reminds me of an image from a film, its name long-forgotten, that was set in the techno-utopian age of the Art Deco culture of 1930s, the time that travel by air, by long-distance trains and passenger ships and new movements in architecture and lifestyle signified the coming of modernism. In that remembered image, people working in a farm field look up as an airship flies past. What is suggested is that society had polarised into those following a traditional, conservative, land-based lifeway and those embracing modernism and its technology—a kind of techno-hybrid society. Recalling the film reminded me of David Holmgren’s (David is a co-originator of the permaculure design system and with Bill Mollison co-authored the first book on the topic in 1978, Permaculture One) notion that if a partial social collapse scenario that leads to the widescale adoption of permaculture does not eventuate, the design system might remain the practice of a subculture. That subculture would be represented by those people in the field looking up at a passing airship.
That image has stuck with me and is indicitative of permaculture and its relationship to the society it is embedded in. Permaculture practitioners live within a technological society but most embrace craft production, land-based activities and traditional tools. Not completely, though. Many adopt the tools of the technological society they are part of. This differs to the image in that film I mention. Rather than posing polarised earthy/techno lifeways, modern permaculture practitioners embrace the earthy at the same time they grasp the tools of modernism in a hybrid, comingled approach. I think this is a positive approach to the permaculture life as it adopts both traditional and modern tools and approaches to create the life that people want to build and that reduces their negative impacts on the world.
In Ecotopia we find parallels to notions of society later found in permaculture and the tools it would use. How much the book influenced what we might call ‘green’ thinking, and, alternatively, how much the ideas prevalent in the alternative lifestyles and incipient environmental movement of the time influenced the book is anybody’s guess. Authors draw upon their social, economic, cultural and environmental surrounds, so it would not come as a surprise if Ecotopia was influenced by the social and technical experimentation then talking place in the alternative subculture. Reading it today, Ecotopia is noticeably dated.
Ecotopia: parallels with bioregionalism
Ecotopia does something else. It carries overtones of a socio-political movement supporting the breakaway of the Cascadia region of British Columbia in Canada along with Washington, Oregon and nearby regions in the US to form a nation state. The idea later gained exposure through the bioregional movement of the 1980–1990s, and that in turn influenced thinking in permaculture.
An alternative idea circulating in this movement was the formation of a Cascadian bioregional network as an alternative to the nation-state structure. It would be characterised by “environmentalism, bioregionalism, privacy, civil liberties and freedom, increased regional integration, and local food networks and economies” according to its Wikipedia entry. The idea was popularised by bioregional advocates of the late 1980s and 1990s. Bioregionalism was incorporated into permaculture as a planning concept at that time.
Science and technology and their impacts play a central role in KSR’s books. His novel about a climate-change-flooded New York, New York 2140, follows his Science in the Capital series, a more-dystopian trilogy that follows the experiences of the lead character as the national capital grapples with the impact of sea level rise and climate change. KSR’s semi-utopian Mars Trilogy describes the trials, tribulations and triumphs of settling and terraforming Mars as a quasi-egalitarian, hi-tech society. It draws parallels with contemporary trends and developments on Earth and takes a sympathetic approach to advanced technology as it explores questions around technology, politics and society.
Also embracing the futures genre is one-time Australian gardening writer, now speculative fiction author, Linda Woodrow. Linda is known to permaculture practitioners through her earlier book, The Permaculture Home Garden.
In her bio at en.PermaCultureScience.org, Linda says:
I do believe in science. I love the scientific method for observing and understanding reality. And thus I find it hard to believe that anyone doesn’t believe that climate change requires us all to seriously change our addictive consumerism… now, yesterday.
I live in a community set up in the early 1980′s. I think if we forget and lose the skills of living as a community we are going to be in big trouble, especially as we negotiate the challenges ahead.
Linda’s foray into speculative fiction is her 2020 book, 470. It is the tale of three generations of an Australian family living in a climate-change-afflicted world of ecological, social and economic breakdown, and their search for a way to live in the circumstances. Linda embraces the fiction writing format by having lead characters and plot. The story starts and leads somewhere via challenges, uncertainties and revelations along the way. The writing style embeds her ideas within the text rather than make them stand out on their own as we find in futurist (and here) writing. They are imbibed in the reading rather than being fed to us.
David Holmgren’s Future Scenarios is a book famliar to many in permaculture. It is futurist writing in that it offers facts and speculation based on those facts. Linda, and other speculative fiction writers take facts, invent characters and create causal relationship between events and between characters. There is connection between things, an interrelated sequence, a story line that carries the factual content and engages the reader. Something happens, therefore something else happens that builds tension and drama in rising action leading towards a climax and resolution. ‘What if’ remains an important question that hangs in the background as a pervasive uncertainty. It gives the work an edge.
Literary storytelling through journalism
Future Scenarios takes present enviro-social trends and extrapolates them into future possibilities. It is not fact—‘non-fiction’ as it is called—and it is not fiction in the conventional sense. It is a type of speculative writing, description-without-a-storyline, and in form it is similar to other futurist writing. There are no central characters, no rising tension leading to a climax, no action taken by protagonists. There are no protagonists. The book makes the author’s ideas accessible to readers, however it is not bedtime reading as it requires intellectual engagement, not the mental relaxation of easy-reading immersion is a storyline in which ideas are embedded in the flow of a fictional narrative.
This leads us to ask: is there is some way that non-fiction can be made to read like fiction? When I did my communications/journalism degree it was called the New Journalism, or literary journalism. Today, it goes by the name of creative non-fiction. The genre called upon the practice of investigative journalism. Producing it was immersive. Journalist would spend time with their subject, learning about the people and their realities. The product was long-form journalism published in journals specialising in the form or in newspapers where it appeared as features. Sometime it was published as books. Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer were its early and noted exponents.
Literary journalism takes the structure of fiction writing and applies it to non-fiction. It uses characterisation, the story hangs off a single character who gives the piece its continuity; it uses direct speech; a first person point of view; detailed description of people, places and things; the introduction>rising action>climax>denounment of classical fiction writing to tell a factual story. Unlike classic journalism, the author is not hidden and may be a character in the story. Unlike a straight fact piece it reads like a novel, a structure that keeps people engaged. Is there potential for this form in permaculture’s literature?
Speculative fiction in permaculture: any future?
The emergence of the cli-fi genre of speculative writing opens the door to the adoption of speculative fiction in permaculture because global-heating-stimulated climate change is a theme, and the search for solutions to that inspires people to participate in permaculture. Cli-fi is a development of sci-fi, science fiction that has a tradition of imagining alternative futures and as a literary space to ask questions about present trends and where they may take us. That is what makes it perhaps the most effective means of discussing both the present and the future in a way that lifts us out of political and ideological mindsets and fixed ideas.
Speculative fiction and creative non-fiction are genres eminently suited to exploring permaculture and what a society that takes its ethics and design principles seriously could look like. It offers a way to get permaculture ideas across to readers who would not otherwise encounter them. That includes readers of science/speculative fiction. They are important because they are people open to new ideas and who are searching for them. What would they bring to permaculture that could make it an inflection point after which things are never the same again?
Worth reading
KSR and permaculture http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/permaculture
A brief excursion into cli-fi…
More brain food on Permaculture 3.0…
