Planting the Seeds of a New Paradigm — Global Permanent Culture (Permaculture)
But does the current permaculture zeitgeist go far enough?
With the arrival of spring many people can’t wait to get their hands dirty in the soil from planting vegetable and flower gardens. Perhaps without thinking about it, what those folks are really getting involved in is the design of a system. They are designing a garden system in such a way as to yield the largest bounty of vegetables, or the most beauty from flowers. According to Wikipedia, the term Permaculture originally referred to “permanent agriculture” as a holistic system of growing plants and foods according to natural ecosystems in which they yielded the most abundance. Permaculture later came to stand also for “permanent culture” in which a new understanding of systems included social aspects as integral to a sustainable human culture. So today permaculture is about good design of agricultural and human systems which align with nature to be the most abundant and beneficial.
In this essay I won’t be talking about the specific techniques of permaculture, but instead some basic principles. I will be referencing an episode of an excellent podcast called the Extraenvironmentalist in which they interviewed the brilliant American permaculture expert Toby Hemenway. He describes the principles of permaculture as well as the new understandings that come along with it. When one fully understands how natural ecosystems work, not only on a micro-level, but also on the macro-level of our entire living planet, then one naturally becomes a systems thinker, or what Hemenway calls a “whole-systems” thinker. He talks about how gardening and permaculture can be a “revolution in disguise” because it’s a way to understand whole systems, and once we start thinking about whole systems it can change not only how we live our individual lives but also how our entire human society is living. We begin to see the human systems we’ve created from a different perspective, or what we might call a new paradigm.
Hemenway goes on to describe permaculture as a method of creating healthy relationships and connections, and as a decision tool for “arriving at” sustainable solutions. He lists some basic moral or ethical questions that permaculture asks when trying to arrive at decisions on how we should design a system. Is it going to care for the earth? Is it going to care for people? Is it abundant and productive? He points out that there isn’t a lot of scarcity when the earth is well cared for. And when people are cared for and live in a fear-free environment they are creative and amazing and brilliant. So if the answer to the first two questions is yes, then nature and people acting in symbiosis will create a surplus and abundance. In short, this simple ethical framework of good design asks whether something is a good thing to do in the first place, and then asks what will we do with the surplus. If the design is not generating a surplus, or if the surplus is being hoarded, then there’s a problem with the design. Hemenway states that a well-designed natural system is self-regulating; if a lot of regulation needs to be imposed then it is not a well-designed system. (Think of the thousands of rules and regulations that governments impose to regulate our economic system.) Another principle of permaculture is that a well-designed natural system should be regenerative versus degenerative. Does a system pollute or degrade or leave its environment worse off? Or does it create more lushness, more richness, more abundance, and a more healthy environment?
Clearly our environment and all major life support systems around the planet are in decline, so what does that say about the design of our systems? It’s also evident that with our extreme income inequality (62 people own as much wealth as half the global population) and the billions living in poverty, there is no surplus. Or if there is a surplus, it’s being wasted and hoarded. So again, how well designed are our systems?
A New Paradigm in Human Thinking
But lest we be too hard on ourselves, systems thinking is a relatively new capacity for humans. In our culture we are not taught to think in whole systems. In fact, for most of human history, as Hemenway describes, our world view, or paradigm, was simply about “meeting human needs” (and we didn’t do a very good job of that). Now our life conditions are requiring us to think not just about meeting human needs, but also environmental needs at the same time. And we need to do so at a larger and larger scale, all the way up to the planetary level. We are now recognizing that our entire global ecosystem is a whole system unto itself, and that we are embedded within that ecosystem. Therefore we are being called to “meet ALL human needs while preserving the GLOBAL ecosystem”. In order for us to do all this, we are developing new capacities and shifting away from a reductionist, fragmented world view to a whole-systems world view. We can now understand concepts such as permaculture, good design, whole-systems thinking, sustainability, globalization, and our planetary environmental predicament. The paradigm shift is not only this monumental change in human consciousness itself, but the actual recognition of this change taking place in real time.
Paradigms change when systems no longer function, or when a poor or outdated design leads to breakdown. Things are no longer working for more and more people around the world. People everywhere are getting dissatisfied or pissed off (terrorism?). People everywhere are ready for a paradigm change. Once we are ready for a paradigm shift and begin thinking in whole systems, then all sorts of things become obvious. We begin to see the linkages, the symptoms, and the root causes beneath everything that’s no longer working. We see not only the types of changes that are needed but also the scale that’s needed, all the way up to the highest level…the planet. Perhaps most importantly, we see new possibilities that were never possible before. When the bio-psycho-social pressures of human society become great enough, what once seemed radical becomes practical.
The Wholest of Whole Systems
If permaculture is about good design in building not only sustainable food systems but also sustainable human habitats, then should we consider whole systems all the way up to the wholest (yes, I’m making that a word) part of that system? Hemenway asserts that if we want to help human beings be sustainable, then that means that the larger ecosystems that we are embedded in must also be sustainable. He says we can’t have a sustainable human culture in an unsustainable ecosystem. I totally agree with that, and basically everything Hemenway has said up to this point. And while I totally respect the great work that permaculturists are doing all around the world, I question one thing. Does the whole-systems thinking of permaculture go as far as necessary, all the way up to the wholest whole? Can we really talk “ecosystem” without talking “economy” and therefore “money”…and that means our entire global socio-economic system itself? American author Charles Eisenstein writes about how we have created a system (at both the micro and macro level) in which the incentive is based upon the axiom, “more for you is less for me”. Contrary to the permaculture principles of abundance and balance, our entire zombie economy (must have…growth…must have…jobs…must eat planet) is based upon scarcity, perpetual cancerous growth and an artificially-stimulated consumption of resources.
And now we have an increasing understanding of the aberrant behavior that scarcity thinking generates. Eisenstein writes, “Scarcity conditioning extends far beyond the economic realm, manifesting as envy, jealousy, one-upmanship, social competitiveness, and more.” Yet we wonder why our seeming human nature is so violent and aggressive and competitive. Our entire monetary system — not just capitalism, but money itself — whether barter, or credit, or any other means of exchange — is inherently based upon “more for you is less for me”.
But this isn’t just the way it’s always been, nor has to be. The premise of permaculture is the same as that of early gift cultures (which occupied 95% of homo sapien existence) — “more for you is also more for me”. So until we extrapolate the principles of permaculture, or permanent culture, to our economy (which does not economize at all) then we will not have a culture with any permanency on this planet. It can be disempowering to come from a fear-based perspective, but it is important that we soberly assess our reality. We can tweak capitalism and the monetary system and government regulations all day long, but until we deal with the root problem at the systemic level, it’s simply rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. Unless and until we transcend being the only species on this planet that believes it has to pay to exist, we will be sowing the seeds of our own demise.
The real paradigm shift that’s emerging now is the capacity to see what actually came before money (gift economies), what’s come about from the use of money, and what’s possible after money. Just as we have evolved from Slavery (under which the rich own the poor outright) to Feudalism (under which the rich hold the poor in bondage) to Mercantilism (under which the rich are the government) to Capitalism (under which the rich own the government), isn’t it possible to conceive of evolving to a post-capitalist world that transcends the use of money altogether (under which everybody is rich in getting their basic needs met, and there is simply no need to own stuff, because within a society of abundance and high technology in alignment with nature, ownership simply becomes an unecessary burden)? Think of a sharing economy based upon resources rather than money.
Idealistic? Hell yeah. Unabashedly. Is it utopian? There will never be a perfect society, but there will always be emergence to something new, and we can do so much better than what we’re currently doing. Let’s plant and water and nourish the seeds of a new human civilizational paradigm, one based on abundance and morality and regenerative whole-systems design…designed to work well for all humans and plants and animals and the earth.
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Side note: I am currently in Athens, Greece. A long time ago here, slavery was seen as natural and even necessary, and it is estimated that the majority of Athenian citizens owned at least one slave. Paradoxically, ancient Greece is considered the cradle of democracy and western civilization (4,000 years ago), and produced many magnificent achievements in areas of government, science, philosophy and the arts. Today Greece has a youth unemployment rate of 49%, a crumbling infrastructure, graffiti-covered historical ruins, a refugee crisis, and its people have been under harsh austerity for six years.
It is more than symbolic — it is timely and signicant to be here for the The Zeitgeist Movement’s annual ZDAY event: http://zdayglobal.org
