The Politics of Permaculture

Front matter

THE POLITICS

‘Critical theorists often restrict themselves to criticising the prevailing conditions of the system. They rarely turn a critical gaze on initiatives based in solidarity and aiming at transformation. Terry Leahy’s book is not only a proof that this is fruitful but a proof that this pathway may lead us to widen the horizon of what transformation can mean:

‘A valuable discussion, including connections with class, feminism, colonialism and differing ideas about social change:

Contents

Series Preface Acknowledgements Preface

What Is Permaculture? Three Perspectives Permaculture as a Social Movement Strategies and Visions

Permaculture Practice: Prefiguring System Change

Preface

This book is about the politics of permaculture. That is not in the narrow sense of politics - meaning parties and governments — but in the broad sense pioneered by the second wave feminist movement. Politics is about contests and collaborations that guide the direction of society. That can be a depressing topic but does not have to be. Permaculture is an optimistic movement and gives us cause for optimism.

‘What is permaculture? If you have just heard of the movement and do not know much about it, you might well think that permaculture is about food growing and gardens. But if you have asked a permaculture afficionado you will have been told that that conception is a mistake. In fact, there are a variety of different ways of defining permaculture. As a sustainable system of agriculture based on tree crops, as a system of sustainable agriculture and settlement design, as a design philosophy for a sustainable society. There is much to be gained from exploring these different conceptions in detail and the next chapter will do that. Those are questions about the foundation of permaculture in ideas. But as this book will explain, permaculture is also a social movement, a body of people, their actions and the ways that they think about the world.

I come to this book after a long, if patchy connection to the permaculture movement. I first encountered permaculture in the late 1970s when Permaculture One (1978)

x @ THE POLITICS OF PERMACULTURE was published. I was into my fifth year of lecturing in sociology at the University of New South Wales (NSW) in Sydney (Australia). I had been a participant in the anarcha-feminist counterculture in Sydney since 1972. Our part of the counterculture was in the middle, between the hippies on one side and the lesbian separatists on the other. We squatted some old houses in the inner suburb of Glebe to start a childcare coop. Some of the people in the coop organised to buy a rural property near Taree in NSW, to be run using permaculture ideas. I am pretty sure it was these events that started me reading the permaculture material. I loved the idea of growing food plants in a forest, a diverse array of useful plants interacting together to suppress weeds and pests.

In the late 1980s I made a serious attempt to go and live on the property with my partner and our two very young children. This turned out to be a lot harder than we had expected. We left the forest in a rainy and leech infested summer, packed up the kids and headed up to Armidale. After a few years, I ended up in another academic appointment and we moved to Newcastle. By the mid-1990s, I had been teaching the sociology of environment for a decade and had begun researching the views of Newcastle locals on the environmental crisis. Why were ordinary people so reluctant to embrace an environmentalist analysis? Why was there so little pressure on governments to do something about these problems? By 1996, I was ready to take the ‘Permaculture Design Certificate’ I studied with Liz Nicholson and Peter Wade at permaculture co-originator Bill Mollison’s property at Tyalgum, on the north coast of NSW. Bill came along to one of our night-time

PREFACE @ xi sessions and we visited the garden around his house. The whole large property was sculpted with dams, swales and plantings. It was inspiring to see permaculture landscaping on this huge scale.

In 1997 I went to my first permaculture convergence at Djanbung Gardens in Nimbin. Djanbung Gardens is the farm and home of prominent permaculture designer and teacher, Robyn Francis. This was my first experience of permaculture as a ‘movement: It was an amazing event. Robyn had landscaped an 8-hectare property as a permaculture food forest, with wild food trees and bamboo at the top and an aquaculture dam at the bottom. In the middle she had constructed a large mudbrick hexagon, to host permaculture gatherings. A cluster of reused railway carriages served for the residence. Vegetables and small livestock were sited around these buildings.

People coming to the convergence camped in tents. At night, after the business proper had concluded, we gathered round an open fire, sitting on logs. Music was provided by an improvised drumming circle. Women leaders of the movement from the Northern Rivers sat next to each other, playing their djembes in complex funk and African rhythms. The rest of us joined in, with whatever percussion was handy. Normal life had been suspended for the duration, a glimpse of utopia. I went back to Newcastle and enrolled in a djembe class. I began digging swales and contour bunds behind our house - planting the food forest. A few years later, I participated in the committee that was setting up the Australian Permaculture Association. We met at Djanbung Gardens to hammer out some of the details.

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In 2003, two things moved my permaculture interests into other countries. One was that I started to supervise a PhD thesis researching a European Union project working with impoverished farmers in North Bali. In 2006, I went for an extended stay in the villages where the project was working, visiting farmers and finding out about their agricultural strategies. The second thing that happened in 2003 was that our university managed to get ten students into our Master of Social Change and Development programme. They were funded by the Australian government through a Landcare liaison with South Africa. They were agricultural officers who worked in the rural villages - where problems of malnutrition and unemployment were alarming. Their work as agricultural officers was on projects designed to relieve rural poverty through agriculture.

In later years, we had more students from Africa and also from other majority world countries, such as the Philippines, Pakistan and Mongolia. I visited the sites in Africa where our students were working and stayed in the villages. Inspired by these experiences, I developed a subject on rural food security and project design. Out of that came my first book - Permaculture Strategy for the South African Villages (2009). At the end of that year, I went to Africa, giving talks and distributing 250 copies of my book to agricultural officers, universities and permaculture people. I also attended the international permaculture convergence in Malawi that year. There I met representatives from the Chikukwa villages in Zimbabwe. An ambitious project of community development and permaculture had been going on there since the

PREFACE @ xiii early 1990s. In 2010, my sister and I went to document this project in a film, The Chikukwa Project (2013). The film shows how permaculture strategies can work to achieve a sustainable food security. Promoting the film, I attended the 2013 permaculture convergence in Cuba. This was a chance to understand more about how permaculture was being put into practice in Latin America, North America and the UK. In 2018, Routledge published my next book on these topics - Food Security for Rural Africa (2018). This second book expanded my focus beyond South Africa and brought my writing up to date with research done since the 2009 book.

This brings me to the book you are now reading - written as one of the FireWorks series for Pluto Press. Many of the books in this series are on social movements of the present period. Social movements that are challenging the system. I have always seen the permaculture movement as one of these. This book is designed with two major purposes. The first is to explain the permaculture movement to those who are not part of the movement but want to know more about it. I want to show how permaculture fits in relation to social movement activism in all its variety. The second is to give an account of permaculture that may help us within the permaculture movement to get a useful overview of where we are at now, a view from the grassroots.

This book on the permaculture movement has been written in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. We in Australia have been lucky that the death rate has been low compared to most other countries due to a combination of factors. One is the relatively late arrival of the xiv @ THE POLITICS OF PERMACULTURE disease here, which meant that governments in Australia knew what we might face. Australia as an island was able to block in-migration and stem new importations of the disease. The national government endorsed quite strong lockdowns. The most surprising development was a conservative national government being prepared to extend the social welfare net to reduce the economic pain of lockdowns. The failure to adequately cover rent, mortgages and income has meant that the lockdowns have never been completely supported by all citizens. But so far, they have been effective enough. The end result is that our government has incurred huge debts. In the near future these debts are likely to be the pretext for reductions in government services.

Worldwide, the problems of Covid-19 are exacerbated by the capitalist economy. Some sections of the corporate elite want minimal restrictions so they can continue to make a profit. The economy seems to require us to open up - so people can get back to earning an income. As a result, lockdowns are only half hearted and deaths soar. Yet what we are actually facing is a problem of rationing. By fine tuning a lockdown, it is possible to provide essential goods and services, enough to make sure that everyone is housed and fed without spreading the virus. The political problem is how to distribute these necessary goods and services to the people who are unemployed as an effect of the virus or the lockdowns, usually both - in a way that seems morally legitimate. If a government was to simply print money (without going into debt) and pay these people, the Covid-19 unemployed would seem to be getting an income without working. The foundation of

PREFACE @ xv consent in capitalist economies is that people earn a right to goods and services by undertaking a paid job. If a very large number of people were to access goods and services without earning the money to pay for them, this mythology would collapse. At least, that is what the authorities are worried about. Governments cannot lockdown adequately, without undermining the ideological foundations for a market economy. So, every day, thousands of people are dying.

Permaculture writers believe that neither government nor the market can deal with the environmental crisis taking place as the growth economy hits environmental limits. The other co-originator of permaculture, David Holmgren talks about the inevitability of economic downturn in the rocky pathway to a less affluent and lower energy future. The Covid-19 pandemic represents the first major catastrophe on this road to economic contraction.

To begin with, the virus probably jumped from wild bats to humans through the trade in wild meats at a food market in Wuhan. While most media treat this as an unlucky accident, some political economists argue otherwise. As agribusiness encroaches on forest refugia, it disrupts the human communities on forest peripheries. Their trade in wild meats sources animals deep into hitherto unfrequented forest - with new disease strains. The social disruption of forest encroachment and globalisation sends some of these forest edge people into the big cities, accompanied by their novel infections."

Moving further along the timeline it is hard to deny the force of this economic analysis. What followed this initial outbreak are problems created and exacerbated xvi @ THE POLITICS OF PERMACULTURE by our economic structures. Globalisation means global air transport. The virus gets out of hand very quickly and spreads to every part of the world. Dense cities and crowded workplaces spread it within countries. Shutting down global trade to contain the pandemic threatens the economy, the profits of companies and the incomes of the people. Neoliberalism in the last 40 years has undermined public health services. There is no spare capacity to deal with an emergency. Medical equipment comes from factories in far parts of the world, a typical product of global supply chains. Any break in the chain becomes a huge problem.”

To grasp the homology between the Covid-19 crisis and other environmental problems, it is salutary to consider the opposition to effective action. Opposing action on climate change, the fossil fuel industry funds a campaign that draws in people worried about jobs. The pro-business media styles itself as the courageous adversary of ‘elites’ - the doom and gloom scientists with their gullible trendy allies. The opposition to the Covid-19 lockdowns is engineered by the same unholy alliance. Sections of the business community fund legal challenges and a media campaign. They mask their own economic motives, standing up for the ordinary masses, supposedly fighting for their freedom against the tyranny of medical experts.

As David Holmgren writes, the Covid-19 crisis reminds us of the frailty of the global market economy. People are thrown back on their household economy and begin to experiment with non-monetary provision:

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A home-based lifestyle of self-reliance, and minimal and slow travel does not provide protection against getting a virus as infectious as COVID-19, but it can provide a base that is stimulating and healthy, rather than a place of detention. Behaviours such as self-provision, buying in bulk and minimal travel not only reduce ecological footprints and stimulate household and community economies, they also ‘flatten the curve’ of infection, thus giving the health system the best chance of responding to those in need and reducing the numbers of people desperately dependent on government aid and assistance.’

As the collection Pandemic Solidarity (2020) explains, the failure of governments and the markets to deal with the pandemic has inspired people in all parts of the world to develop networks of mutual aid - alternative to the mainstream economy. Collectives of garment workers sewing masks and distributing them in their communities, free provision of food to the vulnerable and unemployed, local food production and seed saving.* These temporary expedients give us pointers to long-term alternatives. Many key works of permaculture suggest the necessity to abandon urbanism and locate people in loosely connected rural towns, with government devolved to town councils and bioregional networks. Most production would be for local consumption. Towns would provide their own food, housing, energy and local transport, as well as repairing almost all machinery. A year-long lockdown, isolating each town, would not have to be a huge inconvenience. Access to all necessities would continue to be provided locally. Exchange of some high-tech machinery parts could xviii @ THE POLITICS OF PERMACULTURE be suspended for this period. For medical supplies and collaborative development of a vaccine, transport could be via a train system, with locally enforced quarantine measures. Communication via the net would facilitate a global and national response.

The account of the permaculture movement offered in this book is sociological. That means that I aim to relate the permaculture movement to research on social movements conducted by sociologists. At the same time, this is not a particularly academic book. I intend it to introduce the permaculture movement to those who are not participants and to provide a pause for reflection for people in the movement itself. Is this a book of ‘social permaculture’? Yes, in part. ‘Social permaculture’ is variously interpreted, but at the very least it aims to help permaculturists to make successful interventions in society - by attending to the social issues that arise when you are working with other people.’ In the case of this book, I have aimed to situate permaculture interventions and the permaculture movement in relation to broader social contexts. This can certainly assist us to make more effective interventions.

So, what methods am I using to conduct this analysis? For those who are not trained in sociology, the methods we use can seem random and unscientific. It may help to explain the reasoning behind them. One part of what I am doing here is teasing out the implications of key permaculture writings. Mostly these are writings from the permaculture ‘canon, the books by Mollison and Holmgren, the founders of the movement. The second source for material in this book is a set of interviews with 19 participants in the movement. I aimed to recruit inter-

PREFACE @ xix viewees who were not major leaders of the movement. I felt that the views of important leaders of the movement were already available in their books.‘ It is vital to get a sense of permaculture at the grassroots. I recruited people that I know in permaculture and went online to discover lists of permaculture people in other countries. I used my connections to Facebook friends from overseas that I had met at convergences. In the end, two of these interviewees must be counted as ‘leaders’ of permaculture. Andy Goldring has for many years been the chief executive of the UK Permaculture Association and April Sampson-Kelly was elected to the board of Permaculture Australia shortly after I interviewed her. These 19 interviews are supplemented by prior interviews with permaculture participants in Africa, from research conducted for the documentary The Chikukwa Project.

My approach to these interviews is typical of the sociological method. Such a randomly collected small sample of interviewees is insufficient for quantitative statistical analysis. But it makes sense for a qualitative study. What I am looking for is the available public ‘discourses’ that the interviewees make use of. For example, in what way do interviewees make sense of the different definitions of permaculture?” The logic of a qualitative sociological approach is to look for a ‘saturation’ of data. This occurs when a research question gets a recurring set of answers from different interviewees. In other words, these answers are being found to ‘saturate’ the field of possible responses.* This is what I looked for in these interviews.

I am supplementing the information given by these recorded interviews with knowledge formed through a xx @ THE POLITICS OF PERMACULTURE

‘participant ethnography’ of the permaculture movement.’ I have been a participant in the permaculture movement for decades, for instance going to my local permaculture club, running the club as president for a number of years, taking students to visit permaculture properties, researching international projects inspired by permaculture, attending national and international convergences of the movement. What this means is that the 19 interviews I have used here are illustrative of the information I have already gathered informally via years of participation in the movement.

I treat these interviews as authoritative narratives, as ‘oral histories’ from the movement."° It is not assuming too much to believe the accounts these interviewees give of their own practice. Though these accounts are not necessarily totally accurate, they give us a very good guide to the reality of permaculture as perceived by these interviewees. Together, these accounts construct a reliable enough picture of the operation of the movement.

Can permaculture save the world? This book investigates this and more. What do permaculture authors and people in the permaculture movement think they are doing? How do people organise their lives around permaculture? How does this work out for them? How does the movement hang together and organise itself? What are the strategic choices of the permaculture movement? Is there a permaculture approach to system change? Does it work? What would a society run by permaculture look like? How does permaculture relate to other movements? To the left, to feminism, anti-racism, the environment movement?

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The chapters of the book cover different aspects of the permaculture movement. The first chapter is on the various definitions of permaculture and the way that interviewees make use of these. The second chapter is on permaculture as a social movement. What are the organisations, people and things that make up the permaculture movement and how are they connected? The third chapter is on the strategies for social change that the permaculture movement promotes and the visions of a permaculture utopia that attract permaculture people. In the fourth chapter I look at how these strategic options work out in practice. How do permaculture initiatives forward permaculture goals and also maintain themselves in a market dominated economy? The fifth chapter considers critiques of permaculture from the perspectives of anti-colonial and feminist politics. What is being said and how is the movement responding? A final chapter concentrates on my own thoughts on all these issues.

CHAPTER ONE s ueb e aliu RKRN )

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Introduction

‘Permaculture is the name given to an approach to agriculture and environmental sustainability by its two founders, the Australians, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. Together, they wrote Permaculture One (1978).' This defined permaculture as a system of permanent agriculture, making use of perennial plants.* Since then, these founders have written two further interpretations of permaculture.? In the Global Gardener TV series and in the Designers’ Manual (1988), Mollison describes permaculture as sustainable agriculture and settlement design, accompanied by an ethics of care. This was effectively a second definition, corresponding to a second wave of popular interest in permaculture.* Holmgren’s book, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002), initiated a third wave, broadening the concept of permaculture again. That book defined permaculture as a design system for a sustainable society - informed by the permaculture ethics already established in Mollison’s previous writings.’

Other authors have also popularised and interpreted these ideas.° The differences between these writings mean that there is no one correct way to interpret permaculture.

PERMANENT AGRICULTURE

Permaculture One (1978) emphasises the replacement of annual crops with perennials, enabling ‘an integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man [sic]’” The term comes from the two words ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’ - indicating an agricultural system that can be carried out in perpetuity - an idea usually expressed now by the term ‘sustainable. Mollison and Holmgren reassure the reader that they do not want to do away with all ‘annuals’: ‘It is taken as understood that normal gardening for annuals is part of a permacultural system:*

So, what is this distinction between annuals and perennials? Annuals set seed every year (annually). They die off in winter. Most domesticated crops are annuals

- wheat, rice, barley, maize, sorghum. High-yielding varieties can be selected year after year, quickly leading to very productive crops. In nature, annuals usually grow in disturbed ground, producing a lot of seeds and springing up quickly to fill a gap. The annual plants domesticated by people are no exception. With agriculture came ploughing - digging up the ground so cereals could be established.

In contrast, perennial food plants endure for years and years. These are all the trees, bushes, vines and perennial grasses of human agriculture - nuts, fruits, tubers, bamboo, sugar and some vegetables. These plants do not require extensive soil disturbance. A small hole is followed by a planting, and years of production follow.

Strategies of ‘Permaculture One’

Permaculture One lays out a variety of strategies by which we may replace annual crops.

e Replace cereal carbohydrates with nuts and fruit.

e Grow tubers in the shade of a food forest.

e Grow perennial vegetables.

e Feed small livestock from the excess produced by the food forest.

e The forest also provides timber, fuel wood and fibre.

As Mollison and Holmgren explain, a hectare devoted to nut crops can produce as many food calories as a hectare of wheat.’ This reform of agriculture has also been proposed by other authors with names such as ‘food forests; ‘forest gardening’ or ‘perennial polycultures.’°

Reasons for an agriculture based in perennials

The world’s soil resources are the accumulated humus left by previous forest systems. Early forests have now been cut down and the soil they created is used to establish pasture or annual crops. This is not sustainable. Ploughing loosens soils, allowing erosion. Beneficial micro-organisms are killed when exposed to heat and sunlight. This cultivation is using fossil fuel energy.”

e A polyculture of plants is resistant to pests. They do not have a whole field of the same species in which to proliferate. Companion plants provide habitat for pest predators.

e Different species use different niches in the ecosystem -— trees grow high to catch the light while shade lovers populate the understorey.

e Because land is not exposed to full sun, water use is more productive. Trees transpire water that seeds rainfall.

e Nutrients are recycled from trees to the forest floor and back again - there is no need for synthetic fertilisers.

e Weeds are managed by competition from rampant but useful plants.

e If one species is attacked by pests, it does not mean that the productivity of the food forest as a whole is damaged. The other parts go on producing food.

So, these were the strategies of ‘permaculture’ in 1978. Permaculture drew on ethnobotanical studies of traditional societies to envisage the replacement of cereal crops with perennials. The authors credit pre-colonial societies with many of the ideas now presented as permaculture.”

The food forest definition as ‘branding’

By defining and ‘branding’ permaculture as a system of perennials the founders clearly separated their preferred agricultural system from other alternative agricultures. For example, ‘sustainable agriculture’ ‘organics, ‘biodynamics, ‘agroecology ‘regenerative agriculture. Subsequent definitions struggle to achieve the same clarity about what is distinctive in permaculture.

Why include annual cereal crops in a permaculture design?

By 1979, when Mollison wrote Permaculture Two, he had begun to accept that grain crops could be grown sustainably. He cites Fukukoa’s One Straw Revolution (1978) - planting grains into a mulch of cut stalks to eliminate erosion and compaction problems ‘seems to have solved the problems of no-dig grain cultivation. Mollison synthesises Fukuokas strategy with work coming from sustainable agriculture science and much traditional agricultural practice — the use of intercrops with legumes as ‘the essential plants to fix nitrogen for the grain crop. A grain/legume diet gives ... complete protein." By 1991, Holmgren had also acknowledged the logic of this change in definition.*°

AGRICULTURAL DESIGN

The next canonical work is Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual (1988)7 produced along with his TV documentary series, Global Gardener (1991).'* These two works were well received in Australia’s burgeoning environment movement. Mollison also spread these ideas through international tours. Permaculture education was consolidated through the Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC). This qualification was initially taught by people who had been Mollison’s students in permaculture. After two years of practical experience, a graduate of the PDC was considered qualified to provide training and to certify their own students with the PDC - implying an exponential growth in the number of permaculture teachers and graduates. The basic text of PDCs was the Designers’ Manual.

In Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual Mollison defines permaculture in two sentences, the first sentence defining permaculture as designing to achieve agricultural sustainability. “Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems? Maintenance is included, implying that the ongoing execution of permaculture design is part of permaculture. The content of agricultural knowledge inevitably becomes part of permaculture. As a later part of this chapter will show, permaculture careers are built on designing and implementing agricultural strategies.

This first sentence locates permaculture as a strategy for agriculture. If we think the sentence is talking about a ‘food forest’ it is easy to understand. A natural forest has a diverse range of species. It changes fairly slowly. It is resilient despite fluctuations in the weather. We can imagine an agricultural system like this, combining elements necessary to keep an ecosystem running and also choosing useful plants.

In this new definition of permaculture, what has changed most from 1978 is that there is no explicit mention of perennials - because Mollison now believes it is possible to grow grains sustainably. In the Designers’ Manual, there are indeed some sections that deal with grain agriculture. The chapter on design strategies for the wet/dry tropics considers traditional staples such as maize, wheat and millet. For these he recommends no-till, mulching and green manure.

Yet you could exaggerate the extent of this change. For example, a diagram shows a transition from contemporary Western agriculture (a cereal monoculture) to permaculture. Following this transition, 70 per cent of cropping land has become ‘forage farming; ‘replacing animal forage grains with tree crop, increasing forest cover ... and producing some (if not all) fuel on the farm” Another passage makes the claim that permaculture systems are like natural systems in that they cycle and renew themselves over a very long period whereas ‘annual cropping’ renews itself in one season. ‘Permaculture thus uses the time resource much better than annual gardening alone.” The implication is that ‘permaculture, based in perennials, is an alternative to ‘annual cropping. The chapter on cool and temperate agricultures has almost no mention of grain crops. So, this new definition de-emphasises food forest farming - but without completely giving up on perennials as central to permaculture design.

There is a potential problem with this first sentence definition. ‘Sustainable agriculture design’ is agricultural science. So why have a separate framework and call it ‘permaculture’? I will come back to this.

The second sentence

Mollison’s second sentence broadens permaculture substantially to the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.” Here we are not just talking about agricultural systems but about every kind of technology - energy, metalwork, ceramics, digital IT, so long as it can be done sustainably! Permaculture becomes equivalent to the whole environmentalist movement. The goal of the environmentalism is exactly this - the harmonious integration of humans and (non-human) nature to provide for our needs sustainably. Yet in fact, ‘permaculture’ does not actually replicate the whole environmentalist movement. What permaculture writers do talk about most is sustainable agriculture design and (occasionally) sustainable ‘settlement’ design.