On Permaculture

The ideas behind permaculture

Permaculture was on the edge of my consciousness for many years. I thought of it as a ‘gardening thing’ and it was only when I became more interested in gardening during the pandemic that I decided to find out more about it. It turns out that it is much broader - and even in a certain way could be considered a set of ideas about how to live life. Something about these ideas drew me in enough for me to take the the Permaculture Association’s ‘Foundations of Permaculture’ course last year. 

Permaculture usually gets described in terms of a set of ethics, a set of principles and an approach to design. The ethics are labelled Earth Care, People Care and Fair Shares, which mean roughly what you guess they might. There are various sets of principles around but the most widely acknowledge are Holmgren’s Twelve Principles: Observe and interact, Catch and store energy, Obtain a yield, Apply self-regulation & accept feedback, Use & value renewable resources & service, Produce no waster, Design from patterns to details, Integrate rather than segregate, Use small and slow solutions, Use and value diversity, Use edges & value the marginal, Creatively use and respond to change.

The movement originated with learning from how indigenous people looked after the land and is still very much associated with the land. If you find yourself in permaculture circles, you will rapidly find yourself hearing about ideas such as forest gardening, ‘zoning’, various types of composting and no-dig gardening, with the odd ‘herb spiral’ thrown in. However, permaculture has been applied to a range of domains, and there is a pretty diagram called Holmgren’s flower showing the ‘seven domains of permaculture action’: Land and Nature Stewardship, Building, Tools and Technology, Education and Culture, Health and Spiritual Well-being, Finance and Economics and Land Tenure and Community Governance.

I found myself interested in these other domains, but also sometimes found myself growing slightly frustrated when I saw the principles applied to them. It felt like the principles were often being stretched too thin, shoehorned in to in order to label something that the somebody was fond of as permaculture. And yet I could also often see that the things being described were ‘permaculture-ish’.

I found myself wonder what actually characterised permaculture. What was the essence of permaculture? I like the idea of the principles but felt there was something deeper there. I gradually found myself breaking permaculture down into five main ideas, beyond the ethics:

Idea 1:  Holistic rather than reductionist thinking

Associated Principles: Observe and Interact, Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback, Use Small and Slow Solutions, Creatively Use and Respond to Change, Design from patterns to details.

Central to permaculture seem to be the idea that we think about things holistically. In fact permaculturists sometimes talk about ‘thinking like an ecosystem’. For example, when we think about the land, we think about not just the plants growing but also the long-term health of the soil.

In other areas, there is also very much an openness to nuance, to interconnectedness and to ‘looking broader’. If one thinks in this way, one can see the connections with ways of thinking in other areas. One might realise that eating in a healthy way isn’t just about counting calories. One might realise that external rewards tend to decrease intrinsic motivation. A parent might realise that nurturing values in their children is more important than demanding obedience. Or an educator might realise that students are having an emotional and social experience while learning and not just an intellectual one, so to help them learn, one needs to take that into account.

Permaculture reminds me enormously of Systems Thinking. Systems are more than the sum of their parts and the field of Systems Thinking gives us tools to think about systems and elucidates common patterns and pitfalls. The book Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows is a wonderful introduction that left me feeling that the ideas deserved to be far more widespread.

Permaculture shares something in spirit with System Thinking and couples this with a healthy humility - in the sense that it tells us that we should appreciate that we are always working with complex systems. It tells us to learn to understand cautiously and gradually. Observation and feedback are a fundamental part of permaculture.

I like this type of thinking a great deal. I do have one caveat however. I think there is a slight danger in rejecting science as part of this. Sometimes we can have strong intuitions about things and relying on them can lead to mistakes. One might not realise the pollution hazards of wood-burning stoves for example, or the impact that keeping honey bees might have on wild bee populations. Our intuitions about how to reduce our carbon footprint most effectively might wrong (go read How Bad are Bananas? by Mike Berners Lee!). Gardening in particular is full of folklore and sometimes some scrutiny is in order - the Garden Myths website is good at turning the lens on some permaculture ideas and fostering discussion of what is true or not.

I believe that this type of holistic systems thinking and science are compatible, but I have seen some permaculturists sink into rather anti-science stances. This is possibly a reaction to seeing scientists making mistakes and then concluding that the problem is science itself. I feel instead that holistic thinking should improve science and that science should improve holistic thinking.

Idea 2: Designing sustainable systems 

Associated principles: Catch and store energy, Obtain a yield, Use and value renewable resources and services and Produce No waste. 

There is an emphasis in permaculture on not producing waste and using renewable resources. In terms of ‘Earth Care’, aspiration in this direction feels right to me, even if it is pretty much impossible to completely get there, at least without living a very extreme lifestyle.

Sustainability is a slightly subtle concept and gets more confusing as it is applied away from physical domains. It links into thinking holistically in terms of thinking about the long-term and not just the short-term. I’ve included ‘Obtain a yield’ here, because a system that does not produce a yield, even if that yield is something subtle like ‘joy’, for whoever ‘owns’ the system is unlikely to be sustainable. I think there is more to a system being sustainable for the people involved in it, but it feels important to me to think about it from a ‘People Care’ perspective too. And any system that completely ignores ‘Fair Shares’ ethic on a larger scale will almost certainly cause resentment in the long run.

Idea 3: Build anti-fragile, resilient systems

Associated Principles: Integrate rather than Segregate, Use and Value Diversity

Permaculture cares about resiliency. The more self-sustaining a system is, the more resilient it will probably be, but as very few systems will be truly self-sustaining, there is more to resiliency than that. Permaculture especially recognises that ‘monocultures’ are fragile and hence the ‘Integrate rather Segregate’ and ‘Use an Value Diversity’ principles.

I suspect most permaculturists wouldn’t be able to stand Nassim Nicholas Taleb, but his book Antifragile is interesting in this respect. There are various summaries of the book around (here’s one), but I think the ideas in it have a large intersection with permaculture. There’s a tension between short-term stability and efficiency and longer-term anti-fragility.

For me, one needs to find a balance here. One of the things that matters is what the dependencies of a system are on external systems and how ‘tightly coupled’ they are. As an individual you need to decide to what extent to depend on specialists for different jobs that come up in life and what to learn to do yourself. For some things the call is pretty obvious (it’s worthwhile for most people to learn to cook I suspect) but for other things, it’s less obvious. Not everybody’s passions and abilities are the same. I don’t want to be a farmer, and although I might grow some of my own fruit and vegetables, becoming self-sustaining food-wise doesn’t actually feel like something I want to do. Instead, I want other people, ideally locally, to do that sustainably and for me to then buy the food from them.

Idea 4: Work with nature rather than against it

There’s an idea running throughout permaculture, that I really like, of working with nature rather than against it. It’s not explicitly in the Holmegren principles but it is one of Bill Mollison’s principles, the other main set of permaculture principles out there. It’s very much a Taoist idea. It applies in fairly obvious ways to the land, but it also makes sense in domains like education: Maria Montessori encouraged teachers to ‘follow the child’.

Idea 5: Follow a design process

Associated principles: Design from patterns to details, Integrate rather than segregate, Use edges & value the marginal, Creatively use and respond to change

I’ve phrased this idea rather vaguely, but ‘design’ is an important part of permaculture. It’s a movement very much focused around that what permaculturists do is design. If you start to learn about permaculture, you’ll learn about design frameworks like SADIMET and OBREDIMET which lay out the stages in the design process. These processes feel very similar to design processes from other fields. There’s a part where you observe and information gather, then you do some analysis or evaluation and then you enter into an iterative process of implementation and responding to feedback. It reminds me very much of Design Thinking.

Lots of other fields have design processes and I don’t think there is anything unique about those of permaculture, but following a process rather than just dabbling is an important aspect of permaculture that you might not get if you just went and read the principles.