Permaculture, Effective Altruism and Efficiency-Antifragility tradeoffs

How Permaculture and Effective Altruism are opposites

I am drawn in some way to both permaculture and effective altruism. I love the way they both challenge status quo thinking in interesting ways.

And yet I think they are both missing something for me.

As I’ve thought about this, I have started to realise that my ambivalence is related to permaculture and effective altruism being opposites in a certain way.

I took the Foundations of Permaculture online course last year. When I asked the instructor about what characterised certain things as permaculture, she said that you could regard anything that followed the three permaculture ethics, namely Earth Care, People Care and Fair Share, as permaculture. This got me thinking as to whether one could reasonably regard effective altruism as permaculture.

I think it is totally possible to be an effective altruist and have those same ethics. Nonetheless, based on what I knew of permaculture, it felt very clear to me that the effective altruism very definitely wasn’t what I would regard as permaculture.

The Fair Share ethic is a particularly interesting one. For those of us who aren’t farmers, if we are lucky enough to have a surplus, it will almost certainly be in the form of money. But when I started looking for what permaculturists had to say about charitable giving, I could find almost nothing. When Fair Share was discussed, it was almost only in the form of surplus produce, sharing tools or sharing knowledge and skills. There was this weird vacuum that made it feel like money was a taboo topic. Almost nobody seems to have written anything about giving money away in the context of permaculture.

So what might a permaculturist approach to altruism might be? My natural feeling is that it might involve learning about local charities, talking to them, donating small amounts at first, personally observing the results of those donations and then perhaps deciding whether to donate more. Virtually the opposite of effective altruism (although I think this is a commonality in terms of them both subscribing to a feedback cycle).

It is an interesting tension between the two approaches and I think it comes down to the fact that there are often trade-offs between efficiency and antifragility. The most efficient systems won’t have redundancies and so are fragile - as everything that happened with FTX illustrated. But discounting efficiency altogether is dangerous too. We want to encourage charities to be more efficient rather than waste money on ineffective interventions. But I think it’s good to have some diversity in the ecosystem of charities. Charities can change or turn bad. In the same way as one wants to diversify one’s financial investments, it makes sense to diversify with one’s charitable giving. 

Last year I also read the wonderful book The Molecule of More about the neurotransmitter dopamine. It contrasts ‘dopaminergic thinking’ dominated by dopamine with what the author terms ‘H&N thinking’ where ‘Here and Now’ hormones like oxytocin are dominant.

There was an interesting chapter about politics. People who are more dopaminergic are likely to be left-wing/progressive while people who are more H&N dominated are more likely to right-wing/conservative. Very simplistically, dopamine allows you to imagine better futures for the world while the H&N neurotransmitters allow you to appreciate the present moment more.

It feels to me that effective altruism is in many ways the dopaminergic approach to improving the world while permaculture is the H&N approach. 

The Molecule of More talks about the value of balance between the two systems and I too believe that we need to value both ways of looking at the world and somehow integrate what is wonderful about them both, which means I think we have things to learn from both permaculture and effective altruism and that they aren’t mutually exclusive.