Against Permaculture

The notion that a modified hunter/gatherer system could be the cure-all to the energy, environmental and organizational dilemmas of post-industrial man is surely one of the maddest ideas ever propagated in the often batty world of alternative farming. Such is “permaculture”, a design concept and related philosophy (and offshoots) concocted by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison in the sleepy backwater of Tasmania under the shadow of the world oil crisis in the late 1970s. The term itself is an elision of the words ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’. It has unfortunately become somewhat interchangeable with words like ‘organic’ where this word refers to natural farming methods and the general movement for natural food production free of artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Once there were ‘organic’ gardens. Now they’re ‘permaculture’ gardens. Permaculture, though, is a very specific thing, an assembly of very specific theories and practices, and is therefore quite distinct from other broader manifestations of alternative farming.

In practice it refers to an approach to sustainable agriculture based on perennial as opposed to annual plants. In theory it proposes that the low-energy systems of hunter/gatherers provide the best model for a future agriculture and, by extension, urban and other design challenges. It has developed a large following worldwide; thousands of people have been trained through certified permaculture design courses, and it is eagerly embraced by the wide-eyed and ecologically-minded. There is, however, a worrying absence of critique regarding permaculture, both among its devotees and among outsiders. You can search in vain for material that offers a sober, critical account of the permaculture ‘design concept’. There tends to be a considerable amount of ‘cult’ in permaculture. Permaculturalists, like other greenies, are notoriously zealous; they are on a mission to save the world and have rarely asked hard questions about the assumptions and suppositions that underpin their system.

The present writer, it should be known, is himself a life-long enthusiast and dirt-under-the-nails practitioner of old-fashioned organic farming and gardening – and is not entirely immune to batty ideas - but he has never been either an advocate nor a practitioner of permaculture. In fact, truth be told, permaculture is one of his pet hates. Nowadays it is almost impossible to mingle among the natural farming crowd without constantly having to deal with permaculture and its pervasive ideology. It infects natural farming like canker in an apple orchard. The author’s objections are both philosophical and practical, and longstanding. As it happens, he shares these objections with his son, who is a professional organic horticulturalist and who is well-versed in the shortcomings of permaculture since he encounters them in the field every day. Together, father and son bemoan the prevalence of permaculture on a regular basis. Does no one see its failings? A few of them are as follows:

* * * 

Permaculture is a neo-primitivist, regressive and anti-civilizational philosophy. It is a by-product of late 70s Marxist anthropology-driven utopianism whereby Marx meets Rousseau. Marx supposed that there was an inevitable transition, or cycle, of ‘modes of production’ from primitive communism, through feudalism, industrialism and then to a post-capitalist utopia, advanced communism or primitive communism revisited. Permaculture shares this implicit cyclic structure. It is a return to the lost ideal of the hunter/gatherer. The permaculturalist idealizes the hunter/gatherer mode of production and wants to create a post-industrial post-capitalist version of it. At the same time he sneers upon the accomplishments of the great grain-based civilizations, which is to say civilization in general. This Rousseauian bias is rife among environmentalists; permaculture codifies it into a design system.

As an ideology born out of the 1970s oil crisis permaculture assumes that energy is expensive and scarce and will become more so in future. Like the Mad Max movies from the same era, it is founded upon the myth of scarcity. In reality, though, this world of scarcity has not eventuated. The peak oil apocalypse – a favorite David Holmgren theme – has not happened, and nor is it likely to happen. Permaculture has the same psychology as Marxism; it justifies itself by theorising an inevitable crisis. But the fact is that energy is abundant. Forty years after the publication of Permaculture One oil has never been so cheap, and in the long term the transition to diverse non-oil energy sources is likely to be relatively painless and without intervening crises. As a general point, it is not likely that the captains of industry have made a massive miscalculation – it is more likely that David Holmgren and Bill Mollison have. This makes the whole raison d’etre of permaculture moot. It is premised upon a crisis scenario that did not and is not likely to happen.

Permaculture frowns upon high-energy activities such as digging, ploughing, grain-growing and so on, and opts for low-intensity perennial crops. This allows for certain energy savings, but in every other respect it is massively inefficient. Every efficiency gained by mechanization, division of labour or the human imitation of natural processes is stripped from the system. The plain fact is that permaculture projects are often fatally space inefficient. Like the hunter/gatherer systems upon which permaculture is modelled, it requires a large amount of space to sustain a small number of people. It is often said that organic farming is less productive than chemical-based industrial farming. This is generally true, although usually only to a tolerably small degree. In the case of permaculture, there is often a massive decline in productivity. The idea that an advanced hunter/gatherer system based on perennial crops can feed the world’s population is an utter nonsense. 

This is not to say that all permaculture ideas are misconceived. Like other alternative farming systems it promotes botantical diversity. Monocultures are precarious and can be disasterous, but diversity is over-rated. Often permaculturalists fetishize about “diversity”. Can you have too much diversity? Of course you can – in agriculture as in human society. (To employ a vulgar analogy: Diarrhea is not a cure for constipation.) Diversity is not an inherent good. It is merely one desirable characteristic in a robust, healthy system.  But an overabundance of diversity means a lack of specialization and resulting inefficiencies, as already noted. A permaculture farm will have a hundred different food crops but specialize in none. It is stripped of all economies of scale. 

And who wants a diet based on nibbling perennials anyway? Perennial crops suck. Permaculture yields a diet that is undesirable and unhealthy. Primarily it means a heavy emphasis upon fruit crops. Most of the perennial crops available in temperate zones are fruit-bearing. Permaculture is for fruitarians. Permaculturalists end up eating an awful lot of plums. Their diet is critically low in complex carbohydrates, legumes and their fermented food products, all of which have been the foundation of civilization. It is as mad as the paleo-diet, another hunter/gatherer throwback.

Moreover, permaculture has an entirely perverse view of human labour. It measures labour simply by its energy value. That is, it confuses labour with energy and promotes a crudely utilitarian view of human endeavour. The problem here is that the culture of food by the human hand is much more than merely an expending of energy. It is an expression of our humanness. This is like measuring human activity by its horsepower. It is reductionistic and misses the point. It sees no dignity in human labour at all. Furthermore, throughout permaculture theory there is a contradiction regarding the availability of labour. In an energy crisis labour becomes more available to agriculture, not less, because urbanization starts to reverse – there is a flight to the land. If the projected energy crisis of the permaculture distopia did eventuate, the labour-saving solutions of permaculture would be redundant. Similarly, exporting permaculture to underdeveloped countries is stupid because such countries have an oversupply of able-bodied young men standing around doing nothing. They don't need to save on labour by growing breadfruit instead of wheat. 

In general, the measuring of the relationships between different elements of the farm/garden/system in pure energy terms is distorted and often leads to undesirable results in every dimension. This type of energy-obsessed utilitarianism is crude and backward. You probably can heat your bedroom with your own excrement, but should you?

With a thuggish and sometimes subversive insistence upon utility, permaculturalists have often been responsible for the spread of noxious weeds in many parts of the world. Similarly, a mistaken creed of 'diversity' and an aversion to human intervention has often led to widespread land degradation. 

The proposal to change the plants which we grow from annuals to perennials is a terrible rejection of human culture which comes from a view of people as beasts (i.e their labour is just horsepower/energy). When in fact the cultivated crops (often annuals) are the embodiment of a accumulation of human culture throughout millenia. The selecting of beautiful pumpkins, wheat, rice, etc. from their wild ancestor plants and the human activity of perfecting and developing nature in this manner is the height of what it is to be human and is one of the most important things that differentiates us from the beasts. Our annual cultivated crops are part of humanity - they developed with us, and we developed with them. We have developed to be fed with these crops and cannot do without them, just as they have developed to be cultivated by us and cannot exist without us. This symbiosis completely escapes the permaculturalist. The permacultural world-view is not just anti-civilizational but anti-humanistic and alienated in this respect.

Whilst permaculture often appeals to people who are rejecting the modern, anti traditional relations between man and nature it is in fact an extension of that counter- traditional trend. Reducing relations between man and nature, man and man, and natural system to natural system to nothing but an energy relationship is the height of materialism and a further extension of modernity's materialist mentality.

Sociologically, permaculture thrives among middle-class, disillusioned, ill-educated back-to-nature ferals – all the children of Rousseau’s noble savage. For them, it is not enough to reject the excesses of industrial brutalism as do other natural farming exponents (say, the Prince Charles model of natural farming, or the Catholic distributists.) Instead, they reject civilization per se, at a fundamental level, and glorify the itinerant tribalism of pre-civilization hunter/gatherers. The permaculturalist is typically a scavenger on the fringes. The advent of permaculture should be seen as part of a particular sociology in Australian society during the late 1970s onwards in which the hippy and punk sub-cultures blended into the radical ecological neo-tribalism of the “feral”. These hunter/gatherer “ferals” stand in contrast to the often conservative, earthy, no-nonsense men-of-the-soil types of the broader natural farming movement. This is how civilizations fray.

Old roses in the garden of the author. As well as the points noted here, permaculture is a strictly utilitarian system that overlooks matters of beauty. If you can't eat it, it has no value.  

Finally, in practice, to a great extent permaculture tends to operate like a pyramid scheme. There are endless permaculture design courses that do little else than train more people to run permaculture design courses who then run more permaculture design courses, and so on. There are few successful (which is to say profitable) permaculture farms, especially if one takes out of the equation the money made from offering yet more permaculture design courses. A farm that needs to offer expensive training courses or tours in order to make a profit is not a successful farm. Similarly, a permaculture community garden that needs public funding is not really a successful enterprise. The simple fact is that while there are many successful, robust, sustainable, profitable organic farms – the 'biodynamic' farmers in Australia have over a million hectares under profitable cultivation and a booming export industry -, there are very few really successful permaculture projects and never have been ever since the inception of the system in the 1970s. The ‘design concept’ appealed to a particular demographic of green consciousness in the era of energy anxiety but has produced very little other than a small army of labour-avoiding hobby farmers with a Certificate 3 in permaculture design.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black