The Politics of Permaculture

Terry Leahy

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780745342788
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Economics
• Index: Biological Sciences

'Inspiring. [...] Crammed with lively interviews and grounded examples' Ashish Kothari, founder of Kalpavriksh

Permaculture is an environmental movement that makes us reevaluate what it means to be sustainable. Through innovative agriculture and settlement design, the movement creates new communities that are harmonious with nature. It has grown from humble origins on a farm in 1970s Australia and flourished into a worldwide movement that confronts industrial capitalism. The Politics of Permaculture is one of the first books to unpack the theory and practice of this social movement that looks to challenge the status quo. Drawing upon the rich seam of publications and online communities from the movement as well as extensive interviews with permaculture practitioners and organisations from around the world, Leahy explains the ways permaculture is understood and practiced in different contexts. In the face of extreme environmental degradation and catastrophic climate change, we urgently need a new way of living.

CHAPTER ONE

What Is Permaculture?
Three Perspectives

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).¹ This defined permaculture as a system of permanent agriculture, making use of perennial plants.² Since then, these founders have written two further interpretations of permaculture.³ 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.⁴ 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.⁵

Other authors have also popularised and interpreted these ideas.⁶ 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]’.⁷ 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.’⁸

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.

• Replace cereal carbohydrates with nuts and fruit.

• Grow tubers in the shade of a food forest.

• Grow perennial vegetables.

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

• 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.⁹ This reform of agriculture has also been proposed by other authors with names such as ‘food forests’, ‘forest gardening’ or ‘perennial polycultures’.¹⁰

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.¹¹

• 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.

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

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

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

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

• 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.¹²

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.¹³ 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’.¹⁴ Mollison synthesises Fukuoka’s 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’.¹⁵ By 1991, Holmgren had also acknowledged the logic of this change in definition.¹⁶

AGRICULTURAL DESIGN

The next canonical work is Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual (1988)¹⁷ produced along with his TV documentary series, Global Gardener (1991).¹⁸ 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.’¹⁹ 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’.²⁰ 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’.²¹ 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 What Is Permaculture? Three Perspectives
• 2 Permaculture as a Social Movement
• 3 Strategies and Visions
• 4 Permaculture Practice: Prefiguring System Change
• 5 Gender and Colonialism
• Conclusion: Permaculture Politics
• Notes
• Index