Permaculture

Permaculture:

Addressing Ecological Crises and Redefining Human-Earth Identities

           

We are experiencing, as a human race and as a planet, a radical convergence of crises that spans across all aspects of planetary society and species, from economic pitfalls, social upheaval, and political chaos, to desertification, the ubiquitous disappearance of bees, forests, clean air and water, and the acute deterioration of ecosystems’ ability to sustain life. Old stories about who we are as human beings and about how we relate to- and interact with- the world around us are falling apart. History has never witnessed suffering on such a large scale; humanity’s dogmatic efforts to control and manipulate nature, ‘red and tooth in claw’, have culminated in the complexly woven globalized systems of economy, politics, technology, culture and thought we witness today- a vast machine of human cognition that has transformed the planet, fueling a ruthless, anthropocentric exploitation of other life forms to substantiate our own achievement. Despite producing extraordinary marvels like the Internet, technologies that have essentially transfigured and revolutionized the way we move, act, and think on this planet, our audacious attempts to command the universe as ‘lords and possessors of nature’ have pushed the earth’s carrying capacity to the brink of collapse. Many social and environmental activists fail to enact lasting change because they neglect how powerful our existing stories are, and how deeply the psychology of separation (from ourselves, one another, and the planet) has been ingrained within the collective consciousness. 

Permaculture is a fascinating alternative to these conventional paradigms of consumption and exploitation because it seeks to address the physical and metaphysical, the challenges of both ecological imbalance and spiritual, or existential, disharmony. Permaculture, or ‘permanent (agri)culture’, was “developed” (indigenous peoples have been practicing their own forms for thousands of years) by Bill Mollison in 1959 while observing marsupials browsing the floor of a Tanzanian forest, noticing the seamless brilliance of natural ecosystems compared to our contemporary forms of agriculture.^1,2 Unlike traditional gardens or farms, Mollison noted, areas like [the Tanzanian forest] were resilient, diverse, productive, and beautiful, representing places where nature does most of the work, but where people are as welcome as the other inhabitants of Earth.¹ Contemporary food production is but one microcosm of the broader consciousness that still holds vestiges of the ‘nature as enemy’ mentality; indeed for thousands of years we’ve viewed ‘nature’ as something to be conquered and restrained, something somehow separate from ourselves (Evidence suggests that hunter-gatherers before the inception of agriculture [10,000 years ago] didn’t maintain this self-other duality, but viewed themselves as part of a greater totality.) Permaculture is thus focused on modeling human settlements and agricultural systems on natural ecologies while simultaneously demonstrating the inherent interdependency of all beings on this planet.

In many ways, the fundamental principles of permaculture are in direct opposition to the forces of neoliberal economic/social policies, corporate globalization, and massive industrial agricultural practices. “Permaculture technologies,” says Professor Maria de la Bellacasa, “[represent] a form of concrete political activism… They promote ecological living, local food production, alternative energies, and radical democratic forms of organization.”³ Contrast this description with the spirit of mainstream consumer culture, whereby living systems are fueled by dirty fossil fuels that enslave local economies and disenfranchise communities by making them dependent on large-scale organizations like the IMF or private multinational corporations. Helena Norberg-Hodge’s film Ancient Futures provides a prototypical example while exploring the effects of globalization on the Ladakh people of northern India. A culture rooted deeply in intimate community ties, sustainable living practices, leisure, creativity, peace and happiness was utterly disintegrated as enormous agribusiness corporations seized control of trade and forced Ladakhis into mainstream wage economies; the traditional Ladakh culture collapsed due to the ‘civilizing’ pressures of modernization- a process that continues to affect indigenous groups across the globe. ⁴ In the Eleuthera Islands, Bahamas, “[locals] have also come to rely on foreign companies for jobs- which helps to explain the 40% unemployment rate- and in the last half-century a great deal of local agricultural know-how has been lost in the rise and fall of the tourism industry.⁵ Instilled within the ethos of permaculture is an emphasis on downscaling political and economic structures, contracting the modalities of production and consumption, and establishing a communal society based on the relocalization of living systems to preserve culture rather than homogenize it. This idea of relocalization will be discussed later.

What’s wrong with the current agricultural system?

Feeding the world?

Despite our modern agricultural technologies and advanced globalized distribution systems, it is estimated that nearly 800 million people go hungry each day, and that two-fifths of the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day. Companies like Monsanto claim that low-technology agriculture “will not produce sufficient crop yield increases to feed the world’s burgeoning population,” and thus rely on pesticide-laden, technology-intensive agriculture to produce that maximum output from the land in the shortest amount of time. ⁵ Yet it is abundance, not scarcity, that best describes the world’s food supply: enough food is grown worldwide to provide 4.3 pounds of food per person per day, despite countries like the United States literally throwing out half of what is produced.^6,7 “The industrial system has, over centuries and in virtually every area of the globe, ‘enclosed’ farmland, forcing subsistence peasants off the land, so that is can be used for growing high-priced export crops rather than diverse crops for local populations… removed from their land and means of survival, the ‘landless’ then flock to the newly industrialized cities where they quickly become a class of urban poor competing for low-paying jobs.”⁶ By 2030, it is estimated that 56% of the developing world will be urban dwellers, fifty percent of which is likely due to forced migration from rural to urban communities. ⁶

Toxicity, technology, contamination, pesticide use

According to a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report, between 1970 and 1999, food-borne illnesses multiplied tenfold. According to the FDA, at least 53 carcinogenic pesticides are presently applied to support our massive yields, while the synergistic effects (how chemicals interact with one another) of pesticides have not be examined at all.^8,9 Consequently, the Environmental Protections Agency (EPA) reports that more than 1 million Americans drink water laced with pesticide runoff from industrial farms. “A National Cancer Institute study found that farmers who used industrial herbicides were six times more likely than non-farmers to develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma… exposures to these neurotoxic compounds like PCBs and organophosphate insecticides during critical periods of development can cause permanent, long-term damage to the brain, nervous, and reproductive systems.” ⁶ Food-borne illnesses have skyrocketed with the introduction of factory farms and antibiotics, while the use of irradiation has been one of many disastrous efforts to engineer technological solutions for fundamentally unsafe agricultural practices to begin with.

Environmental costs: transportation, monoculture, and climate change

The overexploitation of chemicals and machines on industrial farms severely erodes topsoil and damages ecosystems over time. The United States has lost half of its topsoil since 1960, and we continue depleting topsoil 17 times faster than nature can replenish it. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reports that 75% of genetic agricultural diversity has disappeared in this century. The genetically modified organisms engineered in labs by Monsanto and other massive agribusiness corporations are far more susceptible to insects, blights, diseases, and inclement weather than are organic, polyculture farms.⁶ In the summer of 1969, an epidemic disease of corn that appeared in North America destroyed a substantial part of the 1970 crop because 70% of the U.S. corn was uniformly vulnerable to a new race of southern corn leaf blight. “The hazard to corn,” says biology professor John Jungck, “resulted from advances in agricultural technology that had created the genetic uniformity.” ¹⁰ This danger is present whenever food is produced in the monoculture format, lacking the supportive safety net of a diverse array of mutually beneficial organisms. The food on an average American’s plate now travels at least 1,300 miles from the farm to the dinner table, exacerbating carbon emissions and further degrading ecosystems.⁶

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Permaculture: A Biopolitical/Metaphysical Response

It is quite essential to acknowledge, as previously mentioned, that the problems provoked by industrial agriculture are mere products of a certain way of understanding our relationships with the natural world- certain ethical, behavioral, and metaphysical identities that have come to define the way humanity interacts within broader contexts. Changing the way we produce and relate to food is a fundamental point of intervention in exploitative ‘biopolitical’ regimes and predominant social forms; in the past few years, we have witnessed a renewed interest in growing our own food and connecting more deeply and intimately with this important process. This emerging paradigm, sparked within ‘mainstream contexts’ by the organic/local food and urban/community garden movements and perhaps culminating with an extensive relocalization/permaculture framework (developing further upon the inchoate stages of the ‘green’ movement), the broader value system of deep, ecological consciousness is about strengthening the interrelationships of, what de la Bellacasa calls, the ‘three ecologies’: self (body and psyche), collective, and earth. “The ethics of permaculture,” she asserts, “are in dialogue with broader discussion in the world of biopolitics/naturecultures; this requires approaching the ethical as an everyday doing that connects the personal to the collective and de-centers the human…. Naturecultures (her term), imply the inseparability of the natural and cultural, and affirm the breaking down of boundaries of the technological and organic as well as the animal and human… more [people] today envision the material world less from the perspective of defined ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’, but as composed of knots of relations involving humans, non-humans, and physical entanglements of matter and meaning.”³

Permaculture is just as much about practical organic farming design principles as it is about transforming the way we view the earth, and thus has embedded within it one some would call dimensions of spirituality or ‘animist’ value systems. The ecological perception of being part of the earth is one that is felt, as “real dirt under our fingernails” and “our bodies responding to the needs of water because we are water.” De la Bellacasa emphasizes her revitalized relationship with worms:

Becoming able of a caring obligation towards worms is nurtured by hands on dirt, love and curiosity for the needs of an ‘other’, whether this is the people we live with, the animals we care for, the soil we plant in. It is by working with them, by feeding them and gathering their castings as food for plants, that a relationship is created that acknowledges our interdependency: these neglectable sticky beings reappear as quite amazing as well as indispensable – for they take care of our waste, they process it so that it becomes food again.³

Because we are constantly on the move, disconnected from where we live and the flowing ecological patterns that sustain us, we have lost our relationship with place, with our surroundings, our landscape, our communities. Environmentalist and Deep ecologist Gary Snyder says that the most important ecological commitment is to ‘stay in one place’, reviving our connections with the land by relocalizing living systems, culture, and identity. Permaculture asks us to be observant, develop greater awareness of our effect on the world around us, and take mindful actions in caring for the mind, body, and environment. ^11,2

A Few Basic Practices in Permaculture

             Instead of the backbreaking labor that goes into tilling, sowing, weeding, and chemically controlling a conventional vegetable garden, a permaculture garden works on totally different principles. It provides its own fertilization, has internal weed suppression and pest-control mechanisms, and manages its internal moisture levels through dry times and wet, functioning as a self-organizing ecology predicated on place.¹ Instead of the grassy emptiness that usually defines yards, city parks, curbsides, and parking lots (mirroring a fundamental cosmology of clean, ‘civilized’ aesthetics instead of functional, productive spaces), these areas could be retrofitted to be lush, food-producing, attractive landscapes that aid nature while yielding much for us as well. Ordinary vegetable gardens are usually fragmented: there is an orderly vegetable plot here; flower beds there, a back corner for ‘wildlife’, etc. A vegetable garden doesn’t offer habitat to native insects, birds, and other wildlife (which are traditionally considered unwelcome visitors) and a flower garden can’t feed the gardener. Therefore, permaculture defends the multifunctionality of all species, treating the garden as a complex web or network of mutual relationships rather than isolated elements intended to serve only a single purpose.¹ “A yard is a dynamic system, not an unchanging still life. By viewing our landscapes as dynamic ecosystems, rather than as static collections of inert objects, we can create gardens that inherently grow in healthy patterns and directions.”¹

One significant feature of permaculture design is the application of mutually beneficial plants that help cultivate diverse species and build the health of the system. For example, if you plant broccoli or roses, aphids will naturally be attracted, which endangers other plants. However, one can scatter these plants among other species that reduce nitrogen in the soil (aphids enjoy nitrogen-rich plants), as well as foster habitats for aphid predators (ladybugs). A rosebush attracts aphids, which lure ladybugs, which lure birds, which leave their droppings to feed microbes and fertilize the rose. In this way, multiple zero-waste feedback loops can be employed to self-regulate gardens through knowledge of nature’s relationships.

Another critical element of nourishing the ecological garden is by building healthy soil. A Latin American farmer is quoted in Gaia’s Garden as saying, “Of course you have terrible soil in your country. What do you expect when you call it dirt?”¹ Our heavily fertilized agricultural lands lose up to 60% of calcium (enriching mineral) due to run off, while in a typical North American forest, only 2% is lost. Similarly, worms ‘turn over’ as much as 25 tons of soil per acre per year (the equivalent of one inch of topsoil over Earth’s landmass every ten years), while we struggle to produce short-term bursts in productivity through tilling.¹ Nature is very intelligent; by understanding her mechanisms we can work with her and not against her. Healthy compost heaps- using kitchen scraps and other organic materials that would normally go to waste- can be used to nourish the soil and serve as a natural weed-protector.

The management of space, as part of the ecological design process, present yet another way for us to mimic nature’s inherent providence and abundance. Elevated ‘keyhole’ beds and spiraling herb formations (shown below) are simple solutions to maximizing sunlight, water collection, and space while utilizing different plant heights to act as filters or barriers to wind or rodents.