The definition of permaculture
Before I went to Portugal for my PDC (Permaculture Design Course), people used to ask me what was permaculture and I used to give an answer more or less along the lines of “well, it’s the opposite of industrialised, monoculture-based agriculture”. Sometimes I would further expand and talk about - what I now know are called - companion plants (plants that have a complementary relationship to one another), or even name-drop circular economy for good measure.
After two weeks spent in the relative wilderness of Sintra, on the Atlantic coast of Portugal close to Lisbon, where wind and waves crash and make you dream of sailing to distant shores, I feel I know so much more but, at the same time, don’t quite know how to answer this question anymore.
The cliffs in Sintra.
As any reasonable human being would do, I start by Googling “permaculture” (the modern equivalent of looking up the definition in the Oxford Dictionary or the Enciclopedia Treccani for an Italian). Wikipedia provides the following definition:
Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, the first ones to coin the term in the 70s saw it as a way to consciously design permanent (perennial and sustainable) agricultural system (do you see the etymology here?). If look at their photos, Mollison always had the aplomb of a wise university professor, one of those wise men you’d like all your university professors to be. Holmgren looks like a nicely-aged hippie, maybe thanks to spending most of his time in nature, under the sun, working with his hands and not only with his brain.
If you want to hear what permaculture is in their own words you can head to this YouTube video. Otherwise, in my PDC I’ve been taught a slightly broader definition of permaculture, as a set of design principles that can be used not only to consciously design natural landscapes but social landscapes as well. This is done by adopting a holistic mindset that pushes you, time and again, to ask the next follow-up question, to look at the secondary, third-, fourth- etc level impacts of any action you might want to take.
From this point of view, it seems to me that permaculture, while originating from the field of ecology and agriculture, is well within this broader trend that (FINALLY!) recognises the limits of our materialistic, mechanistic, piecemeal approach to studying and understanding the realities that surround us. Permaculture has much more in common, as I found out, with design thinking, network systems, holistic analyses, even with that damned agile methodology (don’t get me started there).
At the same time, in one of our long discussions on the - equally long - walk to the nearest main town to get a coffee and a pastel de nata, my fellow PDC student Ellis made the valid point that permaculture appears to be unique within this other bunch of frameworks. Because it provides values and ideals as well as a theoretical and logical framework for analysis and design of solutions. But it also goes beyond that, all the way down to prescribing a colourful plethora of individual tools and techniques. He of all people would know, as he researches and teaches social system design.
These tools and techniques range broadly in scope and areas of application but are very often very practical. Such as exactly how much hay to stomp into a mixture of sand and mud to make it into a concrete-like substance that can be used to make garden benches. Or which breed of earthworms should be used to increase the efficiency and efficacy of your compost toilets (tiger earthworms in case you are interested). This level of practical.
Building with (mainly) natural materials at the PDC school. Photo by fellow PDC student Lara.
Community-based mud stomping.
Beyond getting my hands (and feet) dirty though, the sweep of permaculture ideas and practices I’ve been exposed to in this short couple of weeks included also more mystical (read also scientifically-questionable) ones, which I won’t get into here. While having a somewhat standardised curriculum, PDCs present a unique palette of approaches rather than a codified list of concepts and definitions. Each course absorbs the unique flavouring of the lead facilitators and the teachers (and topics) included, as well as the personalities and interests of the participants. A true co-creative effort, which makes perfect sense at a meta-level, since many of the practical activities of permaculture require a community. Imagine how much mud stomping is needed for building one single bench! Without friends, family and neighbours to help, it’d be a hell of a workout.
If permaculture can be taught so differently from one school to the other, from one course to the next, what is the common learning that one should take away from it?
My - very personal - response to this question will appear at first to have little to do with permaculture itself and is two-folds:
Permaculture is a greenhouse for radical social and environmental change
Permaculture teaches us to recover a go-getter attitude towards nature and life in general
Permaculture is a greenhouse for radical social and environmental change
Permaculture courses are gateways that attract a very specific melting pot of people, from veritable hippies, to those stuck in 9-to-5 jobs who however yearn for a freer life, and their 2.0 version: those like me that have left their stable life and are still wading through the wetlands of “what am I supposed to do next?”. Admittedly, there are also saner people, like my friend Ellis and his partner Christina, that are integrating more nature and natural living into their daily life in the forms of taking part in a community garden. Instead of giving daily life a quasi-fatal shock like I’ve done. Overall however, permaculture attracts people that are in search of that ineffable “something more” and whose guts tell them they might find it in a closer connection to nature. People come to a PDC in search of a community that practices living according to different values and, in the process, get transformed, bonded and end up swelling the ranks of that same community. Which doesn’t mean that every PDC graduate will go off buying chickens and building their new house out of straw bales and scavenged glass. I know I won’t. Yet at least.
But it’s true that permaculture itself offers a sufficiently wide label that attracts like-minded people, provides a space (online and physical) for gathering and fostering a critical mass of people that - each in her or his own way - is willing and able to see life and society in a broader, more interconnected way. In this sense, permaculture represents a peaceful revolution that starts from nature and acts with and within nature.
Permaculture teaches us to recover a go-getter attitude towards nature and life in general
Imagine someone telling you that you can not only feed yourself and your family with food you have grown, but you can cure yourself with herbs you’ve collected and processed. Even further, you can build a plumbing system for waste management, filter the resulting water so that’s again safe to drink and construct from scratch an earthquake-proof house. On your own. With very little money. Without the need for 3 to 5 years of university studies and many more years of slowly learning the ropes. You’d think this person had a well-inflated sense of her own capacities. Sure darling, you go do that. See you when your house collapses. I’ll be the one laughing.
While I’ve for sure felt that the approach to a number of topics appeared a bit too simplistic, I found my instinctual resistance to things that appear “too easy” to be a signal that, indeed, there is some lesson to be learned there. And I believe this lesson to be the following: we have - collectively as a society and in particular in the western world - made things so complicated that we’ve at the same time also acquired a sort of helplessness about life and a deeply entrenched lack of confidence about our own ability to act upon it. Don’t get me wrong, I know this is not true of every single individual but I believe it to be true for a vast majority of people that live in cities and have office jobs, or other equivalent not-hands-on occupations. Permaculture, with its books, YouTube video, telegram communities of practice, hands-on farming volunteering and so forth, gives us back the confidence to start things from scratch, with absolutely zero knowledge, expertise and materials. Will they work all the time? Likely not. But - within reasonable limits - life can also be taken less seriously, with an attitude of trial and error and experimentation. The potatoes you planted on your north-facing garden bed have developed some fungal disease? Try researching its causes, appropriate herb-based tinctures with which to irrigate the plants and plant them again next season! Naysayers will undoubtedly have a field day criticising this approach for its glaring inefficiencies. However, nurturing a go-getter attitude towards nature, natural living and our basic survival needs, cannot but be a very positive development in our societies. It gives us the adrenaline needed to move out of immobility and fear of failure to interact with life in a more creative and hopeful way.
I’ve come out of my PDC with lots of information and twenty times as many suggestions for further readings and research. Almost overwhelming I’d say, but very exciting at the same time. While I don’t believe that every permaculture element is for me, I believe that at least some elements of permaculture are truly beneficial for everybody. So take this as your sign from the universe (through its humble servant, me) to consider investing two weeks of your time to be exposed to a different way of seeing and interacting with life. At worst you’ll get some nice workout. At best it could radically change your view about how we, as the human species, are supposed to interact with each other and the other species that share our same time and space.
