Writing about permaculture

join me on this journey

I feel a genuine and pressing need to write about permaculture, for many reasons, but strongly believing it is important for the future of our world and our understanding of our place within it, is a fundamental motivation. Permaculture embraces a different world view, one much gentler and humbler than the current prevailing one and it encapsulates the complete switch human behaviour is required to make if we are to successfully remain on this planet long into the future. But how can we capture the public imagination with permaculture’s amazing potentials?

Permaculture became almost instantly important to me when I first stumble across it in my 20’s, and coming across the ideas at that moment in my own life was also significant, I found it eye opening and inspiring, challenging and much more. Knowledge of permaculture gave me hope, for the first time I felt there was a way the world could come together to face its problems with a unifying philosphy and world view. The desire to write about it comes from the fact that I don’t think anyone has yet attempted to write about permaculture as a story. There are many books out there, a magazine, flourishing YouTube channels and podcasts, so what have I to add to all of this? I think the answer is telling my own personal story may help bring this wisdom alive for others. For me it began as a quest, a deep dive into the wider world to see what might be out there, I had no answers, only a great many questions, and a general anger directed at a world that did not seem to make sense, but I felt unsure as to the identity of the enemy.

In the late 80’s Bill Mollison produced his Designers Manual, a book I have gone on record saying might turn out to be one of the most important texts yet published, but to be honest, it is a hard read, many pages covering such a wide range of topics, and not least in that it is a manual and not a narrative. Actually, in spite of its density and seriousness it is also a great read and returning to it more recently I was stunned to realise that it is all in there. Permaculture has taken many twists and turns since this was published, has been applied in so many different contexts, and been articulated by many different voices, but coming back to Bill’s great book I find it is all in there, truly remarkable, with great energy, vision and knowledge poured into those pages. So what possibly might I have to add to all of that?

I guess it is what it has done to me and the journey it has sent me on, that is the story that must be told, and along the way I hope any readers might gain some insights of their own. Firstly to say it is no secret, permaculture is not some arcane knowledge guarded by some holy order, it is basically common sense. Or rather, applied common sense, which is somewhat different. Permaculture is something one can figure out for themself, plenty of people have achieved this. The Austrian hill farmer Sepp Holzer for one, or the Japanese rice farmer Masanobu Fukuoka being another, and shall we mention British pioneers Arthur Hollins and Robert Hart, all who can be regarded as pioneers and founding fathers without feeling the need to use the word permaculture, and certainly without attending a PDC.

The truth is that it takes about 30 years of observing and interacting with nature to achieve this, so the books and study and courses really can speed up this process. And, in saying that, you have to be really observant, with the ability to ask all the right questions to really get to the bottom of things. What both Fukuoka, Hollins, Hart and Holzer have in common is the willingness to experiment, to try things out and to learn from the outcomes. Fukuoka instinctively chose not to ‘modernize’ his rice farm and carried on with his organic method even as those around him embraced new technologies and approaches. The further down this path he went, the more he sought to understand, articulate, and extend his methodology. I feel he was constantly asking and pushing himself to further understand just why his minimal interventionist approach, his ‘do nothing gardening’ was indeed so successful.

I often recommend his ‘One Straw Revolution’ as an ideal starting place for permaculture students, although the book does not speak to everyone, it is not scientific enough for some, contains no data as such and is more a set of some slightly whimsical observations, than a text book on how to revolutionise the world, create global food security and other lofty goals. But the book is filled with his own thoughts and observations and covers his own life, from an office junior in a world he did not feel part of, to returning to the family farm where he set about making many mistakes before his own intuitions set in.

Of those pioneers I mentioned, I have met the two British names, before their passing and the first was the amazing and beautifully eccentric Arthur Hollins. His story of taking on his father’s farm at the tender age of 14, farming that during the war time and then being pressured to adapt and apply deep ploughing and many more intensive approaches to farming that went against his core instincts. Rejecting these approaches once again forced him to come up with his own justifications for taking leave of the established path and going his own way. I acquired a copy of his book, ‘the Farmer, the plough and the devil’ on said visit to the farm which sadly was lost to a PDC student some years later.

Oh i see I can get a copy from Amazon, which i should do, here is a wonderful 5-star review from H Robbins, on that platform:

If you are interested in the history of agriculture or in organic farming, you'll find this a gripping read. It is a very personal story of a man struggling from the 1920s onwards with the changing fortunes of British farming to make a success of his family farm. Arthur Hollins inherits a farm with depleted soil fertility, thanks to his father's reliance on chemical fertilisers. It is only through a gradual understanding of how soil fertility works that Arthur comes round to an organic farming system. It is also a detailed portrait of English rural life through the middle decades of the last century. It should become a classic!

Arthur Hollins was a pioneer of organic farming who took on the tenancy of Ford Hall Farm in 1929, when he was just 14 years old. Following Arthur’s death in 2005, Charlotte and her brother Ben had to battle to save the farm and their family home, at the ages of just 19 and 21.

Perhaps I should also go on to say that Ford Hall farm, in Market Drayton has become a place of celebrity. In the years after his death the farm lease was in jeopardy and developers had their eye on converting it to something else, an adjunct to the Muller dairy next door, but it was spectacularly saved by a share offer and it now has 8,000 owners and is run, with a consistent vision by Ben and Charlotte, who had come along much later in their father’s life and were able to step into his shoes and offer up some consistency. They live in the shadow of their father’s legacy and have taken on the great responsibility of keeping it alive and taking it further and keeping it relevant in these much changed times.

So, what was Arthur’s great vision? and Why does this even matter to our story? Arthur was perhaps the first intentional organic farmer in the world. Or let us say he saw himself that way, and in saying that of course I mean he was one of the very first to reject the fertilizer and the plough and return to the methods the predated them. Actually more than a return to the past Arthur started to innovate and create whole new approaches, such as his foggage system based on his deepening understanding of soil life, soil fertility and the web of interconnections between the two. Arthur’s experiments, ideas and assertions made him an originator, part of the source that inspired the first generation of pioneers, those who began to understand and adapt these ideas and apply them to their own circumstances.

Permaculture originated in Australia, a portmanteau of two words, permanent and agriculture, leading us to a permanent culture, asking the fundamental question, if we want our society to survive and thrive then clearly our extractive, polluting and ecologically destructive ways must end and soon. Bill had been a forester as a young man, had helped cut down some of Australia’s old growth forest, until one day when he realised that their efforts were rapidly converting what had been a one-billion-year-old ecosystem into bare soil that was being rapidly eroded away. Cutting floorboards for a house that might last 30 years, we were destroying a forest system that may well have existed when the Australian continent might have still been a part of Gondwana land. One tea break Bill had asked if any of his fellow log cutters owned a house, they replied in the negative.

The story of Bill and David has been told many times, here is wonderful video that encapsulates that in a few minutes, Bill had become a lecturer in Ecology at Hobart University and David Holmgren had been one of his students. He had asked a fundamental question, that in nature we see ecosystems comprising almost exclusively of perennial plants such as trees that live for decades, whereas our farming systems are typified by annual and bi-annual plants, a fundamental and observable difference.

Regardless of all this history, how permaculture came about and naming these pioneer types, the real question is what does this mean for us all today? Most of us are not farmers, we are ever more distanced from our rural roots, globalised industrial food systems are what feed us today, so how is this even relevant to us?

Firstly to take a global perspective, according to Colin Tudge, he of the Oxford Real Farmers conference, and leading intellectual in the regenerative faming world, industrial agriculture only produces about 35% of the world’s food. Achieving that with control over most of the flat land, pumped water and seed and agro technology. Maybe 10-15% of food is still foraged from the wild, mainly fishing but not exclusively and as much as 50% of global nutrition comes from small scale traditional and subsistence farmers. To be clear that means farmers who primarily eat their own crops and sell on the remaining surplus.

Next point we can make is that this industrial food system is not good at producing high quality nutrition and is much better at making money for certain interested parties. The drive for ever cheaper food is coming at a rapidly increasing ecological cost and if that wasn’t enough, the reality is that industrial farming consumes upward of 10 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie delivered on the plate. We are destroying our topsoil, polluting, and draining the ground water for a food system that is heading for collapse. This is why we all need to know something more about the nature of this world we live in. This why we all need to know about permaculture, the truth is we have been dumbed down, especially in the over developed West to see food simply as another commodity, another item for trade and export, just like everything else.

We are what we eat, we know this to be true and food loses much of its real nutritional value as it is processed and converted into commodities designed to make money for corporations. The difference between a fruit and a simulation of fruit in a candy or similar is the difference between health and wellbeing and obesity. The difference is absolute.

Add together all the bad decisions being made about farming, land management, resource use, energy, pollution, turning the population into passive consumers, care not about waste and allow the natural world to become a sponge, a soak for all our exhaled gasses, toxic sludges, industrial bi-products and that leads you rapidly to something that might be described as a global catastrophe, changing the composition of the atmosphere to the extent that stable climate and weather systems start to break down and whole ecosystems begin to collapse. The very resources we depend on begin to shrink away from us, retreating and leaving us high and dry, then you might be forgiven for asking the question “who is driving this thing? How do we get ourselves out of this mess?” There is no easy answer to this question.

https://gogetfunding.com/helpfloodaffectedfamiliesinkenya/

Help flood affected farmers in NW Kenya

Homa Bay county adjacent to Lake Victoria, experiencing widespread flooding

Permaculture pioneers in Homa Bay have suffered terrible floods and need to replant their seeds. Climate shifts are affecting sibsistence farmers around the world, please help if you can.

this is a group fo 20 communities who have been working hard training themselves in permaculture techniques, and are leading the way for many more.

Join me on Substack, there will be regular posts, chapters of the unfolding story, links to current projects and examples from around the world of people and communities coming together to make a difference.

Video: a deeper dive into our societal challenges

REQUIEM FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM is the definitive discourse with Noam Chomsky, widely regarded as the most important intellectual alive, on the defining characteristic of our time - the deliberate concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a select few. Through interviews filmed over four years, Chomsky unpacks the principles that have brought us to the crossroads of historically unprecedented inequality - tracing a half-century of policies designed to favour the most wealthy at the expense of the majority - while also looking back on his own life of activism and political participation. Profoundly personal and thought-provoking, Chomsky provides penetrating insight into what may well be the lasting legacy of our time - the death of the middle class and swan song of functioning democracy. A potent reminder that power ultimately rests in the hands of the governed, REQUIEM is required viewing for all who maintain hope in a shared stake in the future.