Permaculture: What It Can and Cannot be

What is Permaculture? In 1978 two Australians, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren coined the term Permaculture, meaning Permanent Sustainable Agriculture. The model they then suggested included such things as edible landscaping, and forest gardens. These basic principles are not new at all. Until fairly recently, humanity had a very good handle on how to make the most of their area’s resources. If we look at the urban planning of many ancient cities they were incorporating many features that resemble modern Permaculture ideas, in ways many modern cities do not. One present day country that has long been using Permaculture principles, because of necessity, is Cuba. Permaculture needs to fuse with modern technology and industry, if we are to achieve sustainable abundance as a species. Unfortunately when promoting Permaculture as a cure for environmental, social, and economic problems we face opposition from not only the greedy profiteers, but also from, those who either as a result of misunderstanding, or selfish nostalgia for the past, pigeonhole it into something that is just not workable on a large scale, or in the places it is needed most, such as Cities and Suburbia.

Endangering Our Planet For A Selfish Nostalgia

Over the years some have attempted to make Permaculture yet another myopic sub-culture, by hijacking the term to mask the views, or agendas, of those I call Neo-Luddites. Luddites seem to choose a point in time to be nostalgic about and hypocritically view all technology that happened after that time as bad. Sometimes it feels like these people try to control every aspect of environmentalism, or “going green”, by superimposing their nostalgia based beliefs on them. Nostalgia for the time before The Industrial Revolution is quite understandable, however, many of those who long for those times have little understanding of them. Also many who have this type of nostalgia do not understand that many people do not hold this same nostalgia and, others who are living in such conditions in modern times do not want to do so.

Promoters of a Luddite lifestyle taint Permaculture and other Earth Friendly models with their nostalgia based beliefs to a point where these models seem distasteful or insane to others who do not wish to go to the same extremes. What is even more distasteful is that most people who promote forms of Ludditism are hypocrites in that they only follow Luddite type lifestyle when it is convenient for them or fits into their personal likes and tastes. If a person really is living a Luddite lifestyle that is fine if they can do so in peace and leave the rest of us alone to find earth friendly alternatives to fit our modern lives. Saddly, most of the people we will encounter who promote this type of lifestyle are promoting it through the Internet or television whilst at the same time condemning the rest of us for using such things.