Frank once again dives into the morass of Agroinnovations Episode #145 addressing a listener’s comment through a series of clips from recent podcast episodes featuring Simon Huntley, Narendra Varma, David Holmgren, Darren Doherty, and Tom Giessel. Frank reiterates his argument that permaculture isn’t failing as an agroecological design science, nor are permaculturalists failures. As my guests explain, permaculture’s shortcomings have much more to do with our cultural worldview and our socioeconomic circumstances. They also offer numerous examples and case studies that point us in the direction of a new, cooperative model where common land use rights are interwoven into the social and ecological landscape, and different people with different skill sets can collaborate and innovate together on a shared landscape.
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7 responses to “Episode #160: The Failure of Permaculture Redux”
Frank,
I appreciate your effort in talking about this issue in such a depth.
I haven’t listened to all of your post 145 podcast but I will try to summarize what you’re saying and please correct me if I’m wrong.
1.Permaculture as a movement is failing because there’s a lot of scaling up to be done (economies of scale)
2.People in the western world just have to own land before committing to improving it and reinvesting profits, however it’s becoming increasingly hard for people to acquire the land
3.Somewhere in the past movement was on the right track with intentional communities but individualism has prevailed and with it, scattered and isolated individual farm.
4.Those Individual permaculture farms can’t compete with conventional agriculture because they don’t have the scale to do it.
4. Successful and profitable model for scaling up already exists – cooperatives. They offer the economies of scale and opportunity for people to get access to land.
Yes William I think you summarize it well. And there is sufficient evidence to indicate that many, many of these isolated individual farms are struggling mightily to make a financial go of it. I’ve offered many examples of this, and just scan around the Internet for the romanticized articles about young farmers getting started. Or listen to my interview with Narendra Varma. He says two things: most agricultural startups fail at a higher rate than other types of startups, and that most of the very successful farmers in his region were more than willing to sign on to his operation for the promise of a modest, steady wage. Nobody tries to start a factory with just a nuclear family as the labor supply, that seems absurd at its face. So why do we not apply the same logic to farming? In fact, farming is much more complex than manufacturing, because we are dealing with biological systems. This is the logic behind monoculture: simplify farming, make it like a factory, and replace human labor with machines. Increasingly, the goal will be to replace what little human labor is left on the farm with robots, much like what has happened in many manufacturing sub-sectors.
So if sustainable farming is truly promising a different future, it MUST be able to produce substantial amounts of food AT SCALE. I don’t really care anymore that it can produce for a family or a small community. I think that has been a valuable and wortwhile demonstration and experiment, and is has generated a lot of useful knowledge. But if that knowledge doesn’t get transferred? If it doesn’t get scaled up? It becomes one the biggest missed opportunities in our lifetimes. In fact, it is looking like almost a certainty we will fail to scale. So much so that the topic itself is almost becoming a bore. Maybe we should start learning robotics. 😉
Frank, I do believe that we are going into highly robotized agricultural future and that is one of the trends outlined in Global Trends 2030 Report (http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/GlobalTrends_2030.pdf ). The only thing that could prevent this is energy descent scenario.
From what you are talking about (scaling and cooperating) I find that Mark Shepard tackles both. He is on 100 acre scale and member of local cooperative. Maybe you could interview him as a model of what we should be doing.
Ok, so you pointed out the biggest problem that we have and the solution to that. Even if this posts gets click-fested it won’t change anything. Most of the people who are into permaculture aren’t even farming.
Even if this spreads virally we are still marketing to a very narrow group of people, ethnically and culturally.
What are your thoughts on this?
Frank has done an interview with Mark Shepard. Based on his books, videos, and anecdotal evidence from two friends who’ve worked for him, he is probably not a good example of cooperative farming that solves the social issues. He’s much more in the mold of the independent, pioneer, one-man-farm spirit and he lives in a part of the country (western Wisconsin) where land is relatively cheap (well under $5k/acre) and far from urban markets, and households are relatively far apart.
Perhaps his most important insight is that monocrop annuals are currently grown as “food science” chemical feedstocks, and that perennials can be swapped in as lower-input, higher-yield sources of those same commodity components (starches, sugars, fats/oils, etc). If corn and soy and oilseed farmers grew chestnut and hazelnut and honey locust, they could produce a roughly equivalent commodity feedstock. This commodity polyculture would be better than commodity monoculture in many ways, but it would still imply mechanized farming in a depopulated rural landscape.
Or, rather, Mike Moon did the interview here —
http://agroinnovations.com/podcast/2009/01/26/permaculture-in-the-savanna/
It is an intractable problem in a lot of ways. The farming heartlands of the country are ecological wastelands in so many ways. In the Fall of 2013 I was in Wisconsin, where GMO corn is just everywhere. But the ecological wasteland, as is so often the case, is a veritable gold mine for the farmers who are living through this capital intensive era that has become a bubble-sized boom for commodity producers. I’m not sure why Darren Doherty asserts that commodity producers have their backs to the wall…most of what I have seen is the big guys are becoming millionaires. Of course, it is the medium-sized guys in the middle who are squeezed tight, and naturally the permaculturalists who do practice agriculture are often at the bottom of the food chain, eeking out a living on a few acres to prove a point or live an ideal. So what incentive does a big corn producer have to adopt permaculture? Because it’s the right thing to do? This is America, dammit! Where money talks and good intentions are for suckers.
Tom Giessel said in my interview with him that the big farms are going to go away, but the land will remain. What does his base this assertion on? As far as I can tell, wishful thinking. The big farms will get bigger. The medium-sized guys will grow old and sell their farms to bigger farms or ex-urban developers. I think permaculture is great too, but is it changing the landscape of our country or our world? Who can deny that the answer is no? More troubling still, people are actually in some form of denial about this assertion. Why people nitpick around the edges of this argument instead of accepting the reality and offering constructive ideas to address it is beyond me.
Hi Frank. I’ve been involved in questions of permaculture and other styles of eco-design for a while now, and I really share your frustration. For me, the failure of vision that is so prevalent in our culture really prevented me from getting anything done on the “just-do-it” practical level over and over gain, so I started looking on a deeper level for the source of the problem: the level of default-philosophy that got hard-wired into the Neolithic built environment long before philosophical sentences were written, and definitely a long time before permaculture, which is essentially a retweet of earlier memes from the same default philosophy trying to do battle with the newer mega-upgraded version of the OS. That’s why it doesn’t work: not because it’s a good idea trying to overcome a bad establishment that’s too big for it, but because it’s not different from the establishment.
So I have to disagree with three out of the five points enumerated above by William, with #2 & #5 being qualified exceptions. Cooperatives are a great idea in some cases but mostly not in the US right now, and access to “land” is a huge issue if “land” is the limiting factor. But is it? Or are we actually assuming too little, for a change?
Let’s examine this concept “land” for a second, and permaculture’s high regard for it. “Care for land” is called a principle by permaculturists, but it actually can’t really be a principle because it rests on too many assumptions about what those words are referring to. “Land” is not an ecological community of different bodies in a network of associations; it’s a lump of amorphous, clay-like “stuff” (or “matter”, or “substance”) that gets sliced up and allocated among (human) stewards (“lords”, or “wards”) for (human) management. These wardens then essentially shape this substance into whatever they want (a process that nearly always begins in the mind of the warden, long before the warden even visits the place). Permaculture has essentially been behaving like one of these clay-shaping operations, but with a different aesthetic vibe. It doesn’t achieve escape-velocity from the system it too rightly criticizes. This comment is not about cynical reason, which I’m against. I just think that permaculture gets realism and idealism confused, and thinks it’s doing one when it’s really completely absorbed in the other. The result is that a system that tries very hard to be a basis for ecological design fails, because “caring” does not an association make. Like Burning Spear sang about social living, it takes “behavior” to get along. In the society of beings that exist at all (I just call them “bodies”, including not only plants and animals but other both physical and linguistically deferred objects), permaculture resembles other aspects of Neolithic human society in its ironic failure to escape from anthropocentrism.
Ecological design realized as a design of harmony among bodies occupying a shared place (a “place”, not some “land”) is necessarily post-human. This doesn’t mean misanthropic, and it doesn’t mean humans can read “patterns in Nature”: there is no “nature”, so those patterns are actually coming from our side of the fence and don’t provide a way outside it. There is no Zone 5 (the idea of a pristine, untouched, “given” thing we call “nature”), and therefore there is no Zone 0. What does “zero” even mean? The most central? How do I say my house is more central than the tree in my windbreak where the falcon lives, that I call “Zone 3”? Zoning of this kind is what I’m going to call “spacism”, and I’m against it for the same reasons that I’m against racism and speciesism. “Space” is another lump of imaginary clay. I don’t think we live in space; I think we live in places, and that these places are mostly occupied by nonhumans (including our own bodies, which are mostly micro biomes for nonhumans), always already, but we don’t notice them because we’re too busy looking for these mythical patterns in “nature” (“nature” is another default-ontological lump of clay).
But is all this just good talk, or do I have a “real” solution? Part of the trouble with answering that lies with the same default ontology underlying the question. Is permaculture a “real” solution? No? Then we may want to simmer down and think for a bit. Rethinking the ontology (“world-structuring”) we take for granted has to be part of how we design. It is part of the “invisible structures” to which permaculture gives plenty of lip service, but which so often get left out of design because they’re so much slipperier and trickier and agonizing than the “visible structures”, which practically build themselves given the resources and guidance.
But yes, I do have a solution. It’s not perfect, and it won’t magically change everything (although the philosophy I’m discussing does make everything more magical), but it will help, and it does work. I’ve tried it.
Imagine a method of ecological design that drew no metaphysical fence between “visible” and “invisible” structures, but instead simply worked with “bodies” (human bodies, animal bodies, plant bodies, antibodies, bodies of thought, bodies of work, heavenly bodies, etc.), taking any bodies relevant to the design into account whether they are physical, biological, technical, political, social, economic, cultural, philosophical, local or global. Imagine that this design method sees itself as a “design-art”, not a “design-science” (science is just one body among many, not the definition of the whole process). Imagine that the agency of design is accomplished not by a central (human) being who is “the” designer, because this being is actually just one of the design elements. Instead, each element in its own way is designing “around” all the others. I am as much an element in the chicken’s design as the chicken is in mine. Imagine that we also do away with the too-anthropocentric “needs” and “functions” dichotomy and simply try to see, as an artist would, what each body “wants”. Desire is always logically prior to “need” (whatever that even means) anyway, never mind what default Neolithic memes expressed as “Marxism” say.
The bodies all design about each other, and in this process a “place” is formed (call it an ecosystem, maybe, but please don’t call it a “community”). You might call it a “food forest”, for example, or a “house”, but no nonhuman body cares what you call it or even that you helped make it. Mastodons and mammoths made the North American savannas, apparently, and lots of non-pachyderms continued to enjoy the savannas for at least another 2,000 years after the giant elephants were gone.
Speaking of savannas, I like Mark Shepard’s work a lot too, for two reasons: he understands that these metaphysical differences (“Are you doing agriculture OR restoration?”) are imaginary, and his vision of savanna polyculture supporting large populations of happy, healthy vertebrates is not only ecologically accurate, but aesthetically wonderful. The fact that everything that lives in a savanna tends to enjoy itself a lot is why I think it’s a good model: there is an aesthetic enjoyment, a fulfillment of desire going on that makes the work of giant pachyderms aesthetically relevant to other beings who have never encountered them. Shepard doesn’t know it, but he’s proved that there is “art without humans”. If there is art without humans, then human art can be a benefit to nonhumans.
But Shepard still gets it wrong when he says “You must know the difference between an observation and a concept!” Nobody can do that. The real is not accessible, to anything, let alone humans. All a body can know of another body is what it CAN know; the other body’s existence is not what you can know about it, but infinitely more. Reading a book does not access the book’s full existence: it can also be mulch, or a birdhouse. Eco-design will fail if it continues to pretend we can be in touch with “reality”: that’s not something any person, place or thing can do, so we need to stop pathologizing academics, artists and philosophers for not being “realistic”. It is we who are the idealists when we do that, and ecology is realism.
Permaculture IS “failing as an agroecological design science”, because design is not a science. Science is about data, not things that exist. Art is the process of making things that exist: bodies. Design is art. Everything designs everything else. The matsutake mushroom and the lodgepole pine are shaped the way they are because they grew together like that and designed each other, but they’re still two different bodies, which is how you know democracy actually works. Nobody’s following the orders of a strong leader or following the rules of some “community”; it’s all just bodies reaching out and shaking hands. We need to take ourselves less seriously and play more, and do less looking for “patterns” (why look for what we’re stuck with?) and more getting acquainted with the actual things we superimpose the patterns on.
One last thing for now: if this sounds impossible or silly to you, you might as well give up on anything BUT failure for eco-design of any kind, and admit that engaging in it is basically trying to prove something about yourself. Pretending you can read “patterns in Nature” just because you have a holistic ideology (itself a product of 12,000 year old agricultural modes of thought) is still just a performance for entertaining humans; it does nothing for anybody else. No designer can teach you how to read “patterns in Nature” no matter how much money you give them. Truly ecological design happens when you get rid of the patterns and start playing with the parts you find, and realize that they are not parts, but whole bodies who also have some design to offer, and they must be allowed to do it right where they are, even if it’s where you live, because it’s their place too, and without them, there is no you.