Introducing Phase Two of Making Permaculture Stronger: Collaboratively Developing Permaculture’s Potential (E28)

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So what does my recent discussion of the problem with solving problems look like in relation to the trunk in the Permaculture Tree diagram?

Well, the way I have come to see it is that the whole trunk is itself an imposition.

What, wait, what?

I believe the whole above-ground part of the permaculture tree has been growing from a grafted-on collection of design process understandings that were imported from outside.¹

Imported from places like industrial design, engineering, architecture & landscape architecture.²

Because the scion wood and the rootstock were not a compatible match, the graft never really properly took. Indeed, as a result of it being there at all, the latent energy around permaculture generating its own process possibilities has either remained dormant in the roots, or been overruled by the DNA of the grafted-on material.

You see where I am going with this. I don’t want to continue trying to patch up a trunk that in so many ways is a distraction from the work I’m here to participate in. I don’t want to be pulling apart layer upon layer of imported design process understandings that shoot permaculture in the foot by dishonouring its very essence.³

I want to dive deep into permaculture’s beautiful foundations and then to help grow and tend and realise fit-for-purpose design process understandings directly. Without distraction!

What this means for me is…

The Tree is Coming Down

I am cutting the permaculture tree down.

Consciously. Carefully. Lovingly. As a personal thought experiment, I’m cutting it down. Just below the place where the foreign design process understandings were imported and grafted on. To create a fresh surface from which all kinds of wild regrowth can spring forth.

I am talking about the development of design process understandings that stem from permaculture’s own roots. From permaculture’s own DNA.⁴

I’m talking about consciously coppicing the permaculture tree, take three.

To be clear, none of the tree is removed from the site after the coppicing operation. Yes, it will fall to the ground and it will remain there, branches, twigs, leaves. Hot compost the most diseased material, tuck the rest in around the stump.

Where as fresh growth bursts forth, anything relevant breaks down and is reabsorbed and assimilated into the living tissue of the re-growing tree. Just think, the fungi are going to have a field day and there will be mushrooms by the plenty. In other words, nothing is lost. I would like to think the babies will gurgle in contented gratitude to be free of the bath water.

This is when the real work begins. The work of tending to the new shoots. Watching them closely, nourishing them while delicate and young. As they grow, selectively removing weaker stems and shaping up those that remain for optimal health and form.

Making Permaculture Stronger – Phase Two

I declare Phase Two of Making Permaculture Stronger open.

Phase Two is all about tapping into permaculture’s essence, its potential, then co-articulating from scratch design and creation process understandings that resonate with and actualise this potential every step of the way.

Where those of us drawn to this work respectfully converse and collaborate in the hard, honest, yet immensely rewarding work of co-crafting, co-creating something fresh. Something authentic. Something alive.

Something worthy of what Bill and David gifted the world in co-originating the permaculture concept.

To me, this is one way of tapping the part of permaculture’s essence that Bill Mollison manifested when he talked about having lost heart in protesting and fighting against what he didn’t want. He retreated into the bush and when he came back he was a different person. He was intensely focused not on what he didn’t want, but on what he did want. He focused his fire and he took permaculture to the world, igniting a global movement.

I don’t want to be against what I don’t like in permaculture any more. I want to be for what I love. I want to be for growing from that place and the incredible potential within it.

Rather than feeling like I’m pissing on the permaculture party, I want to jump in with the crowd and to celebrate as we co-create new dance moves so wild and so alive that the concrete cracks open and long-dormant seeds germinate for miles in all directions!

Let us honour the pioneers, honour all those who have contributed to permaculture’s incredible story and journey.

Not by assuming that permaculture is finished and perfect and beyond improvement. I can imagine no greater insult to everything they stood for, stand for, to everything permaculture stands for.

Confronting the fact that permaculture is not finished and perfect, I used to think I had two options: 1) Politely ignoring permaculture’s problems, tensions, issues and weaknesses or 2) going on about and trying to ‘fix’ them.

I now see both as equally impotent.

No more of that. Let us not close our eyes to the issues. Yet let us see them as indicators. Let us hone in on and widen the cracks until what is broken falls away and we are left with a place from which to re-grow fresh tissue true to permaculture’s core.⁵

This is what I choose to participate in and I sense this is where I am going to direct a decent chunk of my life force. If it resonates, I invite you to get involved. To bring your gifts to whatever table or forum works for you. Where of course this work is already happening in hundreds of different ways and places, all around the world. Thank God. For this must be our work. It must be held within a field of co-creative coherence.

Indeed, if it resonates, it is because it is not only my voice. It is already in you. If this has any merit as a conversation, it is because it is a conversation that is already happening, all around the world. Let us bring it out into the open. Let us let resonant threads all over the world know that permaculture is well and truly IN THE GAME.

We are leaving the story of the expert, the genius founder behind. It has been a great story, it has served us, it has been a part of the way forward. I have only gratitude for all the pioneering genius that has lifted us high enough to see so far. Yet we are, at a cultural level, moving into a new story, a story in which a process of deep, authentic co-creation is so, so ready to germinate.

It is my hope to look back some day and see that this post was part of the needed scarification.

From today, Making Permaculture Stronger’s byline is no longer by collaboratively identifying and addressing its weaknesses. It is Collaboratively Unfolding Permaculture’s Potential.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for being with me on this journey. I hope to catch you amidst the indescribably exciting things to happen from here on in.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Finn Weddle for his support and for the clarity and depth of his reflections on an earlier draft of this post.

I also thank Joel Glanzberg, Bill Reed, and particularly Carol Sanford, whose living systems frameworks are increasingly informing my approach to all this.

Endnotes

1. The idea that permaculture’s practices (what I call strategies and techniques in the tree) are imports has been around for a while. For example said Rafter Sass-Ferguson in 2015: “None of the practices associated with permaculture actually come from permaculture. With the possible exception of herb spirals…” I am suggesting the same is largely true for the design process understandings supposedly used to get to the right practice in a given situation…
2. It reminds me of the wrong turn psychology took, when, emerging as the new kid on the block, and with the ‘real sciences’ of physics and biology breathing down its neck, it took a fatal shortcut. It uncritically imported fundamental concepts from outside itself. Concepts that didn’t fit, and that then distorted psychology’s ability to understand what was unique about its own subject matter. One of these was the simple idea of stimulus and response from biology. Another was mechanistic causation from physics (even though, ironically, that approach had already been displaced by quantum theory). This was a shortcut. A shortcut potentially fatal to any new discipline because it precludes the essential work of developing units, concepts methodologies and processes out of one’s own unique subject matter and based upon one’s own unique starting assumptions, ethics, and aspirations.
3. That’s right, when you zoom in on the graft you find that there are in fact layers upon layers of grafts. I love how Finn Weddle put it in a comment on a draft of this post: “I would slightly adjust the narrative and say that there have been many grafts on top of each other, at many different stages along both the trunk and the branches. Every time The Essence of Permaculture met a roadblock it was coaxed (by the Gardener/designer) into accepting a new scion/reaching into the grab-bag of existing cultural norms to patch over the issue, rather than staying true to principle which would mean sitting and observing the problem until a novel solution arose from within. So instead of wondering why the tree was making shrivelled fruit and overcoming that issue, a shrivel-resistant variety was grafted straight onto the branches – all the whilst forgetting that it was trying to grow fat juicy fruit in a dry desert!”
4. To be clear there will be many outside perspectives that can usefully come in, but only to the degree they authentically resonate with permaculture’s DNA. I’m not talking about closing the doors, but about getting some decent security guards! Where the driving force is permaculture developing its own material, with resonant external threads as assistants to this, not replacements.
5. For those of you note-reading types up for a bit more nuance, I drew this diagram to come at the same idea from a different way :-).