About six months back I had a dream in which I was talking to my friend and colleague Adam Grubb. I was telling him I had some things I wanted to get off my chest with respect to the topic of permaculture, and that I was thinking about doing so via a website called Dan’s Permaculture Ramblings. We looked at each other in the mutual realisation that this was not a good name for a website. So I said, “well, what about Making Permaculture Stronger?”
That is as much as I can remember from the dream. But the next day, wide-awake, I happened to be talking to Adam on the phone and so I told him about the dream. He liked the idea of the website – under the latter name suggestion – and said he’d contribute. I rather liked it too, so after our call I registed the url. That evening I wrote this very first post. And now I’m getting around to posting it.
So, let me give a feel for what I intend this website to be about, and my motivation for bringing it into existence.
I have been studying and practicing permaculture for a little over ten years. Over this time I have seen permaculture become a lot more mainstream in both Australia, where I have lived for most of the last ten years, and New Zealand, where I am now based. Along the way I helped start the now global permablitz movement, a well-respected permaculture design, implementation and education company, and several overseas permaculture projects in India and Africa. I’ve taught or co-taught perhaps a dozen permaculture design certificate courses, read and written a lot about permaculture, and learned from many senior designers and teachers within permaculture and in related fields.
In the last year I have started running what I call Advanced Permaculture Design courses, in which I get to work with folks that already have some training and experience in permaculture (and want to take it to the next level). I also continue to design, with several hundred professional design projects behind me (most in collaboration with Adam), and three currently on the go.
Obviously, given after ten years I’m still at it, I like it. There is no two ways about it. I’m a fan, and if I had to come up with a short, snappy description of my profession I’d probably say permaculture designer and educator.
That said, as well as being an insider to the permaculture movement, scene, whatever you want to call it, I am also a critic. Though my journey with permaculture is relatively young, I have been around long enough to be able to proclaim, with confidence, that permaculture well and truly needs a good injection of critical self-reflection. From within.
Why? In order to make it stronger. You see I not only like permaculture, I’d like to see it get stronger. I’d like to see permaculture become more and more mainstream, but in a way where it is a shape to offer solid, holistic solutions in a world flying headlong over a cliff where shit is about to get even more out of control.
The best way I know of strengthening something is to identify weak links and then to direct energy toward making them less weak. This approach seems blindly obvious to me, and yet for some odd reason seems to me not to be a significant part of the culture of permaculture. In so much permaculture literature, education, presentation, online media, and so on, the focus is on links that are already strong, and in some cases on making them even stronger. I would like to contribute to the bucking of that trend.
Yes, permaculture is amazing. Gobsmackingly relevant. Awe-inspiringly solution-packed. But let’s be honest about the fact it sucks at some things, that it lacks or neglects other things, that it has had an embarrassing amount of failures & causalities. Furthermore, if it barrels on oblivious to all this, then when push comes to shove, at the very moment when it needs to shine and get its gallop on, one or more of these neglected gaps or weak spots will see it fall flat on its face, or at the least, failing to shine as brightly as it might have.
Now no one really knows what permaculture is, really, in the sense that it is not only continuing to evolve, but that it is a lot of different things all at once. My interest here is not in defining permaculture. Go figure out what permaculture is some place else, then come back here and see if what this site has to say about it rings true for you. As Bill Mollison often proclaimed on my first permaculture course ten years ago, “google it.”
I will say this though. However permaculture is understood or defined, there is something fundamental to all permaculture that involves design. Conscious design. Functional design. Integrative design. Holistic design. Ethical design. Principled design. Permaculture is almost always defined, in part, as a particularly flavoured design system, approach, or method.
It is this aspect of permaculture that I am interested in making stronger. Permaculture as design. I declare that it is this aspect of permaculture that this project is about strengthening. The rest, I believe, will follow.
I don’t know how this site will evolve. Perhaps I won’t even get around to uploading this post. Perhaps I will, and then two friends will see the site before it sinks into obscurity. I’m not fussed. The main thing is that I’ll have a chance to get those things I hinted at earlier off my chest, post-by-sweet-cathartic-post, in a way that develops and sharpens my thinking about them.
Beyond that, I am starting to get some inklings about how wonderful this project could be as a collaboration amongst permaculture practitioners for whom it resonates. Together we’d get clear firstly on identifying what permaculture design’s weak links are, and secondly on finding out what, who, where or if anything is being done about it (and possibly even coordinate efforts to do something about it ourselves – imagine that!).
So, there it, is, post numero uno. I will post again as the urge takes me, and at some point I’ll let others know the site exists, and perhaps figure out ways of enticing others to start contributing. Maybe I’ll pester a few senior colleagues for their two-cents worth. And from there we’ll just have to see what happens, won’t we!
A good day to you.
