Thinking about permaculture…
Watch out: black swans ahead
How do permaculture practitioners deal with the big impact events that we are increasingly encountering?
WE ARE AT a conference in lutruwita-Tasmania, sitting in a shelter beside a belt of pine trees. I am recording a video interview with a prominent permaculture educator. We are talking about community agriculture, the topic both of us presented on at the conference.
Permaculture has come up in our conversation and moving on from specifics I ask her about permaculture’s role in the big events we are experiencing. I want to find out how she sees the permaculture design system responding to the pressing issues in the world, to the crises we seem to be increasingly surrounded by.
…black swans—unforeseeable low probability/high impact events
Crises within crises. Crises nested like Russian dolls. Some can be foreseen but others take us by surprise, so writes author Nicholas Taleb (and here). He calls them ‘black swan events’ (and here) and defines them as unforeseeable low probability/high impact events. The term comes from the surprise that Europeans, a culture with white swans, experienced on encountering Australia’s black swans, something they did not imagine to exist.
The last few years in Australia as well as elsewhere in the world have seen the emergence of black swan-type surprise events. None were specifically predicted by futurists, suggesting that field of prediction has more in common with tea leaf reading than with the real world. I suspect the real world is far too complex and dynamic to be able to make any but the most general of predictions about.
The swans
What are these recent black swan events? Let’s start with one that is ongoing: Russia’s attack and invasion of Ukraine. The war really started in 2014 when Russia siezed Crimea and after it took possession via proxy forces of western Ukraine. Then, on February 24, 2022, Russia attempted to invade the rest of Ukraine. Some military strategists did see this coming, however their warnings were not heeded and although Russia was seen to be building up military forces on the Ukraine border many military analysts assumed they were for what Moscow was claiming—a large scale military exercise. They downplayed the possibility of a Russian attack. Here we have an example of assumptions and expectations feeding a complacency over what became in its surprise a black swan event.
Other black swans:
- the escalation of the long-running Israeli conflict with the Palestinians into outright war in Israel and Gaza
- The fires of 2023 in the USA and in southern Europe including the Greek islands
- Australia’s devastating bushfires of 2020
- the Covid pandemic that came shortly after
- the election of Donald Trump
- the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdowns
- the near-crisis of Australia’s diesel engine Ad Blue shortage in early 2023 that had the potential to disrupt the food and other supply chains by disrupting the transport system
- the hottest and driest spring on record in Tasmania in 2015; the drought led to Tasmania importing 40 percent of its energy needs from mainland Australia as low dam levels led to a shortfall in hydroelectric energy generation which, with its wind farms, otherwise powers Tasmania with 100 percent renewables.
In comparison, global heating is a high probability/high impact event. High probability? That is because it is an inevitable development growing out of the creation of an industrial economy born in England in the mid-eighteenth century and that went global. As it followed its growth trajectory it moved beyond the climatic planetary boundary to become the evolving, long-haul global crisis within which the war in Ukraine, the pandemic, the bushfires and longer-running crises in the global supply chains are unfolding.
Developing responses
The permaculture movement has been vocal about the climate crisis but less so on how black swans are currently reshaping the global system. I put this down to global affairs being absent in permaculture courses and to the types of people enrolling in the courses. Most seem to be seeking solutions to making their own lives more resilient, which is where permaculture has excelled. The global issues are simply too big for it to get a grip on.
My interviewee there under the shelter beside the pine trees admitted that permaculture cannot stop wars and events like that, however it can play a role in the individual and community-based responses to them. It has done well in promoting individual responses to global heating, yet that is a global black swan requiring a global response. Individual responses, while worthwhile, are simply too limited to have much of an impact even if we aggregate them at mass.
I found her answer interesting because people of her age did play a role in ending a war fifty or so years ago. That was the war in Vietnam. It did that by building a mass social movement that could influence people and apply political pressure. The movement combined youth culture with politics in a turbulent blend that achieved more than political involvement alone could have. It was a largely-leftist social movement, the New Left of the time offering a route into an alternative politics which in a rough synthesis blended social justice and progress with Western social liberalism and that eschewed the relics of authoritarian socialism as practiced in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellite states.
Are the days when young people did things like that now gone, I wondered? Not really. Climate rallies bring young people onto the streets in large numbers. Whereas the Left was the only viable political avenue open to changemakers during the late sixties and into the following decade, the complicating factor these days is the rise of the far-right which exploits movements and creates social division.
Could permaculture have built a movement like that of fifty years ago? Who knows? It eschewed the political path by inadvertently repurposing the 1970s feminist slogan about the personal being political and focusing on individual actions in the hope that they would lead to socio-political change. They didn’t. We have seen permaculture banners at anti-lockdown and so-called ‘freedom movement’ rallies, but who has even seen one at a climate rally?
The path to permaculture
Permaculture’s evolution over its 56 or so years of existence provides an interesting study in social movements. One way to look at it is through Roger’s innovation adoption model. The model maps a generalised trajectory for new ideas and innovations. It had some currency in the social movement around permaculture some years ago but is seldom heard of now.
The model postulates that an idea starts with its innovators—Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the case of permaculture—attracts a corps of early adopters and from there captures the public imagination to spread to later adopters. Its popularity increases until it becomes unstoppable.
Permaculture followed that trajectory, however it has not peaked with mass, socially mainstream popular adoption at large scale as interpretations of Roger’s model suggests needs to happen. Whether it is still growing and how fast, or whether it has plateaued, no one knows because the movement as a whole keeps no statistical data. We can see the growth and mainstreaming of alternative medical practices as having followed Roger’s innovation adoption model. It started in the alternative culture of the 1970s and grew from the social fringe into a large industry. Curiously, critics talk of big-pharma but we never hear of big-alternative-pharma despite its existence and the manufacture of its own pharmacology.
The size of permaculture’s global practitioner population is crucial to its capacity to play an effective part in the slow-burn crisis of global heating, however we have only the vaguest notion of permaculture’s active practitioner numbers. Asked about numbers, permaculture spokespeople usually allude to equally vague guestimations or tens-of-thousands or the numbers who have done the permaculture design course, however once again there are no figures to authoritatively back up the guestimates and, anyway, graduate numbers do not necessarily transpose into active practitioner numbers. Do numbers count? They do. That was pointed out to me some years ago while speaking with a federal MP. She said that politicians look to the number of people an organisation has behind it in deciding whether to act on its demands. And politics, we know all too well, is how change occurs at the societal level.
The fateful fall of individualism
I think it was Marcus Aurelius, the Roman military leader and emperor, who a couple thousand years ago coined the idea of ‘amor fati’ — literally, ‘love your fate’, or in everyday language: accept and make the most of whatever happens. In a world in turmoil permaculture can learn from philosophy, first of all by heeding what Marcus said about accepting what is happening and adopting credible analyses of it, then figuring out what it, as a sizeable social movement, can do by mobilising and acting on it.
Doing this requires a conversation in permaculture circles. It is likely that people with a limited understanding of the permaculture design system will ask what events like the war in Ukraine, the ongoing pandemic, the housing affordability crisis, the supply chain crisis and the increasing cost of living have to do with permaculture. They outsource solutions to mainstream political parties and government. Yet, as my interviewer said, the design system does not have the wherewithal or heft to affect those things, but it can help people deal with their impact.
That done, we can look to another statement of ancient wisdom and search for opportunity in crisis. Doing this adopts Epictetus’ dictum of:
On occasion of every thing that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire what power you have for turning it to use.
Marcus Aurelius put it this way:
What stands in the way is the way.
The mind adapts and converts any obstacle to its action into a means of achieving it. That which is an impediment to action is turned to advance action. The obstacle on the path becomes the way.
Or, as Bill Mollison reiterated Epicetus’ idea two thousand years later:
See solutions, not problems.
How do we apply this to a permaculture role in addressing the impact of black swans?
In living through times of uncertainty there is only so much individuals and families can do by themselves. This is because we do not exist as individuals. People have always depended on others for their needs and their survival. The rugged, self-reliant individualist so beloved of libertarians is a myth. Libertarians and the recent aberration of them, the so-called sovereign citizens, take much from the society they live within because, whether they like it or not, they are co-dependent on it. Yet, they contribute little and conveniently ignore the inconvenient fact that humanity has evolved as communities and societies and not as individuals.
People are individuals-in-societies, their many connections forming networks of reliance and cooperation. I think radical feminist activist, Carol Hanisch, who is best known for popularising the phrase ‘the personal is political’ in a 1970 essay of the same name, got it right when she pointed this out:
There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.
This becomes all the more important as we move into a time that seems likely to be beset by worsening and more frequent crises due to the impacts of accelerating climate warning, technological change and a poverty that even middle class people are falling into. We might grow some of our vegetables and fruit at home, keep a flock of chooks, store the rainwater that falls on our roof in a tank, harvest the electrical power of photons colliding with silicon in our photoelectric panels, but the world outside our front gate rolls on and when we step through that gate we have to deal with it. Doing that alone as individuals and families is going to become harder.
My take on all this is the solution pithily articulated by Bill Mollison around 45 years ago when he proposed:
…cooperation rather than competition.
To put Bill’s directive in another form we call it this ‘mutual assistance’’. We see it in permaculture as the design system’s third ethic: share what’s spare or, as it is sometimes stated:
…distribute surplus after providing for our own needs.
The idea of mutual assistance can be traced back to the writing of noted Nineteenth Century political theorist and anarchist, Pyotr Kropotkin. He called the idea of cooperation between individuals ‘mutual aid’ and described it as the capacity for people to help each other. Doing this increased the common good because it was a means of people obtaining their needs, especially where the knowledge, skills and resources to do so for themselves was lacking. He saw how cooperation was a historical artefact in social evolution that increased the survival of individuals and their societies and that held potential for raising the quality of life. Kropotkin’s ideas on mutual aid were published as the 1890 book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.
Mutual aid is the reasoning behind the third of permaculture’s ethics: redistribution of surplus resources (or, as permaculture designer Cecelia Macauley pithily puts it: “share what’s spare”). Doing this is no stranger to permaculture practitioners. Remember Permablitz (and here-for how-to) in which permaculture practitioners voluntarily assist each other transform their backyards into places for food production? And all of the advice offered among permaculture community association members and on permaculture social media?
If we search within the realm of political philosophy for affinity with permaculture’s third ethic we can consider the theory of distributionism. Formulated as a decentralised economic approach beyond the artificial shortages imposed by capitalism to sustain private profit by limiting assess to needs, and the control of resources by state bureaucrats in some forms of socialism, distributionalism proposes widening the ownership of the means of production. We can probably look to worker and consumer cooperatives as instances of distributionism although whether it is a motivator in the formation of coopertives is questionable. The idea behind distributionism seems to fit notions of economic, political and population decentralisation that appear in permaculture from time to time, especially in the context of bioregionalism.
The tension
So we do we see vestiges of mutual aid in permaculture. But we also see a tension. What is this tension and does it inhibit the provision of the mutual assistance we need to deal with the impact of Taleb’s black swan events? It comes from the necessity to participate in the market — the necessity of permaculture people to make a living so they can obtain all those needs that no individual can supply alone. This is how permaculture education, books and other products become commoditised as goods and services to be traded.
The tension is between ideas that could benefit many and the exclusion of some from obtaining them because of their limited ability to participate in the market economy, usually due to limited income. Permaculture has always been critical of the capitalist marketplace yet has been a willing participant in it. That is understandable because it has to survive in a capitalist political economy. At the same time there exists this exhortation to mutual assistance. Probably like all of us, permaculture lives with its own contradictions necessitated by its survival and its need to grow and multiply its numbers in capitalist societies.
Individual permaculture participants have provided free advice and physical assistance ever since the design system started to catch on as a popular practice. Increasingly over the past 20 years we see traces of mutual assistance becoming more common. These have taken the form of the permablitz, food swaps, online advice and the exchange of learning and physical assistance that we see among members of permaculture associations.
A question
From this, allow me to ask a question: based on the existing permaculture principle of ‘cooperation rather than competition’, should ‘provide mutual assistance’ be incorporated under its own name as a new permaculture principle so as to popularise and emphasise its importance to living in a time of uncertainty, insecurity and black swan events?
You might say that permaculture’s third ethic of distributing surplus already encompasses mutual assistance. That is true. To an extent anyway, because it says we should distribute what is surplus to our needs after we have met those needs, rather than the spirit of mutual assistance as a collaborative means of getting those needs in the first place. Mutual assistance steps in right at the beginning rather than as an add-on at the end.
A reason I ask this is because it might be time to take a look at the principles of the permaculture design system. Those attributed to Bill Mollison have been in place since the early days of the design system, those articulated by David Holmgren in his book, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, since 2002. I am not asking for any of the principles to be trashed, just assessed for contemporary viability and relevance, and adapted and added to where necessary. Periodic reassessment of the foundations, principles and practices of permaculture would keep it fit for purpose in the modern world.
How do we turn problems into solutions?
Permaculture is more remedial than preventative. What I mean is what that permaculture educator I was interviewing was saying—that permaculture cannot prevent black swan events but it can play a role in remediating their impact. Despite the evident presence of a libertarian sentiment among some permaculture practitioners, it can only deal with black swan impacts with a cooperative, community-based approach.
This takes us back to what Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius said about dealing with problems, and it raises a question for the permaculture hive mind: how do we, as both individuals and a social movement, accept the insecurities and uncertainties of our time and make the most of them? How do we turn problems into solutions?
More reading on PacificEdge
