No Food Forests On A Dead Planet

Why permaculture is a technical success but a human failure

Permaculture has failed.

It's a hobby for landowners, a social media hustle, an educational pyramid scheme. It has made no systemic difference in human ecology or agriculture. All this despite offering a transformative and unprecedented means for humans to thrive on our planet. The gap between its potential and its reality is a yawning chasm.

The reason is simple: it has bad politics. For what is supposed to be a holistic design philosophy, it essentially neglects the context—the whole system—in which it operates. It has failed on its own terms. The very first ethic of permaculture is:

"Care of the Earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply."

Obviously it has not done that. Our global ecosystem has been pushed to the brink of collapse, spawning a worldwide movement against climate chaos, and permaculture has largely sat on the sidelines, fiddling around with backyards and occasional NGO development schemes.

Belatedly, some permaculturists—particularly in the UK—have recognized the urgency of the crisis and the need for organizing. Ele Waters writes in Permaculture Magazine:

My form of ‘activism’ has always been through living by example...We’ve been living in our little bubble for all these years, home educating our kids, baking bread, crafting our home and feeling positive about ‘doing our bit’. Then Wham! It hit me! The latest IPCC report came out...then unbelievable silence in the media. This was swiftly followed by one of our interns being arrested for her involvement in the anti-fracking campaign in Lancashire. It was the ‘wake up!’ slap-around-the-face that I needed. My idyllic bubble burst allowing my awareness to expand. It was not that I was oblivious to all of this, but I think there was a big part of me that had felt too helpless to even dare look at it fully. I was now facing the knowledge that what we were doing here at [home], although valuable, was not enough.

This gets at the heart of permaculture's political problem: it has no theory of change. While it offers incredibly detailed guidelines for how to make change on one specific piece of land, it has little of use to say about the bigger picture.

The contrast between permaculture's transformative technical brilliance and its political emptiness isn't really surprising: technical breakthroughs are usually wedded to the economic and political contexts in which they occur. Permaculture, as we think of it today, is a product of the 1970s back-to-the-land movement, and while it has some vaguely hippie-ish notions about making the world a better place, it was born in the context of a retreat from the radicalism of the late '60s.

To the extent that its founders had any notion of politics at all, it could be characterized as crunchy liberalism: small-scale capitalism and conscious consumerism. That has shaped permaculture into what it is today: a way to carve out a little slice of personal paradise while harvesting YouTube views for cash. These flaccid politics have made permaculture incapable of contributing meaningfully to the existential struggle for life on Earth.

That is a terrible missed opportunity because permaculture is inherently at odds with capitalism. While it is a world historic breakthrough in our ability to meet human subsistence needs, it is awful at meeting the needs of the commodity market. It is the nature of polyculture—and the more diverse, the more this is true—that it is inefficient at producing commodities. Efficiency in commodities is achieved by scaling production of identical products, allowing for the maximally efficient use of industrial equipment and processes. Permaculture is incapable of supplying that.

A food forest simply cannot yield a million identical, blemish-free apples. The ecological diversity required to create a closed loop system, along with the compromises to yield density and appearance that result from a hands-off approach, make it a bad way to turn the Earth into cash. This is why we don't see thousand-acre permaculture farms run by agribusiness giants, despite all the other efficiencies of a closed-loop system.

But there is an even bigger problem with its politics: there can be no food forests on a dead planet. Capitalism has a single ethos: maximize profit. Nothing else matters under capitalism and no amount of persuasion, enlightenment, or vibe-shifting will change that. This ethos is incompatible with a habitable planet, a point which should now be beyond debate.

If permaculture cannot acknowledge this failure and elect to intervene on behalf of humanity, it will never be widely relevant. And with resistance to capitalism nearing the Hail Mary-stage of the struggle, its presence is needed now more than ever.

The reason for this is that in order to defeat the dual doomsday machines of capitalism and imperialism, there must be a viable alternative. Eco-socialism—an egalitarian, radically democratic political economy that puts human beings and our ecosystem at its heart—is that alternative, but it's a contested idea.

For some, eco-socialism means a more egalitarian distribution of capitalism's preferred means of production: nuclear power plants and factory farms for all. These people call themselves eco-modernists, embracing the most horrific elements of capitalism's suicidal taste for industrial excess. On the other side is degrowth: the belief that we must, on the whole, use much less energy and fewer resources, while fairly distributing what we have. Degrowth makes the case that such a world is not just sustainable, but also vastly better and more enjoyable. Rather than deprivation, degrowth means the opportunity to live a life of real meaning, rather than one spent producing and drowning in toxic garbage.

Degrowth needs permaculture. For degrowth and eco-socialism to succeed, they require the technical competence and prefigurative models that permaculture can offer. It's one thing to blandly say that we should produce food more sustainably; it's another to say that a permaculture food forest can verifiably produce 2,100,000 calories per acre of a balanced human diet under suboptimal growing conditions. The latter is what we need much more of.

Permaculture offers a viable path out of our ruinous dependence on synthetic fertilizers, toxic pesticides, sterilizing monocultures, and energy-squandering supply chains. It offers a means for people around the world to meet their own subsistence needs, rather than producing and purchasing commodities through murderously extractive North/South economic imperialism. And it offers the opportunity to live joyously, beautifully, and meaningfully on a healthy, sustainable planet.

It is not enough for permaculturists to live by example: the fight will not be won through culture. It will be won on the field of politics, no matter how messy, distasteful, and frustrating that might be. But that is where the human species will live or die.

So, those of us who practice permaculture have a choice: we can either join the fight for eco-socialism, or we can watch our food forests burn.

It shouldn't be a hard choice.