Permaculture has always been about reconciliation and healing. It is an entire movement dedicated to imagining that humans can consciously work to repair the damage we’ve done, and that we can even go beyond that- that we can be responsible and creative stewards of place. It’s a beautiful movement filled with really great and practical ideas for how to do less harm, and how to ultimately remember our integral place in the family of things. This is a deeply hopeful message for our time. It’s also a bold one, considering the damage we’ve done.
We (Milton & Grace) have been working in the permaculture scene for many years now. Over time, we’ve felt called to refine elements of the practice for ourselves. We’ve seen that it’s not merely a “design science” meant to transform material landscapes. What we’ve observed over time is that most of our collective issues are social/spiritual, not material. The main disconnect we continue to experience is in the realm of our stories, beliefs, traumas… the collective spell we are under. These are the primary hurdles that keep us from designing a better way of living together.
This is a significant realization to have, especially when we see book after book (or one social media account after another) coming out in the permaculture world, each one offering promises of better ways of doing things. It’s not that these offerings aren’t of value. Sharing our findings is so important. But if our practitioners can’t connect to the heart of what we are doing, it’s just “rearranging the furniture” while our ideological foundation crumbles.
We’ve been talking about this over the years and have finally come up with a philosophical container for this particular collection of thought waves. “Folk Permaculture” seems to fit it well. We want something that is there for everyone. We want something that grandparents can pass on to their grandchildren. No experts needed. For us, this all has become about relational literacy, rather than having a collection of the “right” advice; the latter is too fragile. We are unschooling our permaculture practice.
Permaculture has an amazing potential for change and yet in our experience we see how easy it is to keep falling back into the patterns of our existing, destructive culture. We’ve made a point of studying this phenomenon in the hopes of deepening our own local practice, and we feel compelled to be transparent in our process in the hopes that others might benefit as well. We don’t actually want to present ourselves as having any solutions or answers, this is more an honest exploration of our modern context and our study of how to be more loving and responsible humans.
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A recent example, just to help put all this musing in context: Milton just went to a local permaculture event, meant to bring the permaculturists from the general region together to build community, exchange ideas, and generally uplift each others’ efforts. He felt it was good in so many ways- he met great people, heard meaningful stories, and learned about everyone’s various projects. However, he also came home feeling that the basic needs of the participants weren’t adequately met. It seemed to him to be a bit of an afterthought. This looked like disorganized meals, dirty bathrooms, and gathering spaces that didn’t feel entirely comfortable or well tended. He came home and said “…there was a hospitality issue.”
Apparently the folks at the event knew this and acknowledged it, saying they’d had to kind of throw the thing together imperfectly. I think we both have a lot of compassion for this kind of situation. Messy/imperfect hospitality is still a good thing, and sometimes truly the best we can do. But it spurred some interesting conversations between the two of us when he got home.
Part of the context is that the conversations that were had at the event often veered towards how to scale up. We find this happens a lot in these circles. Got a good idea? Let’s grow it! This is almost a cultural default, the compulsive steering towards progress. The issue here, of course, is that permaculture is so much about all of us being willing to do the humble work of relating to place- growing and cooking food, tending, living more lightly and with limits, building community right around us. This is about deepening our collective roots. Scaling up without attending to the missed opportunities for care was an obvious oversight.
And so, this has become a bit of a social pattern we’ve observed. The story of progress then gets in the way of our ability to literally take care. In our experience, it’s reliably compromising our core ethics. We aren’t trying to dump on the efforts of our peers. However, we need to study the conditions that cause that to happen and want to have some conversations: How do we move forward without accidentally losing quality? Can we be willing to be small and trust the mycelial networking of ideas to do its living work, even if we can’t see the full reach. We see this as an important subject we can continue to explore.
