This article is about the third ethic of permaculture, which was originally about limiting growth, but has been warped into something about fairness.
https://www.permaculturenews.org/2017/0 ... maculture/
My own thoughts are below (it is NOT a quote from the article, though covers the same ground). I am posting this here in the hope of being able to improve this text. What have I forgotten? What else needs saying?
Is a sustainable post-agricultural society possible? This was another question being asked in the late 60s, and the answer that emerged in the early 70s, along with the fledgling environmental movement and new foraging culture, was permaculture. It is a philosophy encompassing food production and much more, with a goal of establishing a new ecological balance between humans and the ecosystems we inhabit. The name means “permanent agriculture�, implying that agriculture as we know it is an impermanent state of affairs.
Permaculture and anarcho-primitivism have some important things in common. Both consider conventional modern agriculture to be harmful, and seek a new relationship between humans our food – one that works in harmony with the natural world rather than attempting to dominate it. The godfather of permaculture - Bill Mollison – drew on indigenous practices, rather than inventing something entirely new. Permaculture does away with all the neat domestic vegetable beds, and monocultures of crops. It creates wild-looking spaces with their own mini-ecosystems designed to produce ‘abundance’, which is then harvested in a more foraging-like way than traditional crops. A lot of the initial work involves observing the land and then working with it, rather than imposing upon it. Permaculture is a whole system, from sacrificial crops to keep the birds happy, who will also eat the pests, to companion plants that bring up nutrients from deep underground or suck nitrogen from the air. It also includes animals for pest control (ducks for slugs, chickens for grubs) and manure.
But permaculture goes way beyond food production. It is intended to replace agriculture, not just as a set of procedures, but as a way of life, just as agriculture replaced the hunter-gathering way of life. It is about people and planet, and because of that it has run into serious difficulties.
The three equal principles of permaculture, as they were originally stated:
Care of the earth
Care of people
Setting limits to population and consumption
The first two are relatively unproblematic, but the third principle has been relentlessly attacked by people who want to water it down or replace it entirely with a principle about fairness. Worthy though the goal of fairness may be in terms of human rights and justice, incorporating it into permaculture in place of limiting growth fatally undermines the whole project. Firstly it renders permaculture incapable of delivering sustainability/permanence, by removing the essential recognition of limits to growth. Secondly, it appears to demand permaculturists embrace something like socialism at every level, including globally. I am sympathetic to socialism, but the limits to growth are more fundamental than any ideological, political or economic system. Our politics must adapt to them, not the other way around. And can we realistically or ethically demand people prioritise equally the well-being of 8 billion other humans when their own survival is threatened?
If we are ever going to build a sustainable human society, then we must learn from the worst mistakes of the past. To reject the principle of limits to population and consumption is to repeat those mistakes. Though it is presented as a claim to the humanitarian moral high ground, it looks very much like a refusal to accept the social, economic and political consequences of acknowledging an unwanted but inescapable truth: either we choose to set, and abide by, realistic limits to population and consumption, or limits will be imposed on us by the rest of the ecosystem whether we like it or not.
