home and local food

Permaculture In Britain: How We Lost the Plot

Possibly the most serious problem facing life on earth – particularly human life – is land degradation – especially soil erosion, salinisation and deforestation. People currently worry about ‘climate change’ – but about little else to do with the state of the planet. I worry about climate change too, but not really about the big one, which I believe would sort itself out if we addressed the local-scale kind, caused by deforestation: the problem that if extensive forests are cut down, the local climate is altered, resulting typically in floods and droughts instead of steady rain, recycled via trees and thus carried across a land mass.

Someone who woke up thirty years ago to what people were doing to the land was a visionary called Bill Mollison. He put the problem down to agriculture not being designed, and design became crucial to his thinking on all aspects of human life. But sticking to agriculture for this discussion, it’s particularly the kind carried out on a big scale on monoculture plantations, for food commodities to go into the food industries, to be sold in supermarket to urbanites, who are alienated from the land on which we all depend, and care little about being responsible for destroying the soils and forests of the world. Mollison dreamed up a new kind of agriculture which he called ‘permaculture’, short for ‘permanent agriculture’. The key idea behind permaculture was the design of diverse agricultural ecosystems, on every scale from home gardens to local farms, to supply local communities – thus solving the twin problems of land degradation due to plantation monocultures, and consumers’ alienation from the land.

In Australia where Mollison was based, there were a lot of people who owned large plots of land, large enough for the owners to employ landscape architects to work out where to put the swimming pool and the barbeque, the lawn, the decorative plantings, the paddock or whatever. So what Mollison did was to set up an alternative school for landscape designers, with courses in how to incorporate food growing in their designs. (That may not be quite how it happened; I wasn’t there, but it was something like that.)

When permaculture arrived in Britain twenty years ago, Mollison’s system was replicated here. What we got was our own school for landscape designers. The trouble is, few land owners in Britain have large enough plots to need designers, or ‘domestic landscaping’, as one commercial franchise operation calls it. According to DEFRA, there are about 22 million households in Britain,[1] 19 million of these having gardens,[2] most of them very small. In addition, ‘there are approximately 300,000 allotments in England on 7,800 allotment sites, a total of 25,393 acres of land use. However, this only equates to one allotment per 65 households.’[3] (The figures here seem to be based on 19.5 million households; it is surprisingly difficult to get reliable figures.)

A substantial proportion of Britain’s 19 million or so households include someone who enjoys gardening. What the people who introduced permaculture to Britain needed to do was to carry out some research into what permaculture design and methodology would consist of in various parts of this country, and then provide short courses and starter packs to introduce permaculture to home gardeners. However, the early permaculturists liked the pseudo-academic culture which came with the Australian system; the hierarchy made them feel important – and they made sure that the network of ‘permies’, as they came to be called, remained small. This tendency was reinforced by permaculture as an idea having been taken up with a passion by a neo-hippy fringe group of travellers and squatters, with their grunge dress, vegan diet, New Age beliefs, and an interest in anything radical and way-out. Lovely people many of them, some highly intelligent, resourceful and caring. Quite a lot of the Australian-style courses happened, and lots of teachers came out of it, but few designs were implemented, very few case studies and demo sites can be cited to prove that the system works – scant information is available after all this time on how permaculture methods might increase yields of food per unit area. Oh, and, since very few permies had any land at all, permaculture was redefined as ‘permanent culture’ so that urban community projects for the benefit of marginalised groups would count as permaculture, despite the fact that little or no food was grown on whatever scrap of land they occupied as a base. Some of these projects are admirable – but they are never going to revolutionise land use in Britain.

The hub of permaculture in Britain is the Permaculture Association ( Britain) (PAB). In the hope that the pseudo-academic hierarchy, the lack of research, the cultic smallness and the grunge element would somehow change, giving rise to a movement towards a land use revolution, I have hung on in there, on and off. I became a trustee of PAB. For a short while I have been Chair, despite not being comfortable with leadership. In that capacity, I wrote a ‘letter from the chair’ for the scruffy little PAB newsletter, addressing in particular the hierarchy problem, and presenting the PAB as the ‘Permaculture Access Bureau’, providing a service rather than wanting to be in charge. Sadly, the letter got cut, with the very section which explained the idea of how we could be an access bureau chopped out. (Letter in full below.) This was the passage which had its guts removed:

‘Anything you want to know about permaculture we (PAB) can help you find it out, usually by passing you on to people who know, because they are doing it or teaching it, or want to do more of it if only they knew a few local people to get together with. And, of course, if you’ve no idea what the dickens permaculture is, we can tell you that, and then pass you on. Oh, and we can help you raise money and spend it.’

The section that was cut out is italicised. It’s possible, I suppose, that the young worthy at PAB HQ responsible for this omission [4] was aware that we actually don’t know of many people who are ‘doing it’, i.e. successfully practising permaculture. He would not have such doubts about all the teachers, nor about the considerable number who, like me, got excited about the idea and remain hopeful. What he probably did not realise was that I had put in my own wishful thinking as a potential corrective to what has gone wrong. Being so young, he doesn’t have the perspective. He was not around fifteen years ago to see how Mollison’s most brilliant of world-saving ideas was lost to the most likely country to do something with it, due to a few egotists who loved (and still do: the ‘Gaia University’ is the latest nutty idea: mostly flying all over the world feeling really important) heading up a crackpot pseudo-academic hierarchy, plus a bunch of passionate and principled crusties, who were happy to put ordinary home gardeners off the whole idea, content to keep their small impoverished club to themselves.

Ironically, the young worthy at PAB HQ was the same person who told me at a recent trustees meeting that ‘We should forget feeding everyone in Britain on the land of Britain; it’s not possible,’ – which is heresy to those few of us who see a revolution in land use as crucial for world change. And Britain is in a unique position due to such a large proportion of the population owning some land.

For Kevin Cahill, author of Who Owns Britain? and Who Owns the World?, private landownership itself is key. In an email to me recently he said: ‘Somewhere in the book I say something like “The cause of poverty is private landownership, but by way of paradox, the solution to poverty lies in private landownership”. What I mean here is that the way in which an elite have hijacked all land and placed it in their private ownership throughout history is the root cause of poverty. But that the solution to poverty lies in everyone having some land, with the domestic property or home owned absolutely and strongly protected against repossession etc.’

One may argue whether it is the ownership itself or the use that is made of it which is key. Either way, Britain has a population of home and garden owners who could really make a difference – and sadly the PAB has alienated itself from this population, and may never recover the lost ground.

In case anyone who reads this (and no one will unless I tell them it’s here, the site being too new to come up on Google) wonders why, being ‘chair’ of the PAB, I don’t lead the movement in a more useful direction, the answer is, I can’t. I’m too old and I don’t have the personal charisma required for leadership, or the diplomatic skills. Plus, as an anarchist, I’m against leadership as such. (Incidentally, Mollison doesn’t understand anarchism, or politics – I’ve been reading up on him to try to find out what happened in Australia in the early days of permaculture, with no joy; he says all sorts of things to different people on different occasions…) Of course, there are situations where it’s helpful for someone to take charge – ‘hold the space’ in a meeting, perhaps, or organise who’s doing what for a group project. But dragging people where they haven’t chosen to go by the force of one’s will or personality or by wily persuasion. Nope! Bad idea. Another aspect is, do I want to be leading PAB when there are people doing good research into land use who say they ‘hate permaculture’? Sad, but true. No, I’ll stick to trying the occasional ploy like this latest one – and the occasional rant like this. I’d like what I say to be taken seriously, because there are things I understand, having studied them in depth, but I’m only a feral intellectual, with no standing whatsoever in mainstream society, so I’m happiest amongst others of that ilk, engaging in anti-capitalist, anti-statist discussions. Btw, I came across a nice piece recently on ‘Marx, theoretician of anarchism’.

This is the chair’s letter – in full:

Letter from the Chair

Hi folks!

The Convergence and AGM are behind us, so it’s the New Year for ‘the Association’, so ‘Happy New Year’ to all our readers. I tend to call us the ‘PAB’, because there’s something Kafkaesque about ‘the Association’ – this mysterious body: what is that? what does it do? And people do wonder what we are, even longstanding members and permaculturists (‘permies’) do – which is surprising and concerning, so I make no apology for exploring this here.

Some people have expectations of the PAB we can’t meet, and don’t aspire to because we’re not leading or in charge of the permaculture movement. Conversely, others imagine we’re presuming some authority or role we haven’t got and wouldn’t want. Calling us the ‘PAB’ doesn’t make this any clearer, of course, but one can at least play with these initials. It looks a bit like ‘CAB’, so are we the Permies’ Advice Bureau? Well, no, because it’s not only permies who come to us, and we don’t give advice. But we are a bureau, so that a start. A bureau’s an office and a kind of desk or filing cabinet. Our office is in Leeds, and in there are four part-time paid staff and some regular volunteers, lots of desks and files and stuff, and computers, and we have a web site, which is a colossal and growing ‘bureau’ in itself, fed with information not only by the office staff but by members, groups and projects out there in Britain and the world. Our bureau provides access to permaculture, so we’re the Permaculture Access Bureau (PAB) – does that make it clearer? Anything you want to know about permaculture we can help you find it out, usually by passing you on to people who know, because they are doing it or teaching it, or want to do more of it if only they knew a few local people to get together with. And, of course, if you’ve no idea what the dickens permaculture is, we can tell you that, and then pass you on. Oh, and we can help you raise money and spend it.

On the money thing, the PAB is at last more secure financially, and we’ve shed that wacky reputation which has sometimes put funders off, so we could have a bigger bureau, more staff, more office space, more computers. What would we do differently with more resources? Maybe nothing, just more of the same but better, more reliably, more quickly, for more people. We are already being more proactive, using more initiative, so that we can roll out what we do best and up the quality. We don’t want too much money, or too many staff, because that would bring the risk of becoming bureaucratic, like some worthy organisations we could name. We want permaculture to succeed because it offers the best hope going in these troubled times. If you’ve watched Al Gore gently frightening Americans about the climate change tipping point being upon us, maybe you’ll be reassured by the thought that there’s a permaculture tipping point happening too.

Looking ahead thirty years, or, given the urgency, five years, when everyone in Britain has access to permaculture, and are ‘doing it’, what might this country become? I imagine it would be returning to its natural state, with mutual aid, common ownership and self-government[5], but with some modern technologies, especially for communications.

By the way, I’m the new ‘Chair’ of the PAB, so I’m here to provide access too. Do send me any comments, grouses or suggestions, to chair@permaculture.org.uk.

With love and best wishes,

Chris Marsh

1. http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/statistics/supp/spkf02.htm

2. http://www.whichfranchise.com/franchisorPage.cfm?companyID=2117

3. http://property.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,30049-2229062,00.html

4. Note: I’ve since learned that it wasn’t him, but the unreliable person who has been editor for years – now, thankfully, retiring in favour of my young friend, who was very apologetic. Hey ho!

5. See Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (London: Heinmann, 1904)

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