I’ve seen some posts from influential bloggers recently that make some interesting criticisms of permaculture.

From author Sharon Astyk, we have Permaculture Future?: Part I and Permaculture Future? Part II. And then from Rob Hopkins from Transition Culture, we have Responding to Sharon Astyk on Permaculture and Transition.

Both essays are long and make several points (if you can get around the constant restatement of “really I like permaculture and don’t get me wrong I really respect it” in Astyk’s essays). There’s a lot to think about, from both authors.

What I’m most concerned about is that both essays seem to miss the point that permaculture is a design practice with core set of ethics:

• Care of the Earth: care of the living and non-living systems of our environment
• Care of People: providing for people to access those resources necessary to their existence
• Setting Voluntary Limits to Population and Consumption: governing our own needs and reinvesting the surplus in the care of earth and people.

Read those again, and think about what “mainstream” culture is like. Of course permaculture is counterculture, at least it is now. So were suffrage and abolition.

A lot of people are put off by attending permaculture-related events that often start off by circling up, holding hands. I wasn’t comfortable with this myself, and the reluctance in others is really palpable. (During my two-week Permaculture Design Course, my emails home to my husband were peppered with the running joke that I really liked it so far, but I wasn’t going to take my clothes off.) I’m glad I allowed myself to keep an open mind long enough to stick around to find that there wasn’t going to be a nekkid drum circle or anything like that. On to the pond-building, goat milking, and food forestry!

I like this essay, Fruitful Misconceptions: Stumbling into Permaculture, especially the section “Permaculture is a sect”, for how the author describes his own experience and how his understanding of permaculture changed over time.

But here’s the thing…if you can let yourself back off from “oh my god the oil is running out and the climate is changing and I really have to prepare for big changes”…if you can let go of that long enough to get a view of the big picture, based on science and fact and looking at the real truth of things…you realize pretty quickly that how intricately everything is interconnected. And standing in a circle holding hands and speaking from the heart is one way some people have found to help each other move on from a culture based on consumerism, greed, and personal isolation and on to one that’s based on caring for the earth and for each other, with fairness: the ethics that permaculture is based upon.

Permaculture provides a framework for understanding how to live a life that supports those ethics. What that looks like is dependent of the context of the situation you’re in. They say that every question about permaculture can be answered one of two ways: “organic matter” or “it depends”.

I want to tell you that you don’t have bear the discomfort of standing in a circle holding hands to do permaculture. I share the concerns of Astyk and Hopkins that this view of permaculture will be a turn-off to people who are otherwise like-minded. Even Bill Mollison has been critical of the scent of “new age” that is sometimes found in permaculture circles…here’s a quote from his autobiography, “Travels in Dreams”:

“As I have often been accused of lacking that set of credulity, mystification, modern myth and hogwash that passes today for New Age Spirituality, I cheerfully plead guilty. Unqualified belief, of any breed, dis-empowers any individuals by restricting their information.

“Thus, permaculture is not biodynamics, nor does it deal in fairies, devas, elves, after-life, apparitions or phenomena not verifiable by every person from their own experience, or making their own experiments. We permaculture teachers seek to empower any person by practical model-making and applied work, or data based on verifiable investigations. This scepticism of mine extends to religious and political party ideologies.”

(Thanks to Permaculture Ireland for that quote!)

So I don’t believe that everyone needs to buy into the version of permaculture that you’ll see if you browse YouTube. To me, permaculture looks very much the way life looked a hundred or two hundred years ago, except for the “man vs. nature” attitude. That is to say, everything except for the number one ethic: taking care of the earth. It’s the ethics that make permaculture different.

I believe that the current mainstream culture I’m a part of is one based on consumerism, greed, and isolation, and that the ethics of permaculture transform it into something much greater than a way of surviving resource limits. I realized a long time ago that I could stockpile all the supplies and grow all the food I wanted, but if my neighbors were going hungry or were in need, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I turned them away. I believe that acknowledging our interdependence in this context by standing in a circle holding hands can be a beautiful thing, and I’m not going to denigrate it. But I’m also not going to claim that it’s an essential part of permaculture, because it all depends on your context. Hey, I am in Northern California, after all!

So if you ask “Do I Have to Hold Hands to Do Permaculture?”, I think there’s only one good answer:

It depends.