Against Permanence

Permaculture was born shortly after the oil shocks of the 1970’s that demonstrated the vulnerability of industrial systems to fossil fuels supply disruptions. This period also saw widespread coverage of “The limits to growth”, a land mark study that predicted that industrial society would peak and decline sometime in the 21^st century, right about now as it turns out. Permaculture was in many ways a counter reaction to the many generations of dizzying technological and cultural change that ultimately led to that precarious position on top of a planet spanning pyramid of complexity. The central goal of permaculture was summed up in its name- a portmanteau of permanent and agriculture, later expanded to include all culture. The dream was to develop a society that was in equilibrium with the natural world, allowing it to be sustained indefinitely. In some ways this echoes the philosophy of political scientist Fukuyama, who stated that the world had reached the end of history with the fall of the USSR, leaving capitalism to reign forever in prosperity. Or the fateful statement of economist Irving Fisher who said that the stock market had reached a “permanently high plateau” right on the eve of the great depression.

Humans are predominantly creatures of habit who enjoy safety, routine and predictability with only a smattering of novelty. The early 20^th century in particular saw people experience a mind bending explosion of new technologies transforming society, though the pace of innovation and transformation has slowed considerably since the 1970’s. Permaculture as such can be seen as a push back against the changes in recent generations, made more urgent by the limited shelf life of industrial civilisation. Permaculture looked to the past and diverse pre-industrial cultures, along with the more modern understanding of ecology and tried to imagine a system where permanence could finally be achieved. This I believe is the flaw at the heart of permaculture from a philosophical perspective. Time is essentially change. Holding back the flow in a system only ensures a bigger and more dramatic change in the future. Stopping small avalanches only ensures that a larger one will happen later. Putting out spot fires only ensures a massive inferno another day.

One salient example of this phenomenon is the stagnation of millions of years of accumulated solar energy in the form of coal and oil that were suddenly put back into motion by humans with the pulse of activity that was the industrial age. In history political regimes that persisted for hundreds of years were typically dramatically overthrown in a short period of time, such as the Ancien Regime in France. One of the main benefits of a healthy democracy is that it can prevent discontent from building to the point where violent revolution is unavoidable. Even more dramatically ancient cultures such as the Australian aborigines that experienced thousands of years with relatively little cultural change were almost wiped off the map within a generation of contact with the rest of the world. If permaculture were to achieve its dream of permanence would it be setting society up for a similar wrenching dislocation in time?

So what are the alternatives to chasing the dream of permanence? What if instead we appreciated the roles and benefits of transience, much like our human ancestors enjoyed before settled agriculture emerged a mere blink of the eye ago in the history of our species? With the climate on course to change enough to potentially make grain based agriculture too unreliable to support settled civilisation then this may be the best approach. Many of the hunter-gatherer tribes in the Americas were settled agriculturalists before European contact, only reverting to a more resilient mobile mode of living after their apparently permanent societies collapsed. Many of the world’s peoples are still leading nomadic herding lifestyles in regions that are unsuitable for settled agriculture. Would this way of living be more suitable for the vast seasonally arid regions of the Australian interior?

In many ways permaculture as a culture already embraces the spirit of experimentation and play in how we approach the problems of daily living. Permanence in any form will likely always remain just an ever elusive dream in a world tossed from one crisis to another. The foolish man builds his house on shifting sands. Better to keep going until the sand stops or best of all make a tent.

The Roman philosopher Seneca once said “It were some comfort yet to the frailty of mankind, and of human affairs, if things might but decay as slowly as they rise: but they grow by degrees, and they fall to ruin in an instant”.