Permaculture: A subtle yet powerful and radical response to the global ecological crisis?

The state of the planet and the impact of human activity – i.e., anthropogenic climate change – have revealed the limitations of the human-nature relationship during the industrial era, sparking alternative ways (2) of imagining this relationship. In that sense, social imaginaries play a central role in shaping innovative responses to ecological crises, yet the diversity of local ecological and socio-economic arrangements calls for environmental discourses capable of adapting to such diversity.

Alternative imaginaries, like those in permaculture (3), offer localised, experimental approaches to sustainable living, but they also risk reproducing existing ideologies or being co-opted by dominant actors. As these imaginaries can shape real actions and have real-world effects, we need to carefully consider their potential impact on how we address environmental issues.

Imaginaries and subsequent policies around permaculture

In our research (1), we identify three different imaginaries, which can coexist but imply very different political implications:

• Permaculture as technical design: nature is organised through intelligent, locally adapted systems. Boundaries between species are purposefully designed as porous interfaces that foster exchange and cooperation.
• Permaculture as a holistic philosophy: the emphasis shifts to fostering awareness about Gaia/Earth as a whole. Boundaries are approached as spaces to be transcended, emphasising the interconnectedness between humans and nature, which presupposes an idealised or already-given harmony that integrates individuals, societies, and the environment into a seamless whole.
• Permaculture as an intersectional movement: the focus is on the fact that ecological relations cannot be separated from class, gender, race, inequality and power. Here, boundaries are problematised to reveal who is protected, excluded or privileged.

Humans are not outside ecosystems

Permaculture challenges the conventional organisation of agriculture by reconsidering the assumed separation between human society and “nature.” Instead of asking “How can humans control nature sustainably?”, permaculture asks something closer to: “How can humans organise themselves as one participant in a larger community of living beings?”

That is particularly relevant to the Anthropocene in which we live. If humans have become a planetary force, then leaving nature alone is no longer a sufficient ecological strategy (4). The challenge becomes learning how to intervene without treating everything else as merely a resource.

There is also a fascinating paradox here: permaculture is deeply anthropogenic as it deliberately designs anthropocentric ecosystems; yet, it tries to decentre the human within the agro-systems it designs. Permaculture’s ambition is therefore not to eliminate human influence, but rather to transform the kind of influence humans exert.

Permaculture as a laboratory for alternative futures

Permaculture may be valuable even when individual projects fail. Indeed, because it operates through small, local, experimental communities, it generates a kind of “archive” of possible futures: different ways of growing food, organising communities, politicising eco-social relationships, relating to other species and distributing resources.

Instead of proposing one grand ecological revolution, permaculture produces many small-scale local experiments from which technical, social and political alternatives can emerge.

Nevertheless, permaculture’s imaginaries are both what makes it powerful and vulnerable. Imaginaries, indeed, can be co-opted: “holistic” ecological language, for example, can easily become lifestyle branding; technical sustainability can coexist with existing inequalities; and even supposedly progressive ecological communities can reproduce class, gender or racial privilege.

Ultimately, permaculture is less a recipe for sustainable agriculture than an experiment in reinventing the boundaries of eco-social communities. Its radical question is not simply how to grow food sustainably, but who or what gets to count as a legitimate actor in the world we are organising.

* Anahid Roux-Rosier (Fundação Dom Cabral, Brazil) and Gazi Islam (Grenoble École de Management, France)

References

(1) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1350508418778647

(2) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1350508413489821

(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

(4) https://direct.mit.edu/glep/article-abstract/14/4/36/14779/The-Changing-Nature-of-Nature-Environmental

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