permaculture

[FionaNyx@aol.com]

Hello, I am posting these personal thoughts about PC which I wrote in the
midst of a conversation elsewhere to share & to invite comment:

I am usually inclined to open explanations to people about permaculture by
saying something like "It is a design approach to sustainable agriculture."
This has become less and less adequate to describe permaculture as what goes
by "sustainable agriculture" has been broadened [actually coopted in my point
of view] to mean sustainable for say 40 years instead of forever, or to mean
"will deplete natural resources at a somewhat slower rate".

To me the core of permaculture is its purpose.  The purpose of permaculture is
to create stable productive systems including people.  "Stable" meaning
"capable of continuing without no or minimal ongoing inputs".  "Stable"
meaning not "static and unchanging", but "resilient and capable of persisting
through any of the natural cyclical fluctuations that we know will flow by".  
Cyclical patterns including: 
-weather changes wrought by the seasons, but also 
-longer cycle events-- the 40 year flood, the regional record low and high
temperatures and rainfall levels,
-infrequent sporadic but still regionally linked events such as spring ice
storms or summer fires,
-fluctuations of various disease, insect and animal populations. 

The purpose of permaculture is not to create big tomatoes or an attractive
landscape, (or to provide a guilt-free method of commodity cropping in
sufficient quantity to fund a middle class family lifestyle).  The tomatoes
and landscape can happen in a permaculture system, (but the middle class
lifestyle probably won't).  

People can take methods developed and used by permaculturists and use them to
garden, landscape and grow crops, but unless the purpose is a stable system
and the methods are applied consistently within the context of such a system,
they are NOT PRACTISING PERMACULTURE.  Don't get me wrong, I am not opposed to
people improving their gardening practices with methods developed in the
pursuit of permaculture.  But it is wrong to say that extracting a couple of
ideas is "doing permaculture".  

The difference between using a few PC concepts or techniques and practising
permaculture is analogous to the difference between speaking a few phrases of
a foreign language and being fluent.  It takes a serious investment of work to
become fluent in a new language and immersion will accelerate the process.
This is likewise true of attempting to learn permaculture, I think, because to
get the permaculture core concept of PERMANENT CULTURE, we have to abandon so
much of traditional agriculture's approaches that trade off long term resource
depletion for short term gains.  Further, like foreign languages, the new mode
of thinking will fade away unless it is used and it is hard to practise in
isolation.

Permaculture is a belief system, too.  I know some people will say this makes
it sound like a cult.  However, I don't see how one can practise permaculture
without replacing the dominant belief systems now in place.  Currently our
economy and agriculture are based on beliefs that maximizing profits (and
doing so by extracting finite resources with low or no current costs) is
responsible behavior.  I think is it impossible to practise permaculture in a
competitive mode within the existing agribusiness playing field.  Permaculture
has to proceed for reasons other than profits.  The ultimate purpose is to
restore a planet- wide stable productive system, caring for and healing our
Earth.

Sincerely,
~~Sherry Levi