YOU TAKE A LEFT as you come around the bend on the way down towards the city from Fern Tree, a little village precariously placed amid the tall forest of lower Mt Wellington where the road to the summit branches from the road over to the Huon.
The road twists as it descends, for these are the convoluted ridges and steep gullies of the mountain’s foothills. Eventually, Strickland Avenue deposits you in the Cascades area of South Hobart.
Why this twining strip of asphalt is significant is because it once housed the dwelling of a remarkable man and because it was here that this man developed an idea with a younger man, and idea that caught the public imagination and that would, in the decades that followed its launch in the late 1970s, blossom into something new in the world.
Strickland Avenue was home to Bill Mollison, co-founder of the permaculture design system, and its twisting route down the foothills , its traverse of ridge and descent into gully, could be taken as symbolic of the unfolding of the design system that came into existence here, amid this steep landscape, on the lower slope of this magnificent mountain of dolerite and forest.
Descending the Avenue that crisp mid-autumn day was to return to my own past in this southernmost of Australia’s cities as well as an unplanned return to the birthplace of permaculture. It led to a brief discussion with my traveling companion and, later, to thoughts of how permaculture has evolved over the decades.
Our descent of Strickland Avenue that day also triggered another thought. It is not my thought alone but is one that has been raised by others and it is this: why has permaculture not achieved influence among social and political decision makers?
A diffuse entity
Permaculture has evolved as a diffuse entity practiced mainly within the community sector of society. Sure, there are examples of successful small businesses develop from the permaculture concept but they remain few. As permaculture co-founder David Holmgren pointed out in 2007, the design system’s success, its most successful adoption, has been as an approach to sustainable living at the community level.
When it comes with trying to get to grips with the question of the lack of permaculture influence among social and political decision makers I believe we must look to the diffuseness that characterises permaculture. This is both the design systems strength as well as its weakness. The reality is that diffuse and amorphous ideas such as permaculture have many interpretations — they become different things to different people — and so are difficult to clearly define and pin down. Some see permaculture as a type of organic food gardening, others as a whole-of-life philosophy for living sustainably; I see it as an approach to community development.
It has been pointed out that diffuseness around the concept can lead to confusion and to difficulty in getting across just what the design system is. While this diffuseness makes pemaculture easily available to individuals by providing numerous entry points, it makes it difficult to encapsulate for decision makers.
By way of analogy…
One way of exploring why permaculture has not gained greater prominence among institutional and political decision makers is to compare it to something that also had its origins in grassroots community practice but that went on to gain considerable influence. This is the bushland regeneration movement.
We can trace the origin of the movement to the work of the Bradley sisters in the bushland near their home in Sydney’s affluent, middle class Mosman. The practice of de-weeding bushland and restoring it to indigenous, or at least native plant communities has its origins here. It soon caught the public imagination.
The reasons for this can be found in the confluence of new ideas that emerged during the 1970s and 1980s and to the emergence of the environment movement at the time, with its focus on natural ecosystems. These was also the years when restoration ecology emerged as an academic discipline around the world, with its notion of restoring natural systems and prioritising native plants. The ideas formulated within this discipline went on to infect the new bush regeneration movement. For environmentalists, bush regeneration provided a hands-on means of practicing what they believed in. It was a natural alliance that led to native plants becoming the default setting when it came to landscape design and to their prioritisation by the environment movement.
The groundwork for the bush regeneration movement was laid by organisations like the Society for Growing Australian Plants. Through their publications, the links made with the science of ecology, the threats to native biodiversity popularised through the environment movement and the emergence of specialised native plant nurseries, Australian home gardeners ripped up the lawns in their newly-gentrified suburbs and started to replace them with native vegetation. A new, mainly inner urban landscape started to emerge. At times, the preference for native vegetation took on a tone akin to botanical ethnic cleansing with non-native plants being regarded as second class and their removal and replacement with natives.
This botanical nationalism was not unlike a similar nationalistic surge around the start of the Twentieth Century. Then, it was not gardeners but landscape painters who led the popularisation of the Australian bush in art. Seeking a break with long-established European artistic tradition, the Australian painters, such as those associated with the Heidelberg School, popularised an impressionism that championed the Australian quality of light as well as rural and bushland scenes. Take a look at Arthur Streeton’s The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might and you get a idea of how artists were starting to see the land differently and to celebrate that difference. An analogy to the surge of popularity in native plants and native ecosystems of the 80s, really, though the artists’ nationalism fed into Australian Federation.
Now catching on as a popular, community-based movement, bush regeneration and its accompanying preference for the native in vegetation moved towards official institutionalisation. By the 1980s, people could be inducted into the practice through TAFE courses and, soon, jobs in bushland regeneration started to appear in local government and in small businesses contracting bushland regeneration services to councils. Jobs, acceptance by local and state government, the availability of TAFE training, native plant nurseries and the emergence of the Landcare movement with its native plant and weed-eradication focus on farms added to community-based gardening practices to establish the dominance of native plants and bush regeneration in the firmament of landscape design in Australia. It was a nexus that was to push bush regeneration into social, institutional and political influence.
Why a lack of permaculture influence?
It was Bill Mollison who drew attention to the reality that the dominant eucalypt-acacia ecosystems were actually human relics rather than the creation of unassisted nature. Bringing an anthropological interpretation to Australia’s landscapes, Bill described eucalypts as “weeds that come up in the presence of frequent, low-intensity burning by Aboriginies over a long period of time”. This was not something that would endear him to the bush regeneration crowd.
The reason why permaculture has not achieved the influence of the bush regeneration lobby is due to its following a quite different trajectory of development and to the decentralised, diffuse structure of the design system.
Like bush regeneration, permaculture has its origins in community action, and like bush regeneration it became a popular movement. It also offered people a means to taking practical action on sustainability. But there the similarity ends. Bush regeneration became institutionalised while permaculture remained in the community sector.
Permaculture has evolved as a decentralised practice based in the work of individuals and community associations. Like bushland regeneration, it developed courses as a means of recruitment. Commonly, these were introduction to permaculture courses and their content has been quite variable with some being little more than gardening courses. The Permaculture Design Course provided a more intensive introduction but this, too, could be variable in focus and content. What the design course was not was an accredited, TAFE-based course. Consequently, and unlike the bush regeneration course of the 1980s and 1990s, it did not achieve the status of ‘official’ recognition. This militated against permaculture’s acceptance as a credible field of study and source of influence by decision makers in local government and elsewhere, though it didn’t work against its acceptance at the community level.
Permaculture’s is a decentralised structure. Power and influence are diffused. The only organisations to attain a quasi-official status are the Permaculture Institute and Permaculture International Ltd, though this remains only a partial status with little influence on the actions of individual permaculturists or their organisations. There are no centralised, representative bodies. This, too, makes gaining influence difficult, for who is to represent permaculture? That’s another of those perennial questions that have surfaced from time to time within the movement.
For those seeking a greater role in society than permaculture has achieved as a popular, community-based activity, the design system has stalled at the level of the home — and recently — the community garden. It has little to zero voice in local government apart from a handful of permaculture trained or influenced people working in local government sustainability education. While this may be no problem to individuals practicing permaculture or to its community associations, it effectively locks the design system out of any deeper, potential influence.
Food advocacy — a marked absence
It is not just political and social decision making that permaculture finds difficulty in directly influencing. It is also advocacy on food at the policy level.
This can be seen as victim to permaculture’s focus on the home garden and on things like energy efficient building design and water efficiency, areas that are now the purview of government and other sustainability-directed organisations. More centrally organised entities like the Australian Conservation Foundation have refocused their efforts over recent years to address issues in urban systems that once would have been the territory of permaculture. It is not that permaculture thinking has influenced these organisations, for the most part the design system in notable for its absence in their thinking. It is that trends in resource use, energy consumption and water management have caught up with and passed what were once permaculture’s cutting edge ideas and permaculture had not moved forward. Thus, the design system finds itself with less influence because its intellectual territory has been partially colonised by other organisations.
Urban food is one of these. Permaculture, through its home garden focus and initiatives such as Permablitz, has excelled at popularising the traditional Australian practice of the home production of food. What it has not done so well is to form partnerships and collaborations with organisations working as alliances to pursue urban food sustainability through influencing policy. Yet, it is through membership of these alliances, and their number is now increasing, that permaculture could truly exert influence. It is true that there may be one or two permaculture people involved with the food alliances, however their number is small.
Set to remain in the community sector?
If David Holmgren is right, then we may be witnessing the confinement of permaculture to the community sector. There it should continue to flourish as it has these past ten years.
This is both opportunity and barrier, especially to taking the design system further into the social decision making process. For that, we will likely have to rely upon the food alliances and other groupings that emerge from time to time to address specific social issues.
Permaculture has come a great distance from its origin there on the winding road that is Strickland Avenue. It retains potential to travel further, however it may require new thinking to achieve that.
