Permaculture and the Modern Noble
Savages
Imaginations and practices in the global permaculture movement
Bachelor Thesis Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology Guido Knibbe – 10421521 – guido.knibbe@student.uva.nl
Tutor: dr. Irene Stengs
Second reader: dr. Gerben Nooteboom Word count: 10.583
Contents
‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ ... 1
Introduction ... 2
Nature and man ... 5
The idea of permaculture ... 8
Projects, images and ideals ... 11
The mythical noble savage ... 16
Mythical forests ... 18
The age of modern noble savages ... 21
The appeal of working with nature ... 25
1
‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’
I get out of the tram at the south-west edge of Amsterdam. As I look around for hints of a garden in this orderly, concrete environment, I spot a sign saying ‘Broedplaats ACTA’ (translated as ‘Arts Incubator ACTA’), which tells me I have arrived at the right place. A man is shoveling in the garden and a woman sits at a distance in the sun. ‘Hello’, she calls out as I approach, ‘did you come to have a look?’ – I tell her that I come for the permaculture course and to do some anthropological research. ‘Ah!’ she responds as her face lights up, ‘well let me tell you, what we do here is simple: we join the works of nature. We are making a food forest’. She shows me around the garden and then leads me inside the building to a small room. I make up from the interior that this room usually does service as a kitchen. For current purposes it is equipped with a table and a few simple chairs.
A projector beams on the wall: ‘Definition Permaculture – A design system to grow food in ecosystems. With the end goal that these will eventually sustain
themselves and that the only work left to be done is to reap’. The teacher tells a story about how she failed to deal with pests in her garden before she was aware of the permaculture approach. ‘As soon as something began to grow the aphids [a plant louse] would be on it. They form a relationship with ants, which milk their sweet juice in exchange for protection against predators. This alliance dominated my entire garden and I kept trying to force them out.’ With pity in her voice, she goes on: ‘I seduced the ants with jam covered with baking soda. When the soda enters their bodies it swells and their stomachs explode. Very sad…’ The students nod understandingly. Cheerful again, the teacher declares: ‘Permaculture is all about relationships, diversity and balance. Forcing your will on it does not work. By working with nature my garden flourished and the dominant reign of ants and aphids was over. There are no ready-made solutions, you have to observe first. So don’t just do something, stand there.’
We go outside to observe the garden by means of a mindfulness exercise (a meditation technique). As I stand under a bare tree in the sunlight I can smell the fumes from the cars pulling up a hundred meters away. I wonder if the woman who showed me around the garden earlier was right when she said that as soon as the trees will flourish the road will not even be visible from here. Watching the little plants sprouting around me I wonder if this is what global change actually looks like.
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Introduction
‘Culture is ordinary’, conveys cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams (2011 [1958]) in his famous essay with that title. A culture, he explains, is the collection of ‘the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meaning’ that appear to its members as every-day normality (Williams 2011 [1958]: 54). This was on my mind as I stood under that bare tree. Perhaps to a citizen of the 21st century, globalization is easily overlooked as a normal, every-day part of life. What does it look like? One might imagine a globe with twinkling dots connected by bright lines. But how do we see globalization when we stand with two feet on the ground? I would say a globalized world looks very ordinary indeed. My experience at Broedplaats ACTA took place at less than fifteen kilometers distance from where I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. At first glance, it may seem like a rather arbitrary occasion. It is easily overlooked that the permaculture course in which the five students and I were
participating actually has its origins on literally the other side of the planet. At present, permaculture is being taught and practiced in a global movement, transforming lives and landscapes wherever it touches ground. People on all five continents – from autonomous individuals to largely set up eco-villages – find in permaculture an ideological and ethical foundation on which they manifest a wholly novel way of being in the world. In an inescapably direct sense, being a permaculturist means taking part in a worldwide revolutionary process. How can we understand the growing appeal of the permaculture movement? In this thesis I try to find answers to this question by exploring the imaginations and practices that drive this global movement to wander off the beaten tracks of culture.
In a world dominated by unsustainable agriculture, Australian ecology designers Bill Mollison and David Holmgren came up with a radical new alternative. When they coined the term permaculture in 1978, they laid the foundations for a uniquely innovative production system that aims to restore rather than deplete natural resources. In the most common sense, permaculture is about the sustainable management of landscapes for food production. However, to fully appreciate all its aspects requires a more elaborate description.
Permaculturists would generally emphasize that the essence of their work is design. Like architecture, permaculture is a science of planning and the assembly of materials – both living and non-living – according to a set of design principles. Mollison (1988) provides a
foundational overview of appropriate strategies in his classic Designer’s Manual. In it, we read how all the ecological designs in permaculture are modeled after the patterns observed in
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nature. The final aim is explained in the term itself. The first part, ‘perma’ (from
‘permanence’) is synonym for a self-sustaining state, which in ecology terms means the independent ability to thrive. The ‘culture’ part of the word stands for both agriculture and culture. This double meaning indicates that the design principles are not exclusively applied to landscapes for food production. Permaculture is fundamentally about human beings ‘working with nature’ in all their activities. This is done by implementing the functional patterns of ecosystems in any realm of society, ranging from building construction to conservation programs. Although the vision of a functional sustainable culture is global, the permaculture approach is always oriented on local projects.
Such projects have been in the making since the start of the movement in the early 1970s. The chronological overlap with the broader environmental movement is no
coincidence. In fact, the emergence and increasing force of these movements is intimately related to a distinct trend of increasing human impact on the natural environment from the late eighteenth century to the present. Raymond Williams (1980) shows that the same period is marked by the idea of a separation between man and nature in industrial societies. Sociologist Anthony Giddens (1999) points to a more recent phenomenon of increased perceptions of risk among the members of what he calls a risk society1. For the permaculture movement, the risk associated with the destruction of the environment is a drive to radically alter the course of modernity. Their solution seems to lie in the idea of working with nature. This is no common idea. It involves new interpretations of age-old romantic questions about what nature is and how humans relate to it.
Thus, while permaculture practices draw from modern scientific principles, the movement is at the same time ideologically embedded in classical Romanticism. Like many other environmentalists, the looming threat of further industrialization has led permaculturists to assess native cultures as sustainable alternatives to western lifestyles. Since at least the first conservation movement in the early 20th century, groups that seek to protect or enhance the environment have been drawing inspiration from native peoples. However, while natives are popularly associated with the idea of living in harmony with the environment, this connection is widely contested in academia. In reviewing The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate, Hames (2007) concludes that there are hardly any proven cases of deliberate conservation by native peoples, rendering their depiction as conservationists factually false.
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It is therefore ironic that although native peoples have never actually been concerned with conservation, their western image does play a role in the construction of ecologically noble lifestyles among conservation-minded people. Interestingly, the noble savage stereotype seems to act as a kind of mirror image of an identity to which permaculturists aspire, albeit in a modern context. In light of this interplay between modernity and primitivism, I discuss in this thesis the notion of what I call modern noble savages. I use this notion to express how the classical noble savage stereotype has been drawn to the present through the collective
imaginations and local practices that make up the global permaculture movement. These imaginations and practices tie in with age-old existential questions about the relationship between man and nature. I will explore what new meanings permaculturists bring to this topic. To do so, I explore how ecological nobility is being imagined and practiced by permaculturists as they aspire to a sustainable way of being in the world. Ultimately, a discussion of these issues will lead to some insight into the growing appeal of the permaculture movement and its philosophy of working with nature in light of the environmental challenges of the 21st century.
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Nature and man
We can either ignore the madness of uncontrolled industrial growth… or take the path to life and survival. (Mollison 1988: 1)
According to Giddens (1999), developments in science and technology since the latter half of the 20th century have been increasingly generative of historically unique perceptions of risk. In what he calls a risk society, people are perpetually fixed on future scenarios. Awkwardly wavering on a technological frontier, they perceive an expansion of choice and influence on the one hand, and risk and uncertainty on the other (Giddens 1999: 3). A characteristic fact of this age is that many scientists now agree that humans should be considered ‘major geological and geomorphological agents’ worthy of assigning the current geological period
‘Anthropocene’ (Price et al. 2011). Giddens points out that the notion of fate has lost its grip on how people live in this age of human dominance, and the idea of a malleable future has taken its place. Contemplating the consequences of the unprecedented level of human impact, Giddens uses the phrase ‘the end of nature’ to describe a transformation in the way people perceive their impact on the natural environment: ‘we stopped worrying so much about what nature could do to us, and we started worrying more about what we have done to nature’ (1993: 3). Although the imaginations and practices of permaculturists are in part rooted in such environmental concerns, they also carry out an alternative point of view on the whole idea of the end of nature.
Practices and imaginations are always simultaneously products and producers of social realities. In her evaluation of the theory of practice, Sherry Ortner (1984) points out that while human actions are importantly influenced by existing social structures, actions at the same time create the social world. A key authority on practice, Pierre Bourdieu explains that this mutually dependent relationship between the actor and the hegemonic social structure is manifested in how human beings deploy themselves in the world, their habitus. Bourdieu’s philosophical theory asserts that while people adapt themselves by internalizing social environments, the capacity for externalization allows anyone to creatively initiate social change (Hage 2013: 81). These mechanisms of internalization and externalization reveal important insight into the relationship of man with nature. In a risk society, man is seen as a dominant geological force that can shape nature at will. In this section I analyze how this hegemonic view is internalized by members of industrial societies. As a springboard to the
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next section about the permaculture movement, I will also discuss why a risk society fails to deal with the environmental challenges of the 21st century.
In the essay Ideas of Nature Raymond Williams (1980) describes the two essential categories that comprise the current hegemonic idea of nature. On the one hand there is the mode of the improvers of nature – a mindset that powered agricultural improvement and the industrial revolution. This is the attitude of those who examine the mechanisms of natural processes, and who mold nature through ‘applied science, the conscious intervention for human purposes’ (Williams 1980: 77). Conversely, in the other category are the lovers of nature, who praise everything untouched and unspoilt by human intervention. In their mode of thought nature is ‘a kind of primal settlement’, admired for its beauty and peacefulness (ibid). Together, these categories comprise a new idea of nature that has taken prominence in the West over the last two centuries. Interestingly, although the admirers and the improvers seem to be separated camps, people often identify with both. For example, industrialists who intervene for economic purposes during the working week may go out in the weekends to admire ‘unspoilt’ nature. The connection between the two extremes becomes more obvious when we consider that both ideas are grounded in the view that man is no longer dominated by nature. At the core of the new idea of nature is ‘the abstraction of man’ from nature, which marks a unique transformation in the history of thought (Williams 1980: 75). I will shortly explain where this new perception of nature came from before discussing its ramifications for the environmental challenges of today.
During the early 1920s, botanist and pioneer of ecology Arthur Tansley was the first to address human interference in what he had termed ecosystems (Sayre 2012). Like everyone in his time, Tansley saw nature as a uniform force that guided the steady development of
vegetation. He used the term anthropogenic to account for the increasing disturbances that occurred as a result of human influence (ibid). More recently, Nobel Prize winning
atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen has ignited an academic discussion about the increasing significance of anthropogenic influences on the earth system. There is now substantial scientific support for the proposal to use the term Anthropocene, or ‘age of mankind’, to geologically describe the period of time that has passed since the Industrial Revolution (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). The scientific evidence points in the same direction as the new idea of nature that is now prominent in the world. Already in the nineteenth century, people had started to imagine themselves as separate from nature. According to Williams (1980), the engine of this profound transformation was scientific understanding.
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Evolution theory had given nature an understandable pattern with a history while stripping off the notion of destiny. The advance of industrial capitalism provided the capacity and confidence to intervene with the natural order. As one might expect, these developments boosted the projects of the improvers. As industry grew, exploitation surged and nature was increasingly seen as a resource for production and an object of consumption. Yet, Williams shows, it is this very same social process that triggered the idealistic notion of untouched nature. It was often the (rich) improvers who fled to the unspoilt margins where nature was ‘a refuge from man; a place of healing, a solace, a retreat’ (Williams 1980: 81). Thus emerged the two complementary sides of this new idea where nature is either exploited or conserved at the margins. Despite any good intentions, the inherently limited idea of separation renders man unable to deal with the environmental challenges of the 21st century. Human impact on the environment increasingly produces biodiversity loss, major soil degradation, global warming and destabilizing ecosystems due to pollution, to name a few (Kendall 2000).
By locating the core of this issue in the idea of separated man and nature, Williams (1980) zeroes in on the central problem that modern society faces: this idea is unsustainable when the actions of man have a dominant influence on the earth. It is unsustainable, first of all in a purely conceptual sense. In a world that is continually transformed by anthropogenic influences such as global climate change, untouched nature simply does not exist. However, more pressing are the actual products of our current activities. The reality is that the
ecologically destructive consequences of maintaining this idea of separation cannot sustain either mankind or nature into a realistic future. Williams (1980: 85) concludes: ‘we have to look at all our products and activities, good and bad, and to see the relationships between them which are our own real relationships.’
The same conclusions are drawn by Sayre (2012) in his evaluation of The Politics of the Anthropogenic where he channels the issue to a central question: ‘how, then, can we think in ways that are adequate to this reality?’ At the turn of the new millennium, Little (1999) reviewed Environments and Environmentalisms in Anthropological Research and insisted on the importance to cross the nature-culture divide in academia: ‘the development of an
ecological theory that incorporates natural and cultural dimensions within a single, broad paradigmatic framework is more urgent than ever’ (1999: 257). He concluded that an important theme for future research will be ‘the need to develop a new attitude of caring for the earth and its inhabitants, human and other’ (ibid). The permaculture movement speaks directly to that need. Embodying an attitude of working with nature instead of against it, permaculturists take a radical step outside the idea of separation and explore new kinds of
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relationships with the world. Beyond the end of nature, permaculturists approach the Anthropocene with a noble goal to unite earth and life in a thriving planetary culture.
The idea of permaculture
The philosophy behind permaculture in one of working with, rather than against, nature… of looking at systems in all their functions, rather than asking only one yield of them. (Mollison 1988: ix)
Worries about human impact on nature and corresponding perceptions of uncertainty have generated various expressions of environmentalism among risk society members. Little (1999: 254) conceptually clusters these different environmentalisms around ‘an explicit, active concern with the relationship between human groups and their respective environments.’ As Williams (1980) also points out, those concerns are often framed in the narrative of lovers of nature as opposed to the destructive improvers. In other words, environmentalists often relate to their environments from within the prevailing framework of separated man and nature. According to Williams (2011 [1958]: 54), a culture consists for an important part of such ‘known meanings and direction, which its members are trained to’. However, culture is always dynamic as it adapts to ‘new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested’ (ibid). So too a wholly novel idea of nature is emerging; one that transcends the common meanings of the risk society. The global permaculture movement represents a new kind of environmentalism; one that is no longer framed in the narrative of man separated from nature. Instead, the idea of permaculture is to work with nature. Permaculturists offer and test new ideas on what it means for human beings to care and take responsibility in relation to nature. Throughout the world, permaculture projects showcase local observations and expressions of ways to unite man and nature. In this section I discuss what the idea of working with nature entails as a way of being in the world.
To understand the permaculture movement in its contemporary form we have to first go back to the early 1970s. Since the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962), there had been a growing public concern about the environment. The Club of Rome with their book Limits to Growth (1972) advanced to the front of a global awareness about the
ecological consequences of unsustainable human impact on the environment. It became increasingly clear that the dominant models for development were degrading both economic stability and ecological balance, rather than improving them. Sustainability and grassroots
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movements produced a wave of social responses ranging from protests against destructive human actions to visions of alternative ways of relating to the world. The permaculture movement as it exists today has its roots in the latter category. In 1974, the encounter of two Australian environmental scientists at the University of Tasmania would lead to an intense collaboration to devise an alternative for the problem of widespread environmental
degradation due to conventional agricultural practices. Initiators Bill Mollison and David Holmgren sought for an approach to food production that would guarantee permanence. To them, the basic flaw in conventional methods was that they were all in conflict with the patterns of nature. To Mollison and Holmgren, a truly sustainable model should resolve this basic conflict and work with nature rather than against it.
The permaculture model for regenerative agriculture is geared at sustainably obtaining a yield while also improving ecological conditions. Permaculture therefore goes beyond the divide between production and preservation. Uniquely, permaculture practices appeal to improvers and lovers of nature alike and is consequently being picked up by people with a broad range of interests. The essence of this approach is simple, but hard to explain simply. First and foremost, it should be understood that permaculture is a method for design. The goal is to create sustainable human habitats by means of modeling natural patterns found in
ecosystems. Permaculturists approach this task by assembling conceptual, material and strategic components in order to establish three core ethics2: care for the earth, care for people and reinvest the surplus built up in the process to those ends. So permaculture is a practical design system as well as a philosophy that aims to establish a culture in which all living species reside on the earth in a healthy balanced state. In the subsequent section I will go into more detail on how exactly this global vision relates to local actions.
The philosophy of permaculture is grounded in the idea of holism. In the natural sciences, this is an idea that regards the world as a dynamic whole in which seemingly isolated parts are considered to be interconnected. This view practically translates into a specific focus on connections and relationships. For example, while conventional agricultural practices concentrate on maximizing the production of a few selected crop species, the permaculture approach aims to establish beneficial relationships between a wide variety of species. In this holistic approach, permaculturists aim to increase overall resilience3 while also
2
Various formulations are used in different permaculture books. Mine is based on Mollison (1988)
3 A term used in the field of systems theory to describe the capacity of a system to maintain its essential
functions by responding to change. In the field of ecology it is used to evaluate the health of an ecosystem and how human impact affects this health. The term was coined by renowned ecologist C.S. Holling, one of the conceptual founders of the field of ecological economics that lay the basis for a scientific movement with the
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enhancing the productive capacities of the ecosystem as a whole. Because they invest energy in diversity, permaculture designs always serve multiple purposes. By cultivating a wide range of ecosystem functions and products, these designs inherently cross disciplinary
boundaries. Perhaps most significantly, the sustainable management practices of permaculture uniquely align ecological interests with economics decisions – ‘a sign’, Williams (1980: 84) suggests, ‘that we are beginning to think in some necessary ways when we can conceive these becoming, as they ought to become, a single discipline’.
The fact that the interests of ecology and economics are currently often opposed is a direct result of not taking into account the intimate relationship of mutual dependence between man and nature. To do so is a matter of expanding the narrow anthropocentric perspective. Permaculture ethics provide a promising solution. In his Designer’s Manual the father of permaculture Bill Mollison explains:
The real difference between a cultivated (designed) ecosystem, and a natural system is that the great majority of species (and biomass) in the cultivated ecology is intended for the use of humans or their livestock. We are only a small part of the total primeval or natural species assembly, and only a small part of its yields are directly available to us. But in our own gardens, almost every plant is selected to provide or support some direct yield for people. Household design relates principally to the needs of people; it is thus human-centered (anthropocentric). This is a valid aim for settlement design, but we also need a nature-centered ethic for wilderness conservation. We cannot, however, do much for nature if we do not govern our greed, and if we do not supply our needs from our existing settlements. If we can achieve this aim, we can withdraw from much of the agricultural landscape, and allow natural systems to flourish. (1988: 7)
From a permaculture perspective, nature is seen as an intricate whole of different species that can be assembled according to their functions and use in that totality, rather than isolating the needs of a single species. Note that the difference between ‘cultivated’ and ‘natural’ systems does not principally refer to a conceptual distinction between man and nature, but rather to the intention of its design. Rather than putting the value of human creations in central place, a permaculture design covers the complexity of interconnections between all entities involved in the process of creation. Mollison:
aim of ‘extending and integrating the study and management of nature's household (ecology) and humankind's household (economics),’ as described on the official website of the journal Ecological Economics at
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You see, if you’re dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can’t connect them. We don’t have any power of creation – we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible (in AtKisson 1991).
Humans as the assemblers of nature; it is an interesting answer to the question of responsibility that comes with being a dominant force in shaping the earth.
From a critical point of view, the idea of humans as assemblers can still be seen as human-centered, or perhaps even arrogant. However, it is important to keep in mind that any environmental question inevitably requires humans to make decisions for non-humans. Famous moral philosopher Bernard Williams (1995: 233) addresses this issue by asking ‘Must a Concern for the Environment Be Centred on Human Beings?’ and reminds us of the fact that ‘conservation and related matters are uncontestably human issues, because, on this planet at least, only human beings can discuss them and adopt policies that will affect them’ (ibid). He closes the paper by illuminating the catch-22 that any lover or preserver of nature will inescapably face: ‘a nature which is preserved by us is no longer a nature that is simply not controlled. A natural park is not nature, but a park… Anything we leave untouched we have already touched’ (1995: 236). So what, he asks, might we do concretely? Though not in a single formula, the global permaculture movement is developing answers. In the next sections I will explore the imaginations and practices from which these answers are articulated and materialized.
Projects, images and ideals
Energies enter a system, and either remain or escape. Our work as permaculture designers is to prevent energy leaving before the basic needs of the whole system are satisfied, so that growth, reproduction and maintenance continue in our living
components. (Mollison 1988: 7)
Permaculture projects are currently developed across the globe. Many actively practicing permaculturists collectively engage in what Ortner (1984: 152) defines as ‘long-term
developmental’ projects. She adds that agents in such projects are ‘involved in relatively far-reaching transformations of their states of being – of their relationships with things, persons,
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and self,’ while their motives and actions are shaped by ‘images and ideals of what constitutes goodness – in people, in relationships, and in conditions of life.’ Taken together, these issues comprise the focus of this section as they relate to the permaculture movement.
Reflecting on the previous section, we can already see some of the main images and ideals that shape the actions and motives of permaculturists. Environmental concerns have obviously been a leading motive from the very beginning. The ideal of a harmonious unity of all living species with the earth is also clearly on the horizon. This image of unity
materializes in the three core ethics of permaculture (see previous section). Permaculturists creatively apply these ethics in their own lives, in whatever way they see fit. In practice, the idea of working with nature is always the main mantra. Together, these images and ideals serve as guidelines for rightful action and how to relate to the self, others and the world.
Loosely sharing this philosophical basis, permaculturists from all over the world engage in innovative sustainability projects. In doing so, a wide network of people collaborates in the grand project of establishing harmony on earth. Local projects are the concrete manifestations of this global vision. A successful permaculture project is built up from a multiplicity of living and non-living entities that are adapted to each other and the environment by forming as many mutually supportive relationships as possible. A holistic view allows for a deep understanding of how nature works, and thus inspires the practical methods of sustainable management and design. Environmental anthropologists Veteto & Lockyer (2008) present a first ethnographic account of what a permaculture project looks like in their case study at Earthaven Ecovillage.
The permaculture approach always focusses on concrete, practicable projects. Permaculture practices distinguish themselves from other forms of environmental action in that they connect holism to sustainability and management by design. These three aspects are at the core of any permaculture project. Applications range from small backyard gardens or even balcony setups, through to community gardens and demonstration sites, to eco-villages4 and larger commercial projects5 of up to 5000 acres. Around the world, a few thousand sizeable projects are loosely connected on the internet6. Permaculturists hold that their management strategies differ radically from conventional agricultural methods. In
4 The Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) connects ‘ecovillages, transition town initiatives, intentional
communities, and ecologically-minded individuals’, many of which incorporate permaculture. See
http://gen.ecovillage.org.
5 Browns Ranch located in Bismarck, North Dacota (US) is a successful example of a large permaculture-based
commercial business. See http://www.brownsranch.us.
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The Worldwide Permaculture Network is the main source on projects around the globe (see
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permaculture, it is emphasized that food crops are to be grown among a diverse collection of plant and animal species that interact to comprise a balanced ecosystem where chemical fertilizers and pesticides are obsolete. The picture of an agricultural field thus changes into what looks more like a garden, and crop products are gathered rather than harvested. Moreover, these gardens are always blended into the local environment, adjusting them to regional climatic conditions.
A good example is the demonstration site of early adopter and permaculture guru Robyn Francis in New South Wales, Australia. Francis was also a leading figure to lift the movement to a global scale as head of the Permaculture International Journal (PIJ) (Payne & Grayson 2007). On her official website,7 she describes how she set out to regenerate a degraded 5-acre pasture field. By taking into account climatic extremes (frosty winters and hot, dry springs) in her initial design, she came up with a system that takes optimal advantage of the varying microclimates. I quote from the website:
In autumn and through winter is the ideal time for all the European and temperate vegetables like cabbages, cauliflower, carrots, kales, mustard greens, beets, onion, garlic and lettuces. Spring is hot and dry, so perfect for Mediterranean and tropical dry season crops like sweet corn, squash, zucchini, beans, okra, gourds, cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes and time for establishing the tropical vegetables and tubers that thrive in our humid wet summer season including taro, cassava, yakon, turmeric and yams
This design of beneficial plant combinations is further supported by other organisms as well: A small flock of ducks manage the temperate orchard, fertilizing the trees, reducing pests and eating back the grasses and herbaceous understory. A flock of heritage chickens are located next to the vegetable garden to process weeds and crop residues into eggs and manure for the compost. Two very spoiled and friendly pigs, Polly and Pudge, are our main poo-producers for the compost heaps, and take care of food scraps, windfall fruit and relish many plants that we don’t eat like Canna edulis leaves, mulberry and bamboo leaves and weeds.
Other systems that have been incorporated include a pond with dams for water storage, buildings that regulate solar heat and collect rainwater, solar panels that capture energy, and
7
http://www.robynfrancis.com/category/permaculture/djanbung-gardens-permaculture/. Accessed on 10-04-2015
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composting toilets that build soil for the garden. In the course of about 20 years, Francis has developed her Djanbung Gardens project8 ‘from pasture to paradise’ and, apart from living there, opened it up to the public as ‘a permaculture education centre and living learn-scape’. Such demonstration projects are powerful messages from the permaculture movement to the world. Their symbolic value is seen as a vital tool in the long-term project to make the world appreciate the feasibility of permaculture. Moreover, they exemplify the uniquely modern, scientifically informed integration of plants, animals and modern technologies that lies at the heart of permaculture.
Besides the roles of technology and scientific knowledge, permaculture also draws on more ancient, spiritual ideas. The permaculture philosophy echoes the deep respect that Mollison holds for the indigenous cultures of his home country. In his Designer’s Manual he states:
For every scientific statement articulated on energy, the Aboriginal tribespeople of Australia have an equivalent statement on life. Life, they say, is a totality neither created nor destroyed. It can be imagined as an egg from which all tribes (life forms) issue and to which all return (1988: 2).
In permaculture, each organism (including the human being) is seen to have its own unique vital function in the world as a whole. Taking inspiration from indigenous knowledge, Mollison summarizes how this vision translates to a practical way of living:
The ideal way in which to spend one’s time is in the perfection of the expression of life, to lead the most evolved life possible, and to assist in and celebrate the existence of life forms other than humans, for all come from the same egg (ibid).
Similar references of indigenous knowledge appear throughout the global permaculture movement, and it is striking to see how easily they are being directed at a wide variety of cultures. Robyn Francis prefers a personal heritage to inform her permaculture practice:
Over the past several decades I have sought to unravel the essence of my European Celtic heritage and translate it to Nature’s rhythms and patterns in the Australian landscape and climate. As a gardener for over 30 years, permaculture teacher for nearly 30 years, and as a free spirit exploring the relationship of self to the Earth and beyond since my teens, it has been a natural progression to integrate this working
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knowledge of nature’s seasons and cycles within the spiritual framework of my Celtic heritage.9
Early adopter and permaculture guru Dan Hemenway (2009) neatly summarizes the
permaculture identity with three key words in the title of his article10 Living Lovingly on the Earth. Many permaculturists would agree with him that to establish a culture of life and love on the earth means a global effort to get in tune with nature:
It follows that if we love and respect the arrangements of land and weather and plants and animals that make up the Earth, then we wish to live within the bounds and patterns of these forces and beings. This has been done successfully by a variety of Neolithic peoples, such as the Amerindians of the American North East. Such peoples accepted and participated in the abundance offered by Nature. They did not attempt, as Western Society has, to ‘multiply and subdue the Earth.’ In my understanding,
‘permaculture’ is a word to stand for the process of bringing our lives back into participation with the processes of Earth (Hemenway 2009: 15-16).
Permaculturists often allude to indigenous peoples (whether they are Australian aboriginals, traditional Celts or Neolithic Amerindians) as inspirational figures whenever relationships with the earth or nature are at issue.
I have used several examples to provide insight into the global permaculture movement in terms of ‘images and ideals of what constitutes goodness – in people, in relationships, and in conditions of life’, from the theoretical perspective of practice theory (Ortner 1984: 152). We have seen that a wide variety of indigenous cultures become
enmeshed in the construction of such images and ideals. That said, permaculturists also have a fresh outlook on the future and take up cutting-edge science and technology to pursue their ideals. Such polar opposites seem to point straight at the heart of what this global movement is all about. Permaculture incorporates both science and spirituality, both modern technology and traditional wisdom, both plants and animals, both living and non-living entities. The purposes of permaculture projects cover the issues of both conservation and production, while the significance of these acts is both global and local. Most essentially, permaculture is about relationships that are both human and natural. Its ethics instruct to evenly take care for both
9
Quoted from her official personal website at http://www.robynfrancis.com/. Accessed on 10-04-2015
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people and the earth. In the end, permaculture is holistic and thus takes an important step beyond these polar opposites to see the world as union.
In the following sections I shed light on how images and ideals of both indigenousness and scientific management principles cultivate the identity of permaculturists. First, I explore the mythical image of the noble savage and its roots in European Romanticism. Next, I discuss the relation between forests and conservationism and show that nostalgic idealism coincides with modern appeals to science in a manner that is more seamless than one might expect.
The mythical noble savage
horrific… that tribal peoples, whose aim was to develop a conceptual and spiritual existence, have encountered a crude scientific and material culture. (...) The
experience of the natural world and its laws has almost been abandoned for closed, artificial and meaningless lives, perhaps best typified by the dreams of those who would live in space satellites and abandon a dying earth. (Mollison, 1988: 2) The term noble savage refers to a stereotype of a romantically idealized indigenous ‘other’ that lives primitively and is therefore unpolluted by the problems of European civilization (Hames 2007). Ellingson (2001) points out that although the term has its origins in the New World writings of French explorer Lescarbot, there is no evidence that early explorers ever attributed the same romantic characterizations to indigenous people as those that have come to be associated with the concept of the noble savage. However, the reason that I address
Romanticism here is not in the first place to give a historically accurate account of it, but rather to better understand romantic thinking about indigenous people by conservationists and environmentalists. Today, the oxymoronic term noble savage neatly unifies the seemingly contrasting notions of nobility and wildness through which indigenous people have been romantically characterized since at least the nineteenth century. I will therefore elaborate in this chapter on the tradition of Romanticism for the purpose of understanding nineteenth century romantic idealizations of indigenous people. My aim is to show how nineteenth-century romanticism became the philosophical basis for early conservationists.
The noble savage debate in academics traces romantic thinking about indigenous people back to European explorers of the New World in the early 17th century (Hames 2007: 179). In short, the idea is that native Indians and their tropical environments in the Americas
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inspired European explorers and scholars to imagine natural, exotic ways of life. Simplified idealizations of Indian lifestyles then caught the imaginations of a broad public. The concept of the noble savage blended into broad debates about the dichotomy between nature and society during the Enlightenment (Berkhofer 1979). Opposing the strong emphasis on reason at the time, the philosophical tradition of Romanticism praised a return to instinct, emotion and intuition as natural guiding forces for a good life as it can be seen and felt directly through the senses. Idealized images of ‘natural’, uncivilized indigenous peoples were employed in arguments to contrast the tainted, artificial products of society (Berkhofer 1979: 76).
A leading figure in eighteenth century romantic thinking was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that for several reasons society had largely been corrupted. To escape the
restrictions of what he saw as polluted social institutions, Rousseau proposed new laws that would assist in a return to the ‘natural state’ of man. He states:
The example of savages, almost all of whom have been found in this state, seems to confirm that the human race had been made to remain in it always; that this state is the veritable youth of the world; and that all the subsequent progress has been in
appearance so many steps toward the perfection of the individual, and in fact toward the decay of the species (Rousseau et al. 1987 [1754]: 65).
Progress (particularly the absence of it) is an important theme in the romantic view on the good life. Indigenous people are idolized for remaining pure, which is seen as a result of not being part of the ‘decaying’ developments in Europe. By not considering these exotic figures as part of the same history as Europe, people living on other continents were romantically mystified.
In his essay on Orientalism, Edward Said (1978) describes a similar process of European imagining. He uses the metaphor of a drama with Europe at large as the audience that watches the social other (in his case people from the Orient) on a stage. Said emphasizes that from this strongly imaginative position Europeans become ‘historically and culturally responsible’ for the unfolding of the drama (1978: 63). It is in this fashion that natives on far away continents are imagined as primitives that still live in another era. Like characters in a drama, they are in some sense ‘stuck’ in time, undisturbed by progress.
Taken together, the romantic associations that make up the exotic noble savage stereotype are all rooted in broader themes of primitivism, naturalness, purity and the good life. Each of these themes directly relate to the topics of debate that were relevant in the
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specific time and place that their romantic users themselves were situated in. The themes are portable, and can be picked up and used by anyone at any time. Thus, the myth of the noble savage can be seen portable constructs that can travel straight to the present. It is due to this portability that the noble savage has more recently come to be associated with conservation. Hames (2007) reviews how narratives on the science of ecology and sustainability have come to incorporate the noble savage. In the modern environmental discourses on conservation, the ‘ecologically noble savage’ is associated with a lifestyle of living in harmony with the
environment (Hames 2007: 179).
A similar reference is contained in the philosophy of permaculture, as seen in the passage from Mollison’s Designer’s Manual that I quoted in the opening of this section. Its modern references aside, the words of Mollison show striking thematic similarities to the excerpt I quoted from Rousseau. In both cases romantic narratives on indigenousness are employed as historical devises. These devises are used either as evidence in social critique or as a sort of moral compass in a search for how to live properly. Whatever the case may be, imaginations about the other are always in a more direct sense about the audience itself. In the case of the noble savage, these imaginations are about an existential search for how to relate to nature. In the next chapter we shall see how this very same search extends to the non-human world.
Mythical forests
Forests, not seen by industrial man as anything but wood, are another permanent agriculture. But they need generations of care and knowledge, and hence a tribal or communal reverence only found in stable communities. (Mollison, 1988: 6) Early romanticists expressed the same adoration for newly explored tropical landscapes as they did for the native inhabitants of the New World. As the quote above exemplifies, forests are particularly favored objects of romantic idealizations. However, evenly important to understand the roots of permaculture, in this section I discuss the science of forest
conservation. I will point out that the merging between romantics and conservationists has given rise to an important dimension of hard science within the idealistic image of forests. Forest conservation represents a marriage between Romanticism and scientific principles. In turn, that marriage has given birth to the profession of forest management and the first conservation movement.
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Stott (1999) asserts that tropical landscapes are natural magnets for European myth making. A glance at the myths that surround lush tropical forests reveals that they are attributed notions of primitivism that are strikingly similar to romantic idealizations of
indigenous people. Stott shows that exotic people and exotic landscapes alike are romantically imagined as existing in a state of natural unity and harmony, constituting the ultimate good life. Such views continue to appear in more recent popular Western culture. William Denevan is professor emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and as an expert of indigenous demography he has written on The Pristine Myth. Denevan (1992) points out that the view of a pristine pre-Columbian America with primitive inhabitants is a romantic invention that remains surprisingly prevalent. He draws an example from the popular book Seeds of change: a quinticentennial commemoration, which was published by the
Smithsonian Institute11 in honor of their 1991-1993 exhibition12 of the same title: pre-Columbian America was still the First Eden, a pristine natural kingdom. The native people were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the ecosphere. Their world, the New World of Columbus, was a world of barely perceptible human disturbance (Shetler 1991: 226 in Denevan 1992: 370).
Aside from demonstrating the contemporary prevalence of romanticized tropical landscapes and their inhabitants, the quote from the Smithsonian Institute also serves as an example for the seamless mixing of such romantic views with scientific terms like ‘ecosphere’.
Stott (1999) points out that since the First Voyage of Columbus in the late fifteenth century, tropical forest vegetation has been romantically depicted by scientists as incredibly fertile, diverse and exotic in comparison to the European home land. Moreover, he identifies two more recent myths that depict the tropical forests as ‘“primeval”, a refuge surviving from a classical Golden Age of the World, unsullied by human sin’ and ‘a woven organismic entity’ (1999: 19). This latter constructs of the tropical forest as an individual organism
dominated the field of scientific ecology in the first half of the 20th century. Stott explains that this is a Darwinian train of thought in which vegetation is seen as a monotonous whole that evolves until it reaches a harmoniously balanced adult stage. According to Stott, romanticists embraced this scientific view and pointed to the tropical rain forest as the ultimate living manifestation of harmony with nature (1999).
11 The world’s largest museum and research complex and the national museum in the United States. Official
website: http://www.si.edu/ . Accessed on 10-04-2015
12
‘Seeds of Change’ was a popular national exhibition on Columbus' discovery of America in 1492 (see also Viola, 1991)
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In addition to feeding into romantic idealizations of nature, Darwinian scientific theories also informed a first progressive political movement for centralized state
management in the United States around the turn of the 20th century. According to historian Brian Balogh (2002), this wave of progressive reforms promised to strengthen the nation by centralizing control over crucial elements of the economy. Scientific management principles were employed to direct large state-building programs. Balogh explains that the social force was strong as the gospel of the Protestant work ethic went hand in hand with an economic shift to more intensive production. Efficiency and usefulness were key words in a moral effort to direct the fruits of labor and national resources to the benefit of the common good. Balogh speaks of an efficiency craze in which ‘so-called efficiency experts captured the imagination of millions of Americans’ through the upcoming media (2002: 202). With resource
management now high on the national agenda, the time had come to ensure the health of a vital source of economic prosperity, namely forests.
Balogh attests that national programs for scientific forest management are at the root of the modern American state, and all is in virtue of a leading figure by the name of Gifford Pinchot, who established these programs in 1905. A unique blend of political influence and specialized forestry training in Europe would take Pinchot a long way as one of the first people in history to convince a large public about the importance of conservation. Prior to his drastic state reforms, forestry did not even exist in the educational system. As a young upper-class gentleman, Pinchot had to invent the profession in an effort to merge his love for the outdoors with Protestant romantic ideals to preserve nature and efficiently manage God’s resources (Balogh 2002: 201-203). In an important way, forestry can be seen to represent a marriage between Romanticism and 20th century development ideals. Foresters represented a new social group of scientifically informed romanticists to whom ‘forests were not only a source of beauty, they were also a crop’ (Balogh 2002: 209).
Pinchot received his education in scientific forestry in Europe from Sir Dietrich Brandis – then the leading authority in the world, managing forests in India and Burma in service of the British. Brandis taught a systematic approach that revolved around planning forest growth. When managed successfully, the condition of the forest as a whole is improved while the production of lumber is regularized. The central idea is that preservation and
production become complementary forces in maintaining ‘sustainable yield’ (ibid). Pinchot saw a great potential to apply these early sustainability ideas more broadly to the management of natural resources in general. This insight culminated into what became his philosophy of conservation. Thus, around 1907, Pinchot started the first large political conservation
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movement that sought to manage the natural resources of the United States by applying the sustainability principles of scientific forestry. In addition to its modern appeal, however, Pinchot also insisted on the archaic essence of conservation. In a reflective paper that he wrote in 1937, the early conservationist announces that his approach has a long history in the ancient practices of what he calls ‘Indian tribes’, stating that ‘you can either say that
conservation is “as old as the hills,” or you can say that it began thirty years ago. Both are true.’ (Pinchot 1937: 255)
In the next chapter, I will elaborate further on conservationism and its evolution into environmentalism. It will suffice here to recapitulate that the origins of the conservation movement are dual. On the one hand, conservation can be understood as one of the major innovations of the early 20th century that grew out of modern scientific principles as applied in the young discipline of forestry. In this light, conservation appears as the first rational, scientific attempt at large scale resource management. On the other hand, conservation can also be understood as a 20th century manifestation of the classical tradition of Romanticism. The movement then appears as part of a longer history of myth creation and the idealization of nature and indigenous people in European thought. As we have seen, conservation debates are informed by both scientific principles and romantic ideals. Therefore, both strands of knowledge represent important traces as they echo in the environmentalist narratives of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
The age of modern noble savages
Permaculture as a design system contains nothing new. It arranges what was always there in a different way, so that it works to conserve energy or to generate more energy than it consumes. What is novel, and often overlooked, it that any system of total common-sense design for human communities is revolutionary! (Mollison: 1988: 9) As science progressed, ideas about the environment were elevated to a whole new level during the latter half of the 20th century. Ecologist had earlier been explaining environmental development in terms of isolated collections of vegetation (regarding the tropical rain forest as the ultimate manifestation of a harmonious adult stage). Innovations such as the theory on energy systems by Odum (1971) in the field of ecology, the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock (1972) in the field of earth science and ecologically informed perspectives in
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anthropology13 paved the way to a more holistic and globally oriented understanding of the relation between humans and the environment. In this section I will discuss how these modern environmental understandings connect to the noble savage myth and the permaculture
movement.
Earlier in this thesis I have discussed how environmentalism relates to the concept of a risk society that lives beyond the end of nature. Following Giddens (1999), I pointed out that perceptions of risk and uncertainty are coupled with the idea of separated man and nature to generate what Little (1999: 254) calls ‘an explicit, active concern with the relationship between human groups and their respective environments’. Reviewing Environmental Discourses, Mühlhäusler & Peace (2006: 463) show that the origins of this discourse lie ‘in the environmental and human disasters provoked by technology… following the economic and cultural conquest of the earth by European colonizers.’ Such references to technology, conquest and colonialism reveal a romantic mistrust in the polluting and decaying
developments of civilization. Since the latter half of the 20th century, unsustainable
development and its related environmental degradation have become worldwide phenomena that increasingly feed into perceptions of risk and uncertainty on the part of environmentalists. Mühlhäusler & Peace (2006: 459) assert that the corresponding discourse is ‘an attempt by risk society members to make sense of the global changes that affect them.’ As part of an effort to make sense of the world, some environmentalists that are exploring alternatives to industrial development have turned their gaze at indigenous others. History repeated itself as this romantic endeavor went again hand in hand with science, this time because ‘the idea that native peoples lived in harmony with the environment was reinforced indirectly in the field of cultural ecology through the energy flow theory of Odum (1972) and others’ (Hames 2007: 179).
Anthropologist Paul Nadasdy (2005) critically analyzes how environmentalist ideals of ecological nobility invoke native traditions and philosophies. He observes that
environmentalists draw inspiration from native peoples through a pattern of imaginations that is similar to that of earlier conservationists. He mentions the case of Gifford Pinchot who was inspired by observations on Indian conservation practices in establishing scientific forest management (Nadasdy 2005: 298). Another central figure in the conservation movement, anthropologist George Bird Grinnell extensively visited the Pawnee and other native Indian Plain tribes on fieldwork trips and based his conservation philosophy on these experiences.
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Grinnell and Pinchot both saw Native Americans as ‘original conservationists’ (Nadasdy 2005: 299, also see Hames 2007: 179). Nadasdy points out that similarly, environmentalist thought ‘portrays indigenous people as environmentalists par excellence’ (2005: 292). He also shows that ironically, although the idea of ecological nobility is a western construct,
environmentalists regard various indigenous cultures as ‘intellectual predecessors’ and imagine the stereotypical noble savage as ‘one who holds the philosophical keys to
environmental revolution’ (2005: 299). While Nadasdy uses these insights to shed light on the ramifications for indigenous cultures, I wish to look more closely at how images of
ecologically noble others affect the very same environmentalists that construct them. In reviewing The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate, Hames (2007: 180) asserts that ‘Much of the debate… revolves around how conservation is defined along with the allied concepts of management and sustainability’ and that ‘conservation refers to actions that prevent or mitigate biodiversity loss and are designed to do so.’ In other words, true
conservation is done deliberately and excludes the mitigation of biodiversity loss that occurs epiphenomenally (as a side effect of actions with other purposes, e.g. spiritual beliefs). In this light, Hames brings together a wide range of studies to conclude that ‘conservation by native peoples is uncommon’ (2007: 186). While it is clear that many native populations sustainably extract resources (often as a consequence of low population density, limited technology or consumer demand), there is no evidence that they deliberately enhanced their environment. As Hames (2007) also points out, this distinction is important because deliberate conservation will guarantee sustainable ethics even in cases of societal or environmental changes, while epiphenomenal conservation does not.
Nevertheless, in the romantic imaginations of many environmentalists, indigenous people have always been deliberately conserving their local ecologies. In the section on projects, images and ideals in the permaculture movement I showed that a wide variety of indigenous cultures are enmeshed in ideas about what constitutes goodness. In taking responsibility for human impacts on the environment, permaculturists live after the very images of indigenous ecological nobility that they themselves have constructed. Thus it becomes evident that the crux of the noble savage myth lies not in historical facts but in the constructs of the imagination. When the construction of an ecologically noble attitude by permaculturists is of concern, the factual dispute about whether or not indigenous people have actually ever been practicing conservation loses relevance. As Hames puts it, ‘although conservation may be a western construct, its origins do not render it faulty or inapplicable’ (Hames 2007: 181).
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Thus the notion of ecological nobility and even the whole idea of conservation turn out to be explicitly modern social phenomena. It is only very recently in the history of humanity that people have the technological capacity to regard the earth and nature as an intricately connected system, as modern ecology would have it. However, this holistic view only
provides a philosophical basis for conservation. In other words, one who sincerely retains the philosophy of conservation is merely potentially ecologically noble. Earlier in this thesis I referred to moral philosopher Bernard Williams (1995: 4) who is joined by Hames (2007: 181) in pointing out that conservation is ultimately about human impact as it results from concrete actions. Permaculturists distinguish themselves from other environmentalists on exactly this practical level. It is by working with a concrete design system for the sustainable management of resources and organisms that permaculturists have established a first approach at true ecological nobility. I propose that it is in this very noble character that the contagious appeal of the permaculture movement emanates from. Considering its global stretch and accessible approach, it is not implausible that permaculture is in effect the first global attempt at deliberate conservation. At the least, this perspective helps to better understand the father of permaculture Bill Mollison when he states:
What is now possible is a totally new synthesis of plant and animal systems, using a post-industrial or even computerised approach to system design, applying the principles of whole-system energy flows as devised by Odum (1971), and the
principles of ecology as enunciated by Watt and others. It is, in the vernacular, a whole new ball game to devise permaculture systems for local, regional, and personal needs. (1988: 6)
The permaculture approach breaks out of the paradigm that separates man from nature. Through their practices, permaculturists give substance to a worldview where man and nature are in union. By aligning their conservation ideology with concrete ethics and local actions, permaculturists do not only imagine what ecological nobility could be like; they become it. Ecologically noble savages have never actually existed as environmentalists imagine them – that is, until recently. The permaculture movement exemplifies that concrete practices can bring the mythical noble savage to life, albeit a modern version. Unlike what one might expect, the nostalgic appeal for planetary harmony crystallizes into reality not despite, but because of modern developments in science and technology. The deliberate conservationists of today are the modern incarnations of the age-old idea of ecological nobility. Translating romantic images into scientific practices, they are, in other words, modern noble savages.
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The appeal of working with nature
Since it was devised in the 1970s, the permaculture approach has stimulated people from all over the world in their pursuits to live sustainably. My aim in this thesis was to better understand this growing appeal. To that end I have analyzed the permaculture philosophy of working with nature and how it relates to environmental concerns and ecological
conservation. In this concluding section I propose what insights can be drawn from this analysis.
The central aim of the permaculture movement is to establish a sustainable
relationship with nature. Coming from a society that commonly sees nature as separate from man, this means a radical break with hegemonic meanings. Embedded in the idea of holism, permaculture projects showcase creative alternatives to present environmental challenges. Whereas the idea of separation leads to an impossible dilemma between exploitation and preservation, the design principles of permaculture offer a way out of this impasse. By following the patterns of nature, permaculturists assemble their environments in such a way that production and regeneration go hand in hand. Permaculture is at the same time an ideology of being in union with nature and a practical design system for ethical action. Its philosophy and practices therefore speak to the uncertainties and worries of a wide range of risk society members that seek a moral framework for living and acting in the world.
Whether it is in the holistic vision of a thriving culture of life on earth or in the concrete design of locally adapted projects, the idea of harmony continually turns up in permaculture. As it turns out, the idea of harmony has always been intimately connected to the scientific principles of ecological conservation. Since the first conservation movement and the corresponding discipline of scientific forestry, management practices for sustainability have always aimed to reach a harmoniously balanced state between production and
regeneration. While modern scientific developments support contemporary conservation-minded people like permaculturists to achieve the same aim but on a global scale, the idea of harmony also turns up in nostalgic imaginations about a fictional past. These are romantic narratives about rightful ways of living that praise ecological nobility and in which the mythical noble savage is the incontestable protagonist. Underlying these imaginations are images of native people that mirror a western construct of conservation. By idolizing imagined ecologically noble others, permaculturists are inspired to concretely enhance the environment and adopt an attitude of responsibility and care for earth and life. In this light,
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the permaculture approach can be understood as a means for environmentalists to concretely act upon their concerns and actively practice the ideal of ecological nobility.
The growing appeal of this global movement reveals how members of risk society deal with the global changes that affect them. The imaginations and practices of permaculturists show how age-old existential questions about the place of man in nature are employed in dealing with modern environmental challenges. They also show how people merge romantic imaginations of naturalness with scientific principles to combine global political efforts with their everyday desires for rightful living. All these various expressions culminate in the core permaculture idea of working with nature. Through this idea, the permaculture movement collectivizes people that want to live in a sustainable present and move into a sustainable future.
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entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper."
