Wesley Roe, one of the longtime leaders* in the permaculture-design and bioregionalism movements, started a thread on his page where he asserts that permaculture has gotten an undeserved bad rap. Many people claim that permaculture is cultural appropriation, but he asserts that is not the case. Many people, including myself, have chimed in on this thread with other viewpoints. The thread is public and you can view it here.
(*Permaculture is a non-hierarchical grassroots movement, and we don’t have “leaders” in the conventional Anglo/Eurocentric sense. When I refer to a leader in the permaculture or bioregional communities, I am talking about a person who has assumed a greater level of care and responsibility for the collective, via such means as teaching, advocacy, and activism.)
Excellent and very important thread, definitely go follow the original post and comments.
Here is a bit of one of the comments; and my response:
Excerpt from comment by Farmer Rishi Kumar: “If permaculture was a ‘decolonial’ framework, why doesn’t it start with focusing on real decolonial changes like advocating for land return, reparations, actually democratic systems? Instead we get a focus on private gardens, swales, homesteads <nausea and vomit emoticons>, self-reliance.”
And my response:
Yes! <five stars> Exactly!
Actually, when I first started studying permaculture, my understanding of it was more along the lines of what you described.
And I think it got corrupted into this private “private garden / homestead” movement which is totally not what it is supposed to be about, based on what we were taught.
It’s gotten really bad, to the point where most people who join permaculture groups are just really focused on their own private food forest and not even focused on any other aspect of permaculture such as energy cycling. And when I or others bring up the ethics, talk about land back and decolonization etc., people accuse us of communism. (Not that there’s anything wrong with communism per se. It’s very telling that that’s the worst insult in their book.)
The things we were taught in class had to do with solving “modern society problems” together using nature-based practices from other places and times. And we were taught where the different practices originated from.
The Permaculture classes that I took were very much focused on collective resources, taking care of community as top priority.
And my response to a fellow anglo/euro person who reports that he is teaching permaculture in Africa:
One thing missing from these kinds of conversations, I often find, is that colonialism is the original culprit in how people lost their indigenous practices in the first place and became vulnerable to mass starvation and other disasters.
We, by which I mean white colonizers, oppressed them and made them dependent!
We deprecated traditional building methods, farming methods, etc. — and traditional structures of governance — as being “primitive,” and sold the idea of the “modern” mechanized, hierarchical, centralized, standardized way as being great. So-called “modern” industrialized Anglo/Euro-centric culture is brutish and uncivilized.
It doesn’t mean that there is no place for technology or industrial equipment etc.; but the oppressive structures need to be dismantled. It’s work that needs to be part of Permaculture. I have sometimes thought that if Bill Mollison knew these concepts he would probably have written them into the book. I didn’t know these words and concepts back when I first took my Permaculture courses, but I did get that feel from the Permaculture courses back then.
Maybe if we acknowledge this more, it would help.
You can view the original thread here, and I highly recommend it!