When the demise of civilization became apparent to me, going wild was the first choice, but currently, it seems the most unreasonable choice of action. Apart from all the regulations in place for hunting, there is very little untouched wilderness out there. And unless you want to go to Alaska, it’s hard to be “wild” when you have to watch for cars when you cross the road from one part of the forest to another. It would also alienate your tremendously, as this type of behavior would be misunderstood by most and make you a target. Also, because of the alienation, it would be next to impossible to perpetuate your views.

I’m not saying that going full wild isnt the way to go, it’s just that the step is too drastic for most people, and at a current level, could sustain very few people.

The world has no place for big artificial and flawed organizational units like the federal government and corporations, but all life is some sort of organization. The US in particular will be much better off as 50 different countries, or tribes, not having to agree on every decision. Civilization needs to die, but the people don’t have to. What is seen as a problem of overpopulation, I see as a problem of population density. The US is almost 2 billion acres. With 300 million Americans at 1/4 acre per person (more than enough to achieve food self sufficiency) that still leaves 1.925 billion acres that people won’t inhabit. Even India, which is pretty bad with population would have around half a billion acres in reserve for wilderness, zone 5 essentially. There isn’t much focus on zone 5 in permaculture so you might feel that it’s not doing it justice, but if you want the current population to have self sufficient food production, there needs to be little emphasis on zone 5. As long as it’s mentioned and planned for and designed for, it’s going in the right direction. This will allow the wilderness to reestablish itself, so that people like you, who want wilderness now, can poke around it freely, and decide how you want to utilize or maintain, or coexist, whichever semantic you chose, with it.

With the collapse of current social structures emanating over us, it’s clear that only broad scale social awakening can save it. It’s not really saving, just making a dethronement of current powers more pleasant. While some of us are preparing for nuclear holocaust, food shortages, and mass mayhem in the streets, this is not what most people would like to see, outside of conditioning by the media. The way of awakening seemed to me to be too far fetched, but after time, I start to see more signs of progress, steps in the right direction.

I think what permaculture does, at least in the way I apply it, is create a path from civilization to wilderness, and uses the vocabulary that you so hate because that’s the only thing that would be familiar to the misguided masses. You could say “self sufficient food production” instead of “sustainable agriculture”. Bill Mollison actually goes though quite length to provide his definition of sustainable, and is as critical, if not more, of green washing as you. In a world full of green washing, it’s good to have something that can say sustainable and actually mean it. And it’s far from just trying to save civilization. Bill makes apparent the problems of society and a good starting place on how to solve them.

The notion of land ownership doesn’t sit well with me either, but it’s working within the current system to bring it down, because as I said, simply picking up and going to live in a forest won’t do much good. But if you purchase some land in the arid part of Texas where there are no people nearby, you can permaculture your property and use that as a base to reforest the rest of the humanless desert without much opposition. Lastly, I see this as the least “working within the system” way to stop paying taxes, which should be the first step in withdrawing support for your government.

I don’t see nationalized military controlled agriculture happening in this country, to a point of land seizure for the purpose of food production, as the agriculture bubble will burst not only because of soil erosion, but irrigation, fuel, food quality, etc.

Permaculture is just a collection of natural principles and patterns, and it’s up to you how you want to use them. The current trend is to apply them to agriculture, to increase yields, minimize inputs, etc etc, and it sure is better than the food production system that is in place. But there is knowledge and technique in there that can be applied to repairing damage in any landscape, and how to live on that landscape, obtained from indigenous people from all over the world, and it’s silly to stay ignorant of this information simply because of semantics.

Instead of books, I recommend the permaculture design course. I’m looking through the 13 dvd set now, it seems the most informative of the ones out there.

I do think that the original article presents permaculture in a somewhat superficial way. For example, the permaculture principles include the idea of community and see community as a key element, very different from the idea of each person having a self-contained permaculture homestead. The permaculture principles involve lots of observation of the natural world. In my own experience, this has involved something like rewilding, since it requires that I notice all the living things around me, the sun, the rain, all of it. In some ways, this may be an opening into rewilding.

At the same time, I do think that there is a gap between rewilding (as I understand it from writers like Quinn and Jensen) and permaculture. There are the permaculture principles and the practice of permaculture. One of the differences for me is that permaculture is anthrocentric and rewilding is centered on what Jensen calls the landbase. While permaculture tries hard to be egalitarian, in practice there is something somewhat hierarchical about it that I associate with having civilization as the center of concern, even if it is a different more earth-friendly civilization.

I would definitely say this about Transition Towns. Transition Towns appear to be all about civilization, sustainable civilization, not industrial civilization, and the transition to sustainable civilization. There is a lot of focus, for instance, on alternative currency systems and alternative energy. Energy descent plans with local governments are part of the plan. It’s a way to reform civilization. Those things are not wrong if in fact they become a transitional stage to rewilding, but they are generally seen as part of the relocalization design of TT and a way to maintain a civilization, far from rewilding.

I’m very unhappy with the blending of Steiner-based biodynamic farming and permaculture (Holmgren’s permaculture and Hopkins in Transition Towns). The biodynamic movement comes from the Steiner tradition, and TT appears to have some roots there, too. There is something disquieting about Rudolph Steiner apart from the historical associations that are extremely disquieting. There is quite a bit of invisible hierarchy in the Steiner movement up to the present. There are a variety of secretive practices in Steiner, very different from the transparency and egalitarianism in rewilding in my limited understanding of it. I don’t find permaculture alone to contain this secrecy, but a biodynamic/permaculture blend does contain it. Steiner is definitely not rewilding, in fact, he felt indigenous peoples and animals were little more than mud when it came to spiritual development, and (caucasian, blond, blue-eyed) civilized people were at a pinnacle of spirituality and their civilizations should be based on that. Steiner education is designed to move children up the ladder, though it is felt that some will never be able to progress much. These hidden beliefs still inform Steiner practice at the center of the movement, nor have they been admitted and disowned by the Steiner movement in health, education, or agriculture/food production.

Another term for permaculture is ecological gardening and I like this term better. As I understand it Mollison did not want permaculture to be taught in colleges or schools, but rather to be taught to people who lived in villages, often third world places. These were not indigenous people in the wild, but closer to it than the industrial civilizations that are part of the first world.

Urban permaculture is a new emphasis from what I’ve seen. In one way, it’s possible that this could be a part of the dismantling of civilization. If urban lots are made into permaculture gardens, it would be a step in the right direction. One of the cities that is collapsing the most, Detroit, has some permaculturalists and also some people who want to buy up land and have large traditional farms. The permaculturalists are closer to rewilding, even though both may dismantle harmful elements of civilization, like concrete.

I’ll look forward to reading the final draft in the book.

I need all my fingers and toes to count yhe instances where you have misunderstood about Permaculture.

If the idea was to get response, it works. But only becuase it is such a ill formed attack on Permaculture that it grates on me and my fingers can not help but respond.

Do a bit of research next time.

Or better still. Do a Permaculture course.

the ethos of total collapse has certainly become more widespread since the original conception of permaculture, which is an ongoing experiential educational enterprise. an enterprise which can learn much from urban scout and the rewild movement.

i assume that a total critique of civilization is omitted from much of the permaculture literature as either a given, and/or as a means of not alienating a potential, more domesticated, drunk-on civilization and its enjoyable technologies, crew/audience. its true, a permaculturist is generally not much of a luddite, nor hunter-gather wannabe, in my experience.

in rewild vs. permaculture (which i do not read as mutually exclusive, but as a contrast/compare function) i would emphasise the ‘zone 5′ dimension. permaculturists seem to insist that zone 5 be left alone. rewilders seem to exist exclusively in zone 5. many environmentalists deeply desire sanctuaries devoid of human trace.
the zone 5 concept is naive in the sense that, since humans are a part of nature, we have been altering its ecology since our origins, as does every living plant and animal. in the more harmonious 99.9% of human history, hunter-gatherers have been hunting, foraging and cutting down trees for firewood/shelter. there has never been a virgin landscape since homo sapiens sapiens came along. paradise found is a paradise lost. but perhaps we should say paradise altered. we’re aren’t total misanthropists are we, scout?

as a budding permaculturista (tho i consider myself a survivalist first), i feel that much of pc has neglected the importance of zone 5. this is probably due to the fact that there is so much to learn about proper management of the home/energy use/garden/orchard in terms of how grossly off course we have gone in our journey as western civilisation and its insistent globalisation. permaculture may focus on food ‘production’ because the ‘green revolution’ has been such a shit storm. ‘we’ll get to zone 5 later.’ so here we are: further research/collaboration required.

as an urban permaculturist, zone 5 can be interpreted as ‘everything unmanageable outside of my home and garden’ ie. the juggernaut of progress and urban excrement at large + all those nice national parks a few hours drive away. it can be too much to try to handle, especially in a mainstream culture insistent on dismantling true community.

i like to think that when i abandon my garden someday, in search of shelter from the coming storm, it will be a tear-jerking haven to the knowledgeable forger passing through. and there are definitely seeds in my survival pack.

as for post-instable-period-post-collapse, i imagine a world of variable communities and migrating tribes -whatever floats the boat for the person on their current stage of personal development. in the diversity of which, i would hope to share my horticultural and ‘permaculture’ knowledge. aahhhh dreams of utopia.

ps – obviously some of could use some anger management here. god knows i did after the incessant rage my inner animal developed from learning how entrapped and poisoned we had become. nip it in the bud people! anger is a useful tool but u have to know how to use it effectively!

I see a symptomatic word it this, the word produce. This is where the permies “logic” is wrong. They want to “PRODUCE” food and worst than that to “PRODUCE SURPLUS”. Permies take the relation between population and food in reverse direction, a fatal flaw. The same junklogic behind agriculturalism. Mad, Mad,and stupid idiot running natural law in reverse order.

Permaculture = PRODUCE so permaculture is shit for me.

right, if the ‘permaculturist’ had followed permaculture principles he would have done just that. i take it that because one person who calls themselves a permaculturist and makes one mistake violating permaculture principles while doing so, you’d like us to completely discount permaculture. utter nonsense.

this is so incorrect on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to begin. please educate yourself before misleading others.

Last fall, I seeded several greens on a Garden Earth Project ReGardening demonstration site. In just a few weeks, a lovely Mizuna plant, which had been seeded amidst wild grasses and leaves was beginning to grow quite healthy and large.

A permaculturist who was assisting me on the site saw the Mizuna surrounded by the grasses and became quite distressed. He was concerned that the grasses would deplete the nitrogen and stunt the Mizuna. His solution was to scrape all the grasses away from the Mizuna. He also established a “natural” rock border to accent the plant and prevent it from being stepped on.

Over night, the healthy, growing Mizuna was gone – nothing left but the stub of a stem.

What the permaculturist had failed to recognize, was that in scrapping away the nitrogen sucking grasses, he destroyed the homes of hundreds of insects, and also bared the ground, removing the moisture retaining ground cover and allowing the soil to evaporate, weakening and traumatizing the plant. The angry, hungry displaced insects attacked the weakened, dehydrated Mizuna plant, rapidly devouring it. It never recovered.

Had he simply allowed things to be, without interfering with the symbiotic relationships of plants and insects that had already been successfully established, the Mizuna would have grown to full maturity, reseeded the location, and been the source of many future Mizuna plants for generations to come.

And that, in a nutshell, is my experience with the difference between the permaculture approach and the ReGardening/ReWilding approach to plant/food propagation.

Anyways, a few months ago a presentation at a sustainability seminar turned me on to Permaculture. I only recently purchased the designer’s manual, and I’ve only skimmed it. I highly respect the intent and the philosophy seems sound so far as I can tell and I feel the teachers are doing good work. I do have criticism though.

1) Domestication taken as a given. Not the plant management per se, I refer to the non-humyn animals. The permaculture presenter spoke of using the foraging of Indian Runner Ducks (a Malaysian domestic breed) because they cannot fly away (capitalizing upon their domestication rather than helping or allowing them to rewild). Also, the “lawn-mower” practice of moving foraging animals in pens. The level of containment (& planting bushes that serve as walls) seems contrary to re-wilding, and I feel it disrespects our non-humyn neighbors. Freedom of movement seems pretty essential for respectful relationships. I need to read pc’s take on aquaculture bofore making assumptions about that, but the rest stands. You have a slippery slope here. The logic of domestication flows easily from breeding plants and animals into humyn eugenics and racial superiority. We must tell lies of superiority in order to justify our victimizing of others. It flows easily from caged animals to caged humyns. It always comes full circle.

The divisions of zones 1-4 & then 5 seems important. From what I read, it comes across as the Orignal Sin mentality: we can’t live sustainably in wilderness (this externali ing of our own being), so we must completely manufacture a habitat with a strong element of control. I will concede most of the civilized, myself included, should not be try reckless forms of “earth-stewardship” without learning and connecting, to make climax ecosystems. Mother Earth should be let to rewild Herself, but I beleive humyns need to play an active role in helping her, rather than consigning ourselves to gardening. The duality of complete authority in 1-4, and then the thought that zone 5 is to be left to itself, seems like a conflicting duality; it implies an alienation from being a sustainable symbiont of the wild, which doesn’t seem to be rewilding. They also seem to advocate terra-forming the land, and if there are plants that humyns act allergenic towards, will pc teachers teach the students’ to hold to Mollison’s concept of working with it rather than against it?

Also, Permaculturists need to absolutely, unequivocably discourage consumption of cereal grains – the exorphins and lectins poison us; we didn’t evolve to consume diets of cultivated grasses. The studies and paleo dieters demonstrate the addictive and unhealthy natures of cereal grains by the superior health of those who return to our Pleistocene niche diet.

Also, pc has another dangerous assumption. As any “well-researched” anarcho-primitivist text will show us, sedentary living is disastrous for us, we evolved as nomads. The systemic lack of excercise increases womyn’s ovulation, and coupled with direct control of food supply, creates the positive feedback loop that created cities. And there are other biological aspects too, such as the high protein, lean meat, non-domesticated meat inherent to foraging diets that counteract fertility & thus population/consumption growth, among other things. Also, sedentism allows for property accumulation (& thus inequality). Even in the Pacific Northwest Natives who settled into horticulture we can see hierarchical power, slavery, and high levels of warfare. (but they didn’t turn it into conquest b/c they had an attachment to the salmon runs.)Probably universal cultivation of contraceptive and abortifacent herbs would go a long ways, but I don’t see that as a systemic component.

I don’t know pc’s take on energy for sure, but the people I spoke to seemed to buy into the “green” energy myths. Solar panels need the extraction of metals from the Earth and industrial processing to work, meaning Civilization is a given. I don’t know about windmills really, other than that they don’t produce much energy, and I saw a windmill in one of the pc designs. Hydroelectric emits CO2, and would probably negatively influence already fragile rivers. Power lines kill between 5-35 million birds per year, so I hope pc doesn’t call it “green”.

Scout mentioned in his preemptive post was guns. I don’t see how pc can teach a design philosophy that claims to be sustainable without teaching some type of hardcore Rhizome defense system to protect against the apocalypse around the corner (the one all around us). How well can eco-villages take on a desperate military-industrial complex? If no, they have Executive Orders that allow them to steal the land and force you to labor to feed them, making for a sustainable serfdom perhaps…

Also, with the global temperatures increasing, that drastically increases the breeding cycles of all the “pests”…will “pure” pc prove sustainable in the longterm, moreso than foraging w/ part-time gardening?

Nevertheless, the practices seem useful and a move in a better direction, so I will learn both foraging & permaculture, but of as espoused has some characteristics that I think are really flawed. If they’d adapt the practices to supplement a primary foraging lifeway, then I wouldn’t have much to say against it, and as a transition I wouldn’t bash it, but I don’t think humynity can live primarily permaculturing instead of foraging in the long run. Still reading though… I remember someone mentioning Masanobu Fukuoka demonstrating how to help domesticated plants re-wild…maybe I’ll look at that too for a successful trilateral fusion!

Hope this was of use to you Scout, and everyone else too.

-Autumn Phoenix

I advise you do this to assist you ability to rewild.

I envy you your youth. Whether I knew it or not in the last two decades, it is apparent to me now, as I reach my mid-fifties, that I have been on a journey to find meaning in life. I don’t measure my life by others in the sense that there is no ambition in me other than to make sense of my existence. Maybe it has resonance with many others before, but what makes me feel it is important is that it is not just my existence amongst other people, but amongst all the species of the world. I have fallen in love with wild nature and want to take my place in that community.

Permaculture was a good schooling for this outlook, not just because it envisions a relationship with nature based on limiting our impact and use, but because it recognises that humans must have a true value for wild nature that ensures that it has its own space (the Zone 5 in Permaculture, which is analogous in some ways to the designated wilderness in America). When I first learnt about this over 10 years ago, I didn’t realise the full importance of it, and most people learning Permaculture and living in our predominantly urban settings in Britain wouldn’t. But it’s that collision of circumstance, the interest in exploring landscapes for native plants and then seeing the context of how and why they flourish, and how all the other species of the land community flourish, that showed me how important wildland is to the existence of humans. Lose that wildland, as we certainly have in Britain, and we are impoverished in so many ways, spiritually, aesthetically, and in our long term survival. When we lose wildland, we lose the ability for landscapes to self-renew, to wholly regenerate, and to be supportive of the whole land community.

I have written of our blanding out of landscapes in Britain from millennia of farming, and how that has taken them to the point where they no longer support the human species, only the livestock that has despoiled them. Shortly afterwards, I came across a remarkable juxtaposition in the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales that powerfully demonstrated this point. I was on my way to look at an area of rewilding on South House Moor in the Ingleborough National Nature Reserve when I came across an area of limestone pavement that stood out from the rest – it had trees growing in it. This is not entirely uncommon in limestone pavement areas, a few ash and hawthorn have sometimes in the past “got away” in spite of the attentions of rabbits and sheep. But what was different was the range of tree species and the fact that there was a developing scrub that you just don’t normally get. The reason had to be that this area of limestone pavement was walled off, excluding the sheep from getting in from the surrounding area. And so I found rowan, bird cherry and ash, with willow, hawthorn, hazel, blackthorn and raspberry. In the ground layer there were greater burnet, wild strawberry, meadow sweet, bittercress, stonecrop, bedstraw, ferns and giant bellflower. By comparison, the landscape outside the wall had just grass around the pavement and no trees within it.

This is simple proof of what happens when the ecological impact of farming pressure is removed from our landscape. Native species re-establish, brought there by wind, birds and small mammals, and the returning natural state of a diverse vegetation community brings with it species that our hunter-gathering predecessors and modern day food foragers would recognise. In this case, the rewilding has been deliberate since the walled limestone pavement is a reserve owned by a wildlife trust, and their aim has been for the site to develop naturally by maintaining stock-proof boundaries.

The returning food potential of the rewilding limestone pavement put me in mind of the wild landscapes I have seen in America where as well as the wild meat, the wild food plants of the Native Americans could be seen in abundance: thus the expanses of camas lily and arrowleaf balsam in Yellowstone National Park; the vast areas of mules ears in Grand Teton NP; the astonishing array of fruiting shrubs beside the Curecanti Creek Trail in the Curecanti National Recreation Area; and seeing most of these and other food plants in all the designated wilderness that I walked. I understand the criticism of protected wildlands from surviving Native American communities since it is an exclusion of these peoples from some of the few areas that can be considered to be their ethno-botanical heritage.

Kat Anderson, author of Tending the Wild, is a powerful protagonist for the importance of Native American management of landscape. She sees California’s indigenous people as having been active agents of environmental change and stewardship. Her belief is that we no longer have the relationship with nature that these native peoples had, and in that separation our knowledge has been reduced to the point that we need to get reconnected. It is arguable whether the native peoples of California shared a conservation ethic, as she avows, but they would certainly have learnt from their mistakes. Anderson shows that overexploitation led to shortages that wild nature would have to struggle to renew, and it is the case that native peoples in California were responsible for the extinction of a number of species such as the flightless goose and the giant island mouse.

The management of the landscape by native peoples was the transition to domestication of native plants within a natural landscape, indicating a degree of ecological knowledge. Modern day exemplars of this would be the Kayapo in Central Brazil who concentrate native plants by growing them in resource islands, forest fields, forest openings, and tuber gardens by selecting and transplanting a number of semi-domesticated native plants. But the Kayapo today, and the Native Americans before first contact with Euro-American settlers, were shaping their landscape from the rich resources of the wilderness that came before them since the Americas were not populated with humans until about 13,000 years ago. Thus the designated wilderness we see today is a valid expression of landscape, albeit that the Clovis culture, that early settlement into the Americas and from which its native peoples derive, extinguished many of the larger mammals of the Pleistocene.

Andersen does allow that designated wilderness as an untouched place, a standard and reference (Zone 5), should exist at one end of a spectrum, and which has human designed environments at the other end. For reconnection to occur, she believes there has to be a middle ground on that spectrum, where ecology and culture are brought together again and where complex knowledge is applied. She calls for ethno-botanical reserves to be set up by an equivalent department at Government level to the US Fish and Wildlife Service that sets up wildlife refuges. These ethno-botanical reserves would be places where in partnership with Native Americans, the correct relationship with wild nature could be learnt.

Britain has a legacy of harvesting wild foods that endures in spite of the massive reduction in landscape cover that gives opportunity for this wild food foraging. As there is in America, there is an imperative in Britain to move towards a contemporary ethno-botany, as much as there is also an ecological need to increase the amount of wildland in our landscapes. The two are interconnected since restoring native species allows us to recreate ecosystems and restore diversity, while meeting some of our own needs in the process from such as wild foraging. There will be conflicts: we risk destroying that new wilder landscape if we don’t relearn our correct relationship with wild nature, if we just regard it as another resource to be plundered and over-extracted.

In our reconnecting with our extended wild nature, we will need to be clear what areas of wildland are to be left untouched as reference areas and out from which an ethno-botanical renewal can take place (Zone 5). Then there will be the areas of the middle ground that range from foraged but unmanaged native habitat, through lightly managed native habitat, and on to predominantly native habitat within which some non-native species can be introduced for specific harvests. The Forest Habitat Network proposals in Britain amply illustrate a spatial model for these middle areas, and the developing approach of Analogue Forestry guides us on how to introduce a limited palette of non-natives into a predominantly native eco-system.

The Analogue Forestry approach seems to me to be a powerful bridging between the structurally similar forest gardens (“food forests”) of Permaculture and the essential greater woodland infrastructure that Britain needs. A manual for Analogue Forestry gives a set of principles for its design and implementation that would be familiar to any Permaculture Designer, and I think most Permaculturists will recognize it as a solution for the scaling up of forest gardens, but with a much needed re-emphasis on native species.

I am perhaps not typical of Permaculturists in Britain. I have always been wary of its origination by just two Australians, and make no assumption about its primacy or universality. But it has helped get me to where I am now, for which I am grateful.

Mark Fisher
http://www.self-willed-land.org.uk

“The simultaneous onset of climate change and the peaking of global oil supply represent unprecedented challenges for human civilisation.”

Which obviously sets out a premise that what he will talk about will “save” civilization, by fixing the “challenges” against it.

Seconly his whole view on collapse is rather meek. Never, in his entire piece does he talk about ecological die-off and environmental collapse. His focus is on the “energy decent.” A slow sort of “power-down” from where we are now to a more Amish-permie type life.

And while I agree with more or less most of what he says in his conclusion, it doesn’t change the fact that what I’m saying is that the most important element here is what is not being said; that civilization is unsustainable and we cannot fix it. The sooner we abandon all notions of saving civilization, the sooner we will find real solutions.

I agree civilisation hasn’t got a future, and living as people once did is by far the best way to go on. But trees, woodland, and ecosystems don’t just appear overnight. It’s going to take longer than my lifetime to return this country to anything like it once was.

In the mean time I’ve gotta eat! I think permaculture can be a useful strategy to help feed ones self and community/small band of like minded people post collapse in order to prevent drawing too much on nearly eradicated wild plants and animals. As things repair themselves – scale it back. This would be the reverse route from civilisation to the wild again given the fact that there really isn’t very much wild to return to. Around the point of collapse all hell breaks loose and there isn’t much certainty of keeping the fruits of your labour, but I don’t see a better way. The emphasis should be on maintaining the right mindset – that rewilding is the end goal, and gaining the skills and experiences to do that.

I can personally attest that Urban Scout allows for differing viewpoints and debates. I’ve done it several times, and was responded to with equally well-thought-out answers. You, however, just sound like a douche. Grow up, and learn to spell.

Also, considering a dictionary an authority on any definition more complex than that of an apple is ridiculously ignorant and naive, especially in reference to a specific discourse with its own lexicon. Primitivists have thoroughly explained what we mean by civilization, which is a much subtler definition that looks at the implications that the word has had behind it, historically.