A few years ago I would have laughed off permaculture as a hipster fad, but it’s actually an innovative framework for creating sustainable ways of living. Another way of putting it is that it’s self reliance through decentralised food production.
Basically, it’s growing your own food, but in a way that benefits everything.
Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole-systems thinking. It applies these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, town planning, rewilding, and community resilience. Permaculture originally came from “permanent agriculture”, but was later adjusted to mean “permanent culture”, incorporating social aspects
White pill
Permaculture certainly falls into the territory of “swallowing the white pill”, a metaphor I often reference, which can be described as the following.
The white pill is a worldview based on the maximisation of happiness of an individual, by acceptance of their situation, in lieu of denial or anger. It is a stoic and ascetic extension of the black pill. Put more concisely, the white pill extends the black pill by prescribing behaviour, not by just describing reality as the black pill does.
Yes, there are looming food shortages. Yes, there is an energy crisis. Yes, the pharmaceutical industry is making people sicker. Yes, the World Economic Forum wants to implement a global technocracy.
What are you doing about it?
If nothing, then you’re a loser. If something, then you’re a winner. And in the context of food shortages, removing one’s dependence on centralised supply chains, mega-farms, and Big Food in general, is definitely a winning strategy.
12 principles
Permaculture has 12 guiding principles which seem to make sense to me. They’re not rules that, if broken, will result in the destruction of Nord Stream; they’re just markers for efficiency.
- Observe and interact.
- Design from patterns to details.
- Catch and store energy.
- Integrate rather than segregate.
- Obtain a yield.
- Use small and slow solutions.
- Apply self-regulation and accept feedback.
- Use and value diversity.
- Use and value renewable resources and services.
- Use edges and value the marginal.
- Produce no waste.
- Creatively use and respond to change.
Our conversation
Jim Gale heads up Food Forest Abundance, which is a company centred around helping people set up permaculture ecosystems in and around their homes.
Decentralisation means defeating globalist tyranny.
