Background: I read the article “The Permaculture Fail” by Frank Aragona on resilience.org, duplicating a blog post giving a extract from a podcast on Aragona’s own Agricultural Innovations site.
The discussions are worth looking at to get a flavour of how people respond to these issues.
Aragona’s argument comes across to me like this. Small time farming, even using permaculture methods, barely works by itself, and certainly doesn’t offer a good life. What is needed is to understand how to work with the economic mechanisms of our society. As he says, “it is time we started creating the socio-economic models that will make permaculture successful”. In a follow-up post, Aragona discusses “understanding economies of scale.
Here at Lancaster Cohousing there are several people interested in permaculture. They recognise that it needs substantial knowledge. Not many people both have that substantial knowledge and are able to put it into practice.
My response is clearly positive. This is, it seems to me, exactly the kind of approach that would be good to take. Naive idealism has never worked out well. I have needed to move away and on, over decades, from such an idealistic perspective. We would all do well to move on. And here, most have done so. We generally recognise that the world is not to be saved on one issue: not if everyone turns vegan, not if everyone eats organic or local food, not if everyone has a miniscule carbon footprint.
One root cause seems to me to be the fallacy that any one of us can know enough, individually, to make a big difference. We need to specialise, but not see our chosen specialty as unique. Rather, we need to continue exploring how to collaborate effectively, and (don’t underestimate this next word) efficiently.
Efficiency is a vital part of what will make a culture genuinely sustainable and resilient.
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