Permaculture

One of the most common words associated with alternative agricultural practices is “permaculture,” an ecological and social practice of food production that has roots in both Black and Indigenous agrarian traditions and white-led Western alternative agricultural movements. While there are many forms of permaculture, Amy Trauger, a food sovereignty scholar, defines permaculture as “a design-based method of crop cultivation that emphasizes an ontology of integrativeness between nature and society” which “works through the interconnected design of the placements of plants and animals in relationships to maximize their health and productivity” (Trauger 44). When first defined to me while WWOOFing by the neighboring farm that was in the process of creating a permaculture garden, I was taught that permaculture was a farming approach that prioritized working together with the natural ecosystem rather than the traditional Western agricultural practice of working the land until all its resources have been extracted.

Etymologically, the term is rooted in the combination of the words “permanent” and “agriculture,” as it entails an agricultural approach to food production that constructs an ecosystem that can grow and sustain itself permanently. While it draws on farming traditions and practices from countless Indigenous cultures that have existed for millennia, the term itself is relatively young, with origins that “are traced to Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren…inventing the term permaculture in the 1970s” (Birnbaum). Modern applications of the term often refer to Western practices such as food forests and nutrient-dense perennial gardens that incorporate livestock. “a food forest has multiple levels of plants filling a variety of ecological functions, including nutrient cycling. It consequently has a dramatically higher yield per acre but also requires and integrated crop-livestock system that provides far higher caloric value and a far wider nutritional spectrum per acre than any other cropping system” (Trauger 111).

However, because of the Western influence on the term, many white farmers who practice permaculture place a higher value on the potential productivity of the agricultural approach, rather than the permanently sustaining and socially nourishing aspects. This obscures the crucial fact that permaculture “is geared toward transitioning communities to a new paradigm,” and is as much about restoring the landscape as restoring a community and its relationship to the ecosystem (Birnbaum). As such, while Black and Indigenous farmers do not necessarily eschew the term, they often understand it as “a more recent and limited Western analogue of the primordial fields of place-based, spiritually grounded Indigenous agroecologies” (Peña 289). Even as these farmers practice permacultural farming approaches, they do not name it as such, instead embracing their more expansive and culturally applicable terms. One example of this is the jaden lakou, or courtyard garden. A Haitian farming technique, “jaden lakou are planted with vegetables, herbs, and fruit trees in a closely intertwined system. Livestock provide manure for fertilization, and kitchen wastes are composted to enrich the soil” (Penniman 82). Focused on creating a mutually beneficial network with the natural forests, this kind of agro-forest employs all the techniques of permaculture, creating a closed ecosystem that nourishes and sustains itself, the surrounding ecologies, and the communities who eat its produce. For Black and Indigenous farmers, permaculture is often a simplistic, Westernized way of understanding the sustainable farming practices they’ve employed through time immemorial, and does not fully convey the expansive possibilities of their own ecological cultural traditions.