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| Vedrussiya village, inspired by Anastasia and the "Ringing Cedars of Russia" |
“Permaculture isn't anything but a movement of gringo hippies who are pretending to be farmers.”
I am very gratified and thankful to this Mayan brother for getting the message across to a journalist so clearly.
To be honest with you, friends, permaculture is a galling deception, and I've been waiting for this article for two years now. I considered writing one myself after escaping from a permaculture design course that I found really repulsive, but I'm really glad that someone else has done the job.
I appreciate the benefit when people touch the soil and interact with Earth, but there are some serious flaws with the permaculture movement that, in my view, consign it to the waste bin. Correct me if I'm missing something important here, but I've never been able to get enthusiastic about permaculture. There was always something wrong with it.
For a start, the field doesn't really understand the structure of the human soul or our purpose here on Earth. The ideology is that a minority of people should enjoy a pleasant bucolic existence with modern comforts (eating flesh, drinking poison alcohol, using diesel...) while others toil for a lesser existence. It's more about escapism and hedonistic carnal pleasure, than about healing ourselves and perfecting the planet.
It proceeds on the basis that some people deserve to live a comfortable life, and that others deserve to work for them as paying customers or volunteer labour. It's making the same fundamental mistake as technocratic capitalism - they forgot that every person is equal.
There is no effort from permaculture to address systemic inequality, and the people in that permie-sect with whom I've talked have been a bit resistant to the notion of a civilisation where every person can be wealthy and we live together peacefully. They're sort of embarrassed by indigenous cultures, they're keen to merge humans with robots, and they prefer to follow instructions than come up with ideas of their own.
The permaculture sect is survivalist and concerned about over-population. It's not about a new era on the Earth, or a beautiful world where everyone is happy. They are basically waiting for another flood to come and wipe out all the world's poor people. It stinks of colonial eugenics.
Intwined in the teachings of permaculture is the notion that some people are naturally superior to others, and that some people's destiny is to be worker-slaves, or simply to be removed from the planet entirely.
I attended a permaculture design course for three days, run by two of Bill Mollison's first students. I only went after my dad implored me to investigate. At the course they told us Bill Mollison's biography in much more detail than is available anywhere on the internet.
Mollison was working with the forestry department in Tasmania, living in national parks, and hating society. Tasmania is a place that was colonised 150 years ago by a total massacre of every single indigenous person by any means of extermination that came to hand. Poisoning, hanging, shooting, cutting down with blades, all died except a few people who escaped as slave labourers.
That history is deliberately censored from the Australian school curriculum. The history of the Tasmanian war has never received any attention from major press. Tasmania is now a very strange place. It has a population of 500,000, about the size of Panama, and its main activities are fruit orchards, dairies, and cutting down virgin forest to make reflex paper and chipboard.
Living out in the forest and resenting society, Mollison decided that he had to go back and improve things, so he went back and sat down at the pub. He started talking to people about his ideas, over quite a few beers, apparently.
Young David Holmgren overheard the conversation and got involved. They moved in together at an anarchist squat, Bill's multiple girlfriends coming and going one after the other over a few months or years as Bill and David focused on simplifying and writing out Bill's new idea: permanent culture. The dude told us that Bill had had about five wives by that stage, and was quite a drinker.
It was David Holmgren who had the business smarts to set up some courses, charge people, and then train them to become teachers. He organised it, filled a room with enthusiastic young people, and put Bill Mollison in front of them with a whiteboard.
The dudes who were my "teachers" were students in that course. They said it was like being attacked with an encyclopedia, or I forget their exact words. It was a full onslaught of information, with no exchange of ideas, and was very much Bill Mollison urgently getting everyone to listen and totally agree with him.
Let's consider the effects and consequences of that course, a decade or so later. Maybe it was longer ago, I can't remember. I deliberately blocked a lot of the info at the course, it was too pernicious, I didn't want to contribute to the ideas by resonating them with my brain.
Anyway, one of these permaculture teachers, Bill's original student, now lives in a bus with his partner and two little children. The other teacher lives in a sharehouse in Melbourne, does community radio and forages for edible weeds. They have a landscaping business in Melbourne, and teach two permaculture design courses a year.
The young protegé David Holmgren now lives on a community title property in the state of Victoria with about seven other people. He has a huge house and a nice garden, conducts tours and otherwise gets money from permaculture courses, selling books to permaculture students, does interviews and runs pip the permaculture magazine. He was a special guest teacher at that course on one of the days after I left.
I couldn't stay there, it was too frustrating, simplistic, not profound information at that course. It must have been more interesting than the standard Melbourne university seminar, because all the other students were really into it.
It tipped me over the edge when one of the dudes sent everyone into a guided meditation which recounted the history of the Earth. It was the standard Year 5 Australian school curriculum about amoebae transmogrifying into whales, spiders, peacocks and people, there being no point to life, civilisation and broad-acre farming having screwed everything, and people being generally an awful invention that the earth would be better off without, that we are monkeys and should go oog-boog in the forest.
All my ancestors were spinning around me, like "What the crap is he saying?? Get out of here and go clear your mind with some leaves and soil!"
I had to go out of earshot. It was making me too mad to hear all those gullible people set off into an illusory world ignorant of the last ice-age, the last flood, the previous Earth civilisations, and without a concept of the soul, the power of imagery, the energy of love, or many of these other important concepts.
Worst of all, since all those people had paid 2000 aud for that experience, they'll go and aggressively defend this knowledge as "correct", because it would hurt their pride too much to accept that they'd been sold a fake. Thus, the illusion perpetuates. Some of them go on to advanced courses, then teacher trainings, following the path set out for them by their spiritual leaders.
"One day," they dream, "I might be like David Holmgren."
And David Holmgren, with a sick, deceptive grin, replies, "Yes, as long as you pay me 3000 aud for this advanced course, buy all these books and start teaching my gospel to others, you might."
I'm writing out thoughts, here, people. They're not oral quotes, they're telepathic quotes... ok...
So that part of permaculture has always been repulsive to me. Yet the interesting aspects of holistic gardening and sustainable community have kept me on the fringes just close enough to watch what is going on.
I have been waiting for this article, developing it with my thoughts into the telepathic dimensions for two years now until someone would write it and publish it. I am really glad to this mayan brother.
Permaculture really is a method to siphon wealth away from the people into the hands of a few. It's technocratic society's answer to sustainable community. It's rammed as many polluted and corrupted concepts into sustainable living as possible, in order to ensure its followers' failure.
Genealogically speaking, it was polluted by Holmgren's desire to own a piece of land in the expensive Victorian housing market, and his decision to do that through debt and income from the ever-expanding pyramid of permaculture students who will buy his material. But in reality, it's just another repetition of the same degradation that held our planet hostage during the last age - the illusion that some people are superior to others. Whereas the truth, as we know, brothers and sisters, is that we are all equal.
Students of permaculture are getting tricked. It's predatory marketing, it hypes up the risk of some calamity occurring, then offers a solution by paying them money. And the solution doesn't even help. Those two guys devoted their lives to permaculture, and what did it get them? They don't even have a place to plant a tree for their descendants! That's the first thing!
The movement is riding on the interest in sustainable development that is happening in every field inevitably, as people turn once more closer to the natural Earth as the provider of all wealth, comfort and energy. Permaculture is a business that combines vaguely anarchist theory, landscaping design, education and settlement design. And the business has some kind of spiritual cohesion to it where by new members pay old members, and they try to keep bringing in new member. That's a ponzi scheme, right? There are loads of people around the world who own properties and businesses about permaculture, and i keep hearing over and over that they used the name because it would make their money business stronger.
Anyway, the main problem is that there are all these people who are super interested in being sustainable, growing plants and making a life for themselves and their descendants on the planet Earth, who are getting a bit misguided by this rather aggressive body of knowledge. In Australia, I notice that the followers of permaculture are not thriving as much as they could. They're doing something - like I said, they've helped people get out among the trees, touch the soil, and consider plants, and that's great, really... But the main communities in victoria are a bit incestuous, not very pure places, and they are not very strong when it comes to government negotiation or broad social interest.
To me, it's not an inspiring movement, and not really what the world is looking for right now. Plants are great, but even permaculture gardens are not that nice. The "Permaculture Research Institute" of Australia is a couple who finance their mortgage by giving courses and charging people for the privilege of doing labour on their property. They have a nice variety of plants, but it isn't a heartwarming place. It's not inspiring, there's not much love there.
I visited it once with a friend, another pdc escapee. The people were smoking canab around a fire when the main man appeared, wearing army camo pants and with a knife for some reason. He started talking tough about how they're all going to go into the wilderness and live of hunted meat when society collapses and all the stupid people in the city start killing each other and starving to death. It was a bit unpleasant.
I don't really like the energy around the permaculture movement. It feels a bit arrogant and not very scholarly. I know plants are great, and the people who've embraced the permaculture name in other countries seem to be bringing some more refreshing energy to the concept. But after going to the course, I realised that permaculture is rotten to the core. I can't associate with it at all, and I think it's really holding back the sustainable evolution of our planet.
Here's the thing, the gardening advice in permaculture is not actually useful. It's designed to provide food in the case of famine, and make money in order to buy hedonistic comforts like craft beer and sheep's cheese.
I am way more interested in arranging settlements and governments according to mayan elders like Pedro Cruz Garcia, and therefore letting people arrange their gardens according to their own soul's preference. This is really important. I'm creeped out by gardens that have Bill Mollison's alcoholic womanising spirit flying around them. Each person's native homeland should be full of their own spirit, of their ancestors and descendants. But permaculture doesn't really get that.
They don't understand about souls, about reincarnation, about ancestors, about spirits, about purity of one's thoughts, about materialising imagery, about communicating with and through plants, about nourishing oneself on unseen energies like love and inspiration, about conceiving children in love and preparing a home for them, about treating children with respect, or about meeting friends and neighbours as equals.
To be fair to Bill Mollison, it's pretty difficult to tune in to all of that down in Tasmania, because it's quite a distressed place, spiritually. I'm not trying to attack him, I just want people to know a bit more information about the movement and its leadership. You're not doing yourself or anyone a favour by following an incompetent leader. They'll come to feel sadly about misleading you, in the end, too.
I'm not actually one for following movements any more. But if you want a book to read and follow like a manual, then read Anastasia and the ringing cedars. I'm in Russia right now observing the effects and consequences of people who follow those books, and ... well ... it doesn't matter if you understand them or not. If you follow the books like a manual, something pretty amazing comes out of it, and you end up with a little native homeland where you can start developing more self-sufficient skills and imagination. For a start, one simply buys a paperback here for about 1.50 usd, then shares it with friends.
Now, the people who followed that book, even without knowing exactly what was happening... They own land, have large, vibrant and growing communities, they have given birth to children on their land, they have planted big trees in a friendly, fun way according to their own design. They have the support of their governments, a growing network of more than 300 villages doing similar things, international tourists visiting them for their summer festivals, and they're creating a fully sustainable life in a way that can be repeated by anyone with practically no limitation.
In so doing, they are re-establishing the pristine, pure way of life on the planet Earth, where everyone is wealthy and everyone is equal.
For example, facebook.com/groups/artandcraftfestival/permalink/1036618176418216
Quoted article: huffingtonpost.com/tobias-roberts/permaculture-as-a-gringo-_b_9753212.html