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Ferguson Diss PERMACULTURE AS FARMING PRACTICE AND INTERNATIONAL GRASSROOTS NETWORK: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDY BY JEFFREY FERGUSON DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Crop Sciences in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Sarah Taylor Lovell, Chair Professor Michelle M. Wander Associate Professor Ashwini Chhatre Professor Thomas J. Bassett ABSTRACT Agroecology is a promising alternative to industrial agriculture, with the potential to avoid the negative social and ecological consequences of input-intensive production. Transitioning to agroecological production is, however, a complex project that requires action from all sectors of society – from producers and consumers, and from scientists and grassroots networks. Grassroots networks and movements are increasingly regarded as agents of change, with a critical role to play in agroecological transition as well as broader socio-environmental transformation. Permaculture is one such movement, with a provocative perspective on agriculture and human-environment relationships more broadly. Despite its relatively broad international distribution and high public profile, permaculture has remained relatively isolated from scientific research. This investigation helps to remedy that gap by assessing permaculture through three distinct projects. A systematic review offers a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the permaculture literature, through the lens of agroecology. This review is organized around a layered conception of permaculture as design, practice, movement, and worldview. The major points of our analysis are as follows: (1) principles and topics largely complement and even extend the agroecological literature; (2) distinctive approaches to perennial polyculture, water management, and agroecosystem configuration suggest promising avenues of inquiry; (3) discussions of practice consistently underplay the complexity, challenges, and risks that producers face in developing diversified and integrated production systems. The second project, an international web survey, with over 700 responses from over 40 countries, provides a first look at permaculture as an international grassroots network. The survey examined self-identified roles of permaculture participants and explored the relationships between those roles and socio-demographic factors race, gender, and socioeconomic status. The influence of structural factors on participant roles was examined by including multidimensional national indices of development, inequality, and ecosystem vitality, for the 45 countries in the sample. Results showed the participation of women at or above! parity (53%), while participation by race showed a white supermajority (96%). Multivariate regression demonstrated that race, gender, and socioeconomic status are shaping participation in distinct ways and that each of these variables interacts with structural factors. The third project provides the first systematic investigation of the agricultural sector in permaculture, using innovative methods to gather enterprise-level data at 48 self-identified permaculture farms in the US. This project develops a ii preliminary typology of permaculture farms based on livelihoods, and assesses the relationship between farm diversification and labor efficiency. Multilevel modeling shows that both diversification and involvement with permaculture increase returns to labor, but may interfere with each other, and that tree crops have significantly higher returns to labor when integrated with animal production systems. iii This project was made possible through the support of the Jonathan Baldwin Turner Graduate Fellowship, and the Agroecology Scholars Fund of the Agroecology and Sustainable Agriculture Program. Thank you to the 196 donors to the crowdfunding campaign that made my field research possible. Special thanks to Andy and Peter for especially generous donations. My heartfelt gratitude to the 48 farmers who took time from their demanding schedules to spend a day with me, and the hundreds of permaculturists around the world who took time to respond to the web survey. In the most literal sense this project could not exist without you. To my committee, thank you: Tom Bassett, for introducing me to political ecology and thereby inspiring this project. My advisor Sarah Taylor Lovell, for giving me enough rope – and not letting go of the rope. Michelle Wander, for being authentically excited about my work. Ashwini Chhatre, for real talk and an activist’s critical commitments. To all of my family, thank you for all of your multifaceted support through the years and through this academic venture. To my sister Melissa, thank you for all the coaching from your insider’s perspective on academia. I probably wouldn’t have even stuck my foot in the door without your encouragement. To my chosen family, thank you: Brook, Eric, and Meadow, for believing in me. To the whole Salon for Major Works in Progress crew, for all of us believing in each other. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................ 1 2 PERMACULTURE FOR AGROECOLOGY: DESIGN, MOVEMENT, PRACTICE, AND WORLDVIEW. .............................................................................. 8 3 GRASSROOTS ENGAGEMENT WITH TRANSITIONS TO SUSTAINABILITY: DIVERSITY AND MODES OF PARTICIPATION IN THE INTERNATIONAL PERMACULTURE MOVEMENT ..................................................................................... 63 4 LIVELIHOOD DIVERSITY AND LABOR PRODUCTIVITY ON US PERMACULTURE FARMS ................................................................................................................. 111 5 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................................. 159 APPENDIX : ADDITIONAL DATA AND OUTPUTS AND ANTICIPATED OUTPUTS ..................................................................................................................... 165 v 1 Introduction WHY PERMACULTURE? The challenges of transitioning our global society to a mode of operation that does not erode its own prospects for survival are complex and multi-layered. There is no longer any doubt that we face a host of converging and intersecting crises. Attempting to inventory these crises produces a list that is inevitably messy, overwhelming, and incomplete: climate change, peak oil, habitat loss and mass extinction, ocean acidification, the ongoing release of toxic and long-lived pollutants, and so on. While such an inventory is inevitably incomplete, as written this list is not only unfinished but critically deficient. Environmental crises are always already political- economic crises (Moore 2015; Park et al. 2008). Any attempt to diagnose the former is hopeless without accounting for their complex linkages with the latter, e.g. spiraling inequality within and between nations (Piketty 2014; Pickett and Wilkinson 2011), the increasingly unstable global economic order (Crotty 2009; Klein 2015), the active erosion of democratic processes and the commensurate accumulation of power in the capitalist owning class (Cerny 1999; Klein 2008; Gilens and Page 2014), and global military conflict (Le Billon 2001; Brauer 2011; Hsiang et al. 2011.) Evidence and theory both suggest that institutions that have been entrusted with the administration of a ruinous industrial society are not up to the task of navigating the transition to a radically different socio-environmental order (Smith and Watch 2007; Bekessy, SA et al. 2007; Krey and Riahi 2009; Houston 2013). The tools used to build and maintain the world-system are especially ill-suited to transform that system - or as Audre Lord put it so powerfully: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde and Clarke, 2007). With increasing recognition of the failure of top-down regulatory and market-based initiatives to address socio-environmental issues, more attention is being paid to the importance of actors from outside of large institutions (Seyfang and Haxeltine 2012, Ernstson et al. 2008, Leach et al. 2012, Bergman et al. 2010). Grassroots actors and their aggregates - networks, communities, and movements - are increasingly looked to as critical agents in transition and transformation. 1 The food system is no exception to the diagnosis of institutional failure and grassroots agency. To the contrary, the food system by nature occupies a central position within broader issues of sustainability. The emerging food sovereignty perspective illustrates the international rise of a shared understanding of the importance of grassroots agrarian perspectives and the centrality of the food system within broader projects of collective liberation (Patel 2009; Wittman et al. 2011). In short, a societal transition to sustainability requires an agroecological transformation, and such an agroecological transformation requires, in turn, a transformation of society at large. We are interested, therefore, in perspectives and modes of action based in the grassroots, and that encompass both agrarian sectors (those working directly at the production end of the food system) and metropolitan sectors (non-agrarian society at large). This investigation addresses permaculture, an international grassroots movement that fits these
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