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Permaculture and Political

Written by Lasse Kristensen CEVRO Institute

Submitted thesis for the degree of Master in Philosophy, Politics and

Thesis Advisor: Josef Šíma

December 31st 2018

Abstract This thesis has examined and considered the design system of . Permaculture is a whole-systems design framework and an applied design-science, where systems designed by permaculture are oriented towards the creation and the institution of more sustainable, abundant and resilient both human systems and natural ecosystems. The permaculture system has motivated and empowered a growing decentralized social grassroots movement towards that purpose of permaculture practitioners, scientists, , networks, communities and enterprises worldwide. From an ethical approach to permaculture design, the goal is to transition human institutions and natural systems towards designs and activities that can mitigate and reverse the environmental challenges that face mankind and the Earth’s ecosystems today. Amongst the socio-ecological issues that the permaculture worldview is concerned with and which it seeks to transition away from, are the unsustainability of the current systemic and worldwide reliance on non-renewable fossil-fuels and the environmental consequences from the practices of industrial agriculture as a system of food production. These institutional analyses are therefore examined. For the purpose of transforming the human interactions with natural systems, there exists an expanding permaculture design-science literature that forms a synthesis from both natural and increasingly social science disciplines. However, within the permaculture literature, only a limited fraction touches upon social science aspects of the economics and politics related to how to best achieve such a permaculture transition. The intent of this thesis therefore is to expand the social science aspects and the understanding of permaculture in that regard, as there are inevitably decisions and processes involved in attempts at socio-ecological transitions attempted by permaculture initiatives that relates to social science and its field of . It is worthwhile to ensure that informed political and economic considerations are taken by permaculture practitioners in their attempts at instituting new socio-ecological regimes. Based on a review and discussion of the existing permaculture literature, an analytical discussion is taken that covers a selection of political economy theories related to permaculture. These include free- and political environmentalism, environmental and institutional entrepreneurship, the use of knowledge in society and how market- mechanisms of rights and propagate that use, theory, and issues related to regulation and harmonization.

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Acknowledgements My thanks and sincerest gratitude first of all goes to prof. Ing. Josef Šíma, Ph.D, who with his unique PPE master’s program at CEVRO Institute in Prague gave me the opportunity to study in a program where philosophy, politics and economics are brought together to better understand our world. Without this opportunity to

I had both study the world that we live in, and to engage with bright fellow students and renowned professors from across the world, the culmination and synthesis of the ideas within this thesis would not have been possible.

I also extent my sincerest thanks to Aalborg University for initially grating me the opportunity to study economics with knowledgeable and educating professors.

As a university where the professional staff and students interact closely in group- based settings and projects, my undergraduate years at Aalborg University helped spark a deeper curiosity in me about the interesting fields of economics, politics and philosophy that I have since come to learn much about.

Finally, I must express my deep gratitude towards my supporting parents and my dear sisters who have all been there for me in so many ways over the years of my studies. Special thanks go to my dear and close friend Anders, who first introduced me to the interesting ideas of permaculture a half a decade ago, and with whom I have since continued to frequently discuss these ideas. Our discussions and unanswered questions have allowed me to explore the world of permaculture and the connection permaculture have to both the natural and social sciences. Without our discussions, I am very certain that this thesis would not have seen the light of day either.

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Foreword My own introduction to the concept of permaculture, short for permanent culture, came to me through a dear friend who, during his travels abroad studying and learning about sustainable farming methods, came across individuals with knowledge of the permaculture design philosophy. Permaculture is a whole system design philosophy, a framework for creating sustainable human settlements through mimicking and adapting human designs and institutions to be more in line with the patterns of . The main goal is to design human settlements within existing natural systems and to create through their interdependence both and resilience, thereby preserving and regenerating the Earth’s natural systems for future generations to come by keeping a place for people in them. As my friend began to forward me the literature, recorded lectures, documentaries and other materials on permaculture, I slowly began to realize that the implications of a permaculture design system and its underlying thinking could eventually come to affect many of our existing social institutions, such as agricultural food production, energy-systems, finance, political structures, , landscaping, city infrastructure, rural and urban design and others1. The list of areas considered by the science and practices of permaculture systems continues to expand. It has been doing so over the last about 40 years since the idea of ‘permanent cultures’ initially was formulated in the late 1970’s by the two Australian originators, environmental psychologist Bill Mollison and ecologist David Holmgren. It is argued by both Mollison and Holmgren as well as other leading permaculture thinkers that some of our existing human institutions and activities are structurally, and in some cases inexorably from their design, consuming and depleting the Earth’s natural eco-systems leading to environmental consequences, where they amongst others mention industrial agriculture and systematic fossil-fuel dependency, two cases which are examined in this thesis. The final outcome of these energy and food-producing institutions are a diminution of the diversity, abundance and resilience of the Earth’s ecosystem, which are very foundation of life on earth. In the literature, and in

1 See Appendix A for a non-exhaustive conceptual map of areas examined by permaculture. Page 4 | 95 some scientific publications, the permaculture whole-systems design framework is argued for to be one potential solution-framework towards the necessary transformation that is deemed required in relation to our socio-ecological regimes and how human societies interacts with nature. Given the uncertain prospects of a human civilization that is systemically dependent on fossil-fuel energy, an energy-source that by some recent estimates are said to last about 50-100 more years (Ritchie & Roser, 2018)2, any vision and designs for posterity and future generations must work to mitigate and solve such institutional and systemic ‘- negative’ energy structures and the institutions supported by it that leads to environmental consequences. Certain institutions (e.g. industrial agriculture, city- planning, transportation systems) and current patterns are argued for by permaculture to assists in the depletion the Earth’s natural eco-systems (e.g. air, waters, soils, forests), both small and large, and has brought forth a long ‘laundry list’ of such as deforestation; desertification; air, water and soil ; destruction of healthy top-soils; reduced land-based water retention leading to rising water levels; increasing climatic and temperature fluctuations.

Having studied the fields of philosophy, politics and economics has given me the opportunity and the toolbox to look at the permaculture design philosophy and the ends it seeks from a social science perspective. It is a theoretical outset from which the permaculture cross-disciplinary synthesize can be expanded from, through the introduction of ideas selected from the social sciences theories of political economy. Economics and politics are important aspects that should be considered in individual and collective decisions when it comes to designing new and transitioning existing human institutions and settlement design, both rural and urban, with new socio-ecological regimes in mind. It is my thesis that as an applied science, permaculture design propositions can bring practical solutions to guide human civilization into the future and deal with current environmental issues. The aim across social, economic and political bodies are increasingly centered on designing human communities that are more in line with natural systems,

2 They note on their findings that “these values can change with time based on the discovery of new reserves, and changes in annual production” (Ritchie & Roser, 2018). Page 5 | 95 whereby the negative environmental impacts and ensuing catastrophes from past actions and institutions can be mitigated and reversed. Permaculture proposes on such design framework. Expanding upon the permaculture synthesis by introducing selected ideas deemed relevant from the social sciences will broaden the already wide permaculture knowledge-base accessible to individuals, groups and communities. This knowledge-base and the permaculture worldview has already motivated a growing permaculture grassroots movement of permaculture designers worldwide. To the extent that permaculture continues to expand its ideas and therethrough its influence on agricultural food production systems, housing and garden designs, eco-village arrangements, transition towns, ecological education, environmental policy, city food-sovereignty programs, nature regeneration programs, and a long continuing list of other permaculture design ideas and implementations, it is the purpose of this thesis to add and synthesize the relevant social science ideas from political economy theory to the permaculture synthesis and begin a discussion of how those connect. For the purpose of this thesis, it is a task undertaken by first by looking extensively at what the permaculture framework is. This review is expanded by a review of the growing permaculture grassroots movement, and a brief outline of the environmental issues that permaculture design attempts to mitigate and reverse and its practical solutions proposed to do so. An expanded analytical section follows that introduces one of the most elaborated institutional analyses within the permaculture framework, related to the unsustainability and disastrous ecological and climatic effects of the institution of industrial agriculture, and how this type of system of food production is kept functioning through the support of a diminishing fossil- fuel base. With a theoretical, empirical and institutional analysis as the foundation, attempts are then proposed at introducing a selection of theories from the field of political economy. These include theories of free-market environmentalism and political environmentalism, environmental and institutional entrepreneurship, the use of knowledge in society and how market- mechanisms of property rights and prices propagate that use, public choice theory, and issues related to regulation and harmonization. The availability of permaculture literature that has synthesized ideas and theories from political

Page 6 | 95 economy literature into the permaculture framework are almost non-existent, yet permaculture publications often, and must inevitably touch upon areas that are related to social science theory (e.g. institutional analysis and transition theory as well as social, political and economic considerations). The selection of theories herein are entirely subjective on behalf of the author, and the restrictions of choice and their analytical depth is given by the scope of the thesis itself. The considerations in this thesis may hopefully begin new discussions or add to existing ones, as societies both small and large continues to move forward into an age where dealing practically with the environmental consequences of individual and collective actions are of increasing concern to create more ‘permanence’ in human life on earth. Solutions must be found in both natural, social, economic, political, legal and cultural thought, in order to reduce the chances of erroneous decisions when it comes to the designing more sustainable, permanent and interconnected human and natural systems.

The permaculture approach has already attracted millions of people across all walks of life around the world, and to make informed decisions on the issue at hand requires critical thinking and an informed knowledge base. Here the introduction of social science theories into this knowledge-base becomes the essential tool in fields related to individual and collective decisions and the choice between mechanisms to steer the institutional transitions.

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Table of Contents Abstract ...... 2 Acknowledgements ...... 3 Foreword ...... 4 1. Introduction to Permaculture ...... 9 1.1 Ethics of Permaculture ...... 13 Earth Care ...... 15 People Care ...... 16 Fair Share ...... 17 2. The Permaculture Social Grassroots Movement ...... 21 3. Environmental Issues and Permaculture Solutions ...... 28 3.1 Practical Permaculture Design Solutions ...... 31 4. Institutional Analysis – A Permaculture Approach ...... 36 4.1 Fossil-Fuel Dependency and Industrial Agriculture ...... 41 4.2 Four Energy-Futures: ...... 51 Techno-Explosion ...... 52 Techno-Stability ...... 53 Energy-Descent ...... 53 Collapse ...... 54 5. Permaculture – Economic and Political Aspects...... 55 5.1 Free-Market Environmentalism and Political Environmentalism ...... 56 5.2 Environmental Entrepreneurship and Permaculture ...... 61 5.3 The Use of Knowledge in Society and Economic Coordination ...... 63 5.4 Political Environmentalism, Public Choice and Permaculture ...... 70 5.5 Prices, Property Rights and Permaculture ...... 73 5.6 Permaculture, Regulation and Harmonization ...... 77 5.7 Permaculture and Political Economy ...... 82 6. Conclusion ...... 86 7. References ...... 87 Appendix A – Components of the Permaculture Design System ...... 93 Appendix B – Permaculture Flower by David Holmgren ...... 94 Appendix C – Permaculture Design Principles by David Holmgren ...... 95

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1. Introduction to Permaculture Permaculture is an applied design-science, and its name is an abbreviation of ‘permanent culture’3. In addition to being an open-source applied science that is formed on a knowledge synthesis from a range of sciences, permaculture also integrates innovative technology, and it constituted by a worldview from a set of underlying ethics, land-use principles and design techniques (Grayson, 2013). Permaculture is a cross-disciplinary ‘whole-systems design’ framework4 with the principal goal of creating co-existing regenerative, resilient and sustainable5 human settlement systems and natural ecosystems. Russ Grayson, a leading accomplished permaculture author and practitioner, explains that permaculture is “a design system for human occupation of our towns, cities and rural lands that would sustain us over the decades, over the centuries. Combining science and natural systems, curiosity and technics this would be a regenerative system, one that increases the stock of useful resources wherever possible” (Grayson, 2013, p. 3). In a broad sense, permaculture can be said to refer to designing and using land- use systems that promotes stability in society, focusing on the many aspects of human life, while also utilizing and regenerating natural resources in a sustainable way with a concentrating on preserving wildlife habitats and their species diversity of animals and vegetation. Co-founder of permaculture David

3 Late co-founder of permaculture Bill Mollison described it as “an interdisciplinary — permaculture—with a potential for positivistic, integrated and global outreach” (Grayson, 2010b). In its early years of conceptualization when the idea of permaculture came out in 1978, permaculture was initially short for ‘permanent agriculture’. Given that a ‘whole-system’ approach is taken in permaculture thinking, the scope and application of permaculture has since expanded over the past four decades to include other aspects than agriculture, and hence permaculture today means permanent culture. Permaculture author Russ Grayson notes that, “Rather than an approach to ‘permanent agriculture’ as first envisioned, (founders) Bill Mollison and David Holmgren realised that a more comprehensive description was needed. So, it was that permaculture became reinterpreted as ‘permanent culture’. This acknowledged the fact that the different elements that make up a culture are linked in an interactive social and economic matrix and a system thinking approach such as permaculture does not allow the separation of any single one, such as agriculture, from its context (emphasis added)” (Grayson, 2010b). 4 Russ Grayson explains that ‘systems-thinking’ “treats problems and their potential solutions within the larger social, economic, environmental or other contexts in which they are embedded so as to produce a more effective solution rather than a superficial and short-lived quick fix” (Grayson, 2010b) (Grayson, 2015, p. 15-17), a ‘systems-thinking’ approach that is widely used in the permaculture literature. 5 The meaning attached to the word ‘sustainable’ vary widely. One way to define sustainable is ‘the ability of human cultures to reproduce themselves for generations along with a preservation of the material needs without disastrous collapse or long-term deterioration’. Page 9 | 95

Holmgren defines it as “Consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs. People, their buildings and the ways they organize themselves are central to Permaculture” (Holmgren, 2002, p. xix). It teaches to think and live eco-systemically through an understanding of natural axioms and patterns and a mimicking of those in practical design, and permaculture presents an approach to designing environments which have the diversity, stability, and resilience6 of natural ecosystems (Richardt, 1995, p. 5). Editor of Permaculture Magazine Maddy Harland notes that “The discipline of permaculture design is based on observing what makes natural systems endure, establishing simple yet effective principles, and using them to mirror Nature in whatever we choose to design. This can be gardens, farms, buildings, woodlands, communities, , even towns and cities” (Harland, 2010). Permaculture teaches to regenerate damaged land and to preserve existing environments and eco-systems which are still intact (air, lakes, oceans, forests, grasslands, soils, urban, rural etc.) in all climatic types, while creating and keeping a place for people in them. In Permaculture: A Designers Manual, a treatise and foundational work on permaculture, the author and co-founder of the permaculture concept Bill Mollison7 writes that permaculture is about “designing sustainable human settlements and preserving and extending natural systems. It covers aspects of designing and maintaining a cultivated in any climate; understanding patterns in nature; climatic factors; water; soils; earthworks; techniques and strategies in different climatic types; aquaculture; and social, legal and economic design of human settlements” (Mollison, 1988). Permaculture design lends and

6 Resilient (eco)systems are systems of high abundance in species- and , redundancies of eco-functions and self-stabilizing response mechanisms to ecological disturbances. One commonly used definition of resilience is “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks” (Folke et. al., 2010). For permaculture design, “The term ‘resiliency’ best describes our goals now, not some possibly-unachievable ‘sustainability’, but systems, institutions, industries and land-uses that can resist, adapt, fluctuate and reconfigure when pressures from outside the system impact them. Resilient systems are dynamic rather than being some more or less stable state within ”. (Grayson, 2015, p. 12) 7 Bill Mollison was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1981, by some called the alternative Nobel Prize, “...for developing and promoting the theory and practice of permaculture … As a result of his active commitment, many countries now have adopted permaculture as a sustainable land- use ethic” (Right Livelihood Award, n.d.). Page 10 | 95 integrates knowledge from a wide range of scientific disciplines in order to synthesize and expand its array of knowledge including those captured in the different definitions given herein.

Permaculture incorporates and synthesizes the relevant knowledge from both natural and social sciences, such as , botany, zoology, , animal husbandry, ecology, environmental , sustainability design, mechanics, , meteorology, horticulture, , building architecture, , town planning, geology, politics, economics, anthropology, complexity science, law, traditional ecological knowledge8 and others (Grayson, 2010b) (Bohler, 2017) (Akthar et. al., 2016) (Steven, 2002) (Hemenway, 2015) (Eliades, 2016). It does so in order to better understand the conditions under which a sustainable and resilient permanence between human and natural cultures can be created and sustained. Permaculture is a whole- systems based, or ‘holistic’, design approach, where healthy and resilient ecosystems, both natural and human, are at the core, and where all the human and natural sub-systems of the ‘whole’ and their interdependencies are considered in design. Geophysicist James Lovelock explains that “the Earth system is a self- regulating system comprising the atmosphere, oceans and surface rocks and all of the organisms, including humans” (Lovelock, 2008). It is this interaction, interconnection and interdependency between humans and nature within a greater Earth system that is important for permaculture design considerations. As it is a whole-systems approach, “Permaculture is a design system for the creation of socially, economically and ecologically sustainable settlements, whether in rural areas or metropolitan cities ... a system of nature-assisted design that takes biogeographic knowledge as its starting point” (emphasis in original)

8 A type of “a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment” (Ferguson & Lovell, 2012). In line with mainline economic thinking, this type of knowledge production within an informal cultural institution is kept in place for sharing ecological knowledge, customs and traditions, and represent a tendency towards a social equilibrium that has evolves through trial and error processes, in this case involving knowledge about natural ecology. Technical solutions in permaculture designs often lend from this type traditional ecological knowledges from past civilizations, a kind of knowledge which is still passed on through culture today outside the formal institutions of knowledge. Page 11 | 95

(Grayson, 2010). While permaculture in its early years underwent little scientific research despite its increasingly public profile, scientific research and publications across a spectrum of sciences on the design platform have in recent years begun to increase9 (Ferguson & Lovell, 2012, 2015), with publications identifying the permaculture system as one potential contributor towards solving the Earth’s ecological and environmental issues through design and increasing ecological literacy (Ferguson & Lovell, 2015). A paper published in 2017 by the Permaculture Association in the U.K. noted on the whole-systems approach that “Permaculture is not a set of practices - it is a way of putting existing practices together in a way that maximises our positive impact in the world. We need research that shows how integrated design meets human and planetary needs better than design for single outputs” (van der Velden, 2017, p. 34). As indicated by Bill Mollison earlier above, the focus of permaculture is to build in and incorporate sustainable practices into all our human systems (See Appendix B). Recent focus in permaculture designs has centered on improving the resilience of designs against changing climatic tendencies and weather patterns that necessities a mitigation of the increased volatility, by introducing specie-diversity and overlapping function redundancies into natural and social systems. This is done through understanding and mimicking the natural patterns observed in nature itself, and studies also increasingly reveal that thriving and sustainable human civilizations are fundamentally dependent on the existence of sustainable and resilient natural systems to support their stability (Beddoe et. al. 2009) (Hemenway, 2010 & 2015).

The concept of permanent cultures should not be understood as static and unchanging ones, but ones that are dynamically adapting to changing human and natural systems. The goal in permaculture design is through a type of earth to create cultures that are self-regenerating, resilient and adaptive to the changing circumstances over a long-term generational time-span (Grayson, 2013, p. 7). By using holistic, or whole system design thinking, and by incorporating a wide range of knowledge, including how complexity systems work

9 The main fields of research related to permaculture happens, according to analyzed Google Scholar statistics (Ferguson & Lovell, 2012) within the ‘Social’ field, with an estimated 6-7 pct. combined related to economics and politics, and the ‘Planning & Design’ and ‘Biophysical’ fields. Page 12 | 95

(Hemenway, 2015, p. Ch. 1), which is a type of conceptual systems thinking that reflects how both human and natural systems interact, evolve and adapt due to their innate complexity, permaculture helps to and design against increasing natural volatility. The late prominent permaculture thinker and biologist Toby Hemenway defines permaculture in a broad way, describing that it “is a design system based on observing nature and developing a set of principles that are in harmony and allowing all the ecological functions to all occur while still keeping a place for human beings in it too as well” (Hemenway, 2010). To keep a place for people in any design of settlements (e.g. tropical, temperate, rural or urban), changing circumstances and contextual cultural aspects must also be considered, and this is done through a deeper understanding of social customs and traditions. The importance of ‘time and place’ consideration in permaculture design is one one reason that there exists such a wide range of definitions of what permaculture is. These differences are due to the fact that permaculture means different things to different people depending on where they are situated. The permaculture ethical code works as an underlying foundation for permaculture thinking and design, and it is a code that, while being broadly clear, it leaves great scope for individual and contextual interpretative understanding, adoption and application.

1.1 Ethics of Permaculture Unique to permaculture as a way of designing human and natural systems is that the design system is based on a set of ethics and principles10 that people volunteer to adopt as their private governance -system (Grayson, 2013, p. 5) (Harland, 2013) (Holmgren, 2002). It is unique in that as an applied science, it also incorporates its own underlying ethical code together with a set of design principles to steer its design considerations (Holmgren, 2002 & 2013b). From this approach, permaculture designs from ethical design principles that centers on the

10 The permaculture idea further provides a set of permaculture principles (Holmgren, 2002). These are a set of universally applicable principles to any climate and scale and they work as guidelines to be used in designing sustainable systems. “They are derived from the careful and thoughtful observation of nature, and from earlier work be ecologists, landscape designers and ” (Harland, 2010). This thesis will not consider these principles further in-depth, as they relate more to the actual practical choices and processes and a design as is less relevant for the purpose here involved. They are interesting to analyze economically and politically to further expand the understanding of the nature and the design system of permaculture. For an overview of the set of principles, see Appendix C. Page 13 | 95 succession of human posterity by working with natural ecology instead of against it. In areas of land-use, such as urban design or farming and other systems of food production (e.g. organic agriculture, , biodynamic agriculture), permaculture is, due to its ethical foundation, unique among its alternatives. This goes for other areas as well of human settlement design, where permaculture has been applied or is being reconsidered. Landscaping, house construction, finance, education, community initiatives, research and technology (Mollison, 1998) are fields considered by the permaculture literature. Permaculture design in these areas are based on its ethical code and in this way, the ethics assists individuals, local communities, the city councils, businesses, NGO’s and so forth, in informing and navigating their actions on environmental aspects, and in fact, as shown in part 2, increasingly do. Permaculture works from a set of ethics with the propositions that humans should think and act responsibly in their relations to each other and to the earth, a moral postulation that builds on stewardship concept of the connection between humanity and nature. As its ethical code, permaculture puts forth three value propositions. These ethical value propositions are Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share (Permaculture Association, n.d.) (Holmgren, 2002). According to Maddy Harland, these ethics are derived from different belief-systems worldviews and their commonalities (Harland, 2010), and permaculture writer Toby Hemenway emphasize on the ethics that they reflect the ideas of past civilizations in the way they oriented their actions towards the Earth (Hemenway, 2010). On the permaculture ethics Maddy Harland notes that “What permaculture does is make them explicit within a design process that aims to take them out of the realms of philosophy and practically root them in everybody’s lives, transforming thinking into doing. It is their combined presence in a design that has a radical capacity for ecological and social transformation”. This view adds to the fact that permaculture is an applied science which lends from a plentitude of scientific disciplines, including the history of moral philosophy and value systems of past and present human civilizations.

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Earth Care

Working with natural systems, instead of against them, and using methods that impose minimal impact on the environment’s natural ecosystems are at the core of the Earth Care value proposition. Based around an understanding of environmental ecology, the complexity and the interconnectedness of human and natural systems and their systems-stability interdependency, the Earth Care ethic introduce a set of ‘cultural’ constraints on human activities as a culture interaction with the environment. One way to understand the function and purpose of a human culture and its institutions in general, is as a set of what is permissible and impermissible behaviors, or the ‘rules of the game’ of a society. Culture can be considered as a social equilibrium between permissible and impermissible behaviors by those engaged in that cultural society. The culture emphasized by permaculture, which more permaculture practitioners and also people not related to the platform are subscribing to, is one that “reflects a belief in the critical importance of caring for the earth, thereby making provision for all life systems to continue and reproduce. This entails protecting biodiversity and natural relationships and systems, protecting, strengthening and regenerating natural systems when we are making decisions including considering the downstream impacts of development” (Donovan, 2010). The impacts of the Anthropocene11 increases as populations and economic throughput grows, and permaculture argues that changes therefore are required to human activity and settlement designs to adapt to this fact, and this ethic is a general way to help individuals think about the choices in their daily life. It is an approach to all human activities and entrepreneurial decisions, in the choice and use of resources for and production, as well as choices of consumption. To educate and empower individuals in this way to implement ‘small solutions to big problems’, the expanding permaculture literature, educational networks and online material and other informational systems contains knowledge and design ideas for making a

11 The is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “the period of time during which human activities have had an environmental impact on the Earth regarded as constituting a distinct geological age” (Miriam Webster, n.d.) and by Oxford Living Dictionaries as “Relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.” It is often considered the opposite of the (Oxford Living Dictionaries, n.d.) Page 15 | 95 wide range of human activities more in line with natural systems12. To ensure the interdependency that exists between human and natural cultures, the earth care ethic seeks to sustain life and ecosystems through educating individuals on the necessity to use natural elements ecologically and sustainable, such as plants, animals, waters, soils, forests and air, as “Altogether, these resources provide the ecosystem services that underpin human life” (Akhtar et. al. 2016). The sustainable use of ecosystem resources are aspects in designs of all types and sizes ranging from gardens, houses, urban and rural communities, food producing land, waste and facilities, energy production and others (Hemenway, 2009, 2015). Editor of Permaculture Magazine Maddy Harland writes that “In everyday life, this may involve buying local produce, eating in season, and cycling rather than driving. Its about choices we make, and how we manage the land. Its about opposing the destruction of wild habitats, and the poisoning of soil, water and atmosphere, and its about designing and creating healthy systems that meet our needs without damaging the planet” (Harland, 2013). The earth care ethic has introduced analytical reconsiderations taken by permaculture practitioners about the ecological impact of some of our present human institutions, such as modern industrial agriculture. This type of a permaculture institutional analysis is elaborated on in part 4.

People Care

The permaculture People Care ethic centers on the importance of community and deepening local networks, cooperation and collaborative efforts to implement the sought change and realizing local solutions to environmental problems. This ethic promotes the idea that a community thrives best when the basic needs for all its members are met locally, instead of from relying on solely on distant sources, and that care of human needs must begin with the individual, from where his or her

12 The Permaculture Flower is one conceptual framework for a whole-systems design approach to the range of human activities that are increasingly reconsidered according to permanent culture design. It lists Culture & Education, Health & Spiritual Wellbeing, Finance & Economics, Land Tenure & Community Governance, Land & Earth Stewardship, , and Tools & Technology (Holmgren, 2002, p. xx). See Appendix B for David Holmgren’s Permaculture Flower. Toby Hemenway’s modified version of the Permaculture Flower lists ‘Personal, Local and Regional considerations in a permaculture system for basic human needs of Food, Energy, Water, Shelter, Waste, Health, Spirit, Community, Justice and Livelihood (Hemenway, 2015, p. xiii). Page 16 | 95 expanded focus can then further extent to include his families, neighbours and the wider community. Educating people and building settlements that sustain their basic needs in efforts is part of permaculture design considerations towards a growing empowerment, self-reliance and personal responsibility of local communities. It is contrary to the idea that elites, powerful politicians and oligarchs are the solutions to problems in local communities, and that it is instead the individual and the community themselves that are the focal point for finding and implementing solutions, as their contextual knowledge of their own time and place circumstances and knowledge supersedes that of distanced politicians (Permaculture Association, n.d.). Actions taken by individuals should, as with the earth care ethic, be actions that cares for other people and through such considerations reduce the negative environmental on others.

Fair Share

Fair Share is the synthesis of the two Earth Care and People Care ethics above, and this third ethics is based in the idea that “There is no point in designing a sustainable family unit, community, or nation whilst others languish without clean water, clean air, food, shelter, meaningful , and social contact” (Harland, 2010). While fair share living is not a quantitatively set level of consumption, or specific limits set to the range of human choices as proscribed through top-down governmental regulations and restrictions, it is instead a voluntarily self-imposed constraint upon the individual himself on his possible and necessary range of permissible actions and consumption. As information increases (e.g. through permaculture knowledge or other scientific systems and studies) on the ecological long-term effects and consequences from the way people, businesses, organizations and governments act, the Fair Share ethic promotes specific types of private and group decisions in both private affairs, as well as in interpersonal exchanges and social affairs. This ethic “set the boundaries for consumption and reproduction and reallocate surpluses” (Holmgren, 2002) as a core idea, in that permaculture fundamentally aims to empower individuals and communities through education and the free exchange of ideas to prioritize their value rankings and to share what they deem in excess, based on considerations of the first two

Page 17 | 95 ethics. This is an idea of sharing and giving back to the human and natural through voluntary ‘charity’ but also an understanding that it is a prerequisite to ensure a human-nature function that is in balance. While the sentiments of charity held by individuals involved within the permaculture profile have not yet, to the authors knowledge, been investigated, it would seem plausible that the ‘whole-systems approach’ in permaculture thinking reinforces the perception of the necessity of this type of charity by permaculture practitioners, given that the interconnectedness and interdependency for resilience of systems everywhere are illustrated as dependent on such a value proposition. Giving back to systems that supports societies, including natural systems, are important in order to close the ‘energy-loop’ of inputs and outputs, such that a system is ‘recycling’ itself instead of being ‘extracted’. Permaculture researcher Toby Hemenway puts the ethical thinking here as “Does it care for the earth; does it care for people? If you do it right, you will create a surplus that should be returned to nature and people. The earth is so abundant that it can create an amazing abundance, returning the surplus is important to support the system by closing the loop” (Hemenway, 2012). As a whole system framework, permaculture designs must recognize the interdependency between people in local and regional communities, as every part of a greater whole must thrive in order to achieve system resilience. This idea goes for both natural and human systems (Beddoe et. al. 2009), and the history of permaculture indicates a high degree of global decentralized networking, community projects, and sharing of ideas freely between permaculture practitioners on best-practice through the years as they understand the importance of giving back to human and natural systems (Grayson, 2009).

These three ethics of permaculture in totality puts the emphasis on the individual and the community to design their settlements and implement solutions to environmental problems. It is at the same time both a way of thinking, a philosophy, and a way of taking practical actions (Grayson, 2013). The perspective on the individual and the community has over the recent decades been further reinforced by the perceived inadequacy of governmental action to successful implement solutions to Earth’s current widespread environmental issues (more on environmental issues in part 3) (Ferguson & Lovell, 2015) Page 18 | 95

(Harland, 2013). Building on these ethical value propositions, the permaculture ethical framework is “a design system for and land-use that’s concerned both with the consumption and production side, and that’s based on universal ethics and design principles which can be applied in any context” (Grayson, 2010b), using natural systems as model for simple and innovative ways to design and live sustainably within more resilient systems for both present and future generations (Permaculture Association, n.d.). A key goal of permaculture is to create environmental flexibility and natural rehabilitation, and it is suited for “for over-exploited, marginal and degraded soils and water areas” (Akhtar et. al. 2016). Research shows that the existence of human civilizations is inexorably dependent on the existence and abundance of natural resilient ecosystems in order to sustain itself (Beddoe et. at. 2009), and a land-use ethics that reflect this is increasingly necessitated. Permaculture acknowledge this fact and it “recognizes the intrinsic worth of every living thing. A tree has value in itself, even if it presents no commercial value to humans. That the tree is alive and functioning is worthwhile. It is doing its part in nature: recycling litter, producing oxygen, sequestering carbon dioxide, sheltering animals, building soils, and so on” (Steve, 2002). While research increasingly acknowledges the human dependency on natural systems (Beddoe et. al. 2009) (Dudley & Alexander, 2018) (Lovelock, 2008), this idea has always to some extent been a concern for past generations and civilizations. Kenneth Boulding (Boulding, 1966) noted in his article The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, that without a vision and a moral compass for our civilization’s ‘future image’, “there is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that a society which loses its identity with posterity and which loses its positive image of the future loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart” (Boulding, 1966). A concern for posterity, and a concern for the that is passed on to future generations is fundamental in culturally considering and formulating the constraints between permissible and impermissible actions taken individuals. While permaculture in its early years from its ethical starting point focused mostly designing sustainable agriculture and food production as a solution to the destructive nature of

Page 19 | 95 industrial agriculture (more in part 4)13, its scope has expanded to encompass all areas of human activity14, and the reason came from considerations on “How can we have an organic agriculture or horticulture and manage our landscapes to sustain themselves over generations on the one hand and then consume goods from industries managed in ecologically damaging ways on the other?” (Harland, 2010). The line of thinking is that all human economic activity should be rooted in ethical actions that sustains and grows itself and the surrounding natural eco-systems, instead of consuming and depleting those (e.g. rainforests, wildlife habitats, fisheries, clean air, reefs and soils).

Ferguson and Lovell notes on environmental socio-ecological transitions like the ones suggested through permaculture design and ethics that “Transition requires not only socio-technical innovation, but also the narratives and values that motivate adoption and advocacy” (Ferguson & Lovell, 2015). Permaculture science incorporates value propositions and narratives that has sparked an international social grass-roots movement focused on environmental transitioning. As they further note on transitioning into increasingly stewardship-like cultures, “the permaculture worldview incorporates a theory of human environment relations that positions humans as ecosystem managers, highlighting the potential for holistic design and management to meet human needs while increasing ecosystem health (emphasis added)”. Permaculture differs then from other models of preservation-oriented conservation of nature and models of purely and continuous -oriented developments, as those two temporally are contradictory to a permanent and sustainable systemic relation between human well-being and nature (Ferguson & Lovell, 2015). As will be shown later in part 3, Kenneth Boulding (Boulding, 1966) formulated his ideas on the economic aspects of an ‘Earth stewardship model’ where both recycling and less resources use for the same economic throughput are factors of economic success, instead of solely

13 According to permaculture author Maddy Harland (Harland, 2010), data shows that one third of the human is taken up by the food we buy. Early permaculture thinkers might from this fact have naturally begun their considerations of a permanent culture by the institutions of food production and land-management before expanding the synthesis. 14 See more in Appendix A and B for examples of the areas of human activities considered both practically and analytically. Page 20 | 95 considering the factor of growth in economic throughput. Neither a focus preservation or economic growth alone are deemed sufficient for such a model. The impact of permaculture has also seen itself grow into a worldwide social grassroots movement, as the popularity of the above framework, its design principles, and the practical techniques people has used in their designs, has caught the attention of people in communities worldwide.

2. The Permaculture Social Grassroots Movement Motivated by the permaculture design system, a decentralized and innovative permaculture social grassroots movement15 has emerged worldwide over the last four decades that today defines the permaculture profile (Hathaway, 2015) (van der Velden, 2017) (Grayson, 2010a, 2015). The permaculture movement is heavily oriented towards sustainability and regenerative practices, advocacy, community outreach and social-enterprise initiatives, and the permaculture movement is a collection of thousands of projects and ongoing processes globally within local communities and regions in their efforts to be agents of socio-ecological change. Through both open-source sharing of intellectual and practical knowledge and techniques, global cooperation and local collaboration (Grayson, 2013, p. 3), the movement is an entity that is rethinking existing practices, structures and alternative institutions. Those include rural and city facilities, amenities and infrastructure systems, food and house production and “realized projects include gardening organizations, farms, demonstration sites, credit unions, multi-issue community organizations, numerous periodicals, campus greening and initiatives, and a variety of accredited and unaccredited institutions of higher learning” (Ferguson & Lovell, 2014, p. 265) (Hemenway, 2015) (See also Appendix 1). The international permaculture movement then is a voluntary and self- organising social grass-roots movement of practitioners, designers, organizations and communities, working as a decentralized and distributed bottom-up network of nodes that continues to evolve and expand the permaculture design system,

15 One research paper uses ‘grassroots innovations’ “to describe networks of activists and organisations generating novel bottom–up solutions for ; solutions that respond to the local situation and the and values of the communities involved”. This definition fits well with the data on the activities of the permaculture grassroots movement (Seyfang & Smith, 2007). Page 21 | 95 which then in turns changes the movement as it dynamically adapts to changing environmental and social circumstances (Grayson, 2010b) (Grayson, 2013) (Ferguson & Lovell, 2015). As a movement it is a decentralized system of networking individuals and groups, oriented towards the empowerment of individuals, communities and activists to become the mechanisms of environmental change and instituting a wide range of practical solutions which the design framework suggests (more in part 3 on practical solutions). The orientation focused on empowering individuals and local communities through education on environmental issues and permaculture solutions is reinforced by the perception that the current national and international political bodies have failed to reverse the tendency on some of the current environmental issues that has about the depletion of natural ecosystems. Many involved in the permaculture movement are tired of waiting for governments and large to set a more positive course, and “individuals, community-based organisations and some businesses are taking the lead to create that future for themselves … Permaculture seeks to empower individuals in communities rather than corporations and government. It sees the only valid role of economics, social institutions, government and to be that of creatively curating the planet for the people and the life that populates it” (Grayson, 2013, p. 2-3). Studies show how these social grassroots movements and networks, like the permaculture movement, should be increasingly regarded as important decentralized agents of change, as they can respond to the environmental issues and damages by innovating and implementing novel niche and localized solutions, and therethrough they can also influence the existing economic, social and political institutions from their practices, either directly or indirectly (Ferguson & Lovell, 2015). What Ferguson and Lovell describes as “simple solutions populism” of the permaculture approach suggests that some of the best solutions to global environmental crisis can be found and implemented individually and on a local basis with the accessible materials, prerequisite knowledge and skills, which permaculture teaches. What they explain is a theory of change, “simple solutions populism shifts the perceived locus of control over environmental crises toward the individual and ameliorates the inverse relationship between the scale of environmental problems and individuals’

Page 22 | 95 sense of efficacy” (Ferguson & Lovell, 2015, p. 4). Rafter Ferguson and Sarah Lovell also finds that “With the substantive failure of governmental regulatory approaches and top-down market-based initiatives to address these issues, increasing attention is being paid to the contributions of actors from outside of large state and nonstate institutions”. This attention to decentralized ‘outside’ environmental actors is also shown to be a critical component in recent research on the influence of environmentally oriented movements and organizations and their mechanisms as agents of change16 (Ernstson et. al. 2008) (Leach et. al. 2012) (Seyfang & Haxeltine, 2012). Agents outside the political arena are actors for mobilizing and coordinating the resources needed to support sustainability-oriented socio- ecological transitions throughout the societal sub-orders, one such distinction between sub-orders similar to what economist Stefan Kolev categorizes as the economic, legal, political and cultural sub-orders (Kolev, 2015). Studies show that permaculture should also be seen as one such non-state agent of change, or market-agents, with an extensive internet knowledge and information-sharing hubs available to individuals and groups, that are already expressed in more than 4.000 permaculture projects worldwide on all the Earth’s inhabited continents (Ferguson, 2014, 2015) (Nierenberg, 2017). Permaculture has grown to have a widespread international presence in its attempt to influence and redesign those current ecosystem-depleting institutions, such as industrial agriculture which is the exampled look at in part 4, and , landscaping, city design and similar areas, that in different ways brings with them environmental destruction and ecosystem depletion.

Permaculture then is what political economy would consider a decentralized movement of entrepreneurs and innovators acting in mainly local markets and environments to create and redesign present human and natural systems towards objectives such as sustainability, regeneration and resiliency. Editor and co-

16 (Ferguson & Lovell, 2015) finds that “Scholarship on these issues is spread across multiple disciplines, theories, and terminologies, most saliently in the literature of sustainability transitions, social-ecological systems, and in studies of environmentalism spanning political science, social psychology, and . Emerging scholarship on grassroots innovation networks is helping balance a preponderant focus on top-down technocratic processes in the literature of sustainability transitions” (Ferguson & Lovell, 2015). Page 23 | 95 founder of the Permaculture Magazine writes on permaculture movement that “This is a decentralized, democratic vision of social transformation where grass- roots initiatives … can begin to plan for a low carbon ‘’ on a community level. There is no time to wait for central government to act, or eventually to react” (Harland, 2013). The ‘energy descent’ to which Maddy Harland refers, is the inevitability of a scenario to come about, or more generally, a peak fossil-fuel scenario, will according to the research and a energy-systems analysis, will mean a decline in the available energy-source of our current civilization from some of its present institutional underpinnings. This decline in our current civilizational energy-source is most often considered in relation to the availability of oil, as it is the dominant energy-source for global economic activity in one form or another (more on peak-oil, industrial agriculture and permaculture in part 4).

Increased research on grassroots movements, such as the permaculture movements and its role as an agent of environmental change, helps bridge the knowledge-gap on sustainability transitions, environmental research, and the importance and the transitional impact of decentralized bottom-up institutional orders. The importance of bottom-up decentralized orders for environmental solutions to problems stem from their contextual embeddedness of the engaged individuals’ specific time and place placements and differences, and their knowledge, whereby they are more adequately equipped with information required to take informed and likelier successful decisions (e.g. on local landscape features, environmental issues concerned, weather patterns, community needs). The decentralized feature is an important characteristic for transition decisions, one which centralized top-down decision makers are less equipped to take, due to their lacking site-specific knowledge (more in part 5). This is even more true as ecological transitions historically have been distinct heterogenous phenomena, whereby historical practices cannot be invoked as ‘best practice’ for a one size fits all approach (Bergman et. al. (2010) (Smith & Stirling, 2010) (Lawhon & Murphy, 2012). Grassroots networks and movements, including those involved in the permaculture movement, may implement sustainability transitions through a generation of both technical and social innovations at the ‘edges’ of current Page 24 | 95 environmental practices and land-uses, and they often emerge as niches due to the high degree of differential features between local environments and ecosystems (Ferguson & Lovell, 2014, 2015) (Seyfang & Smith 2007), (Leach et al. 2012). With the focus on a mobilization of individuals and local communities by educating these on permaculture design ideas and technical solutions, “grassroots networks create cultural and economic niches that buffer novel technologies, including forms of social , from the market and policy” (Ferguson & Lovell, 2015) (See also Seyfang & Haxeltine, 2012). Permaculture, in light of a social science interpretation, should be seen as one case of a free-market bottom-up and decentralized transition process that through both individual education and empowerment acts in spontaneous ways to implement new ways to coordinate the distribution of resources between sought ends, such as sustainability, regenerative designs, ecological human settlements and ecosystem abundance.

A survey was taken in 2014 to profile Australia’s ‘national permaculture profile’ and to also lend support to Australia’s official Accredited Permaculture Training (APT) educational program (Francis, 2014). Based on a national representative statistical sample of active Australian permaculture practitioners on how permaculture is applied by those practitioners “including earning a livelihood through permaculture work, enterprise and employmentt”, the 2014 survey sought “to identify and address the specific knowledge and skills required for permaculturists to gain employment and/or establish and operate their permaculture business, enterprise and community programs”. Of 177 respondents to one question, with 82 being official APT graduates, 42% of the respondents went on to purchase land and develop it with permaculture principles and techniques, and 42% also established their own enterprises. 71% responded that they were active in existing community projects, while 53% had initiated their own new community projects. Respondents had in total provided 184 educational courses, such as the Permaculture Design Course, the APT, community permaculture workshops and advanced and specialist courses, and combined had taught 20.302 students over a 5-year period, with community workshops totaling more than 1/3 of those. The study indicates a high degree of community engagement and ‘enviropreneurship’, a term coined by Anderson and Leal to define entrepreneurs Page 25 | 95 that generates ideas and solutions to improve the environmental quality through market and social enterprises (Anderson & Leal, 2015, p. xii). On the matter of permaculture education to create information outreach respondents are also active and the paper concludes that “The statistics from this question clearly demonstrate the solid demand for training in permaculture and for permaculture trainers” (Francis, 2014, p. 3). The permaculture profile in Australia is a community that in many ways reflects the permaculture communities in other countries across the world (Ferguson, 2014), a decentralized global, active and growing educational, business and social enterprise movement.

Another permaculture paper The Next Big Step (van der Velden et.al., 2017) published by the Permaculture Institute in United Kingdom also touches on the permaculture movement profile, and it estimates that “Grass-roots diffusion of knowledge has led to an estimated 3 million practitioners worldwide”, a growth that initially went from only a few dozen Australian practitioners in 1976 to 1978 where the permaculture idea was first released to the public in the paper Permaculture One (Mollison & Holmgren, [1978] 1990) to where it is now. In The Next Big Step paper, there was also identified a growth in permaculture organizations across the world since the late 1970’s, and “They act as hubs for local projects and practitioners, offer free permaculture advice and organise meetings and network activities. Most identify as being effective in knowledge-sharing, team work and achieving their day-to-day work, and many offer trainings in the Permaculture Design Course”. A decentralized permaculture system of knowledge sharing and practice including businesses and social enterprises exist worldwide through individual ‘self-empowered’ action, grass-roots initiatives and sharing of permaculture knowledge. The high degree of engagement in the movement has been fueled through a distrust that top-down hierarchical political structures and their responses have been inadequate to solve the many pressing environmental issues (more in part 3 below), and the permaculture movement is often described to be emphasizing an ‘act local, think global’ idea. The survey in The Next Big Step was taken on 451 practitioners from 36 different countries, including Australia, the U.S, the U.K, Canada and Oceanic and African countries. The study lists the most urgent priorities considered by permaculture practitioners on how to combat Page 26 | 95 the current environmental and ecological issues and found that it was in ‘Developing resilient and self-reliant communities’ and to ‘Restore ecosystems’. These priorities reflect closely the theoretical whole system design thinking that is at the core of permaculture thinking today (van der Velden et. al., 2017, p. 14). To achieve the goals, the respondents listed “developing the credibility and visibility of permaculture as a solution” as the most urgent approach, as permaculture is often understood only as a garden and food producing system, where the new research and the academic focus should therefore be to “provide reliable evidence for effective permaculture practices and approaches”. Growing the grassroot scope and action was also a prioritized focus, reflecting the decentralized institutional order underlying the permaculture movement, binding individuals together through the idea of an ethical and principled permaculture design approach with practical implementable solutions.

These studies reviewed above by themselves, does not represent the true picture of the global permaculture network, as they are a collection of data that does not represent the whole population of the permaculture movement. But it is found for the permaculture movement profile that “Overall, there is a strong desire to participate in meaningful activity that empowers and inspires individuals, changes local environments and communities for the better, and contributes to solving global level issues through local impacts.” (Van der Velden, 2017, p. 20). The full picture is still being drawn, and it is an increasingly important research area as permaculture is growing its profile, its relevancy and nature is being understood, and therefore an increasing amounts knowledge is being produced and shared by both new and existing regional and continental permaculture organizations like the Permaculture International Research Institute (PIRS) and the European Permaculture Network.

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3. Environmental Issues and Permaculture Solutions The long list of environmental issues of our time includes amongst others the loss of natural forest-systems17 and wild-life habitats through deforestation activities18 meant to create new agricultural farming-fields19, which then further leads to the loss of abundant ecosystems and a lack of soil-bound water retention due to the nature of mainstream agriculture. Loss of water-bound water retention results in large-scale water run-offs and increasing water levels in the oceans, as less water is retained by soil-bound systems (Mollison & Holmgren, [1978] 1990). Other issues are waste pollution; food-shortages; insecticide leading to loss of both insect populations and ecosystems that are dependent on insect species20; upticks in unusual weather and temperature patterns including droughts, heatwaves and storms; industrial water and ; land and top-soil degradation, erosion and desalination which in leads to desertification21 and increasing fears of food insecurity22,23; unsustainable long-term fossil-fuel dependencies and the case of a

17 According to data from The (The World Bank, n.d., A & B) on total forest-land covering the Earth, the data shows a and almost linear decline averaging 0,04 pct. in total forest- land loss. The reduction in forest-land has resulted in a total coverage going from 31.8 pct. in 1990, to 30.8 pct. in 2015. The total loss of 1 pct. over two and a half decades is estimated to be about 1.3 million square kilometers of lost forest-land systems. 18 On using fire for deforestation and land-clearing for farmlands, geophysicist James Lovelock explains that “Our use of fires as a biocide to clear land of natural forests and replace them with farmland was our second act of geoengineering; together these acts have led the Earth to evolve to its current state. As a consequence, most of us are now urban and our environment is an artefact of engineering. During this long engineering apprenticeship, we changed the Earth, but until quite recently, like the photosynthesizers, we were unaware that we were doing it, still less the adverse consequences” (Lovelock, 2008). 19 (Hathaway, 2015) finds that about 50 pct. of all global land has been converted into agricultural systems and that about 30 pct. of all food globally is produced by industrial techniques, meaning “-intensive, large-scale, highly mechanized agriculture of crops with monocultures of crops and extensive use of artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, with intensive animal husbandry” 20 One published study conducted in Germany estimated “a seasonal decline of 76%, and mid- summer decline of 82% in flying insect biomass over the 27 years of study” (Rockström, 2017) 21 Since the advent of industrial agriculture, “more than 17% of vegetated land has suffered from human-induced degradation of soils due to poor fertilizer and water management, soil erosion and shortened fallow periods as well as continuous cropping and inadequate replacement of nutrients removed in harvested materials or lost through erosion … Soil is precious – it can take from 200 to 1000 years to produce a single inch of topsoil, but we are losing 75 billion tonnes of soil or nearly 10 million hectares of farmland per year to erosion – equivalent to almost a quarter of Canada’s total arable land. More than a third of the world’s arable land has been lost since large-scale industrial agriculture began in the 1950s (Hathaway, 2015). 22 means a year-round availability of a sufficient quality of good food that would support an active lifestyle (Grayson, 2015, p 21). 23 The U.N. Global Land Outlook (GLO) report describes that “Land degradation also triggers for scarce resources, which can lead to migration and insecurity while exacerbating Page 28 | 95 peak-oil scenario; inadequate mitigation of air, noise and heat pollution in urban environments; a general loss of biodiversity and species (e.g. plant and animal species, loss of unique ecosystems like coral reefs and rain forests), collapse of fisheries; decline in the availability of freshwater lakes and more (Rhodes, 2012) (Beddoe et. al. 2009) (Dudley & Alexander, 2018) (Ferguson & Lovell, 2015) (Hemenway, 2010, 2012) (Rockström, 2017) (Lovelock, 2008) (Ernstson et. al. 2008) (Mollison, [1981] 2001). This list is not complete and is meant to give an indication of areas of environmental concern, some greater than others. Their importance is in one way indicated by the fact that these and other environmental issues and what their long-term effects on the Earth will be, and their social and economic impacts, rank high in the ongoing debates within political arenas and conferences and within the related scientific fields. In September 2018, the U.N. secretary general António Guterres told world leaders at the U.N. headquarter in New York that “runaway climate change” will come about in just two years if a new course is not taken on the world’s environmental issues and its reliance on fossil fuels. The U.N secretary general stated that “Climate change is the defining issue of our time, and we are at a defining moment ... Scientists have been telling us for decades. Over and over again. Far too many leaders have refused to listen” (The Hill, 2018). Similar political and scientific conferences have been ongoing over many years and have been shaped by the scientific research on the Earth’s environmental status. Oxford University geophysiologist James Lovelock wrote for The Royal Society (Lovelock, 2008) that “The Earth is now recognized as a self- regulating system that includes a reactive ; the system maintains a long- term steady-state climate and surface chemical composition favourable for life. We are perturbing the steady state by changing the land surface from mainly forests to farm land and by adding greenhouse gases and aerosol pollutants to the air. We access and income inequalities. Soil erosion, desertification, and water all contribute to societal stress and breakdown. In this regard, land degradation can be considered a “threat amplifier,” especially when it slowly reduces people’s ability to use the land for food production and water storage or undermines other vital ecosystem services. This in turn increases human insecurity and, in certain circumstances, may trigger or increase the of conflict” (Dudley & Alexander, 2018). The report finds that approximately 20 pct. of the Earth’s vegetated land surfaces has shown persistent declining trends in between 1998 and 2013. This included 20 pct. of croplands, 16. Pct of forest lands, 19 pct. of grasslands, and 27 pct. of rangelands. Related to food- security “These trends are especially alarming in the face of the increased demand for land-intensive crops and livestock.” Page 29 | 95 appear to have exceeded the natural capacity to counter our perturbation and consequently the system is changing to a new and as yet unknown but probably adverse state”. James Lovelock emphasizes the increasing negative environmental impact taking place that are inherent to a range of modern human institutions, including industrial agriculture which is examined in part 4, as they run counter to the ecological patterns of Earth. It is likely that human society might have reached its tipping point in terms of the self-stabilizing effects of the Earth’s systems, and that this new state is imposing more costly and adverse effects on human and natural systems. What the correct solution to these environmental issues listed above are, will only be adequately found through an evolutionary process of entrepreneurial discovery, awareness and knowledge production of solutions that reflects these new ecological states, which will help to correct the economic problem of resource coordination to ends that mitigate and reverse those negative environmental outcomes (more in part 5) (Kirzner, 1997). In (Beddoe et. al., 2009), it is noted that “Overcoming these roadblocks and creating a sustainable and desirable future will require an integrated, systems level redesign of our socio- ecological regime focused explicitly and directly on the goal of sustainable quality of life rather than the proxy of unlimited material growth. This transition, like all cultural transitions, will occur through an evolutionary process, but one that we, to a certain extent, can control and direct. We suggest an integrated set of worldviews, institutions, and technologies to stimulate and seed this evolutionary redesign of the current socio-ecological regime to achieve global sustainability”, and permaculture is then argued for in the paper as one such proposition of an integrated design framework as a platform of redesigning the socio-ecological (i.e. human-nature) regime and building sustainable settlements and institutions in line with natural systems (Beddoe et. al. 2009). On socio-ecological regimes one publication explains that “Although it is not novel to recognize the interconnectedness of humans and the environment, there is an urgent need to construct new approaches that emphasize an integrative framework equipped with comprehensive models, reinforcing methods, and complementary data”, further noting that “It is no longer tenable to study ecological and social systems in isolation from one another” (Redman et al. 2004), and as has been shown one such

Page 30 | 95 applied integrative regime is the permaculture design framework and its examples of practical solutions.

3.1 Practical Permaculture Design Solutions The permaculture framework, consisting of a set of ethics and principles (see Appendix C), takes many forms in practical design. Upon the platform, innovators and environmentally oriented social entrepreneurs build new and useful ideas, techniques and things, and permaculture practitioners design systems spanning a “broad spectrum from regenerative agriculture, urban food systems, resource efficient building design, alternative economic systems, , new forms of land access and community settlement, community development and sustainable urbanism” 24 (Grayson, 2013). Practical design solutions are designed with the cultural and contextual circumstances in mind of where the designs are to be embedded, meaning there are no one-size fits all solution, and the ethics and principles-based design approach is arranged to consider all varieties of natural systems as they are general guidelines applicable to all socio-ecological circumstances. Permaculture designs take into consideration natural phenomena like e.g. water, plants, animals, sunlight angles, wind directions and speed, temperatures, soils, resources, water accessibility, and considers the social settings like population and local economy, culture, the basic human necessities involved, in both rural and urban settings, and considers social aspects like infrastructure planning, housing, recreation, culture, education, spirituality, art, and barter systems and others25 (Diver, 2002) (Hemenway, 2015). Writing for the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Center for Appropriate Technology, Steve Diver notes on permaculture that “The focus is not on these elements themselves, but rather on the relationships created among them by the way we place them in the landscape. This synergy is further enhanced by mimicking

24 Toby Hemenway explains on the growth of people using the permaculture concept and the areas in which it is being used, that “in the early days of the discipline, permaculture attracted gardeners, farmers, landscape designers, and nascent permaculture teachers. Permaculture’s concept can be applied in so many ways, permaculturists today include software designers; water, waste and energy engineers; social justice activist; educators and school administrators from kitchen garden to graduate studies; community organizers and government officials; restoration ecologists; teachers of yoga, bodywork, and spiritual practice, in short, almost everyone” (Hemenway, 2015, p. x). 25 See also appendix A & B for outline of areas involved in design considerations. Page 31 | 95 patterns found in nature”. Practical and technical permaculture applications brought forth and implemented from this design-approach are many across the published permaculture knowledge base (see e.g. Mollison, 1988) (Hemenway, 2009, 2015) (Whitefield, 2004), and one study finds on permaculture practices, with more than 4.000 ongoing in 2017 (Nierenberg, 2017), that “there is overwhelming evidence both that the methods work and they may offer the means to address a number of prevailing environmental challenges, e.g. peak oil, climate change, carbon capture, unsustainable agriculture and food shortages, peak phosphorus (phosphate), water shortages, environmental pollution, desert reclamation, and soil degradation (Rhodes, 2012). Some practical solutions have now left the ‘permaculture paradigm’, as they have increasingly become part of mainstream solution-thinking over the decades (Grayson, 2015). Practical techniques still heavily emphasizes food-production aspects and ecological land- use management due to the destructive nature of mainstream industrial agriculture (more in part 4), but besides the food production focus, an increasing amounts of implementable solutions are also being put forth on energy-efficient buildings, waste water treatment, recycling systems using natural components in the process (e.g. animal, insects and plants), eco-village and transition town initiatives, community an and development, urban permaculture and food production, permaculture playground designs (Polat, 2008) (Donovan, 2010) (Kennedy, 1991) and other social and economic structures that can play a part in ‘permanent and sustainable communities’, “As such, permaculture design concepts are applicable to urban as well as rural settings, and are appropriate for single as well as whole farms and villages” (Diver, 2002), and one article on permaculture on urban design note that “Since over half the World's population lives in cities, it seems likely that strengthening the resilience of these environments, using urban permaculture, may be a crucial strategy in achieving a measured descent in our use of energy and other resources, rather than an abrupt collapse of civilization (Rhodes, 2012)”. Urban, or city permaculture design is one increasing subject of permaculture thinking

(Hemenway, 2015).

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To mitigate and reverse the potential climatic changes and the impacts from ecosystem depletion from certain widely practices human institutions and their related CO2 emissions, permaculture design applies a range of techniques, including effective carbon sequestering techniques or ‘negative emission’ techniques in design through introducing carbon-fixing plant species and trees, and is one approach that supports the mitigation of net carbon dioxide emissions26 (Boysen et. al., 2017). Boysen et. al. notes that “We therefore suggest fully exploring the pertinent options available now, which include reforestation of degraded land and the protection of degraded forests to allow them to recover naturally and increase their carbon storage … Further options range from upscaled agroforestry approaches to the application of biochar and various no-tillage practices for food production on appropriate soils”. Carbon sequestering, organic food-forest systems, regenerative agriculture and agroforestry27 systems are methods from which permaculture lends for its design instead of industrial agriculture mono- specie food production systems. On CO2 sequestration and the impact of agriculture, James Lovelock explains that “Tree planting would seem to be a sensible way to remove CO2 naturally from the air, at least for the time it takes for the tree to reach maturity. But in practice the clearance of forests for farmland and biofuels is now proceeding so rapidly that there is little chance that tree planting could keep pace. Forest clearance has direct climate consequences through water cycling and atmospheric albedo change and is also responsible for much of the CO2 emissions. Agriculture in total has climatic effects comparable to those caused by fossil fuel combustion. For this reason, it would seem better to pay

26 Data presented at Oxford Real Farming Conference in 2018 showed great promise for carbon dioxide sequestration using permaculture landscape design. A study of one farm noted that “it was permaculture framework, with its three ethics and its principles, that enabled them to design such a highly productive, healthy, species-rich farm, a farm so profitable that it employs eight people and only needs to cultivate 1,000m2 intensively. The rest is left as unimproved pasture, woodland and forest gardens. Researchers have also discovered that the farm is capable of sequestering carbon in the soil and biomass up to six times more than an ordinary woodland. This is one way of drawing carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it down, a potentially revolutionary strategy for climate change (emphasis added)” (Harland, 2018). 27 These types of , permaculture being the most widely practices form, “presents an alternative paradigm of production based on ecological principles such as recycling wastes, minimizing energy and water use, maximizing genetic diversity, regenerating soil and increasing its carbon content, integrating livestock and crops into a holistic system, and promoting other beneficial biological synergies. Moreover, agroecological methods have the potential to actually boost production and farm incomes” (Hathaway, 2015) Page 33 | 95 the inhabitants of forested regions to preserve their trees than plant new trees on cleared ground” (Lovelock, 2008). It is such considerations that are taken in permaculture designs. Techniques often implemented that are considered permaculture ‘trademarks’ are Keyline-systems; natural wind-break and fire- protection design; passive wind, solar and water energy systems; low-energy production technologies; aquaculture and aquaponics systems; food forest cultivation; plant and animal forms pest-controls and fertilizers instead of chemical-based compounds; perennial poly-crop cultivation; sloped swale mounds on contour lines to grade the natural land and increase water retention and flow management; no-dig and no-tillage gardens; synergistic companion-plant and guild systems; retention and storage systems for water and sun and wind energy; rotational animal grazing to support natural regeneration patterns with a focus on soil rehabilitation and organic materials production for e.g. renewable organic fuels and house constructions (see e.g. Mollison, 1988) (Hemenway, 2009, 2015) (Whitefield, 2004) (Hathaway, 2015). Ferguson and Lovell explain that “Permaculture’s central concept is that humanity can reduce or replace energy and pollution-intensive industrial technologies, especially in agriculture, through intensive use of biological resources and thoughtful, holistic, design, patterned after wild ecosystems” (Ferguson & Lovell, 2015). In the sphere of community, economics and finance, local systems of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) with emphasis on horticulture techniques and a diverse range of species cultured, are alternatives to the current global transportation-intensive institutional food supply chains (Hemenway, 2015). Life cycle and complexity-analysis of systems, together with ‘natural energy-’ are used better internalize the full costs and benefits of technologies and economic systems; regionalized and decentralized money systems are explored; sharing and permaculture ‘ethical’ finance and investment considerations are applied, as for example in the hundreds of permaculture-inspired Transition Towns of villages, cities and communities worldwide that are reinventing many ‘mainstream’ social and economic systems28

28 On the goal of the permaculture inspired Transition Town movement, Seyfang and Haxeltine finds that “the movement can be conceived of as a grassroots innovation, a sociotechnical niche comprising many constituent projects (individual TTs) where new social infrastructure and institutions, value sets, and priorities are practised in a value space which is distinct from Page 34 | 95

(Seyfang & Haxeltine, 2012). These above and countless other practical techniques and examples are used in permaculture designed systems in order to mitigate and reverse the long list of environmental issues while at the same time still focusing on the economic and social ends of local and regional communities and their individual needs (Hemenway, 2009, 2015) (Whitefield, 2004) (Mollison, 1988)

(Holmgren, 2002).

Permaculture touches on many aspects of our human systems in trying to bring them in line with ecological natural patterns and flows, yet food production systems have been one of the core focuses due to the environmental challenges that our present industrial food production systems impose, related to many of the issues listed earlier above, and which geophysiologist James Lovelock’s paper also touches on. Through alternative design systems, permaculture is instead teaching how the regeneration of soils can be done on a localized basis, how those techniques can be introduced into urban environments with other externalized benefits (Hemenway, 2015), and how a sequestering of carbon dioxides through ecological management is both possible and applicable in productive food production and human settlement systems, reversing the problems of industrial agriculture, and permaculture shows often cheap and ingenious means to actively taking in use to assiss in restoring the Earth’s natural systems and balance29. Co-founder Bill Mollison noted in his Right Livelihood Award acceptance speech that “We estimate that of the species that we can see and count, we will lose some 35,000 in the next one and a half decades. All my life we’ve been at war against nature. I just pray that we lose that war … Multi-dimensional systems will out-yield one-dimensional

mainstream society … This new and rapidly growing civil society movement aims to address the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil, through local community-based action. Transition towns, villages, and cities are springing up around the UK and internationally, aiming to galvanise local actions towards reducing dependency on fossil fuels.” (Seyfang & Haxeltine, 2012, p. 389). 29 One paper finds that there is strong evidence of permaculture and regenerative agriculture methods working and that “they may offer the means to address number of prevailing environmental challenges, e.g. peak oil, climate change, carbon capture, unsustainable agriculture and food shortages, peak phosphorus (phosphate), water shortages, environmental pollution, desert reclamation, and soil degradation” (Rhodes, 2012). Another paper on the economics of permaculture finds that “Permaculture successfully internalizes its wastes (fulfilling another economic goal) through its recycling of inputs and outputs within the system … By attempting to reproduce the ecology of natural areas in a planned and managed way, without the aid of artificial inputs, permaculture has the potential to provide an economic solution to environmental problems” (Richardt, 1995, p. 92). Page 35 | 95 systems hundreds of times. Polycultures will always out-yield monocultures. The Permaculture system is a safe way of a sustained ecology; it is in itself a safe and system.” (Right Livelihood Award, [1981] n.d.). Permaculture is one practical ‘applied science’ approach with technical solutions for mitigating and reversing the environmental ‘crises’ presently imposed some of our human institutions.

4. Institutional Analysis – A Permaculture Approach As a whole system design framework, wherein the interactions and interdependencies that exist between parts of the ‘whole’ system of both human and natural interactions and interdependencies are analyzed, permaculture brings about one analytical framework that can be used to examine those sub- systems within the whole, including human institutions, by the aid of its synthesized and integrated social science aspects. Human institutions and natural systems both functions as parts of a greater whole system, or in economist Kenneth Boulding’s term for it, a ‘Spaceship Earth’ system (Boulding, 1966). Understanding the the energy loops within the whole system, both human and natural, and interconnectedly designing systems that close them and considering them in a socio-ecological (i.e. human-nature) analysis, can in a permaculture analysis be ascertained in order to transition institutions and systems designs (e.g. industrial agriculture) that in their present forms extracts from within the ‘whole system’ more ‘energy’ input or resources than it exceed its energetic . Such an institutional or systems analysis is a critical proponent for a permanent designed culture to ensure its temporal permanence. If the energy consumption used to sustain human systems (e.g. fossil-fuels and a consumption of eco-systems to sustain industrial practices like agriculture) exceeds their energy return to the natural energy-source systems upon which those systems rely, then the system is temporally unsustainable and will inevitably collapse as a stable system for human and natural habitats unless other energy sources can replace those deficiencies (Boulding, 1966) (Hemenway, 2012) (Holmgren, 2013a). One critical conclusion from this analytical ‘systems’ approach and permaculture, is that industrial agriculture, as touched upon above, due to both its innate dependency

Page 36 | 95 on the external assistance of non-renewable fossil-fuel energy inputs, and its inexorable and structural nature to consume and deplete natural eco-systems30 is an unsustainable human institution for food production that currently sustains billions of people globally (Hemenway, 2010, 2012) (Richardt, 1995) (Mollison, 1988) (Mollison & Holmgren, [1978] 1990). Industrial agriculture is one human institution of food production that must be reexamined in order to prevent the further decrease of the Earth’s life-sustaining ecosystems, and to ensure future food security and prevent what have historically been one cause for civilizational decline and collapse (Beddoe et. al. 2009) (Hemenway, 2012).

The increased environmental research focus and whole-systems thinking in recent decades can in part be explained by the theoretical economics analysis that Nobel nominated economist Kenneth Boulding put forth in his article ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’ (Boulding, 1966), and article which he wrote in the years when concerns over the negative manmade effects on the worlds ecosystems were beginning to gain wider attention. He wrote that “We are now in the middle of a long process of transition in the nature of the image which man has of himself and his environment”. Human civilization is today global and interconnected, and it is progressively losing its conceptions of what Boulding noted as the “somewhere beyond the known limits of human habitation”. The frontiers of ‘the unknown’ have disappeared as human societies have grown, more natural lands have come under human control, and nations have become internationally connected through markets and more accessible information. As Boulding points out, this means that an ‘escape’ no longer exists from the negative consequences from man’s own self-created effects on his environments. This change in mankind going from an ‘open’ to a ‘closed’ perspective of human habitation on Earth brings with it, according to Boulding, a shift in economic

30 One research paper finds on the agricultural use of fresh water and emission of greenhouse gases, that “Agriculture uses 85% of freshwater and, directly or indirectly, produces nearly half of all greenhouse gas emissions. Industrial agriculture accounts for a large proportion of these ecological costs and also depends on high energy use and toxic chemicals (Hathaway, 2015). It further notes that “Due to its scale, the environmental impacts of agriculture are significant, but this is particularly true in the case of industrial farming, “capital-intensive, large-scale, highly mechanized agriculture of crops with monocultures of crops and extensive use of artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, with intensive animal husbandry”. Page 37 | 95 principles that are different from the open ‘cowboy economy’, being symbolic of the “illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behaviour, which is characteristic of open societies” to the closed ‘spaceship earth’ economy “in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form”. The permaculture analytical ‘whole-systems’ approach (Hemenway, 2015, Ch. 1), its ethical propositions and its design principles and techniques, are arguably synonymous or closely related to Boulding’s ‘spaceship earth’ idea of how permanent economic systems are analytically perceived to be successful, an idea of man finding his place in the closed cyclical ecological systems of ‘spaceship earth’, and therethrough designing and instituting economic socio-ecological regimes that are capable of reproducing themselves and achieving dynamic ‘permanence’. In Boulding’s conception of the cowboy economy, throughput from factors of production and consumption are the variables of economic success, including the part made possible through the extraction of raw material from reservoirs as they are used in inputs but ultimately results in being outputs of pollution. The GDP measure of economic growth is the indicator of success in the cowboy economy. In the ‘spaceship earth’ economy, economic success is instead considered as the part of the GDP which constitutes reproducible resources and the outputs which are sequentially turned into other productive inputs again. Throughput is not a desired goal in itself, and “the essential measure of the success of the economy is not production and consumption at all, but the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital stock, including in this the state of the human bodies and minds included in the system”. Stock maintenance and technologies that maintains the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the existing capital stocks, while at the same time reducing the necessary economic throughput, are considered gains, as it reduces the impact load on the system while maintaining the use potentials. It is not to say that throughput or fluctuations in the processes are bad in themselves however, as variety, fluctuations and evolution in goods, scene, desires, social bonds and so forth are inherent changing variables of complex human, and natural

Page 38 | 95 systems are also undergoing constant changes (Hemenway, 2015) (Anderson & Leah, 2015). While science and public discourse are changing the underlying human perspective of our relation and interconnectedness to nature as we begin to understand the systems interdependencies more (Beddoe et. al. 2009), Boulding notes that for the economic scientific discipline “This idea that both production and consumption are bad things rather than good things is very strange to , who have been obsessed with the income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts” (Boulding, 1966, p. 8). To understand the ‘economics’ of permaculture as a design system, the point of these two distinctions between the cowboy economy and the spaceship earth economic and their criteria’s for success are one way to better appreciate the emphasis permaculture puts on both the human and natural aspects in the way humans’ design, work with and use their natural environments. Permaculture ethics and the literature emphasizes the natural ecological limits to economic growth models based on growth and consumption alone and economic systems fundamentally reliant on exhaustible resources. Permaculture science for this reason attempts to design and create human settlements that adheres to design ethics and principles that are conscious of the ecological patterns surrounding them, and which are more in line with the principles of a ‘spaceship earth’ economy, due to its Earth Care ethic, than a ‘cowboy economy’.

The transition from the open plains to the closed earth human-nature perception in socio-ecological thinking, where new frontiers and lands are no longer available anymore for use once those already used life-sustaining ecosystems and resources are depleted (e.g. forests, soils, lakes, oceans) brings consequential changes, like the one described above, to the idea of what constitutes economic success (Boulding, 1966). While Kenneth Boulding argued then that “we are very far from having made the moral, political, and psychological adjustments which are implied in this transition from the illimitable plane to the closed sphere”, a case that is still true today, the process of adjustments to moral, economic, political, and psychological thinking have begun and is ongoing, as illustrated by the case of permaculture as one mechanism of change. A perception of economic success for human settlement design and its dependency on natural systems and resources Page 39 | 95 must incorporate the idea of ‘closing the energy loops’ as touched upon above. Closing to loop in a system is to balance the inputs and outputs and turning ‘bads’ and ‘waste’ into energy-inputs again within the system through e.g. ecological understanding (the functions of natural mechanisms) and technology. Boulding writes that “in regard to matter, therefore, a closed system is conceivable, that is, a system in which there is neither increase nor decrease in material entropy. In such a system all outputs from consumption would constantly be recycled to become inputs for production, as for instance, nitrogen in the of the natural ecosystem” (Boulding, 1966, p. 5). Permaculture is oriented towards closing the energetic loop through science and practical designs. Boulding writes that without inputs returned into the earth as functional energy, any evolutionary development will be impossible, a key point also emphasized by permaculture science in reconsidering and transitioning an increasing selection of human institutions to be in line with ecological patterns. A structural socio-ecological necessity is that human systems ensures the continued existence and abundance of natural systems (e.g. forests, oceans, wildlife, insect populations, soil health. Succession of life depends on natural systems, and to Boulding economic success should be measured not in throughput alone, but also in a sustainable recycling of outputs into new inputs. He writes that “From the point of view of the energy system, the econosphere involves inputs of available energy in the form, say, of water power, fossil fuels, or sunlight, which are necessary in order to create the material throughput and to move matter from the noneconomic set into the economic set or even out of it again”, emphasizing the idea that humans’ process types of ‘energy’ resources into production through its economic systems. This economic processes of inputs and outputs must be ‘re-cycling’ themselves over the long-term in terms of resources (e.g. oceans and freshwater lakes, soil fertility, forests, minerals, biodiversity, soil fertility, human waste and pollution outputs), or otherwise the itself will be increasingly unstable from excessive changing ecological balances and patterns, which historically have led, according to Kenneth Boulding, permaculture thinker Toby Hemenway and scientific publications, to civilizational decline and collapses as increasing ecological instability incurs natural disasters and pressure on local economies (Beddoe et. al. 2009) (Boulding,

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1966) (Hemenway, 2012). Kenneth Boulding’s economic analysis of the interconnectedness between human and natural systems resembles the analytical conclusion of leading permaculture literature on the necessity for a change in perception of what constitutes economic success (Hemenway, 2010, 2012) (Mollison, 1988) (Holmgren, 2002).

4.1 Fossil-Fuel Dependency and Industrial Agriculture As outlined above, a human system dependent on supplementary inputs for its own maintenance to the extent that these inputs surpass the yearly re-production through natural regeneration processes or through the return from human processes back into the system, can be seen as an unstable system that can only be temporary in a broader temporal or long-term sense. As shown by both permaculture and scientific literature, examples of institutions or practices that features such analytical innate instabilities are the current civilization fossil-fuel dependency and the practice of industrial agriculture (also including institutions that are dependent on exhaustible energy-sources, a case to which industrial agriculture itself also belongs) (Lovelock, 2008) (Hemenway, 2012, 2015) (Mollison, 1988) (Mollison & Holmgren, [1978] 1990) (Seyfang & Haxeltine, 2012), (Beddoe et. al. 2009).

On fossil-fuel dependency, writing for Ourworldindata.org, Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser explains that “Fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) are finite, consume them for long enough and global resources will eventually run out” (Ritchie & Roser, 2018), and they put their current estimates on those finite-reserves to be about 50 years for oil and coal, and 114 years for natural gas. Oil is by far the most important energy-source for the current socio-economic regimes worldwide, and a ‘peak-oil’ scenario is therefore an important aspect to the foundation and the continuation of this regime. Peak-oil is the physical phenomenon represented by a bell-curve lifespan of the Earths accessible oil deposits, where hitting the ‘peak’ indicates the point beyond which the long-term oil production rates begin to decline given that the Earth’s oil-reserves are declining and new discoveries are lessening, whereby a declining state of oil availability and use, due to increased scarcity, will set in (Seyfang & Haxeltine, 2012). Important to the argument on

Page 41 | 95 the dangers of peak-oil and the effects of hitting that state and entering the trend of declining availability, is the economic reality that, as less oil becomes accessible, the costs of extraction each additional barrel of oil increases, putting pressure and hard limits on current consumption and resource-use levels of our civilizations, to which oil is the life-source (meaning transportation systems, agriculture and food processing, heavy industry, construction etc.). As energy-availability of a civilization’s energetic ‘lifeline’ declines, historical experience shows a potential for civilizations to become unstable and the chance geopolitical conflicts to increase substantially (Beddoe et. al., 2009) when structures and lifestyles increasingly change as the energy that sustains regional communities and their consumer habits becomes scarcer. Available reserve estimates from Ourworldindata.org are based on current economic growth and consumption patterns, but they exclude the likely extension of oil-deposits from new discoveries that may extent this time-frame31. What the time horizon is for a peak-oil scenario to occur, or if it has already taken place, is almost impossible to predict, as new reserves are still discovered and advancements in technology increase the effective use per unit of oil, such as re-melting of plastics (Science Illustrated, 2014). However, the existing capital-stocks of energy in the earth will at current conditions continue decline, despite the mixed conclusions on whether humanity has yet reached its peak-oil scenario (Rhodes, 2012) (Hemenway, 2012). Fundamentally, a peak-oil (and other fossil-fuels) scenario is a future inevitability due to its finite nature, implying that some kind of institutional and technological transition will be inevitable (explained more in part 4.2). To transition away from societal oil-dependency and the institutional structures it supports from the affluence of cheap oil, the permaculture system is proposed as one possible alternative for an ‘energy-descent’ solution. Now, over half a century after

31 One article permaculture, energetic transition and the peak-oil scenario analysis find that “Despite claims that peak oil is no longer a threat because vast resources of gas and shale oil (tight oil) can now be recovered by fracking (hydraulic fracturing) combined with horizontal drilling, the reality is that proven actual reserves are only adequate to delay the peak by a few years ... Moreover, to make any sensible difference to the liquid fuel crisis, which is the most immediate consequence of peak oil, it would be necessary to convert the worlds one billion vehicles to run on natural gas rather than liquid fuels refined from crude oil, and this would take some considerable time and effort. The loss of widespread personalised transportation is thus inevitable and imminent, meaning a loss of globalised civilisation and a mandatory return to living in smaller localised communities” (Rhodes, 2012). Page 42 | 95

Boulding wrote his article on the necessity to ‘close’ the energy-loop, oil is still humanity’s leading energy source. It is likely that technological innovations in one way or another will be able to circumvent this fundamental reliance on oil and the negative fallouts that flows through some of the institutions it supports, such as modern industrial agriculture analyzed below, but, Boulding argues, “Failing this, however, the time is not very far distant, historically speaking, when man will once more have to retreat to his current energy input from the sun, even though this could be used much more effectively than in the past with increased knowledge” (parenthesis added) (Boulding, 1966). The temporal limitation of fossil-fuel availability is a leading reason for why the permaculture literature often emphasizes the use of solar, water or wind energy sources, or other energy-types, which to man’s temporal cognitive perception is an unlimited (solar, wind) source.

The understanding of energy flows in systems both human and natural and their interconnectedness are becoming an increasingly important topic, a topic which Toby Hemenway indicates as ‘energetic literacy’, and this increased importance of understanding the energy-structure of human and natural systems, is based on the given that humanity has likely reached a peak-oil scenario, and those systems that are at present innately dependent on that external and exhaustible energy- input, are at the risk of becoming fragile components within the wider socio- ecological (i.e. human-nature) system, as its energy-input source could undermine the system as oil becomes more scarce and political interests and corporate lobbying might stifle a smooth transition away from an oil paradigm. Permaculture co-founder David Holmgren summarizes this analysis saying that “The era of extraordinary energy growth and abundance has left the populace and the politicians of the industrial world without an intuitive understanding of energy, since, by its very excess we have not needed to appreciate its nuances … When any system – be it economic, biological or ecological – is fed by an increasing amount of energy, we see an increase in the internal complexity of that system. By way of example, in the era of the growth of extraction of fossil fuels, human economies, laws, communications, education systems, technologies and so on have all developed to stunning levels of complexity. The availability of concentrated energy sets hard limits on what any system can achieve in terms of both its scale and Page 43 | 95 complexity. This is something true of all ecological systems, and human systems are far from immune. A loss in either energy concentration or rate of energy flows will result in decreased societal complexity, either slowly or in catalysing – and potentially catastrophic – events" (Holmgren, 2010). This is a leading permaculture argument for the problems of a civilization’s socio-ecological regime fundamentally reliant on energetic resource means that are exhaustible. New energy sources and technological innovations can and may materialize through entrepreneurial innovations that will replace or circumvent the issues inherent to oil in the current socio-economic structural use of it. However, due to the heavy institutionalized and embedded use of oil in modern civilization, oil-use dependency has become a rising concern, where entrepreneurial and scientific efforts also center on transitioning unsustainable human institutions away proactively from the use of oil. Permaculture design and its ecological energy analysis is one attempted solution framework, and below follows its analysis of modern industrial agriculture.

As touched upon above, Industrial agriculture, the current worldwide institution and practice of food production, is amongst the major causes for many of the environmental crises mankind faces today (Hemenway, 2010, 2012, 2015) (Lovelock, 2008) (Rhodes, 2012) (Mollison, 1988, 2001) (Seyfang, 2007, p. 124). One paper explains that the environmental problems encountered with industrial agriculture practices due to its use magnitude, is “the effect of replacing deep- rooted trees with shallow rooted plants, and replacing perennial crops with annual crops. This exacerbates certain agricultural problems such as soil erosion (through wind and water) and salinisation (as the water table rises through lack of deep roots to soak up excess water)” (Richardt, 1995, p. 4). Industrial agriculture has brought with it great benefits for humanity, but as a food-production system, it is inexorably an institution that depletes natural ecosystems where it is used. This is so due to its ecological land-management practices and its use of heavy inputs of fossil-energy to sustain itself, but with comparatively low outputs of energy in terms of calories and beneficial returns to natural ecosystems. While industrial agriculture is efficient in production, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren notes that “The energy now needed to produce these crops far exceeds the calorific return from Page 44 | 95 them”32, which is possible due to the (yet) continued availability of cheap energy inputs. But in terms of energy efficiency and ecosystem abundance, industrial agriculture is innately inefficient. Industrial agriculture depletes and consumes healthy and abundant ecosystems in its wake as it relies on land-clearing, tillage, and the destruction and loss of healthy top-soils, forests, grasslands and species (Mollison, 1988) (Hemenway, 2010, 2012). Acquisitions of new lands for productive agriculture, or open field culture, means endemic deforestation and destruction of wild ecosystems leading to a decline of biodiversity and animal species; it is heavily reliant on external energy-input factors such as fertilizers, herbicides and pest- controls; it reduces the retention of water in much of the temperate climate zones where deforestation has led to soil-bound water being displaced from the earthly soils and deep-root systems into the seas, one leading cause of desertification (Mollison, [1981] 2001). Normal agricultural practices are not by design mimicking natural systems, it is annual and therefore not focused on long-term succession and ecological understanding, and external land in addition to the crop land itself must be used for the production of animal fodder, fertilizers, and the resource extraction and processing for large machinery and tools to sustain modern agriculture production. Additional to the costs of the industrial agriculture supply- chains, a food-system that permaculture attempts to transition away from and localize to reduce its energy impacts and dependencies, is that “In modern food- supply systems, full nutrition and a varied diet are provided by a world-wide transport, storage, and marketing network. This reticulation of food is, of course, more energy-expensive than local agricultural diversity and is only possible due to fossil fuel subsidy”33 (Mollison & Holmgren, [1978] 1990, p. 8). Agriculture also

32 One paper finds that to produce, process, and distribute a single calorie of food energy using industrial agriculture methods, requires inputs between 7.3 and 10 calories of energy – mostly from fossil fuels. In the the United States, the paper indicates that 20 pct. of that energy (between 1.5-2.0 calories) is used directly in the production of food, while the remainder is used for the processing and transportation of food goods (Hathaway, 2015). 33 This “system of provision” analysis is based on a vertical chain understanding that understands lines as “the production, marketing, distribution, retail and consumption in social and cultural context, which mediate between and link ‘a particular pattern of production with a particular pattern of consumption’” (Seyfang, 2007, p. 121). This framework of analysis a system through a “” perspective is central to permaculture. Seyfang explains that “sustainable consumption is understood to require fundamental changes in lifestyles, economic and social systems to seek increases in quality of life rather than material consumption. It therefore demands a deeper understanding of the systems of provision which mediate consumption patterns, Page 45 | 95 means desalinization of the earth, leading to the decline of earth minerals and loss of fresh water. This is brought about due to the breakdown of healthy soils through monoculture one-crop cultivation practices like plowing, tilling and mineral extraction used by the harvested crops. It is a structural food production practice that must therefore rely increasingly on external inputs in the form of chemical compositions of pesticides and artificial fertilizers to sustain its productivity and to remain economic in environments of degrading lands and declining soil-health. Annual agriculture systems are not sustainable because nothing about them are permanent (Mollison & Holmgren, [1978] 1990), and with mass cultivation and the use of petrochemicals in conventional agriculture, the earths topsoils are continuously depleted away, leading to an inherent state of in production output and a reduction in the nutritional content of food goods without increasing external inputs to complement the loss of destroying the Earth’s fertility. Maddy Harland finds that “an alien agriculture has the capacity to turn delicately balanced ecology into dessert” (Harland, 2010), which permaculturists Toby Hemenway notes is the ‘inexorable’ outcome of industrial agriculture without increasing external energy-inputs in the form of fertilizers and pesticides are used (Hemenway, 2010, 2012). Mollison and Holmgren find that “the energy sustaining the system does not come from the sun via photosynthesis as in pre-industrial times, but mostly from fossil fuels via the industrial systems … the high yields of today are not due to efficient or even sustainable methods, but to a high external energy subsidy. The reduction or collapse of the energy subsidy will result in a catastrophic drop in production. The basis for support of even pre- industrial populations, at low standards of living, would not exist. The actual damage which has been done to productive land and the environment at large by high-energy agriculture, in terms of soil breakdown, pollution, and breeding of resistant pest strains, is not really known but there are indications that it is considerable, wide-spread, and long-term … the impact of high energy on the land itself was not considered (emphasis added)” (Mollison & Holmgren, [1978] 1990).

in order to transform these elements of social infrastructure at a fundamental level”. The social and productive infrastructure of systems is central to understanding and designing permaculture systems. Page 46 | 95

Toby Hemenway points out that it is not only the high energy-use of agricultural production itself that are from a whole-systems approach ecologically and economically unsustainable as our modern industrial food complex is made up of processing and transportation systems that are also adding to the oil energy- dependency necessitated to sustain the globally interconnected food supply system. Hemenway finds that on average the daily worth of fossil-fuel consumption also takes up to 7 years of accumulated stored sunlight to be replenished (Hemenway, 2010). On this note, Holmgren and Mollison concludes that “The reduction or collapse of the energy subsidy will result in a catastrophic drop in production. The basis for support of even pre-industrial populations, at low standards of living, would not exist” (Mollison & Holmgren, [1978] 1990, p. 3). Permaculture Magazine editor Maddy Harland finds that food-producing systems covers 33 pct. of the human ecological footprint, which signifies the relevancy of reviewing the sustainability of current food-production systems and their connected energy-expensive global transportation systems of food items, where up to 95 pct. of global transportation is sustained by fuel (Harland, 2010). Hemenway concludes that “the current math is against humanity” in this energy-analysis and that a fundamental socio-ecological transition is required. The analysis captures the inadequacy of industrial agriculture as a ‘permanent’ human system of food production. Ecosystems are being depleted at an ‘alarming’ rate with disastrous environmental outcomes through modern agriculture (Mollison & Holmgren, [1978] 1990) (Hemenway, 2012) (Hathaway, 2015), and this systemic inferiority of ecological destruction that signals success to the farmers and which “turns ecosystems into people” (Hemenway, 2010) cannot by definition be made ecologically sustainable to support such a positive feedback loop of population increases that is brought about at the cost of destroyed ecosystems consumed for farmlands, lost healthy top-soil, deforestation, loss of water-table water-retention, and with climatic changes indicating worse weather patterns in the future to which modern agriculture is very susceptible.

Societal decline happens for various, and often not easily identifiable reasons, but according to one study, declines “usually result from the human-dominated ecosystem moving to a brittle, non-resilient state caused by internal changes or Page 47 | 95 external forcings” (Beddoe et. al., 2009), where ‘non-resilience’ of a ‘state’ relates to both human and natural systems and their interconnectedness. An example of the past is the collapse during the bronze age, as a situation of ‘peak-wood’ came about in Europe where the wood-intensive uses exceeded the natural and human- assisted reproduction, and which therefore led to the loss of the wood-based energy-base that sustained the fuel-base of the bronze age civilization. With thousands of kilograms of bronze produced each day, and about 6 cubic meters of wood, or about one 60-eyar old tree, used per kilogram of bronze production, European forests quickly diminished, and it took several centuries for those forests to naturally reproduce themselves (Hemenway, 2010). A similar scenario is argued for to be happening today as outlined in this part from a permaculture analysis (Hemenway, 2010, 2012) (Mollison, 1988). Hemenway finds that one reason for why the problematic nature of agriculture is still so widely practiced, is that the informational feedback generated by the negative externalities from industrial agriculture have been too slow and widespread to be properly recognized and captured through e.g. price mechanisms and compensations for the ensuing negative externalities that has materialized themselves elsewhere in the Earth’s system in different formats (see part 3 for list of some current environmental issues). Kenneth Boulding gives another economic reason for this, which is due to the human propensity to time-discount the future, one propensity to discount that is further reinforced through a societal loss of a future image of posterity (Boulding, 1966). Permaculture, by designing from its Earth Care ethic, superimposes inherent value on the regeneration, succession, abundance and diversity within ecosystems, including food-producing ones, in both social enterprises, urban design, food production and other areas of human activity. The increasing pressure on natural systems could be argued for as the reason frameworks such as permaculture and its movement gains increased attention.

The permaculture alternative to industrial agriculture is in incorporating a system of horticulture into food production systems, meaning garden culture techniques, based on the ethics and principles used in all permaculture design (see Appendix C for the permaculture design principles). Such a transition from industrial agriculture to horticulture will introduce a conversion from Page 48 | 95 conventional ‘farming’ techniques to ‘gardening’ techniques (see part 1.2 for examples of practical permaculture techniques), using smaller and less energy- depending tools, where crops are mixed to improve biodiversity (e.g. agroforestry and ). Horticulture societies structurally sustains the biodiversity of species and ecosystems better and increases local food-security (Hemenway, 2010, 2012), which are today central aims of the U.N. Global Land Outlook report (Dudley & Alexander, 2018). The U.N. Global Land Outlook report explains on solving environmental issues that “informed and responsible decision making, improved land management policies and practices, and simple changes in our everyday lives, can, if widely adopted, help to reverse the current worrying trends in the state of our land resources”. It then explains the importance of ‘resilience building’ and strengthening the adaptive capacity of ecosystems and communities through sustainable management and a restoration of land resources. Another area emphasized in the report is on a “no net loss” approach, which is similar to the above energy-analysis of oil-use and industrial agriculture. The report explains that “Land degradation neutrality or no net loss of healthy and productive land means more services onsite and less negative environmental or social impacts offsite. For consumption, it means significantly reducing the current levels of food waste and loss”. The report mentions that agriculture should be optimized for ‘farming for multiple benefits’, which requires a fundamental shift in the current agricultural practices, where a shift should support “a wider array of social, environmental, and economic benefits from managing land-based ” than does industrial agriculture. Where the permaculture approach is to empower individuals and communities, the Global Land Outlook report also explains the necessity of “prioritizing and balancing different stakeholder needs at a landscape scale while incorporating site-level specificity on land use, demand, and condition so that a full range of are produced. Land use planning helps identify those land uses that best meet the demands of people while safeguarding soil, water, and biodiversity for future generations”. Striking similarities exists between the solutions and approaches proposed by the GLO report on transitioning land-uses and the emphasis permaculture puts on individual and local empowerment, on responsibility, where local communities attain self-

Page 49 | 95 reliance and resilience in food-security through better design principles, such as horticulture and ‘urban-permaculture’ (Hemenway, 2015), based on an understanding and a mimicking of nature in the design. It does so in order to capture energy flows (e.g. food, water, sun, wind) more efficiently and sustainably, and to use them regeneratively than industrial agriculture does. Permaculture (i.e. horticulture) encourages annual succession in food systems, promoting the growth and climaxing of diverse natural systems, instead of annual cutting and tilling. It also increases a sense of connection with posterity, emphasized as important by Kenneth Boulding in better strengthen the economic perception of long-term negative and positive effects of present actions, and horticulture can further help to reverse and mitigate already degraded lands and items on the long list of environmental issues. A “Restructuring of agriculture is an essential part of any attempt to deal with the environmental crisis with which man finds himself faced. A shift towards people-intensive agriculture, with long-term aims of improved productivity and lower energy consumption is necessary … Only this type of action will escape modern agricultures' ultimate fate of slow degeneration, or total collapse, as non-renewable resources run out.” (Mollison & Holmgren, [1978] 1990. p. 4). A permaculture design around horticulture systems has the potential of a continuous evolution toward ecological climax states and making food production more resilient, the opposite on industrial agriculture systems, and it has innate qualities of ecosystem services that are deemed necessary to make human settlements more resilient towards likely increasing climatic fluctuations and environmental crises. Mollison and Holmgren further find that “The structural diversity of a permaculture increases microclimate variation, which allows a greater range of useful plants. Plants changing the microclimate for man and other species is another example of the symbiotic interactions which can occur in . Symbiotic relationships of this type are characteristic of complex ecosystems. Some of these aspects mentioned aid in the net yield to man, while others, such as a complex array of herbivores may reduce yield. However, the 'costs' of diversity must be accepted as system stability becomes critical, which it does if independence and regional self-sufficiency become goals of future communities”. In this way, permaculture systems both integrated into urban and rural settlement

Page 50 | 95 systems and food supply production with focus on intensive, rather than extensive land-uses, frees up additional land for other uses. It promotes plant diversity, yield and unique microclimates and habitats, it fosters a sense of posterity as species and designs are fundamentally designed to be multi-generational. It is a renewable, self-sustainable and cyclic system, which industrial agriculture in all cases are not. It is a system that innately is more decentralized, that promotes ‘holistic’ or whole-systems thinking instead of reductionist thinking, and it promotes resilience and stability (Holmgren, 2002, p. 185) (Hemenway, 2015).

4.2 Four Energy-Futures: According to permaculture authors David Holmgren and Toby Hemenway, the finite nature of fossil-fuels leading to ‘peak’ scenarios in the energy-base and climatic changes from depletions of ecosystems imposes a set of four potential ‘energy-futures’ scenarios for human society going forward (Hemenway, 2010, 2012) (Holmgren, 2011). Holmgren mentions that “the simultaneous onset of climate change and the peaking of global oil supply represent unprecedented challenges for human civilisation. Global oil peak has the potential to shake if not destroy the foundations of global industrial economy and culture. Climate change has the potential to rearrange the biosphere more radically than the last ice age. Each limit the effective options for responses to the other”. Peak-oil and climatic changes are fundamental structural dangers to the future resilience of human and natural systems. Autopoiesis describes a system that reproduces itself, a recycling system in line with Boulding’s idea of spaceship earth, a ‘permanent cycle’. For human culture to be sustainable in the long run, it must be able to reproduce itself and preserve itself and its natural sustenance, without a dependency of finite exhaustible inputs and activities like modern agriculture that bring forth a depletion of nature’s ecosystems as buffers and stabilizers against climatic fluctuations.

Peak-oil and climatic changes (from e.g. industrial agriculture) are two issues of societal stability concerns for the future according to the outlined permaculture analysis (Hemenway, 2012). The inevitability of a peak-oil scenario and the degradation of land from agricultural practices will increase the scarcity and the

Page 51 | 95 costs of e.g. energy, food and water and other goods, as the natural life-sustaining system disappears and oil-availability declines, and the chances of geopolitical conflict rises (Hemenway, 2015) (Dudley & Alexander, 2018). The U.N. 2017 Global Land Outlook report describes that “Land degradation also triggers competition for scarce resources, which can lead to migration and insecurity while exacerbating access and income inequalities. Soil erosion, desertification, and all contribute to societal stress and breakdown. In this regard, land degradation can be considered a “threat amplifier,” especially when it slowly reduces people’s ability to use the land for food production and water storage or undermines other vital ecosystem services. This in turn increases human insecurity and, in certain circumstances, may trigger or increase the risk of conflict” (Dudley

& Alexander, 2018). The climatic consequences that are slowing showing themselves from the widespread unsustainable and ecosystem-depleting land and resource use will continue unless institutional transitions related to those causes takes place. The proposition according to permaculture thinkers David Holmgren and Toby Hemenway is that given the inevitability of peak-oil and the emerging climatic instability consequences, one of four ‘energy futures’ scenarios will unfold itself going forward, depending on how fast those phenomena manifests and impacts our human and natural systems and how the socio-ecological response is to those. The four potential ‘energy-futures’ scenarios are the ‘Techno-Explosion’, the ‘Techno-Stability’, the ‘Energy-Descent’, and the ‘Collapse’. These four potential futures span a spectrum of outcomes between a fast and a slow decline in oil availability and use, and a fast and slow manifestation of climatic and environmental disasters.

Techno-Explosion

The Techno-Explosion scenario is one where future entrepreneurial efforts and technology solves the present social dependencies on finite-fuels, and where both peak-oil and climate change are slow to manifest, whereby these unsustainable institutions and practices are peacefully transitioned away from avoiding geopolitical and social conflict and economic instability. According to David Holmgren, the “Techno-explosion depends on new, large and concentrated energy

Page 52 | 95 sources that will allow the continual growth in material wealth and human power over environmental constraints, as well as population growth” (Holmgren, 2011).

Techno-Stability

The Techno-Stability, or ‘Green-Tech Stability’ scenario, is a future where technology like wind-generators, solar panels and other increasingly sustainable technological solutions are implemented within existing institutional models. Peak-oil effects manifest itself slow, while climate change conditions come fast (Hemenway, 2012). This scenario “depends on a seamless conversion from material growth based on depleting energy, to a steady state in consumption of resources and population (if not economic activity), all based on novel use of renewable energies and technologies that can maintain if not improve the quality of services available from current systems” (Holmgren, 2011), and the conversion of energy-sources from finite fossil-fuels to infinite e.g. solar and wind energy implies the trend towards a steady state energy-base involving less change.

Energy-Descent

The Energy-Descent is a future where human society designs for less energy availability within all the aspects of human systems, and design to utilize other energies and resources than fossil-fuel deposits as ‘peak-oil’ happens fast, but climatic conditions change fast, necessitating different land-use techniques to acquire increased resilience to mitigate and potentially reverse those. Long term reduced energy-availability means less economic throughput, and an increasing dependency on renewable and less dense energy-types will change the structures and designs of society to consider the changing energetic rules as they were before industrial society, where e.g. oil was not a foundational resource asset. In this scenario a replacement-technology for fossil-fuel use has not come about which can sustain the present scale of economic throughput, and “Biological resources and their sustainable management will become progressively more important as fossil fuels and technological power declines. In many regions, forests will regain their traditional status as symbols of wealth … Energy Descent is a scenario dominated by change, but that change might not be continuous or gradual. Instead it could be characterised by a series of steady states punctuated by crises (or mini collapses) Page 53 | 95 that destroy some aspects of Industrial culture”. This is the scenario where permaculture as a system is designed and evolved with the purpose of responding to a scenario like the Energy-Descent, with a continuation of less energy availability, and the response of frameworks like permaculture can be turn the descent into a ‘Creative Descent’ where earth stewardship and knowledge of ecology and earth science mixed with appropriate modern technology can transform economic activity that was prior based on energy-extraction into economic activity based on energy-recycling (Holmgren, 2011), the type of economic reality as visualized by Boulding’s Spaceship Earth society.

Collapse

The fourth Collapse scenario is one that demonstrates the failure by human activities and institutions to consider and adapt to a reality of depleted fossil-fuels and increasing climatic fluctuations and extensive damage to existing supporting ecosystems. Where the Techno-Explosion resembles the better future, the “collapse would be fast and more or less continuous without the restabilizations possible in Energy Descent. It would inevitably involve a major “die-off” of human population and a loss of the knowledge and infrastructure necessary for industrial civilization, if not more severe scenarios including human extinction along with much of the planet's biodiversity” (Hemenway, 2011)

Broadening the institutional analysis of human energy-use and food-production systems to include research on energy and climatic issues within a permaculture framework builds an analytical framework that gives the context to consider the “ecological, economic and of everything from agriculture to human settlement patterns and even fundamental human values and beliefs” in a ‘whole-system’ socio-ecological setting. Systems that inexorably depends on energy-inputs through extraction instead of recycling can be a complementary cause for “geopolitical manoeuvring around energy resources, including proxy and real wars to control dwindling reserves and policy gymnastics to somehow make reducing carbon emissions, the new engine of economic growth” (Holmgren, 2011), and the potential of a reduced energy-future puts great pressure on inventing and implementing appropriate ideas to deal with such a potential reality that does not

Page 54 | 95 lead to conflict, wars, mass starvation and famine, populational displacements and so forth. It is this potentially likely scenario of an energy-descent and the potential of a collapse that permaculture science, through its cross-disciplinary knowledge and appropriate technology, attempts to mitigate and avoid by designing resilient, sustainable and regenerative human and natural settlements and systems. In 1988 Bill Mollison noted that “Strategies for the necessary changes in social investment policy, politics itself, and towards regional or village self-reliance are now desperately needed” (Mollison, 1988), changes that are also underscored by several of the response pathways and goals outlined within the U.N. 2017 Global Land Outlook report (Dudley & Alexander, 2018, p. 275) and the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015).

5. Permaculture – Economic and Political Aspects So far it has been established that permaculture is a cross-disciplinary applied design-science framework that through a whole-systems ethics and principles- based approach seeks to build resilient, abundant and sustainable human settlements and natural ecosystems. It does so by reconsidering some of our human institutions and bring about a socio-ecological transition to solve current environmental issues. This transition is taking place through permaculture initiatives worldwide, captured in a motivated permaculture social and innovative grassroots movement that was originally sparked by observed and analyses environmental issues and structural problems to some human institutions, that was further reinforced by a sense of inadequacy of governmental action to solve these issues, two instances that was considered in this thesis above of the structural dependency on fossil-fuels as an energy base for human economic activity, and industrial agriculture that is the dominant, yet ecosystem consuming institution of food-production across most countries globally. Kenneth Boulding’s article The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’ was shown to encapsulate the ideas of economic success of permaculture with its emphasis on ‘closing the loop’ of systems and the whole-systems idea of natural and human interconnected permanence. It considers economic success not only as throughput to meet human needs within social communities, but also by a factor of the recycling of resources.

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It has been shown that scientific research indicates a necessity for socio-economic and socio-ecological transitioning away from these institutions due to the current origin of many environmental issues from them. One solution alternative solution was shown to be the permaculture platform. A transition in human land-use is deemed necessary in order to avoid a ‘futures-scenario’ of civilizational collapse, and instead proactively prepare for an energy-descent, should technological innovation under the current institutional structures fail to mitigate, reverse and solve the current environmental issues and likely future crises.

Institutional transitions and attempts at new (in permaculture localized) governance structures inevitably involves individual and collective considerations and decisions related to the political economy of their processes. The theories of political economy can help outline some important aspects related to the economics and politics of the issues involved about politics and economics of transitions, and what types of institutional ‘decisions’ and structures that expediently brings about mechanisms that smoothens transitions that a society values and deems necessary. In this last part of the thesis follows therefore a discussion of a selection of issues of with the social science of political economy that are related to transition processes. These social science theories are selected in the aim of expanding the economic and political understanding related the permaculture phenomenon and to shed light on the nature of the economic and political aspects that will be considered in the designs choices towards creating permaculture systems through socio-ecological transitions.

5.1 Free-Market Environmentalism and Political Environmentalism The theoretical framework of environmental economics put forth in Free-Market Environmentalism for the Next Generation by Terry Anderson and Donald Leal (Anderson & Leal, 2015) sets a good foundation for considering the political economy (i.e. politics and economics) of permaculture. Influenced by economists’ Ronald Coase, James Buchanan, Douglass North, and others on the functions and importance of property rights systems34, prices, competitive market,

34 (Anderson, 2015) notes that property rights are “the rules of of the game that determine who has the right to decide how resources are used and who derives value therefrom. If, at a point in time, property rights are clearly defined and enforced, then the roles and obligation of human beings to Page 56 | 95 institutional analysis and entrepreneurship, Anderson and Leal make a theoretical distinction between what they define as free-market environmentalism and political environmentalism. It is an analytical framework for considering different propositions on how a society might solve its environmental issues, and therefore it lends great help towards understanding the permaculture framework, worldview, grassroots movement and design transition goals, and to understand what the outcomes are of different adopted political economic decisions, and which political and economic outcomes that can be expected from free-market environmentalism and political environmentalism.

According to Anderson and Leal, a theoretical shift has happened in the economic and political understanding of environmental issues and the institutional framework that most expediently can bring about their environmental solutions. In the past, the focus was on preventing negative externalities from ‘market-failures’ and political means was understood as the better solutions for environmental issues (i.e. political environmentalism). To understand why, negative externalities (opposite of positive externalities) implies that “A resource use has an external cost when some of the activity’s costs are born by people other than the user, without their consent” (Schmidtz, 2000), and it means that the producer of the negative environmental finds that his costs of discharging i.e. his waste into the (e.g. air, oceans, forests, rivers, land and soils), are less than his costs of purifying that waste before releasing it, incentivizing him to not purify his waste as he can then avoids the costs himself and instead impose the cost on the rest of society (Hardin, 1968). The problems with common-resources, externalities and perceived market-failures is that, due to a lack of clearly defined property rights, resources are turned into unowned and open-access ‘commons’, meaning that individuals are unable to reap or face the benefits and the costs of decisions related to those resources that have environmental consequences (Pennington, 2011, p. 227). Negative externalities, like pollution and oceanic waste dumping, are cases of what is described as ‘market failures’, meaning a situation where there is a divergence between the negative one another as users of nature will account for the human values and natural conditions at that time”. Page 57 | 95 social costs and the private costs of an activity, a divergence that favors the latter on account of the former bearing the costs instead. Political environmentalism, based around this argument of externalities and to correct market failures, focusses on using , regulations, subsidies, quotas and restrictions, and limiting or privileging the access to, and the use of, environmental resources (Pennington, 2011, p. 225). What the market fails to correct should be done through political arrangements. But a recent shift in the theoretical analysis has happened, and “Over the decades, practical environmentalists were beginning to see the power of markets as solutions to, not causes of, environmental problems” (Leal & Anderson, 2015). The focus has increasingly shifted to free-market environmentalism that focus on the roles and the importance of market-based solutions towards solving environmental issues. The shift has taken place from a growing understanding of the importance of interactions between market- mechanisms and environmental entrepreneurship, or ‘enviropreneurship’, a term used by Anderson and Leal. Enviropreneurs are environmental entrepreneurs that with their focus on conserving and restoring environmental resources and systems discovers and creates solutions to the coordination of resource uses towards environmental ends, and they do so based on market-mechanisms of property rights, prices and profit, that together creates the entrepreneurial incentives, information and means for innovation to do so.

The foundation and reason for analyzing the means (free-market vs. political environmentalism) and the ends (environmental outcomes) in a free-market environmentalism and political environmentalism framework, is based on the ideas of ‘dynamic economies’, that are “based on entrepreneurship and economic processes” (Anderson & Leal, 2015, p. xii), and ‘dynamic ’ (Anderson, 2015). On dynamic ecologies, they refer to ecologist Daniel Botkin who notes that “nature undisturbed is not constant in form, structure, or proportion, but changes at every scale of time and space” (Botkin, 2012, p. 84). James Lovelock explains in similar terms that “The Earth system is dynamically stable but with strong feedbacks. Its behaviour resembles more the physiology of a living organism than that of the equilibrium box models of the last century” (Lovelock, 2008). Both economic and natural processes are in fact dynamic and complex systems of Page 58 | 95 evolutions, adaptions, changing orders, decline and growth (Simpson, 2013) (Hemenway, 2015). Therefore, the conceptions of dynamic economies and ecologies sees that neither human nor natural systems are static and unchanging entities, and they are important considerations for the choice of what economic and political is arranged to deal with those dynamics in a way that best stimulates good environmental solutions to perceived issues. Biologist and permaculture practitioner Toby Hemenway give an explanation of the permaculture design and how it closely connects to the understanding of dynamic human and natural systems, in that “Permaculture design applies broadly to many forms of what we have come to call complex adaptive systems. These types of systems include not just ecosystems but brains and nervous systems, business and economic networks, communities and neighborhoods, legal and social systems, and a host of other multicomponent, interconnected flexible, and responsive systems that all follow similar set of governing principles and have many general in common … When many parts are assembled so they can interact and influence each other, new properties emerge, such as self-regulation, feedback loops, self-organization, and resilience” (Hemenway, 2015, p. xi-x). Human economies and natural systems, considered in permaculture design, are never in steady-state equilibriums, as they are both continuously undergoing change through evolution and adaption. Permaculture in this sense therefore means a culture that can be sustained permanently, but not as unchanging, but with the understanding in design that “we have to stay dynamic, because conditions will change, and we will have to adapt to those new conditions” writes Russ Grayson (Grayson, 2015, p. 5). With changing continuously happening in both human and natural micro- and macroclimates, “Free-market environmentalism is a process in which environmental entrepreneurs discover new demands on nature and new constraints from nature. Dynamic ecology and dynamic economics are linked together through property rights and exchange that produce price signals reflecting the value of nature” (Terry & Leal, 2015, p. xii). Anderson and Leal go on to explain that it is the environmental entrepreneur that discovers and fills new and existing market niches by reorganizing the coordination of resources into new combinations and environmentally beneficial uses, such that more valued individual ends are met

Page 59 | 95 as changes in human values and natural conditions continues to change. For environmental entrepreneurship to reflect changing natural conditions and consumer ends, market mechanisms must be in place and allowed their functions to work of both property rights that are clearly defined and enforced, and price signals that signal entrepreneurs of consumer demands and scarcity conditions.

Permaculture science and the inspired permaculture social grassroots movement are, as demonstrated, oriented towards developing and changing aspects of current socio-ecological regimes, meaning an institutional transitioning in the design of human settlement, their energy and resource use, food production and others. This goal is sought through an emphasis on empowering individuals with the right knowledge and outside the scope of government. From a theoretical social science analysis, permaculture and its grassroots movement of community activists, practitioners and business entrepreneurs, are combined an example of a free-market ‘enviropreneurial’ movement, as it in a decentralized structure generates ideas and implements solutions through different markets (e.g. education, food production, house construction, landscaping) (see also Appendix A). Idea creations such as its ethical code, its principles and design solutions are used to improve the environmental quality of natural systems (e.g. sustainability, resilience, diversity) through market (social) enterprises, advocacy, Transition Towns and other activities. There are already indications of the successes of permaculture practitioners, community projects and businesses to implement their systems and achieve results (Nirenberg, 2017) that are both economical35 and environmentally beneficial (Richardt, 1995). As the permaculture movement and its successes grows, it seems inevitable that increasing data on successful market-based ‘enviropreneurial’ solutions of permaculture practices will be accessible in the future. The permaculture movement is one example of enviropreneurial initiatives and innovations towards environmental ends, where consumers and producers embed themselves in lifestyles and cultures that, by

35 The paper The Economics of Permaculture finds that permaculture enterprises (mostly food production) have costs that are “economical in the medium- to long-term, but perhaps not so in the short-run - primarily because of the high costs of establishing a productive practice” (Richardt, 1995, p. 101) Page 60 | 95 learning what works in the design framework through trial and errors process, are in line with permaculture ethical ideas. Entrepreneurial innovation within the permaculture synthesis has led to free-market environmentalism ideas for solving environmental issues successfully, often issues where attempts at solutions through political environmentalism have been perceived by people involved with permaculture movement to have proven increasingly inadequate to the task (Grayson, 2013).

5.2 Environmental Entrepreneurship and Permaculture Entrepreneurial alertness (Kirzner, 1997) is the human innate ability to discover and knowledge and correct economic resource coordination in the market that are discovered not to be in line with consumer valuations. The entrepreneur, when discovering an unfilled niche or demand, then redirects his available resources into economic uses and productions that better reflects those new consumer preferences. Terry Anderson explains that “Entrepreneurs act on the disequilibrium inherent in the market process by discovering knowledge not currently represented in market prices and by discovering alternative approaches to adapt to dynamic market conditions” (Anderson, 2015, 170). With a growing consumer concern for the environments and the preservation of nature’s ecosystems, permaculture is one entrepreneurial ‘market-innovation’ related to ideas and production of human settlements. Important for entrepreneurial activities to be successful, including permaculture works, is that the given institutional arrangements exist for the entrepreneur to obtain his necessary knowledge, which as mentioned includes clearly defined property rights and price systems. If weak property rights of resources like land and waters, and faulty market price signals exists, the mechanisms on which the entrepreneur most rely becomes problematic, as they hamper the entrepreneur’s ability to adequately and expediently discover and correct economic discoordination’s, such as negative externalities and market failures (Anderson & Leal, 2015). Uncorrected and weak property rights and hampered market prices that should otherwise reflect subjective consumer valuations on their sought environmental ends for the permaculture enviropreneur, may instead lead to market failures, as these two mechanisms are the important knowledge and information systems for Page 61 | 95 environmental entrepreneurs that are working with e.g. energy resources, food production, forest systems, urban sustainability design, and wildlife systems. Weak property rights and a hampered or manipulated market will make these two mechanisms work inadequately in signaling the entrepreneur of what the relevant time and place circumstances are of available environmental resources, and the specific situations of which he must be keenly aware in his calculation of his best economic and environmental resource use. It is for this purpose that property rights and prices play an important part in all human coordination of resource use, including resources used for designing systems of permaculture. Co-founder of permaculture David Holmgren writes in an article (Holmgren, 2013c), touching on the permaculture entrepreneur, innovation, free-market principles, and the freedom of permaculture from governmental regulation and restrictive interference. On designing for a permaculture system through innovation and the importance of a perceived ‘advantage’, meaning in economics a profit or a benefit in a broader term, not necessarily meaning only monetary, that “First, if the changes or innovations required do not confer some advantage to the innovators and early adopters then there is little incentive for others to follow their lead”. Economic science emphasizes the importance of prices to ‘confer’ the information of successful enterprise to others of the advantageous returns so that others may adopt those ways or parts of them in their economic resource use, here related to designing successful permaculture works that are proven to work not only in theory but in practice. Holmgren goes on to further state the importance of permaculture changes and innovations to be self-reliant in their operation, outside the scope of governmental subsidies, licenses and cooperation, as the governmental favors may be cancelled or revoked, a reliance which lessens the very self-reliance of individual permaculture works and broader permaculture designed communities, villages and cities. He writes that “unless the necessary changes or innovations can be independently adopted by individuals, households and local communities without the resources, support and approval from central authority, then it can always be blocked by established interests that stand to lose by its widespread adoption”. Political goals and interests change continuously, and permaculture should,

Page 62 | 95 according to David Holmgren, steer clear from the likely fallouts of shifting political paradigms and realities. Holmgren describes, related to the widespread adoption of permaculture and entrepreneurial innovation within the system, that “it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for higher order organisations and governments to mandate a reality that doesn’t already exist as working models. Progressive and integrated adoption and refinement of the myriad of strategies and techniques associated with permaculture, enacted at the and local level, addresses all three systemic issues”. (Holmgren, 2013c). This last point on the inability of centralized governmental action to mandate by degree a reality unless its institutional and capital structure already exists, means that it is instead the ‘myriad of strategies and techniques’ at the individual and local level that must be pursued by entrepreneurs to achieve environmental ends. Why central authorities are inadequate to act as entrepreneurial entities and economic coordinators, and why it is instead the decentralized nature of the individual and households in their local communities that takes on that role and why they are better at instituting new economic and environmental changes (e.g. a permacultural socio-ecological transition or alike transition alternatives), is demonstrated by economist and Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek in his article The Use of Knowledge In Society (Hayek, 1945).

5.3 The Use of Knowledge in Society and Economic Coordination F. A. Hayek’s seminal economic article The Use of Knowledge In Society (Hayek, 1945) demonstrates that every human has a kind of personal knowledge of his specific time and place circumstances that is both tacit, “dispersed, contingent, particular, local, transitory” (Rogoff, 2008), a kind of knowledge and information about each person’s contextual circumstance that cannot captured and passed on but which is necessary to engage in economic action. Hayek explains that the “knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess” (Hayek, 1945). At each moment in time, every person only has part of the total knowledge. But it is nonetheless this type of tacit and ‘decentralized’ knowledge, which is aggregated and shared spontaneously through knowledge-based systems Page 63 | 95 such as price mechanisms, that is both fundamentally important and a necessity for the entrepreneurial coordination of economic resources that reflects human wants. The decentralized nature of knowledge that Hayek clarifies on, aggregated through spontaneous shifting market prices, solves the issue of knowledge communication that is otherwise not available to any one person36. Price mechanisms provides the knowledge needed for entrepreneurs to choose between the alternative courses of economic action at any given time, and prices are constantly changing their value through their dynamic relation to the supply and demand conditions of resources, such as land and goods availability. Prices37 are to economic actors a knowledge surrogate, a field of vision, for all his entrepreneurial activity, including the types of environmental entrepreneurship activities that permaculture designers are involved in. This knowledge that individuals take advantage of in their coordination of resources cannot be, due to its decentralized nature, adequately collected and used for by central authorities that reflects the real changing tastes, preferences38, states and circumstances of both humans and natural systems. Only decentralized economic actors can do this due to the epistemological nature of human knowledge that relates to both human and natural conditions. Hayek points out that “If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic” and from that logic coordinating the resource

36 Hayek also notes language and cultural inheritance as types of decentralized informational communication systems that brings important knowledge to persons and their entrepreneurial activities (Hayek, 1945, p. 528) 37 On the interaction between prices, humans and nature, (Anderson, 2015) write that “Prices arrived at through market transactions are a reflection of people's perceptions of scarcity and value. In a world where resource and environmental constraints are continually changing along with the value that people put on the environment, prices provide the necessary information to allow people to respond to dynamic natural and human conditions.” 38 It is often argued that economic activity and consumption is oriented by a profit-motive that must be curtailed to ensure environmental protection. However, environmental values and motives to protect that are part of what the list of consumer preferences. As economist Ludwig von Mises points out, subjective individual valuations (i.e. preferences) need not only have a profit motive for behind their sought ends, instead such choices can be grounded in wide range of diverse motives, including environmental motives. Mises writes that “Choosing determines all human decisions. In making his choice man chooses not only between various material things and services. All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and the ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another. Nothing that men aim at or want to avoid remains outside of this arrangement into a unique scale of gradation and preference” (Mises, 1998, p. 3). Page 64 | 95 accordingly. But Hayek’s point is that no one knows or can know all the relevant information, and “The reason for this is that the "data" from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society "given" to a single mind which could work out the implications, and can never be so given” (Hayek, 1945). Knowledge of this kind relates to all spheres of human activity, including environmentally oriented activities and transitioning human systems to be ecologically designed, as the ‘economic’ problem is “a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality” (Hayek, 1945). Ecological and permaculture knowledge on what are the most efficient and socio-ecological best- practice action is too spread out to be captured by one individual or group, even groups of scientific ecology and permaculture experts (Anderson, 2015, p. 167). It is often popular by environmentalists to criticize the unregulated and wild ‘free- market’ for the current environmental issues at hand, types of perceived market- failures. They argue that state regulation or restriction through top-down measures should be imposed upon the market through political environmentalism39, meaning that individuals involved with the market processes should be restrained in their coordination of resources towards alternative ends, in order to restrain market participants of creating ‘environmentally damaging outcomes’. If economic agents are restrained, it is possible to solve ecological destruction through a better and more informed scientific and ‘environmental knowledge’ imposed on that lack expertise. However, while markets as well as

39 These arguments are backed up by the branch of environmental economics. On the problems with the epistemic approach of this branch of economics, (Anderson, 2015) writes that “Environmental economics acknowledges that individuals choose, but it assumes that private actors ignore some costs of their action and therefore engage in more of that action than is socially optimal. Too much fishing of a stock of fish, too many emissions into the air, and too much diversion of water from rivers are examples. The implication is that private action must be curtailed by collective action to achieve socially optimal resource use”. But this branch of thought fails to consider “how collective action works, i.e., public choice … static models leading to policy recommendations to correct the divergence between private and social costs do not recognize the evolutionary nature of property rights. They fail to recognize that incomplete property rights are opportunities for entrepreneurs who can better define and enforce property rights and thus capture the previously uncaptured rents”. These are important methodological aspects in considering whether permaculture should orient itself towards free-market environmentalism or political environmentalism. Here it is argued by Terry Anderson that the latter approach is insufficient to its goal of efficiently solving environmental issues. Page 65 | 95 political arrangements are not either producing perfect outcomes, this claim that top-down commands are necessary when markets acts ‘environmentally wild’ misses the crucial epistemic point that Hayek makes. On that point of choice between e.g. free-market and political environmentalism, it is a question of which system is more adequately equipped to consider the relevant and existing knowledge. He writes that “it is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals … Which of these systems is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on the question under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge.” (Hayek, 1945). Centralized planning and command, whether it is environmentally concerned about the distribution and use of ecological resources or not, cannot capture and take advantage of the knowledge that is spread throughout society in the same way that decentralized economic calculation and coordination can through prices. Central planning cannot by its epistemological limitations match the efficiency of open-access markets, since markets, property rights and prices are the institutional mechanisms that better captures the dynamic changing nature between human valuations and natural conditions, and therethrough informs entrepreneurs of sound production decisions (i.e. reflecting consumer demands). In a system where the relevant facts are dispersed, prices help to inform the many disconnected individuals to coordinate their plans. A centralization and top-down control scheme of designing, planning and coordinating economic, including environmental resources and goods, is not a mechanism capable of making the same considerations, calculations and informed decision-making as decentralized market agents and their individual planning can through the prices they create and act on through the ongoing market processes. The price system is therefore the coordinating element that is crucial for permaculture design considerations, as it informs the permaculture practitioner on the availability of resources (e.g. availability of renewable resources, consumer wants that can be produced sustainably, land-prices reflecting land-health and wealth etc.). Prices are central to the sound functioning of the exchanges of information and resources that necessary to economically educate a growing group of individuals interested in permaculture, and the individual and collective

Page 66 | 95 decisions that most take related to land-resource in their pursuit of creating more permanent human settlements and restoring degraded ecosystems and making them ecologically designed and economically productive. A research paper by Mark Sagoff notes that on the use of market mechanisms for identifying and valuing ecosystem services, services that permaculture designs are oriented towards preserving and restoring, “economic stakeholders (user groups) generally do well in identifying these services and assigning prices to them. These prices arise spontaneously in—and serve to coordinate—market activity related to the environment. The relevant ecological information which markets gather and apply tends to be dispersed, contingent, particular, local, transitory, and embedded in institutions and practices” (Sagoff, 2008). That the relevant knowledge and economic information for ecological economic activity is specific to time and place circumstances (e.g. dispersed, contingent, particular, local, transitory and embedded in the institutional structure and cultural practices) was explained by F.A. Hayek. The relevant information for ecological and economic activity, including permaculture designs and practices in their local, context cannot be gathered by central government planning due to the nature of this type of knowledge, and it is an epistemic claim against the expediency of political environmentalism.

In his article, Mark Sagoff goes on to note that the problem with using scientific knowledge for price-settings outside markets, a type of knowledge that could also be used to institute types of governmental regulation, subsidies and restrictions on environmental concerns in top-down fashions, such as related to the land-use techniques in industrial agriculture and its use of oil for the production of food, is that “The knowledge science seeks, unlike the information markets gather, tends to be centralized, collaborative, collective, and consensus-based; science pursues concepts and principles that are timeless and general rather than ephemeral and site-specific.” (Sagoff, 2008). The free-market approach emphasized by David Holmgren for permaculture designs, businesses and other activities, that they should remain outside the scope of governmental reliance and interference, is supported by what F.A Hayek and Mark Sagoff demonstrates and what is captured in the dichotomy between free-market and political environmentalism Page 67 | 95

(Anderson & Leal, 2015). Permaculture’s focus on the human-nature interconnectedness and a designing for permanence must be able to incorporate human valuations and what consumers wants produced. Due to the nature of this type of socio-ecological decentralized human knowledge, “ecosystem services may appear to depend not on ecological constants but on many kinds of economic variables, including what people want produced, as indicated by prices set in global markets. The exchange value of an ecosystem —like that of any good—is constantly negotiated in view of market conditions”. The possible designs available on how to design interconnected human and natural permaculture systems are limited only to the extent of human ingenuity with an understanding of those systems, but they must be economic and profitable enough to sustain and grow themselves40. Choosing economic alternatives from the available design-choices are, as demonstrated, best done through institutions and market mechanisms such as the price-system41, property rights systems, legal codes and cultural differentials (Hayek, 1945) (Terry & Leal, 2015) (Pennington, 2011) (Sagoff, 2008). While a permaculture design might good in theory, it must also consider that “Different legal regimes often impose quite different and variable conditions”, and that consumer wants and scarcity in available resources, land, labor and other inputs (variables that are constantly changing as demonstrated by the conceptual nature of dynamic economics) put restrictions on the available economical permaculture design alternatives. On the market “Market actors, groups, and property owners seem to have a good handle on the ecosystem services that

40 A survey of permaculture practitioners (Ferguson, 2013) finds that some permaculture businesses “organize land use and enterprise strategies around principles of increasing ecosystem health and productive capacity. On clear-cut hillsides and denuded overgrazed rangeland, for example, permaculture farms are using on- and off farm revenue to increase soil health, perennial cover, and improve landscape . Rather than -offs between conservation and production, in these contexts permaculture farms are using production processes to increase ecosystem health, and in turn increase the sustainable productive capacity of the landscape. Along this pathway, permaculture farms work to increase the productive capacity of the landscape, supporting a future supply of local food”. 41 The use of the price-system by permaculture practitioners has been shown to not only involve indirect monetary transactions, but in the case of a study of permaculture farms also “barter, and direct exchange in which money plays a subsidiary role to human relationships … Farms prioritizing production for subsistence and barter are fostering relationships of mutual aid and reciprocity, producing and circulating food and other goods in tightly networked circuits of community exchange” (Ferguson, 2013). The use of direct exchange methods within local communities is a reflection of the local-community orientation that permaculture design and activities emphasize. Page 68 | 95 affect them and they do fairly well in bargaining with each other to manage conflicts and ” (Sagoff, 2008). Social science in this way is therefore helpful to demonstrate to permaculture practitioners that permaculture systems and communities that seeks discover new or transition current institutional structures (e.g. reduce fossil-fuel dependency and change away from industrial agriculture) are best at capturing the dynamics of human’s and nature through market interactions instead of top-down governmental approaches, as the latter cannot capture and effectively use knowledge that is ‘dispersed, particular, local, practical, implicit, and transitory’. Instead centralized action must rely on “objective” measures to valuate economic and biophysical environmental values to use in their planning, measures that cannot be a reflection of the dynamic realities they seek to capture. Sagoff notes on the knowledge analysis that Hayek’s criticism of the central planning approach “centered on the complexity of modern society and the impossibility that any individual or group of social and natural scientists could command all the information needed to guide an economy or even how to second-guess economic activity” (Sagoff, 2008). Objective measures, or ‘scientific objectivism’ on the value of human labor or the value of environmental resources (e.g. animals, vegetation, wind, water, air, minerals, soils) cannot in fact be discovered scientifically and ascertained due to the epistemological nature of their knowledge42. “Neither a ‘commodity’ an ‘economic good’, nor ‘food’ nor ‘money’ can be defined in physical terms but only in terms of views people hold about things” explains Hayek, and instead the value of economic goods must be found through the spontaneous market processes of constant discoveries and corrections, that

42 This discussion and analysis leads back to the “socialist calculation debate” that took place in the 1920’s, where “Hayek and other economists in the at the time engaged in the “socialist calculation debate” over whether a planned economy, which determined or measured value by applying the concepts of social and natural science, would perform better than a society that relied on price signals set by markets” (Sagoff, 2008) (see also Hayek, [1935] 1963). To that issue and that of quantifying the value of nature, it was demonstrated that “the complexity of modern society makes it impossible for scientific managers to organize the staggering amount of information relevant to any particular economic action … Alas, no way can be found to quantify units for valuation in nature apart from the local, transitory, fluctuating, path-dependent, and circumstantial views and beliefs people hold about things ... The economic problem is not to understand the biophysical factors of production but to explain “how the spontaneous interaction of a number of people, each possessing only bits of knowledge, brings about a state of affairs in which prices correspond to costs, etc., and which could be brought about by deliberate direction only by someone who possessed the combined knowledge of all those individuals” (Rogoff, 2008, p. 500). Page 69 | 95 both considers the human values and the natural circumstances of e.g. resource scarcity, plentitude and substitutes of forests, fresh water sources, animal species availability, land quality and so forth, all important for permaculture design planning. Hayek’s analysis emphasizes therefore the importance of market actors, ‘the man on the spot’, “because only thus can we ensure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used”. Fitting well with this epistemic nature is the emphasis of permaculture to empower individuals and communities to implement environmental solutions or trying to institute new socio-ecological regimes and restoring and utilizing ecosystem services appropriate to their localized context. What Hayek argued, according to Rogoff, was that “Reason … must first recognize its limitations. Markets when properly governed by the rule of law, respect for rights of person and property, and democratic institutions simply work as the best method we have to integrate knowledge, including ecological knowledge, into the day-to-day economic activity of individuals (emphasis added)”. Permaculture practitioners are, unlike a central government, embedded in their local and specific time and place settings, where they seek to effect socio-ecological change based on permaculture ethics and principles, and they are therefore more keenly aware of the particular and practical knowledge that are sensitive to changes in technology, preferences and tastes, and how that knowledge must be considered and applied to their available resources. Their ‘enviropreneurial’ economic and ecological activities aimed towards ends that consider both the human and the natural aspects are according to this analysis best achieved through market institutions of property rights and prices.

5.4 Political Environmentalism, Public Choice and Permaculture Kenneth Boulding (Boulding, 1966) argued in his article that to achieve his concept of a ‘Spaceship Earth’ society that better circumvents the current lack of posterity vision and appropriate time-discounting in the human valuation of future environmental resources, “There needs to be special legislation to cover these cases, and though such legislation seems hard to get in practice, mainly because of the widespread and small personal incidence of the injuries, the technical problems involved are not insuperable. If we were to adopt in principle a law for penalties Page 70 | 95 for social damages, with an apparatus for making assessments under it, a very large proportion of current pollution and deterioration of the environment would be prevented” (Boulding, 1966, p. 13). Boulding’s argument for taxes to penalize negative externalities upon environmental resources and others are along the lines of political environmentalism, in which the propositions for central intervention are built on the perceived ‘market-failures’ of small individual incidences of injury. In the perspective of the permaculture analysis, the individual incidences of farmers using industrial agriculture practices that leads to negative externalities on others (e.g. from a loss of abundant ecosystem services or climatic changes due to loss of natural systems) that are not appropriately accounted for in their costs, would according to political environmentalism that restrictions and taxes should be imposed on the production of such ‘bads’. Bolding goes on to note that “The law of torts is quite inadequate to provide for the correction of the price system which is required, simply because where damages are widespread and their incidence on any particular person is small, the ordinary remedies of the civil law are quite inadequate and inappropriate”, and this critique on the inadequacy of the market system of prices and the property right systems of law is at the core of argumentation in political environmentalism advocacy, and why industrial agriculture should be restricted from the analysis in part 4. But public choice theory, a school of economic thought that takes the view of dynamic economies and ecologies (Anderson, 2015, p. 172) finds that the arguments put forth by Boulding and the political environmentalist should be met with skepticism. The skepticism stems from the nature of how politics work and how it responds to dynamic environmental conditions. Politicians, just as business entrepreneurs, are self-interested and face information costs involved in their gathering of the relevant information related to the topic at hand. The presumption that politicians only work in the public’s interest on issues of the environment and that only sound science of the consequential outcomes is at the basis of decisions, is a problematic assumption. Political judgements and decisions are affected by the political climate, budgetary restrictions, pressure from constituencies and other factors “all of which may or may not lead to efficiency or environmental quality” as they affect the incentives of politicians and the decision

Page 71 | 95 outcomes. Incentives of politicians diverges from the public interest due to political realities of “lobbying, log rolling, agency delegation and discretion, executive authority, and litigation. In this political process, benefits are concentrated on special interests while costs are diffused to the general population, and voters remain rationally ignorant, meaning they typically are well informed about narrow issues of concern to them, and ill-informed about broader issues outside their coalition” (Anderson, 2015, p. 173). Means of environmental regulation, taxation and restriction will always be affected by political pressures as self-interested individuals and groups seeks the favors of politicians, so “In the context of dynamic ecology, there is little reason to expect that politicians, bureaucrats, or constituents will take account of dynamic changes, especially if they require considering consequences beyond the political cycle”. This innate nature of the political processes is one likely explanation for why there are within the permaculture movement and in the literature a perception of inadequacy of governmental actions and results on behalf of turning the tide on environmental issues. The political time-dimension is too short, much shorter than private ownership interests, as it is curtailed by political terms, and the political processes are not adequately equipped to capture and take regard of all the relevant and decentralized knowledge of time and place involved. The muddled reality of political processes and private lobby interests that controls and coordinates large portions of the world’s legislation and economic wealth which has created far less than ideal environmental outcomes is captured by permaculturist Russ Grayson who explains that “the of enlightened self-interest that would once have improved our societies has become the dead hand of temporary political advantage and corporate control“ (Grayson, 2013, p. 3). Even if a central committee of politicians and private special interest groups’ working together could discover an ideal solution, meaning that one must first assume away how the nature of knowledge discovery works, it is very likely that their final findings and decision-outcomes would still diverge widely from the most optimal economic and ecological decision given the many factors that influences political decisions. It cannot be assumed that a political process will lead to an appropriate ‘realignment’ of the current private and social costs of certain outcomes of

Page 72 | 95 institutional practices (Pennington, 2011). The invisible hand of , meaning how people individually cooperate through self-interests, decentralized knowledge and market mechanisms that creates the kind of wealth that individuals seek and to reach optimal economic and ecological solutions (i.e. the invisible hand) is dead in the hands of politicians and special interest groups, where decentralized decisions that through market signals capture the relevant knowledge are absent.

5.5 Prices, Property Rights and Permaculture How open-market mechanisms more adequately brings about the economic solutions to ecological issues that asset prices on environmental resources are found through market discoveries (Pennington, 2011). Prices considers the benefits and costs involved in each resource-use, and the right knowledge (e.g. a permaculture design approach) is by extension best established and passed on through those spontaneous market-mechanisms. But as is the case with self- interests and transaction costs (e.g. information search) involved in political decision makings, entrepreneurs or enviropreneurs also face the same reality of self-interests and information costs attached to their activities and gathering the relevant knowledge to know the tradeoffs between various alternative combinations of ecological productions. Enviropreneurs need to know the amounts that are available of i.e. land, water, vegetation, species, raw materials, capital goods such as machines and tools, infrastructure, labor, financial capital and so forth, what the individual preferences and wants are. To acquire this knowledge is costly and it is a continuous process because of the dynamic nature of human and natural systems. This is the knowledge that permaculture practitioners must acquire to remain successful in their enterprises and productions of sustainable ecosystems and their services. Knowledge production for this purpose, is as shown, best relayed through market-generated information, and Terry Anderson notes that “Enviropreneurs recognize the positive relationship between economic incentives and environmental quality. Whether an enviropreneur is running a for- profit company or a not-for-profit organization, the financial component cannot be ignored. Successful enviropreneurs devise ways to combine sustainability with profitability” (Anderson, 2015, p. 177). As human values change towards more Page 73 | 95 environmentally oriented ethics such as the Earth Care ethic, and what the supply and demand conditions are of the changed value scales of consumers (e.g. higher value put on forests, clean water, reduced fossil-fuel use, sustainable cities and food production), then enviropreneurs is connected to this information, and they can through prices, practical and scientific knowledge reallocate the use of their resources towards higher valued end such as sustainable settlement systems and the regeneration of eco-systems and services. Through the right market institutions of defined, enforced and transferable property rights, and prices, dynamic markets produce knowledge and responds to changes in people’s subjective preferences and the changes to dynamic environments. If these institutions are lacking, then the link that binds dynamic markets and dynamic ecologies are broken.

According to Terry Anderson, environmental problems results from a lack of well-defined property rights of e.g. access, ownership, use and transfer rights of environmental resources (land, water, rivers, air, wildlife). In cases where a resource-use exposes others of negative externalities, lacking property rights becomes the problem as rents cannot be captured by the damaged party. The same is the case of positive externality systems and practices on others (e.g. horticulture, regenerated ecosystems), where the enviropreneur such as the permaculture practitioner cannot capture the external benefits from his successful businesses (e.g. increased wildlife, plant abundance, air purification, carbon dioxide sequestering) so that his beneficial activities may continue. If property rights however can be redefined to include both costs and returns from activities that are currently not properly prices according to the permaculture analysis, meaning the negative externalities of industrial agriculture and the positive externalities of a horticulture, then the costs and benefits involved in whether or not to use a permaculture designs can be considered from prices that reflects those measures of the ecological factors involved that are now captured by property rights and therefore prices. The lacking property-rights systems that could solve the list of issues (listed in part 3) are opportunities for institutional entrepreneurship by enviropreneurs to solve those lacking rights and then gain rewards from the solutions. Anderson explains that “The effectiveness of markets Page 74 | 95 in providing a link between humans and their depends on how well the property rights induce owners to account for changing human values and changing states of nature” (Anderson, 2015, p. 165). Related to the case of permaculture, Terry Anderson demonstrates that successful enviropreneurship is the market’s tendency “to create harmony from dissonance”. Enviropreneurial permaculture design needs both prices and property rights systems to create this ‘harmony’ of sustainable and regenerative interactions between dynamic and complex human and natural systems. Mark Pennington explains that it is private property that allows minorities (i.e. permaculture practitioners) to experiment with their ideas in a private space that does not accord to majority values, and from there the merits of the ideas can be tested. If those ideas are found to be successful and if their benefits become visible, then an increasing amount of people can adopt them and emulate such models (Pennington, 2011, p. 247). On the issue of the continued use of damaging agricultural practices and a lack of a transitioning to more ecological food-systems, he further explains that “In the specific case of the agricultural sector this process may have proceeded much more speedily had it not been for the enforced state subsidisation of intensive farming methods across most of the major democracies” (Pennington, 2011, p. 240). If property rights can be defined according to changing and perceived circumstances instead of being held in place by government subsidies and fiat, then the entrepreneur can better discover and then acts upon the changes happening to goods, services, environments and other inputs and adjust their production based on these new rights systems.

The increasing successful permaculture applications worldwide within local households, communities, transition towns and eco-villages (Seyfang & Haxeltine, 2012) are examples of enviropreneurial agents acting towards changing the disequilibria between economic and natural circumstances and discovering new institutional arrangements to deal with them. Not all entrepreneurial activity is successful however, wrong decisions are made from the available knowledge “but just as poor adaptations in nature are eliminated, albeit slowly, via evolutionary processes, bad decisions in markets are purged by economic losses” (Anderson, 2015, p. 171). In the case of agricultural activities, based on the arguments put Page 75 | 95 forth on the destructive effects of industrial agriculture in part 4, strengthening the property rights of what are deemed negative externalities of industrial agricultural through entrepreneurial institutional discovery (i.e. changing the ‘rights and rules of the game’ of land-use) would reduce food-production activities that in total impose high economic losses as those losses are internalized on the industrial agriculturist himself. The same argument can be extended to issues of deforestations, oceanic waste disposal and air pollution. Economist Mark Pennington explains the point that is relevant to permaculture enterprise and communities, that “The capacity to discover new ways of configuring property rights may be of particular relevance to environmental problems that transcend the boundaries of a single property owner and may be a prominent feature of an approach to environmental protection that draws on the principle of competitive spontaneous order … What matters in all of these cases is that resources are converted from an ‘open access’ state to one where some form of exclusion is introduced at the relevant jurisdictional level.” (Pennington, 2011, p. 233). If the wider costs incurred due to a loss of stability and life-sustaining ecosystem- services can be internalized on the producers’ own costs of those effects, then the evolutionary market processes will signal to market agents engaged with food production that they should restructure their production processes towards combinations that do not produce the costs involved with ecosystem depletions and disservices43. Permaculture advocacy and systems would according to this analysis

43 Deforestation, destruction of soils, pollution and other are in many cases economic ’free-rider’ problems, that exist due to lacking property rights that captures the damages on the producer. On this, Anderson makes a clear explanation of how permaculture practitioners and other enviropreneurs can gain the benefits of working out and strengthening the property rights on natural resources and services, and these solutions include communal types of ownership structures ‘discovered’ in the local community. Transition movements, such as the permaculture inspired Transition Town movement, are examples of institutional entrepreneurship engaged with types of property rights organization. Anderson explains that “Contracting issues are particularly important for environmental entrepreneurs because many environmental goods and services are subject to the free-rider problem. That is to say, goods such as clean water or air, preservation, or greenhouse gas reduction can be enjoyed by people who cannot easily be restricted from enjoying the good if they do not pay for it. Once clean air and water are produced, anyone in the vicinity can enjoy it; once endangered species are preserved, people can enjoy a sense of satisfaction out of knowing those species continue to exist; and greenhouse gases reduced in one location can potentially stave off global warming around the world. Environmental entrepreneurs trying to capture rents in producing such goods will be undercompensated for their efforts if they cannot find ways of contracting-privately or collectively through government-with potential free- riding consumers” (Anderson, 2015, 192). Page 76 | 95 benefit from emphasizing the importance of clearly defined and enforced property right systems in and between communities.

5.6 Permaculture, Regulation and Harmonization In a recent paper Towards Permaculture 3.0 (Grayson, 2015), it is discussed whether to introduce of a set of voluntary standards to the permaculture design framework. The paper finds that a set of standards (i.e. harmonization) “would provide quality assurance for people commissioning permaculture design and construction and for those organisations and individuals seeking voluntary assistance from permaculture practitioners”44 (Grayson, 2015, p. 27). One other permaculture paper The Next Big Step finds that within the permaculture movement there are polarizing views on standardizing permaculture training and education. It mentions that a compromise between a set of minimum standards, but otherwise a flexible system beyond that on permaculture training and on education, “promotes the wonderful diversity of teachers and supports them to continually improve” (van der Velden, 2017), but the standardization compromise should recognizes that human and natural circumstances of time and place exists in all design and must be considered, and which cannot be effectively standardized for. Russ Grayson explains on this point that “the standards, or a code of practice, would need be stated in general terms given the diversity of ways in which permaculture is applied”, and that permaculture offers a system of design for decentralized applications where its practitioners live and work. Permaculture is not a political type of ‘programme’, instead it encourages participants to take approaches to their diverse range of activities based on the permaculture ethics

44 (Grayson, 2015) proposes on harmonizing (i.e. standardizing) permaculture to i.e.; “set minimum quality and performance criteria in regard to design, construction and finish; apply to both design, construction, handover (and any necessary training) and to participatory/ consultative process with clients and project stakeholders; be developed and managed by a focused, self-organising team within a national permaculture organisation; be developed by a diverse team including people from any national organisation hosting the standards, permaculture designers and educators, professional designers working with permaculture concepts and ideas (such as architects, landscape architects, qualified garden designers, community workers etc) and a communications specialist ; be actively promoted so as to eventually become a de-facto set of standards; although applying to projects in the places stipulated above, the standards could become a reference for permaculture projects elsewhere than public places; be revisited from time to time for review, amendment and updating (emphasis added)” (Grayson, p. 28).

Page 77 | 95 and principles (Grayson, 2010b, 2015). The permaculture ethics and principles functions as the “rules of the game” parameters (Pennington, 2011, p. 235), rules of the game that are designed, evolving in its application and adopted privately for effective socio-ecological governance. Permaculture is not a production system per se, it is a land-use and community planning philosophy, and as it is not limited to a specific method of production, but instead it is “amenable to locally adapted techniques of production”. Its ephemeral nature makes it difficult to harmonize into a homogenized use (van der Velden, 2017), as the permaculture ethics and principles are concise declarations applicable globally to any environment, and the applied techniques that convey these ethics and principles will therefore differ according to the location, the conditions and their purpose (Akhtar et. al. 2016) (Holmgren, 2002).

Economics show that there are benefits to regulation and harmonization on both the demand and supply side (Salin, 2001). On the supply side, reduction of externalities or gains from economies of scale can be obtained by coordinating harmonized (meaning standardized) productions of one or more producers, the case often being that in networking activities. On the demand side, harmonization reduces the information costs innate to the nature of diversification and consumers collecting knowledge of the unique characteristics of each of the available differentiated goods. Economist Pascal Salin explains that “Information costs are therefore decreased by the introduction of standards and labels” (Salin, 2001, p. 62). But Salin further explains that due to the differentiated nature of individual human characteristics and their changing wants and preferences45, it doesn’t follow that an optimal degree of goods diversification or an optimal degree of harmonization can be decided objectively a priori and instituted. Building on F.A. Hayek’s explanation on how knowledge is discovered, produced and used in a society (Hayek, 1945), Pascal Salin explains that on the ‘optimal degree’ of harmonization “we cannot know in advance and forever whether such gains exist

45 Pascal Salin explains that the concept of economic optimality is meaningless if it is defined independently of individual wants and perceptions that are heterogenous in nature and constantly changing. Consumers and producers have their own views of what is the optimal degree of differentiation (and therefore also harmonization) for the goods and services they desire (Salin, 2001, p. 63). Page 78 | 95 in any activity and if so, how great they are”, that knowledge has to be ‘discovered’ (Salin, 2001, p. 63). The optimal degree of harmonization is a discovery process, and due to the epistemological nature of discovery processes, it is a discovery process that necessitate the options of both free entry and free exit by entrepreneurs, meaning that competitive regulation and freedom of contract creates the degree of harmonization in a production process, as opposed to international and national top-down measures (Pennington, 2011, p. 235, 248) (Salin, 2001). Under competitive regulation and freedom of contract, individuals and communities can come together in social and organizational structures that restricts their ‘permissible’ behavior, such as the permaculture ethical code does, and through such restrictions and agreement on worldview and environmental values, they can engage in the cooperative production of collective goods (e.g. clean air, vibrant wildlife, fresh water accessibility, food security and production). The discovery process is about ‘discovering’ the institutions, production and design methods and the degree of harmonization in those, that make them resilient and robust, and this process requires the trial and error experimentation “with different bundles and combinations of property rights, in order to discover which structures, help to lower the transaction costs of internalising externalities and the relative value placed on collective goods themselves. Equally importantly, there should not be any one owner at the meta-level with the capacity to determine the content of the institutional rules that other social actors must adhere to” (Pennington, 2011, p. 235). These arguments by economist Mark Pennington are relevant to understanding the success of permaculture as a design system adopted through a ‘free-market’ embedded social grassroots movement of free entry and exit and absent of top-down standardizations of permissible design. The argument thus extents to permaculture projects and their degree of harmonization on e.g. permaculture training, education and a “minimum quality and performance criteria in regard to design, construction and finish” (Grayson, 2015). Permaculture standards to which individuals subscribe must include options of free entry and free exit related to how practitioners try to apply the framework. The problem therefore with instruments of top-down political regulation and imposition of ‘optimal degrees’ of harmonization is that political institutions and

Page 79 | 95 their constructivist processes cannot acquire and use the relevant knowledge to identify the optimal degrees of harmonization. As already explained above, political instruments and decision-making processes are diverged from what in a perfect world would be the ideal solutions46. It is unfeasible that governmental command-and-control agencies can collect all the necessary data to “model, monitor, and manage a process as complex as an ecosystem” (Anderson & Leal, 2015, p. 7) and to regulate agriculture and standardize permaculture adequately and efficiently47. A market-based process of standardization with free entry and exit options wherein enviropreneurs can assess the optimality of the standards proposed (Grayson, 2015) (van der Velden, 2017) is a more adequate mechanism to ascertain the value and relevancy of harmonization. This process should be ensured for the permaculture participants, meaning that options of both free-entry and exit exists, because the optimal harmonizations of permaculture designs, educations, trainings and so forth are best discovered through a competitive regulation process that “induces people to devise new technologies and new institutional arrangements so that the optimal dimension is changing over time” (Salin, 2001, p. 66). The free entry and exit options does not necessarily mean that only ‘good’ solutions are made for the environment, ‘bad’ outcomes inevitably always exist in systems that are evolutionary and changing through time, with niche adaptations that informs others, but ‘exit’ options allows for greater experimental adaptions as individuals are not bound by one approach or centralized majority decisions to deal with ‘bad’ outcomes, and they can instead experiment with new designs (Pennington, 2011, p. 248). Opposite to that of a open-access market-based process of regulation and harmonization of economic activities through competitive regulation and freedom of contract, is that of a national or ‘world government’ majority system. To Pascal Salin “The absolute

46 (Anderson & Lead, 2015) explains that the problems of regulation are that “Agencies and firms are subject to regulation lobby for exception or protection under the law, often at the expense of the environment and their competitors. Bureaucrats seize budgetary and managerial control. Established private companies are exempted from new regulations. Bureaucratic and regulatory capture is costly, inefficient, ineffective, and unpopular. Bureaucracy also lacks a framework for entrepreneurial vision and achievement that can take environmental quality to higher levels without sacrificing economic growth.” 47 The failures of centralized government control in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union illustrate how central planning can lead to environmental destruction rather than environmental improvement (Anderson & Lead, 2015, p. 7). Page 80 | 95 nightmare is a world government, from which individuals would have no possibility of opting out” whenever their individual circumstances changing their priorities necessitates them to do so (Schmidtz, 2001). As philosopher David Schmidtz explains, on environmental values and priorities that they may give cause for conflict between individuals, it is often the case that conflicts that are perceive as conflicts of values, are not always rooted in differences in the held values between individuals, meaning what is environmentally permissible behavior and what is not, but instead conflicts may be rooted in a difference in environmental conflicts of priorities (Schmidtz, 2000). Schmidtz explains that “even people who embrace environmentalist values will act contrary to those values when they cannot afford to act in accordance with them. There are times when conflict is a matter of conflicting priorities” (Schmidtz, 2000, p. 6). The important point of this argument is that forcing or coercing individuals to ‘do environmentalism’ or ‘do permaculture’ through e.g. top-down legislation for regulation and harmonization will not alleviate people of their economic realities, and often will lead instead to make them worse off, as time and resources are used in ways not in line with their circumstantial priorities. where either regulation or harmonization are required to counteract market-failures, those are better adapted to the problems at hand if they are allowed to emerge via bottom-up processes of evolutionary competition (Pennington, 2011, p. 226). The permaculture People Care ethic should be a strong argument against coercing people to take on commanded ‘environmental priorities’ as this will at times leave them worse off given their present situations. The existence of internationally imposed standards for pollution and other environmentally damaging activities, common-resource uses and so forth, disincentivizes the improvement of their production and use through institutional entrepreneurship to better define the respective property rights of the polluters, commons-users and those that gains and loose in the process. Why this is the case is that it is through institutional entrepreneurship and establishing property rights to long-term losses of ecosystem services from industrial agriculture, or to the pollution of seas or the atmosphere, that the “Technical or institutional solutions may be devised to overcome the apparent difficulties in the definition of property rights and, therefore,

Page 81 | 95 in the definition of individual responsibilities” (Salin, 2001, p. 77). The permaculture institutional analysis of industrial agriculture and fossil-fuel use would, according to the advocates of political environmentalism, call e.g. for the taxation, regulation and restriction of certain industrial agriculture practices, in order to mitigate and reverse ecosystem depletions, and instead it would advocate the harmonization of food production to be instituted according to the ‘best practice’ permaculture designs. However as shown, there are many issues involved with political processes and decisions. Coerced production, regulation and harmonization of economic activities and resource use are according to Salin Pascal the worst solutions to environmental issues. Coercive measures are anathema to the epistemic of how both dynamic economies and dynamic ecologies work and interconnectedly interact48. Mark Pennington also explains that “Should there be only one rule-making body, then any errors tend to be systemic and the capacity to innovate and adapt to local circumstances is impeded by the need to secure the support of an overarching authority or majority” (Pennington, 2011, p. 235). Coercive market regulation and harmonization, and the public ownership and command of certain land, seas and air resources, makes it impossible for enviropreneur like permaculture practitioners to invent new and better institutional frameworks and ways to better define property rights and therethrough collect the necessary knowledge to use resources both economically and ecologically to restore degraded environments with human ends, sustainability and resilience in mind.

5.7 Permaculture and Political Economy In concluding his analysis on the coming of a Spaceship Earth society, Kenneth Boulding emphasized the need to deal with the development of skills and knowledge in order to handle the more immediate environmental problems, in order to then successfully deal with the larger environmental ones. He saw that

48 The problem of the Amazon forest for instance, a matter of great concern for permaculture practitioners, arises “because the Brazilian state is the legal owner of the forest and allows woodcutters to cut down trees. Those harvesters have no incentive to grow new trees; they do not own the land and would not benefit from such action. The best way to save the Amazon forest is to privatize it (remembering to leave part of it to the indigenous people who have been its first settlers)” (Salin, 2001, p. 75). Page 82 | 95

“as a succession of mounting crises, especially in pollution, arouse the public opinion and mobilize support for the solution of the immediate problems, a learning process will be set in motion which will eventually lead to an appreciation of and perhaps solutions for the larger ones” (Boulding, 1966, p. 13). The permaculture design approach with its emphasis on small solutions to the bigger problems (i.e. sustainably designing the household, the garden, small-scale food production and the local community), the permaculture ‘learning process’ has been able to consider and develop solutions to the bigger problems (i.e. industrial agriculture, fossil-fuel dependency, -systems, the restoration of lost water, air, soil, forest, urban ecosystems)49. This development fits well into Boulding’s description and anticipation of an increasingly mobilized public environmental awareness. But where Kenneth Boulding urged for taxes and regulatory systems to deal with the larger problems, it has been explained that a design-system and movement like that of permaculture, which shown that voluntary enviropreneurial and innovative activities within a framework of market-based institutions of price-mechanisms and property rights systems can bring about changes on a larger scale through the decentralized and spontaneously emerging processes. In this market-based framework, the relevant knowledge of dynamic economies and dynamic ecologies are transmitted to the enviropreneur acting as the ‘man on the spot’. The permaculture movement’s own ‘culture’ of acting outside the scope of the inadequacy of centralized actions of government to affect change50, is a reflection of what Hayek found in 1945 when he wrote that “If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the

49 In his book The Permaculture City, Toby Hemenway explains on the successive developments of permaculture, that “in the early days of the discipline, permaculture attracted gardeners, farmers, landscape designers, and nascent permaculture teachers. Permaculture’s concept can be applied in so many ways, permaculturists today include software designers; water, waste and energy engineers; social justice activist; educators and school administrators from kitchen garden to graduate studies; community organizers and government officials; restoration ecologists; teachers of yoga, bodywork, and spiritual practice, in short, almost everyone” (Hemenway, 2015, p. x). 50 The permaculture literature does not neglect the existence of government and the dominant role it plays in society. Policy advocacy is one aspect mentioned where permaculture practitioners can and should work to affect change, this is however typically oriented towards the local city-council level (Towards Permaculture V3, Toby Hemenway 2015). It is also a necessary task as existing regulations and laws in cases may prevent the institution of permaculture design on designated areas and land-types. Page 83 | 95 ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them” (Hayek, 1945). Hayek’s article serves as a reminder that the idea of a benign, omnipotent and omniscient government is a utopia, as political mechanisms and processes are far more inadequately equipped to act on the rapid evolutions and adaptions taking place within both dynamic human economies and dynamic natural ecologies.

If permaculture practitioners can affect change through their institutional and environmental entrepreneurship and strengthening property rights on natural resources and if they “can overcome the technological, legal, and political transaction costs to facilitate market responses changing human demands and changing natural conditions, they will link dynamic economics and dynamic ecology” (Anderson, 2015, p. 178). This is in line with one key area for permaculture networks to focus on, which is to “Enable social eco-entrepreneurial activity” (van der Velden et. al., 2017). It is through market-mechanisms of adaptions to changes in ecological knowledge, human preferences, environmental conditions, that the necessary ends can be achieved to circumvent a collapse scenario of human civilization and instead institute an energy-descent scenario should technology fail to replace the extent to which oil sustains the current structures and practices of human civilization. The U.N. Global Land Outlook report asks the question that “We already know much of what it takes to build a resilient planet for future generations – to harness the immense opportunities for sustainable growth provided by nature and ensure a more secure future. The question is: can we catalyze a shift from the current “age of plunder” toward an “age of respect” where we respect biophysical limits?” (Dudley & Alexander, 2018) By understanding what the principles of nature are and building environmentally friendly human institutions it, people and market work together with nature to improve upon its quality, diversity and richness. Permaculture has been found in this thesis to be a market-oriented design-framework, a worldview and a grassroots movement engaged with knowledge production, exchange of ideas and practical and profitable solutions (Grayson, 2015). It is one answer to the above question of if mankind can ‘catalyze a shift’ towards a more Page 84 | 95

‘respectful’ approach to nature, in that permaculture works towards this end and offers alternative solutions to both the smaller and bigger environmental problems today. Permaculture is trying to transform the way local communities produce, consume, live and work together in order to address the major environmental pressures on natural systems. This analysis of the permaculture design framework and its energized grassroots movement has been extended by introduction of the above selected political economy aspects of the social science discipline, in an attempt to extent the social science aspects of permaculture with important considerations related to how human economies and institutions most adequately can interact with natural ecologies.

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6. Conclusion This these has found that permaculture is a market-based system and phenomenon acting outside the scope of government that strives to create and institute more permanent, sustainable and resilient both human settlements and natural ecosystems. It has been shown how market-mechanisms of prices, property rights and institutional and environmental entrepreneurship are important mechanisms to the permaculture system as permaculture is a decentralized system of practitioners and networks worldwide that relies heavily on knowledge production and sharing and site-specific design. To reach this conclusion, this thesis has examined and considered permaculture from a social science perspective. The thesis has looked at permaculture as an applied design- science, and how the permaculture worldview and ethics has motivated a growing permaculture social grassroots movement worldwide. The thesis has also applied permaculture as an analytical framework for examining the sustainability of selected current socio-ecological regimes and practices, with in-depth analyses of both the current worldwide fossil-fuel dependency and the problematic consequences to the environment from the practice of modern industrial agriculture. From these analyses it was shown how a peak-oil scenario and increasing climatic changes and fluctuations will lead to one of four likely ‘energy- futures’ scenarios based on a permaculture analysis, and what permaculture design proposes to do about the current problematic socio-ecological practices. To extent the scope of the permaculture science-synthesis and the knowledge related to discovering and instituting new socio-ecological transitions, a social-science discussion of a selection of political economy issues related to permaculture was taken in the last part of the thesis. This discussion introduced theories related to free-market environmentalism and political environmentalism, environmental and institutional entrepreneurship, the use of knowledge in society and how property rights and prices propagate that use, public choice theory, and issues related to regulation and harmonization. It has been the intention of this thesis to expand the knowledge of the social science aspects related to permaculture, such that permaculture practitioners may take more informed decisions on the political and economic aspects of their mission to bring about socio-ecological transitions. Page 86 | 95

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Appendix A – Components of the Permaculture Design System

Appendix Figure 1: A conceptual map of the permaculture design system (Grayson, 2013, p. 8).

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Appendix B – Permaculture Flower by David Holmgren

Appendix Figure 2: David Holmgren’s Permaculture Flower conceptual framework for considering the range of human activities and needs in a permaculture design (Permaculture Principles, n.d.). About the Permaculture Flower is noted that “The ‘permaculture flower’ has been adapted from David Holmgren’s book Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability” in (Holmgren, 2002). To see an overview of the permaculture design principles in Appendix C.

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Appendix C – Permaculture Design Principles by David Holmgren

In addition to its ethics (see part 1.1), permaculture designs around a set of principles. They form the foundation for permaculture design and are also found in most traditional societies. Here are the 12 principles of permaculture as described by David Holmgren (Holmgren, 2002, 2013c).

1. Observe and Interact – “Beauty is in the mind of the beholder” By taking the time to engage with nature we can design solutions that suit our particular situation. 2. Catch and Store Energy – “Make hay while the sun shines” By developing systems that collect resources when they are abundant, we can use them in times of need. 3. Obtain a yield – “You can’t work on an empty stomach” Ensure that you are getting truly useful rewards as part of the working you are doing. 4. Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback – “The sins of the fathers are visited on the children of the seventh generation” We need to discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems can continue to function well. Negative feedback is often slow to emerge. 5. Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services – “Let nature take its course” Make the best use of nature’s abundance to reduce our consumptive behavior and dependence on non-renewable resources. 6. Produce No Waste – “Waste not, want not” or “A stitch in time saves nine” By valuing and making use of all the resources that are available to us, nothing goes to waste. 7. Design from Patterns to Details – “Can’t see the forest for the trees” By stepping back, we can observe patterns in nature and society. These can form the backbone of our designs, with the details filled in as we go. 8. Integrate Rather Than Segregate – “Many hands make light work” By putting the right things in the right place, relationships develop between those things and they work together to support each other. 9. Use Small and Slow Solutions – “Slow and steady wins the race” or “The bigger they are, the harder they fall” Small and slow systems are easier to maintain than big ones, making better use of local resources and produce more sustainable outcomes. 10. Use and Value Diversity – “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” Diversity reduces vulnerability to a variety of threats and takes advantage of the unique nature of the environment in which it resides. 11. Use Edges and Value the Marginal – “Don’t think you are on the right track just because it’s a well-beaten path” The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system. 12. Creatively Use and Respond to Change – “Vision is not seeing things as they are but as they will be”. We can have a positive impact on inevitable change by carefully observing and then intervening at the right time.

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