Comment by sjy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sjy | Hacker News Reader

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You seem like a smart person who writes well, and I’ve met a few such people with an interest in permaculture. What do you think about the claims that it’s pseudoscientific, and prescribes agricultural methods that couldn’t possibly feed the current global population? I’m not advancing these claims myself – I know very little about permaculture – but I have done a few searches to try to learn more and I’m really put off by the lack of a clear definition and the conspiratorial, anti-science views that many proponents of the concept (philosophy? theory? movement?) seem to express. I’m also thoroughly confused by the relationship between permaculture and agroecology, which seems like another word for the same thing to me.

I found an article in a permaculture publication [1] which acknowledges unscientific thinking as a major problem for permaculture, while defending the concept as something to be promoted and advanced in a scientific way. I’d be interested in reading more work like this, or preferably, something published in a mainstream science journal which permaculture advocates like you accept as fair comment. The author of the article I’ve mentioned seems to dismiss my preference for those sources as “fetishizing the outputs of big-money science” – do you agree with that?

[1] http://liberationecology.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Ferg...

I've been studying permaculture/regenerative agriculture for a couple years. I think part of the problem is that you will find a broad spectrum of practitioners. From hobbyists, that just apply a practice because somebody else had success with it. To professionals, like Joel Salatin and Richard Perkins, that record everything, perform experiments, and improve process. The professionals are less Mollison style permaculture design and more regenerative agriculture. The basic idea is the same. Work with nature instead of against.

Permaculture as a hobby is just another school of gardening with an eye to efficiency and permanence. You will find as many opinions of the "best" way as there are people. It doesn't help that some practices are very specific to local climate.

Papers on soil microbiome and rhizosphere interactions are the basis of regenerative agriculture practices. If you want to understand how these practices can feed the world I would start there.

PS Now that I have written this, I realize it doesn't really address your criticism. Look towards regenerative agriculture to feed the world over permaculture. While permaculture can be applied at large scale it is more of a homestead practice of planning your land use for efficiency of your own food production.

Agroecology and agroforestry are terms for building ecosystems that provide agricultural output. Something like a nut tree forest with berry understory and mushroom production on rotting logs with farm animals roaming about. An agricultural plot planned to perform as an ecosystem with as many niches producing output as possible.

This might be worth looking into: https://www.fermedubec.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ENGLIS...

The final version can be requested here: https://www.pubhort.org/actahort/books/1137/1137_47.htm

I think you have very valid points on all of these.

@tastyfreeze's comment had said a lot of what I wanted to say. I'm going to add to that.

When we think about "feeding the world", what frame are we using to look at that? If we were to look at it in terms of total yield distributed for everyone, we'd probably fall short with permaculture.

That set of calculations can be done from a top-down, mechanistic view of the world, wheere all inputs, processes, and outputs can be adequately described. Implicit in this view is that the these living systems, ecologies, and communities can adequately modeled, predicted. And that it can be deployed in a way that can get the results that we want.

However, as James Scott had argued in his book Seeing Like a State, there is a tendency to force these systems into forms that makes it easier to observe, measure, and control, and in doing so, fail. (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...)

We can't actually know what happens when something falls outside of the model, and there's a bias to avoid considering how complex adaptive systems behave when you can no longer model or control it.

Permaculture design principles were developed from a different frame: it is a way to work with, cultivate, and evolve a complex adaptive system (the local ecology) such that human communities can thrive within the ecology it belongs to. That is why you see design principles as "Slow and Small Solutions". Permaculture is something that isn't just decentralized, it must be implemented in a decentralized, site-specific, community-specific way.

Even with this, it is true that getting to 100% food self-sufficiency for a single family is extremely difficult. There was someone who made the news in the permaculture circles who accomplished it for a year. He did it to prove a point, but it wasn't expected that everyone does this. Instead, what where we are talking about is slowly increasing the self-sufficiency of a family, and gradually including others in the neighborhood.

If you are looking for the academic core of permaculture, check out Bill Mollesin's and David Holmgren's works.

I don't know if there are published studies done when we start considering the whole, or studying these living systems as complex adaptive systems. If you come across something like that, I would be interested in checking it out.

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