The Problem with Permaculture.

Back when we were planning to move back to Australia from California, I explored permaculture as an option to improve our land.  I had a permaculture design drawn up as some expense. It was really pretty, and I still consult it from time to time.

There are some excellent things about permaculture, and its younger child, regenerative farming.  It’s a whole different way of looking at the landscape as an interlocking whole, rather than separate pieces. 

It requires you to think first about your soil and water, then second about what you want to grow, whether plants or animals. 

Permaculture encourages you to regularly assess and reassess what you’re doing, and think about ways to make it better. 

Those are all valuable skills. 

Unfortunately, the more I’ve learned about how native ecosystems work, and how fragile they are, especially in our area, the more I’ve become suspicious about permaculture advisors’ use of weeds in particular to “build biomass.” That can work, but…

Once you’ve introduced a weed, it can be really hard to get rid of it.  The logic of building biomass is that you’re creating a stepping stone towards a more functional ecosystem.  Our sheep pasture here in Australia can become very unbalanced and fragile.  It’s fascinating how the different native plants and animals interlock and create a full web, for example with microbes that will fix nitrogen in the soil for future fertility.

The problem with weeds, such as willows, bamboo, box elder  or other exotics, is that they have no real interaction with the other plants around them.  The fact that they’re not eaten, leaf by leaf, the way the eucalypts are, is a sign that they’re not a participant.  A lady in Arizona was very proud of her quick-growing, beautifully unmarked eucalyptus tree on her permaculture farm.   I wasn’t so impressed.

Californian eucalypt forests are simply eerie to walk in.  There are no birds.  No hum of insects.  Just the sound of one branch squeaking against another as they grow enormous. 

That’s biomass without interaction. 

I also read somewhere about problems in Florida with invasive allocasuarinas (I think littoralis), with the comment “and no grass grows underneath them.”  That puzzled me, because grass does grow under our river casuarinas.  When I went down to the riverbank to have a look, that grass was all native species that can live with the casuarina’s chemical defences in the soil.  The invasive African Lovegrass won’t grow under casuarinas, and that’s become a tool for me to reduce the spread of feral grasses. 

So, for me, permaculture’s blind spot is in the value of the historical ecosystem it’s replacing.  Even if it’s been damaged over the years, it can potentially be restored and make a rich and productive piece of land. 

But it’s definitely not “one size fits all”.   It’s not “use anything to hand”.  It’s not a blank slate that you can treat as you want.   It takes a lot more thought and understanding, not just blindly using what others have in different parts of the world. 

It is also a slight comfort to me when I watch my new, small trees being gnawed on by insects, that they are probably building a food source for birds, and creating that web that I want to re-establish.