Permaculture roots & routes to indigeneity
Tending wildness
It’s often told that permaculture is indigenous wisdom, applied ecology and whole-systems thinking. How has indigenous wisdom shaped permaculture design? I’ll share my learnings, and propose that permaculture can offer ways into connection with the living world, as I seek to find myself once more becoming indigenous to a place.
What is permaculture?
As I understand it, permaculture is an intentional design process that offers us ways into connection with the living world, land and each other, through combining systems thinking1, indigenous wisdom and applied ecology. Permaculture design utilises ethics, principles and design process to guide and inform right action.
Bill Mollison and David Holmgren are described as the co-founders of permaculture, beginning their collaboration in 1974. The story that I like most about how permaculture developed is about Bill in the Tasmanian forest. Bill had worked as a forester and had observed the self-sustaining nature of forest ecologies, where the needs of the forest are met from within the forest, there are no external inputs and all outputs go back into the cycles of life, there is no waste. He is recorded as saying “I believe that we could build systems that would function as well as this one does."2 I see now he was tapping, perhaps intuitively, into long held indigenous wisdom, arising from his observations.
This self-sustaining forest ecology is what we understand today as circularity, a circular economy, or closed-loop system, and it’s one of the fundaments of permaculture, and the main goal of permaculture design is to create these kinds of systems. Later, David wrote a PhD thesis to further develop what became the permaculture approach to land management, habitation and agriculture, which was published in 1978 as Permaculture One. Later still, Bill refined the model, publishing Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual in 1988, which still shapes the PDC curriculum taught today(!?).
In the 50 years since Bill and Dave did their work to document the permaculture design process, it has spread to encompass what is now a worldwide movement. Dave went on to write more deeply into the permaculture concept and principles, in 2002 he published Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. You can read a summary of the concepts and principles from that book in the revised 2020 edition of Essence of Permaculture.
This is not the whole story though. The 2024 documentary The Story of Permaculture by Shane and Kay Hatton at Bosco’s Garden followed calls to expand on the origins of permaculture and recognised a whole host of other pioneers, including Masanobu Fukuoka, Sepp Holzer, Robert Hart, Emilia Hazelip, Allan Savory, Vandana Shiva, Dr. Elaine Ingham and Geoff Lawton, to name just a few.3
So you see, permaculture is so much more than Bill and Dave. And with the work of the late Dan Palmer and his Making Permaculture Stronger podcast and blog series, and in particular the conversation he had with Gordon White, Chair of Permaculture Tasmania, we can begin to tell a whole range of different stories about the origins of permaculture. It is a living ecology, all who engage shape and form it. It seems to me that the movement arises simultaneously in many contexts.
For me, there are two threads to the narrative around how permaculture shows up in the present that are vital for shaping the future of the movement, and the conversations its practitioners’ must now have. The first thread is around decolonising permaculture, the second is about shifting the praxis from the mindset of modernity which sees the world as a machine, and takes a linear approach.
Moving permaculture from a mechanistic paradigm into a ‘world as living paradigm’ is the thread I’m most interested in, and my work on becoming indigenous feels like a practical exploration of this. There is work to do around the core of the movement, to bring rigour and vitality to its theoretical underpinnings, and to bring creativity, and other intelligences and ways of knowing, to its methodological expressions.
The word ‘permaculture’ was originally a portmanteau of the words ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’, more recently it has been understood as ‘permanent’ and ‘culture’. I find the idea of permanence tricky, as really in complex adaptive systems where change is the only constant, the idea of permanence is a bit of a misnomer. I have come to understand this notion of permanence to be more about perpetuity, where cycles of life continue, perpetually, in ways that are sustaining and regenerative (rather than sustainable, which is a word that’s become too stained by greenwashing to use now, and extractive4).
For me, the Welsh translation of permaculture, ‘paramaethu’, (para-my-thee) offers a better understanding of the nature of the name and all it implies. The term was developed a decade or so ago, when a group formed around permaculture in Wales. There’s more about this on Chris Dixon’s website.
‘Para’ in Welsh is ‘to continue’ or ‘to last’. ‘Amaeth’ is ‘cultivator’, ‘amaethu’ as a verb is to cultivate, or nourish and nurture. So we could translate ‘paramaethu’ as ‘continual nourishing’ or ‘continual cultivating’. Given what I know now about indigenous food systems, this linguistic expression of the term feels very alive for me.
In her book Permaculture Design Companion, Jasmine Dale refers to the active process that this translation, this verbing of the term, gives rise to. I have learnt that ‘verbing’ is very common in indigenous languages, where the language grows from the land. In English, with all our nouns, and love of naming living things, we somehow take away some of the life and process involved in the living5. Jasmine goes on to describe how ‘Paramaethu Cymru’ becomes ‘permaculturing Wales’, or more literally if you will, continually nourishing and nurturing Wales. Given what I have learnt about how indigenous cultures have cultivated landscapes to feed all life for eons, I also enjoy ‘continually cultivating’.
I have found that permaculture offers ways into finding ourselves in relationship with the living world, beyond tricky human supremacy, into a kincentric worldview, where every living being, animal, mountain and river becomes our relation, our kin. If we can find that, we will come to know that as a species we cannot carry on with the harms we are inflicting, as we seek to re-embody ways to live more lightly on earth through the decisions we make, which inform our actions.
Routes in
I first came across permaculture in 2019 when I was delivering the Share Cardiff project with filmmaker Mike Erskine, through Cardiff Transition. I had been reading Rob Hopkins’ tales of the beginning of the Transition movement. I read that he had been teaching permaculture in Kinsale, and I wondered what permaculture was, so I started looking. I stumbled upon the permaculture principles, and in January 2020, committed to design the garden in our new home using them. At the time, I was taking part in a biodynamics course with Kai Lange and Poppy Nicol at Global Gardens.
What happened next can only be put down to one of those glorious serendipities that would appear to have the power to shape the rest of my life - Poppy shared a post about an Intro to Permaculture evening she was hosting with the late Sarah Pugh from Shift Bristol, a preceder to the PDC they would run at Global Gardens, no way! In April 2020, in full lockdown, I wholly participated in the online learning and gorged on the gorgeousness, as I took part in Shift’s first ever online PDC.
Around that time, I was also involved in birthing the Penarth Growing Community project with local environmental charity Gwyrddio Penarth Greening. I’d begun to get a bit frustrated at the lack of growing projects in my local area. At a meeting attended by over 100 local people in January 2020, I expressed an interest in forming a community growing group. There was interest in this from other folks too, and the journey I have been on with Eurgain Powell to bring this to life began, later we were joined by Anne Crowley and many other people have shaped the project with the gift of their time and inspirations.
In January 2022, I committed to deepen my practice, enrolling on the Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design with the Permaculture Association. Feeling like I wanted a taught element on my Diploma, I participated in Liz Postletwaite’s year-long PDC for Artists and Creatives. In March 2023, a new structure for supporting projects emerged in the form of a social enterprise, Wild Ceridwen CIC. Cam Elizabeth and I enjoyed a profound process to bring that to life, joined later by Elen Robert. In April 2024, having completed my Diploma, I enrolled on Alfred Decker’s Permaculture Teacher Training.
Meanwhile, I’d been interested to learn more about permaculture in Wales and had come across Paramaethu Cymru. I’d been lovingly encouraged by Peter Stopp to feel into the idea of forming a local group, and somehow got mixed up in the conversation with Nim Robins that followed when Peter announced that he planned to step down from his role as Chair after 8 years. Serendipity at work again!
In January 2024, a group of us gathered in the deepest, most beautiful heartlands of South Wales to plot the route for Paramaethu Cymru into the future. And so I became involved in the Paramaethu Cymru Steering Group.
As I use permaculture design in my work around finding my own place with land, the challenges of permaculture in the city become clear. I find the way the Transition movement grew out of permaculture to be fascinating. I can see that essentially, Transition is urban permaculture. I feel I have come full circle, thoroughly enriched by the learning on the way.
Becoming indigenous
The learning I encountered on my diploma journey had a distinct thread running through it around becoming indigenous. I have been looking for more information on the indigenous wisdom that weaves itself through permaculture, I’ve read the canonical texts, I’ve read copiously, but still an understanding of how indigenous wisdom shapes permaculture alluded me.
Then, I happened upon the work of Lyla June Johnstone, an indigenous scholar, musician, poet and community organiser. When I read her PhD thesis recently, Architects of Abundance, which is all about indigenous food systems, the world unfolded in my mind, and I could see how indigenous wisdom had shaped permaculture. As I read I just thought ’this is permaculture’. I had found what I was looking for.
To come back to what Bill said about believing we could build systems that work as well as the one he witnessed in the Tasmanian forest, it seems that indigenous cultures have been doing exactly this for time immemorial.
What struck me in Lyla June’s writing and research was the focus on the importance of structure, principles, values, goals and strategies which are arising from context, always. We know that a framework in a design offers the structure we need for our creativity to flow. We know that ethics and principles are integral to permaculture design. We set goals and develop strategies in our designing. The alignments were crystal clear. I felt like I had found the indigenous roots of permaculture.6
Individual to collective
The other impression I am left with after absorbing Lyla June’s work is the need for us as a species to move from notions of ‘individual’ to notions of ‘collective’. It feels like what is important to do now is grow relationships, between people, with and in the places we find ourselves, and for me, there’s a focus on relationships with plants too.
It’s all about mutual learning and growing community. Rekindling care, reciprocity and mutuality, as we come to find ourselves once more in interdependent relationship with the all beings around us, moving away from our dependence on corporates to meet our needs, coming to re-localise as we situate ourselves in right relationship with land, each other and our wild kin.
Sacred
Lyla June’s work elucidates the precept of the sacredness of all life. For me, cultivating a garden is also cultivating a spiritual practice. As I explore my own indigenous roots more deeply, the path takes me to Celtic shamanism, herbalism and plant intelligences, along the channels of the work of Stephen Harrod Buhner.
Part of this is also about language. It saddens me to be a Welsh person who has, because of colonisation, lost her language. I am not alone in this. I wonder how the remains of the language might reside in my bones. I’ll explore this more through the Ancestral Autumn Imaginarium I’m taking part in with Sarah Hymas.
Ways of knowing
Another aspect of this work of becoming indigenous, which I have learnt from various places7, is about rekindling intelligences. Quieting our intellectualism, and being open to imaginal, emotional and intuitive realms of experience. Opening up our capacity to sense our relationships, our deep entanglements with the living world, acknowledging our interdependence. This often emerges for me through art making, performance poetry and gardening.
Sit spot
It seems to me that to begin a nature connection practice8, the best way to start is to find a sit spot. A place from which to observe the living world that you revisit time and time again, noticing the subtle shifts and changes as the seasons change. This summer I have spent a lot of time in my garden sit spot watching the bees on the borage, which led to the insights that you can read here.
It is through this ‘being with’ that we can begin to feel our connectedness with all life forms once more. Welsh storyteller, Angharad Wynne, recommends taking an offering of oats to your sit spot for the beings you encounter there. She says that ‘developing relationships takes time’.9
Wild kin
As I have been tending my urban forager’s garden this season, and observing the ways we are evolving together, I notice a shift in my focus from edible perennials to herbs and plant for pollinators. I also notice that one key way to develop a relationship with other beings who share the garden is to put attention into creating habitats for them.
One of the messages that came through so strongly in Lyla June’s research is that indigenous cultures weren’t only creating food systems to feed themselves, they were committed to feeding all life, because they recognised that diversity creates healthy ecologies.
This season robin has nested in our garden, making her nest from coir that I left out when I took down the hanging baskets (they were too hard to keep watered). Next season, I’m going to design ways to welcome more wildlife into the garden, starting out by installing a mini pond, and also researching which indigenous plants attract butterflies. I have only seen a couple of cabbage whites this year.
Another observation offers insights into the relationships between elements in the garden. I have a honeysuckle, a strange cultivar that came from the garden centre, which has been growing for a couple of years up the trellis. The plant always suffers hugely with black fly early in the year. This year it was decimated and looked awful, so I pruned it back to just above the ground (I was preparing for an open garden, aesthetics was on my mind). I wasn’t sure what would happen.
Before I did this, I’d seen lots of ladybirds. Then I couldn’t see so many…of course, I had taken away their food source, what a mistake! The other thing I noticed is that robin, whose chicks had fledged by this point, wasn’t coming to visit anymore, neither was blackbird, who I’d seen many times enjoying the strawberries and blueberries. I realised it was because I had taken away the shelter they had been using as they entered the garden by removing the honeysuckle. Honeysuckle is growing back strongly now, and the growth looks healthy, so hopefully it will be back for shelter by next spring. Maybe my actions will have tweaked the balance, so the black fly don’t dominate - let’s see.
Committing to design practice
The philospher, Bayo Akomolafe says “the times are urgent; let’s slow down”10. Slowing down, observing, reflecting and letting things grow from context are all strategies I aim to employ in my practice. The slowing down is about living a more simple life where I’m always occupied with reducing consumption and personal degrowth as I aim to live more lightly with earth. And also about taking time to really consider what action I take through involving myself in an intentional design process. It is here that the permaculture design process offers support, in the form of a structure.
Structure
Lyla June learned that a common factor in indigenous food systems was the need for there to be structure to support the development of the systems in perpetuity. She identified a range of principles and values that offer the necessary structure, which are common to the cultures she studied. I see such a deep alignment with how the design process has worked to offer me structure for the work I do in the world, and how I live. I also understand that there is a relationship between pattern, structure and function in the living world.
There are relatively few patterns that make up life, repeated over and over again, yet each expression of one particular pattern is unique, like a fingerprint, or a body - we all have them, but none are the same. Patterns offer life structure in order that life can function - meet its needs, make its contribution to the unfolding whole.
It can be stated then that permaculture design process and praxis has learned from indigenous wisdom that life needs structure to function, and that structure arises in living systems as pattern. Employing patterns is a common feature of permaculture design. For me, this is one of the prominent ways in which permaculture design is informed by indigenous wisdom, isn’t it wonderful!
Final thoughts
I have enjoyed Doughald Hine’s work around regrowing living cultures, and I feel his message fits well with the notion of becoming indigenous. He suggests that a key to finding yourself embedded within living cultures is to look for the things in the culture you find yourself in that your ancestors would have recognised, and then tending them by, for example, cooking from scratch, storytelling, following the cycles of the moon and seasons, scything, growing plants, fermenting, making bread, creating ceremony and ritual.
I heard the indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta say on a podcast ‘Open your eyes, everything you are looking for is always around you’.
Around us, everywhere, we find the roots of our own indigeneity. Through doing the inner work, observing and interacting with the world around us as it unfolds, and paying attention to growing the relationships that feel nourishing for us, I believe it is possible for us as Westerner’s to find and make routes for ourselves to once more become indigenous to a place, and to make home for ourselves, wherever we are.
Summary
For me, becoming indigenous to a place means my attention and efforts go towards:
Relocalising - finding ways to meet my own and my family’s needs from the local ecology and economy
Personal degrowth - living well, with less
Learning my own ecosystem and ecology - who else is here? How is life living?
Making habitat - feeding all who come to the garden
Being curious - creatively exploring through writing, gardening and art-making
Further reading
Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook by Kirsten Bradley
The Forager’s Garden by Anna Locke
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Paramaethu Cymru - Website & Facebook
I have some things to say about the way the concept of systems thinking has been applied in permaculture. For me, there needs to be a bit of updating of the theory we use, we know a lot more about how complex, living systems work now, and some of the tools and devices we use to employ systems thinking in the design process are a little out of date. I have written a little about that here in A Provocation.
Hemenway, Toby (2009). Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture (2nd ed.). Chelsea Green Publishing. p5.
On the YouTube listing of the documentary, there’s an extensive list of of other people who have contributed to shaping the movement. I would add Rakesh Rootsman Rak, Sarah Queblatin, Tammi Daleston, Carla Moss, KT Shepherd, Heather Jo Flores, Liz Postlethwaite, Nim Robins, Elizabeth Westaway, Gail Robinson, Angie & Andy Polkey, Lusi Alderslowe, Alfred Decker and Peter Stopp to this list!
Liz Postlethwaite has written a generous and insightful thread on extractive and regenerative on her Mud and Culture Substack, the posts begin here.
For further discussion on this, listen to Tyson Yunkaporta
I’m going to delve a more deeply into the principles I found in the next edition of Liz’s Mud and Culture zine which will come out in the autumn. I’ll make a post to accompany that as well.
Jung’s Four Ways of Knowing, Dan McTiernan’s work with the Alef Trust and Permaculture Association around Embodied Permaculture, the Wolf Willow Institutes’ work around systems learning, and Nora Bateson and her warm data labs.
It’s important to note the use of language here. Many indigenous languages have no word for ‘nature’. I use it here as a short hand, for ease of understanding. For more on how language shapes our experience of the living world, see Rebecca Hosking Sharing the land with all life.
In this conversation with Lyla June at St Ethelberga’s.