start typing his name in the popup, should give you a dropdown to select.
or start typing @john and that should bring up a list as well. in this case, @johncfeeney should notify him.
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Yo, I’m around. Yeah, so team “not tending” 
… My personal preference, and something I’m still putting together as a article, is to draw a clear line between (a) “land management”** as a potential regenerative or restorative tool to help jump start the healing of damaged ecosystems***, seeing it as a time-limited undertaking, and (b) the same thing seen as a long term, ongoing, integral part of a group’s subsistence strategies. Personally, I see the former as a much better bet in terms of long term ecological sustainability.
** a very general term encompassing “indigenous land management,” “tending the wild,” “low level food production,” and other terms that all mean about the same thing, including “permaculture” as it would usually be meant in this context.
*** This picks up on something Andrew and I were discussing here recently. “Restoration” can lead to semantic confusion, but I think an idea like “helping an area get closer to what it would be had it not been for civilization’s (or other DR societies’) impacts” might be close to what I’m thinking of.
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I need to continue instigating the use of your advanced graphics capabilities.
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I found this to be the more helpful part from the links above for this discussion:
I suppose the wording in the FAQ about the differences between permaculture and feralculture is more detailed than the one line version of what feralculture is:
For the sake on simplicity, I’ll restate my hesitations here;
I feel like permaculture may be valid as a tool so long as it is directed towards an end point of “giving in” to wildness rather than establishing a protocol for long term “tending”. If we want to talk about “permanent culture” instead of “perpetual agriculture”, then we have to recognize (as I believe @andrew and many of this direction do) that the only semblance of permanence can lie in the resilience of immediate-return, nomadic hunter-gatherers.
“Tending the wild” is an implied virtue of IR HG function. It’s not that IR HGs are unaware of their impacts (both positive and negative) to their bio-regions, but that there is neither the technological ability nor the cognitive distance necessary to think on a scale of long-term change. Much like property, design is a response to created circumstances.
Even when I find permaculturalists that I do agree with (few and far between), I find this to really be a major sticking point between my own perspective and wants and theirs. As an anarcho-primitivist, I find a crucial element of rewilding, of undoing domestication, to be giving up control.
So if there’s a question here, it’s kind of the usual: why permaculture at all? And if permaculture does play a role in “feralculture” as a means, where does that begin and end. If we are working towards the wild, are we designing with the end goal of not designing?
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Just to clarify - and Kevin can correct me if I’m wrong - I’m pretty sure what Kevin is saying here is that just living via IR HG, without any purposeful “land management” or “tending the wild,” has positive ecological impacts, in a sense having an effect of “tending the wild” just by virtue of the basic activities of IR living. This is basically what we’d expect of any animal species living in a given area. (I found a good paper demonstrating that.) And I would add that the impacts of such activities may, for all we know, be more beneficial to ecosystems long term than those of purposeful land management.
As for purposeful land management involving the various practices authors like Kat Anderson outline (e.g., burning, pruning, weeding, transplanting, coppicing, sewing seeds…), my research is telling me IR HGs engage in it fairly minimally and sometimes not at all, depending on the people.
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The reason I think permaculture concepts remain prescient is the idea in the following quote. I’m sure there are better sources to encapsulate this idea, but it’s fresh at hand, so… from that shoddy communal warfare paper
The hunter-gatherers of East Africa and the Kalahari were unrepresentative in the sense that before the advent and spread of agriculture, hunter-gatherers inhabited not only marginal land that agricultural and pastoralist societies were unable to use and did not want, as they do today, but also mainly lived in the world’s most fertile environments.
This concept isn’t limited to Africa at all. We face the same challenge, and it seems to me that we will always be on a path to IR, and not ever actually live in a scenario where landscapes that surround us can reasonably supply our food. Granted, there remain pockets where it’s more possible than others, and I currently inhabit one.
And sure, someone could say, “yeah, but you can hunt, gather, and forage in the city and be fine.” And I agree with that. I think in Austin one could live pretty well on a diet composed primarily of dove and squirrel.
Lots of things are possible, lots of things can be theorized. It seems to me that if we are serious about this being a distributed network, or if we think this idea can be taken and run with by others having nothing to do with this community, then it makes sense to be honest about things. Lots of landscapes are destroyed, and biomass is destroyed, and biodiversity is destroyed.
My hope is that people who already own land will join our project. And if those people own land that isn’t a magical hunter-gatherer paradise, then they should have another path. Many people are excited and draw significant energy from the idea of nudging landscapes toward increased biomass and biodiversity. I think we should encourage those people who have that land and who are motivated by those things to do exactly that. And I think this is why the network idea, and free movement between properties is helpful… people who have land that could do with a nudge toward life, but who don’t want to do that work, can roll their properties into the network, increase our landbase, and allow the folks in the community who geek out on that stuff to do their thing.
At the moment, I am not one of those people. I don’t want to be a farmer or steward or whatever. But I like that other people are into that, and there’s a lot of obliterated farmland out there that could be nudged toward more life.
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I think you’re missing the point a bit. This isn’t like saying that everything will just be fine, it’s a difference of direction.
Permaculture carries it’s essential values and principles which include things like “build a surplus” and center around concepts of stewardship as necessity. Even the underlying principle of design implies that we can know more about ecosystems than an ecosystem left to itself. The reality of the application of permaculture is typically far worse than what I’m even describing and it’s hard to not see the anthropocentric bias that it carries from gardener perspectives.
When I talk about permaculture, I’m not saying that we should have no role in helping destroyed lands recover. To the contrary, my goal has been a combination of let it go and replant natives. Ecosystems are much larger than us and we have a lot to learn from them, but we’ve also only ever known them as wounded. I think we’re the last people who should be designing ecosystems, but if we’re working towards the untended wild, then it’s a different picture.
Replanting native seeds and encouraging native pollinators is an active step towards integration without domination. By focusing on building a surplus and a direct correlation between planting seeds that yield direct caloric intake, building a “food forest”, we’re missing out on the bigger picture: all healthy forests are “food forests”. Edible plants are just a part of our diet that can come from a healthy and functioning ecosystem. Design based on immediate yields could be short sighted in attaining that larger goal.
Just an example of this is my old yard. It was 3 acres that had been horribly abused by complete white trash. The house was a shack that had effectively been the brothel end of a speakeasy and built for little more than that, but the area was fairly wooded with that 3 acres relatively open short of some awesome Tulip Poplars. The yard was split between us and some redneck pieces of shit who would mow as often as twice per week. Considering the differences we had with them and the compromises that forced, our landlord was willing to let us “let it go” on our end of the yard.
Over 1.5 years, that’s exactly what we did. The differences in the soil along the mow line were staggering. After the first growing season natives had started popping up (at the time we were too broke to add more than a few seeds here or there) and by the second spring we were having native pollinators return (including Giant Leopard Moths growing wings on our front door). Garter snakes took residency under our front porch and Star-Nosed Moles took over the back. The change was happening very, very quickly and by that second spring, our yard was our best morel spot that year.
There was no design there at all. In most places I’ve typically planted native wild flowers that attract native pollinators with pretty great results, but that’s really it. Sometimes they take, sometimes they don’t.
I tend to see this current of thinking that permaculture is our only path out or towards rebuilding soil and lending the land back towards a resilient wild state, but I think there is a lot of gardener-thinking going on there that is more agricultural residual than mock-horticulture. As with most things to overcome with rewilding, I think a degree of giving in is vital and humbling. It doesn’t mean it’s the only means or the be-all-end-all, but there’s something to be said for it.
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I was mostly just referring to the IR hunter-gatherer orientation. That’s my preferred aesthetic too, but I don’t think that alone gets us very far.
Specifically, I was referring to this:
living via IR HG, without any purposeful “land management” or “tending the wild,” has positive ecological impacts, in a sense having an effect of “tending the wild” just by virtue of the basic activities of IR living.
I simultaneously agree, and don’t think it gets us anywhere.
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I think this all is really quite simple. I think if you strip permaculture down to its basic roots, it is about using human inputs to encourage massively biodiverse habitat (perhaps it is too anthropocentric, so let’s expand the focus of our habitat encouragement). There’s a lot of baggage the permaculture community has accumulated, and I think putting wild/feral as the goal – always – is a heuristic that clears away all of that baggage.
I’m not going to defend herb spirals or a focus on surplus because I think the wild/feral lens precludes those things.
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Another thing that perhaps I should state is that I feel a sense of urgency, and I approach these questions with that impetus.
It’s absolutely true that the earth doesn’t need us or our species. However, I am currently alive, and I happen to like it. I sense ecosystems collapsing and mass extinction happening and that impacts my life. So there’s something unsatisfying to me about a laissez faire approach to degraded land. The IR HGs we share as ancestors weren’t born into a toxic petrochemical nightmare, and I wish I could pretend I wasn’t either, but I can’t click my heels together hard enough to make it real.
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Another thought that bears on my perspective is this thing that’s put to me on occasion:
you can’t put the concept of gardening/farming back in the bag.
I think that’s terrifying and depressing and absolutely true. So if our goal is a “permanent culture”, which I think we can agree permaculture in its current state is incapable of delivering, then what do we do with this idea that growing one’s own food is a "good thing " or constitutes “right living” or is a path to “food sovereignty” or any number of things others feel that we can’t make them unfeel? I think the most leverage is in taking that enthusiastic energy that many people get, that I got, when first stumbling on permaculture, and directing it toward wildness. Perhaps wildness of a non-sedentary horticulture habitat orientation, but something that doesn’t require a leap to full blown anarcho-primitivism and the understanding of however many critiques required to get there without freaking people out.
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Clearly I struck a nerve here, but I think we’re talking past each other a bit in some places, but at odds in others. I’m wanting clarification over purity of thought.
I see a shifting back and forth about what feralculture means and it seems to have the most potential to become articulated in defining itself with or against permaculture. Hence my earlier post about how I think the original, brief response on the FAQ was less useful than the FC vs PC FAQ point. Considering who is likely to use this term, I think the jury will remain out until this point is approached.
Is FC middle ground? Is this a “on the fence” issue? Is PC a pathway or a tool amongst others?
I certainly hope you don’t think this is what I was implying…
I disagree. We assume gardening and farming are a given, that this is innate cultural knowledge or cultural activity that we can just assume exists or that we can work off it. That’s absolutely not the case. The percentage of people who grow any portion of their own food (at least in the US) is negligible. But gardening is small scale farming and applies techniques that come out of the Green Revolution. So these aren’t conceptualizations that we’re born with even if we do have a grasp on the life cycle of plants.
The point is that gardening actually does require a learning curve. It might not always be the most complicated one, but the standard notions are still based on constant inputs and often industrialized ones. Hunting and gathering is in our bones, breeding and domesticating is not any more than plants have a want to be planted in rows and weeded.
I think the reliance on PC is indicative of liberal notions that gardening is a starting point. I don’t see it that way. Maybe for some, but not by and large. Through encouraging rewilding we’re asking people to question and challenge domestication. You’ve written about challenging comfort itself. By looking beyond the garden instead of seeing the garden as a gateway, are we really asking for much more? Is PC not just the new carrier of Revolutionary hope that we can navigate a soft crash?
And, if it needs to be said, I don’t ask this lightly. Again, none of this is going to be easy. Rewilding, like the collapse, is a process and we’re talking about generations here. I don’t think any of us will live to see the nomadic IR HG life we were meant to live, but the best we can hope for is to at least head in the right direction.
And none of this will be easy.
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What I’m trying to get at with the gardening stuff is not that it’s in our DNA, but that it’s a cultural trend that can be tapped into, like “paleo” is a trend that can be tapped into. These tendencies, and others, strike me as reactions to an unsatisfying and alienated culture. The people who self-select these paths are looking for something, and that’s as far as they get. It seems strategic to me to be able to talk to these people, and direct them to whatever feralculture iteration without scaring then away.
A lot of those people are liberals with liberal ideas. Liberalism is less a part of our bones than gardening so I don’t see it as a disqualifier.
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@primalwar, are you saying something similar to the “medium is the message”? That gardening is inherently patronizing, so that in doing that action the perception as a steward will be systemically reinforced by that action negating it’s usefulness as a temporary solution towards a feral culture?
This line of thinking seems similar to what Ingold says in Perception of the Environment. Here’s the amazon summary of that book:
In this work Tim Ingold offers a persuasive approach to understanding how human beings perceive their surroundings. He argues that what we are used to calling cultural variation consists, in the first place, of variations in skill. Neither innate nor acquired, skills are grown, incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment. They are thus as much biological as cultural. The twenty-three essays comprising this book focus in turn on the procurement of livelihood, on what it means to ‘dwell’, and on the nature of skill, weaving together approaches from social anthropology, ecological psychology, developmental biology and phenomenology in a way that has never been attempted before. The book revolutionises the way we think about what is ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ in humans, about evolution and history, and indeed about what it means for human beings - at once organisms and persons - to inhabit an environment. Reissued with a brand new preface, The Perception of the Environment is essential reading not only for anthropologists but also for biologists, psychologists, archaeologists, geographers and philosophers."
I will also say that I do garden myself. I even made a rack to dry scrape a Yak hide and instead turned it into a tomato trellis (because I though the rack wouldn’t hold the hide without buckling).
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@primalwar & @johncfeeney, have you listened to Toby Hemenway’s “Liberation Permaculture” talk? Toby employs a critique of civilization and agriculture. I think it would be a helpful point to reference as the starting point for our working definition of permaculture. Starting there, and not with pop-capitalist-permaculture with herb spirals and how to get permaculture into Wal-Mart, we might work to locate feralculture somewhere between that (though not on a single linear spectrum) and IR HG.
If it’s unclear, I don’t really see feralculture as needing to invoke “permaculture” in defining itself, or being included in the end result of the definition of permaculture. I think that using permaculture as a reference point is helpful for thinking it through though. I also think using permaculture as a point of reference when talking to permaculturists about feralculture is helpful for making connections in people’s minds. But when talking to people who have no idea what permaculture is, or farmers, or academics, invoking permaculture tends to be counter-productive.
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In discussions about deciding when to start in an HG mode and when to shift into a horticulture mode, my answer has always been something like, " the specific piece of land in question has to answer that". Permaculture has the concept of observation of nature and doing a deep analysis to figure out what might be appropriate for the particular landscape. Unfortunately, as permaculture is often practiced, it seems that somehow nature is telling people that what the landscape wants is a polytunnel through which they can extend seasons for growing annual vegetables the permaculturist is familiar with from grocery store aisles, and a goat.
The above answer is anthropocentric and egocentric (not in the Stirnerian sense, calm down, @bellamyfitzpatrick ), and in the importation of plastic junk, externalizes concerns for those landscapes over the horizon in favor of “my land”.
So, on the group’s land in Alaska, what are the design plans? Basically do nothing. It’s a boreal forest.
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Not even necessarily that, which is why I’m trying to push this in the direction of discussing means and ends. Your garden isn’t my problem. Clearly there’s a matter of scale here.
But the “medium is the message” still applies to other degrees. We know that gardening carries the logic and practice of agriculture, so even when permaculturalists are trying their best to make their gardens more ecologically sound, it’s still often drenched in anthropocentric thinking.
Is the garden the pathway, the end point or just a hold over until we get beyond it?
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The means-ends question is where all of the discussions between Feral Farm Matthew and I have… eh hem… ended.
My position for a couple years now has been that permaculture should be a tool toward IR HG ends, his position is that some kind of sedentary horticulture should be the end. I haven’t been swayed, so KT and I probably basically agree.
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I guess this is the question I’m getting at. Obviously the group started under the banner of permanent paleo/permaculture community and feralculture will no doubt be kind of stuck with that. Using feralculture is going to be seen as a nod to permaculture, hence the need to clarify or at least think out loud on the subject. But seeing as how there is some really entrenched emotions and connections to the subject, this is the kind of thing that will make the term either more appealing to some or less appealing to others.
I ask about this out of sincerity because I don’t see permaculture as a vital or solitary alternative. And I find that many use it simply as a “well this is our way out” kind of failsafe, but have increasingly disregarded any critique or nuance about the actual history of the DR world that horticulture creates and that permaculture, at best, hopes to attain.
I haven’t seen that, but at the same time, this is what I’ve been getting at as well. Permaculture is established and has been well before anyone was trying to sell it into Wal-Mart. My first introduction came over a decade ago by people telling me they were going to save the world by planting fig trees in their yard.
The problem isn’t that there is no one in the permaculture camp who gets the bigger picture, it’s just that there’s nothing about permaculture that necessarily lends to one direction over the other. There’s a chasm between your application of it and someone like Matthew’s, but as long as those divisions are going to be claiming a right to the use of the term, it’s just a mish-mash and one that is completely unappealing to a person like me.
Permaculture unquestionably comes from a backdrop of “permanent agriculture” and it’s not going to shed that without serious intentionality. But those waters are very, very muddy and in need of clarification if there is any use.
I get that this seems like I’m prodding an out of sight wound and beating the shit out of a dead horse, but if “feralculture” is the genesis of discussions about the direction permaculture can or should head in and a discussion about the synthesis of rewilding and things like the anarcho-primitivist critique of civilization, then it’s best to say that now then to have another discussion five years from now about whether feralculture was meant to imply permaculture or die hard rewilding.
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