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Passive_Nihlist OP wrote (edited )

As the original conmentor alluded to in a previous comment, I think there is a productivism that is at least creeping into, if not innate to, permaculture, and it seems to me more and more anthropecentric. I think the idea of rewinding which relates to permaculture is interesting, in asking how can "Wild Nature" return in places it has been destroyed by civilization. But I think to simply answer that the answer is permaculture risks falling into creating an artificial nature that we mistake for "Wild Nature" - similar to how solar punk anarchists mistake eco-brutalism for nature.

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existential1 wrote

I did some PDC (permaculture design courses) many years back and I've read a lot of the literature on it. There was a time I was into it, and I am now very much not into it. The thing you comment on here is a fundamental issue with permaculture.

It is still inherently built on the idea of human-centered agriculture. It does not challenge agriculture as a way of organizing, and agriculture almost without fail leads to archy. It almost completely depends on the notion of private property at scale. Sure, there may be some permaculture demonstration site or park that is somewhat communal, but invariably those things depend on people not using them all that much and still completely relying on the market and agricultural system we have today.

Second, there is very little consideration for full plant life-cycle in permaculture and changing our consumption patterns to facilitate that. For example, eating radish seed (and seed pods) instead of radishes themselves. It is less about how we adjust ourselves to support the ecosystem and more about how we adjust the ecosystem within our private property to work more "efficiently". This leads to the third issue...

Permaculture is, at its core, a scientific, discriminating, way of viewing the world and nature. This leads to picking winners and losers, sacrificial species for one we care more about because of what it does for us, specifically. Fundamentally, permaculture is a Western (read "white man's") answer for the ecocide that Western (read "white man's") economics and culture has brought upon the world. And just like other aspects of western culture, permaculture attempts to ontologically capture the practices of indigenous peoples across the globe without considering that a different view from western culture made such practices possible in the first place.

That got a little diatribey, but I can't stress enough that permaculture is trash. It's like, a gateway perspective to abandoning anthropocentric ways of working with non-humans. That is it's only redeeming quality to me, but, you have to go through the gate and leave that shit behind.

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[deleted] wrote

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Passive_Nihlist OP wrote

I disagree. I think civilization has constructed a dualism between Man (as constructed by Leviathan) and Nature. I definitely do not think this dualism is "natural" that man is always separate from nature, but humans have separated themselves through civilization. So I do not think "Wild Nature" is separate from humans, but it is separate from this civilized ideal of humans.

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