Introducing Phase Two of Making Permaculture Stronger: From Solving Problems to Developing Potential (E27)

Making Permaculture Stronger

Note: This post may not make much sense unless you read (or listen to) the previous post first. What I've been doing... As reviewed in the last post, I have spent more than three-and-a-half years attempting to help strengthen permaculture's weakest links, or, in other words, solve permaculture's biggest problems. In this approach, success is tacitly defined as the degree to which the weak link or problem is made to go away.64 The Problem with Solving Problems Phase Two of Making Permaculture Stronger starts with my realisation that focusing on problems, even if the problems are getting solved, does not and cannot solve the problem that the whole approach of solving problems is itself, well, problematic.65 Joel Glanzberg has summarised the situation perfectly: We are so accustomed to machines and the mechanical world of Newtonian Physics that we can barely think about how to address the problems of a living world. We try to fix them as we would an old truck: We identify the bad part that is to blame for the problem and repair, replace, or remove it. This is our general approach to everything from medicine to foreign policy to justice. We try to get tumors, dictators and other “bad guys” to reform or we simply replace them. Then, we are continually surprised when new tumors, symptoms, or bad guys promptly arise to take their place. Changing the manifestation of living systems without shifting the underlying causal patterns will always be an uphill battle and often takes us in the wrong direction, like super-gluing the cracks in a hatching eggshell. As has Carol Sanford (in this article): When you start well-intended efforts by identifying a “problem,” you are trapped into thinking that you have to fix it. This leads you on a search for the causes and results in efforts to try out many solutions. It pulls all of your energy toward an endless effort that is based on the mindset that got people into the rut in the first place. Einstein warned us about that. Hmmm. This is exactly the sense in which I have been trying to 'solve permaculture's problems.' Oh well, it's not like nothing good has come from this approach (and yet it is time for a fundamental change of direction)... Now I do not think all this effort has been a waste. Absolutely not! I have learned a heap that has really boosted my ability to serve as a permaculture design process facilitator. I know this is also true for permaculture colleagues around the world. Almost weekly someone reaches out with gratitude for how this project has inspired and supported them to deepen their own design process understandings and practices. Nonetheless, I’m clear it's time Making Permaculture Stronger explicitly extracts itself from the business of dabbling in problems. Where I spend countless hours focusing on aspects of permaculture that I don't even like. On weak links. On problems. Problems that worry me. Problems that demoralise me. Problems that as best I can tell are getting in the way of permaculture's ability to evolve toward deeper and fuller expressions of its potential. I'm glad for everything this effort has created and I want to make a clean break from the whole mentality. It is time for something different. Thankfully there is an alternative that resonates so deeply it brings shivers to my spine. Regenerating from the Core Having spelled out the futility of the problem-solving mentality, Carol Sanford brilliantly illuminates an alternative approach: Okay! Okay! So what do we do? As crazy as it sounds, we skip over what exists. We act as though the problem doesn’t matter. This sounds harsh, even cruel, but consider: within regenerative processes, problems are not useful information. Nature doesn’t care that rat populations are exploding in the suburban countryside. Regeneration in this instance occurs when this niche within the ecosystem is filled by returning populations of foxes and owls.