Article: How to Decolonize the Permaculture Movement

Article: How to Decolonize the Permaculture Movement

Some good and important (and one misleading) point about permaculture as a movement.

The author criticizes that permaculture is sometimes misused as a business (for those $2,000 permaculture courses) and therefore can’t be a good example for the rural population of poorer countries, since they have neither the financial and technological means to host courses nor the time. The predominant demographic for permaculture is white and male, and this needs to change. We need to make permaculture more interesting for people from all over the world.

Another important point is made about money:

“We need to be honest and admit that establishing an economically viable permaculture system takes time and money. […] It takes years for a perennial food system to develop enough to offer any sort of subsistence or income, and almost no small farmer around the world has enough savings or alternative sources of income to wait around for their system to develop into the marvelous and awe-inspiring productive systems that you see on a 20-year-old permaculture farm.”

Permaculture is still very difficult if you don’t have a lot of capital to start with. We know how this feels like, this is why we decided to try to get a little support via crowdfunding. In our view it should be mainly the governments who support and finance permacultural projects – since they are the ones really trying to mitigate climate change, reforest and prevent topsoil erosion and greenhouse gasses, goals that 200 states assigned to in the Paris Agreement. This could happen through an extra tax on businesses (the more ecocidal, the higher the tax) that gets redirected to projects that qualify. But until then we depend partly on the solidarity of generous donators.

The only thing that we criticize is that the author encourages people to grow monocultures of grain crops – which is not only toilsome and labor-intensive, bad for the environment, and hardly ever sustainable, but also responsible for our bad health (obesity, cancer, dental problems, heart disease), and, even more profoundly, for the ever-increasing overpopulation of our world. It supplies the women’s body with ‘safe’ calories that increase the possibility of a pregnancy, which in turn doesn’t involve many years of breastfeeding (as opposed to primitive tribes) during which women usually don’t get pregnant, because babies can be fed soft starchy food very early so that the woman can get pregnant again.
Recent studies prove that North-American’s bodies have unusual high levels of the carbon 13 isotope – due to their massive intake of (GMO) corn starch through fructose syrup as a food additive. You are what you eat.
It is a misbelief that humans need excessive amounts of grains in their diet, explained in detail here.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tobias-roberts/how-to-decolonize-the-per_b_14501784.html