Why gardening won’t ‘save the world’

Permaculture and regenerative agriculture aren't “solutions” to our predicament.

The truth is, growing food is what most of us reckon we'll get forced to do when all else fails. It represents the exact lifestyle we’ve all been working so hard to avoid. 

In the industrialised world going back to the land remains largely the preserve of the rich. You need to own land, or rent it from someone who'll let you grow veg instead of grass. 

Many industrialised governments have taken, or rather dished out, great pains to ensure this is so. Check out the oppression and almost total eradication of travelling people and squatters in the UK, for example.  

You also need a lot of spare time to grow some of the most expensive veg on Earth. That is, if you factor in the opportunity cost of not working on something else. And you may have noticed that landlords and banks don’t tend to accept carrots as payment these days. 

Working the denuded soil of industrialised nations amid climate chaos is also not that easy. Before co-founding Extinction Rebellion Roger Hallam was a successful organic vegetable farmer. He turned to activism because one year it rained for seven weeks, killing everything. The next year it didn’t rain for seven weeks, killing everything. 

Privileged people everywhere love telling the less privileged to “grow some veggies”. Echoing the same sentiments risks strengthening their hand. It overlooks the fact that being poor and underprivileged isn't just about the systematic theft of land and resources. It becomes a state of mind, a lack of opportunity or even perception of opportunity. It’s about being oppressed by people wealthier than you. And then trying not to go postal when they tell you to live like a peasant, grubbing in the garden of your rented hovel while they buy another SUV. 

Depressed people can barely cope with their existence. Telling them to start a garden is dangerously like telling the suicidal to just fucking cheer up a bit. 

Even the oppressed know their options only too well. And even the less well off are rather attached to their industrialised modern lifestyles. They’re not going ‘back to the land’ unless forced by abject poverty or at the point of a gun. This has already been road tested by robust, folksy environmentalists like the Khmer Rouge. 

But what about the power of permaculture and regenerative agriculture, I hear me say to myself to make the next point. Well, their core insights are pretty simple. We can grow a lot of organic food if we all become non-mechanised, semi-subsistence farmers. But we knew that already. 

That’s what most of us were doing for the last 10,000 years, until the last 250. Most of us had a terrible time, even back when the climate wasn’t going batshit. We created colonies, industrialised civilisation and modern dentistry to get away from all that. 

Permaculture suggests that two Australian academics in the 70s somehow discovered farming methods vastly more effective than anything handed down through hundreds of generations of lifelong farmers whose lives depended on it. The same goes for ‘regenerative agriculture’. 

This strikes me as wishful thinking at best. It’s more likely just startlingly arrogant. It even smells a bit like cultural colonisation. Yet again things are ‘discovered’ by white men from the dominant culture. Because there's no way they could have existed before. 

Permaculture won’t see us Transition Town our way to a stunning new future of abundance for eight billion people. If it ever came to define our culture, which it won’t, we'd be much more likely to transition back to the 18th century. That was when we were only poorly feeding an eighth of that population and fighting wars with silly hats on.  

I have a permaculture design certificate. In Vietnam I worked on permaculture projects where rural people reverted to farming in much the same way as their grandparents had. Some of those people were working in paddy fields expertly sculpted out of hillsides to catch rainwater more than a thousand years ago. If anyone will see out the end of industrialised civilisation without noticing, it could be them. Permaculture largely contributed some snazzy new buzzwords and diagrams.

‘Urban regenerative farmers’ are growing food in cities, where there wasn’t much before for really good reasons. Tower blocks make crap farms. Hydroponics needs power we can’t spare for lettuces and microgreens. And the idea of pointing elaborate lighting rigs at plants rather than just letting the Sun get on with it is bonkers.    

Some people who get into permaculture like a bit of hobby farming, or their veggie patch. That’s usually as far as it goes. In industrialised countries these endeavours are cotton-wooled inside the affluence of their technological societies. Most of the top permaculturists keep going by running courses, speaking at conferences, travelling consultancy and convincing acolytes like me to work for free. It’s remarkably like some kind of hippie pyramid scheme in the mud.  

I have permaculture-minded friends who’ve been living in everything from buses in South America to woods in South Wales. They all enjoy international flights, hospital visits, family support and inherited money. Most of that would be impossible if everyone lived like they do. Very few of them have ever produced enough food for their household, let alone what they actually consume.  

Others suffer from what I call ‘Premature Lifeboat Syndrome’. A couple I know spent two decades on 10 acres of land in an eco-village in rural New Zealand. They built up their smallholding as a haven of simplicity and sustainability. When I met them in their 50s they were knackered. They physically couldn’t carry on. Volunteer backpackers would never do all the work. They had nobody to pass the property on to, as their kids had gone off to ordinary lives. Disheartened, they sold and went to live in the burbs, where a lot of these people end up. 

They had jumped into a lifeboat on the Titanic, with all the privations of those small rowboats. But when they pulled the cover up once in a while the big ship was still skimming the waves with the restaurants open. It would be hard not to feel cheated. 

This illustrates the calculation everyone in the industrialised western world is making. We’re gambling on whether we can get away with our excesses for our lifetimes, and maybe our kids’ lifetimes, before the hammer falls and we have to go dig turnips in the rain. 

Get it wrong one way and we live in self-imposed poverty. Everyone scoffs at us and scoffs the remaining luxuries. Get it wrong the other way and our shit might hit the fan before we’re ready. Most of us want the goodies today. We’re prepared to go on risking it. We have a load of immediate hassles to deal with and intoxicants to keep us distracted. If that’s not quite enough we distract ourselves by growing radishes and believing that means we’re on the side of the righteous.   

It should not be surprising that although people know where the lifeboats are, they aren’t rushing to climb into them. Deep down most ordinary folk don’t think of returning to the land as the ‘Good Life’. They think of it as the ‘Shit Life’ of failure. Things like careers and property ladders still exist, for the time being. We know there’s little hope of hopping back onto them again if we abandon them too early. 

People are not being evil or stupid. They're being pragmatic. They're trying to enjoy their lives as best they can. They know they're extremely unlikely to change the entire world around them. 

Many in the environmental movement treat this approach with scorn. This is unfortunate, as we're going to need a lot of very pragmatic people to avoid a complete meltdown of human society. 

I worked as a forester and gardener throughout my teens and into my late 20s. I happened to like it, but not all the time. I know exactly how unromantic weeding for eight hours in the grey midwinter can be. I didn’t have to support a family. I wasn't thinking about my old age. I still had the choice to go and do something else. I took that choice.

The fact is for most people in most places gardening sucks. Especially when you compare it to driving fast, getting wasted or holidaying in exotic places. Enforced gardening sucks worse. 

I realised I was unlikely to encounter a buxom babe wandering the woodlands in search of a bloke smelling like a goat with a collection of axes. Even the most ‘liberated’ girls I know took this kind of lifestyle as far as a festival or two and no further. 

Several of my closest friends roared through their 20s pulling girls at festivals like low hanging fruit. They’ve since struggled to settle into a long lasting relationship. This is not unconnected to the fact that they now live rugged, adventurous, even heroic lives on what most people consider the edge of poverty. For most, that lifestyle is just like the aid destinations I’ve written about. These are lovely, romantic places to visit, but few of us really want to live there. 

And that’s before we even consider the kind of primitive politics, if not outright anarchy, that’s likely to predominate if we all went ‘back to the land’. History may not repeat, but it does rhyme. This is something this movement also studiously avoids talking about. It tends to assume manual labour somehow inevitably creates a kind of deeply practical social harmony. 

I've considered setting up home in several permaculture based eco-communities. Most displayed all the deeply practical social harmony of an octopus playing bagpipes in a tank full of custard. 

I’m not saying that permaculture and regenerative agriculture are a waste of time. At the very least they have got industrialised people thinking about real food and how its actually produced. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t do them if they want to, or that we all shouldn’t spend a bit more time with dirt under our fingernails. And by all means apply this thinking, along with other concepts, to specific problems wherever it’s appropriate.

But it’s healthy to acknowledge when we’re in a minority. And like Dirty Harry said, it’s important to know our limitations. We’re not going to solve all the world’s problems by planting some herbs and raising a few chickens. Claims that we are might be another form of comfortable delusion for those affluent enough for that kind of escapism.