I suspect one of the biggest reasons there is a reluctance to accept that permaculture is political is the amount of privilege people will have to confront to do so. Challenging the political realities of colonisation, poverty and access to land, gender, disability and neurodiversity are huge topics within certain permaculture circles; and completely absent in others. Organising out of that divide seems to be too hard for most permaculture communities to take on.

Also, seeing how politically fractured the US is, I’ve seen a few online spaces where the topic of politics has come up. There’s been a number of responses I’ve seen where people express a tiredness of the divisiveness. I think they’re drawn to permaculture as a place of empowering respite. I can understand that they don’t want to get drawn back into the nastiness. That’s possibly where permaculture does have the potential for designing and adopting new ways of decision making. Those ways probably aren’t in a facebook group though…

I was interested to hear there was a move towards forming a party at some point. But yes, I know first hand how much hard work they are. Maybe it’s time for some permiepolitics conferences.