Back to part one

Teaching on a permaculture course circa 1998. Pic by Stella Strega

AP: How have your ideas developed since beginning with obtaining an allotment to garden in your progression towards permaculture?

G: Well, permaculture is a word that tends to be misunderstood. Many people assume it is about "gardening techniques" like no-dig beds, herb spirals and so on but It’s actually something much wider-the definition I like is "Designing sustainable human communities by following natures patterns".

Permaculture is about seeing how nature functions and trying to apply these lessons to how we meet our needs rather than constantly trying to battle against nature’s laws. Food growing is just one part of permaculture – it’s also about how we build, transportation, economics, health, water systems, how we deal with our waste, how we relate to each other…

Permaculture is also an ethical system which says that we shouldn’t just be meeting our immediate needs but also be planning to meet the needs of future generations ahead – in other words recognising that we don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children…

So for me, having an allotment and growing some of my own food is about taking some personal responsibility about earthcare, peoplecare and fairshares, and fitting that into a wider context like not owning a car, being part of a LETS (Local Exchange Trading System) system, being vegan, being involved in ‘Agenda 21’, supporting farmers markets and local growers and resisting crap consumer culture!

G: Permaculture is a design system, or rather perhaps a philosophy, a way of looking at things of making links and connections. You can have a cup of tea which is the end result of a highly industrialised, earth polluting, resource exploiting unsustainable chain, or you can grow a lemon balm plant, collect water from your roof, heat it with solar or wind power, pick some leaves and make your own. That’s just one example. Our lives are full of such choices so that in a way, permaculture is about making the choices that are the most sustainable and ‘earth right’ and in some way trying to systematise those choices so that they become conscious and thoughtful design, rather than the somewhat disconnected and random way we are used to living in this post-modern age. Permaculture is for everybody whatever their circumstances. It’s about finding ways for all of us to walk more lightly upon the earth.

AP: How inspired were you by the ‘May Day’ Antics of a couple of years ago when the lawns outside parliament were turned into gardens? How positive or negative did you see this action/protest?

G: I was quite chuffed to see some of my writings from 10-12 years earlier recycled as part of the "guerrilla gardening" literature. The stuff I’d written about squatting little pockets of land and surreptitiously planting seeds here and there. A lot of that was from a little booklet I published called "Dig For Revolution!" It’s out of print now but as obviously there is still an interest I’ve scanned it and put it on the web at http://spiralseed.co.uk/dfr. As for the action itself, I ended up with mixed feelings. I was at a couple of the Reclaim The Streets planning meetings and we’d planned to do some quite positive actions including running permaculture workshops and stuff. On the day, I went up there with a friend, who wasn’t really into it all and who got bored, so we went to the pub – by the time we came out the cops had sealed off Parliament Square and Trafalgar Square so we never got involved in the actual gardening events – the fact that Parliament Square was the target was kept very quiet, myself and most other people assumed that Parliament Square was the assembly point and that we would move off to squat and garden some derelict land south of the river. There’s also a contradiction there between the idea of having a democratic, open, anarchist action, and the fact that the organisers actually had a hidden agenda, which wasn’t being shared even with folk involved in certain levels of the planning.

There were also communication problems on the day, which RTS have acknowledged. ‘DO OR DIE’ (Earth First! Annual) made some strong criticisms of the day, which I think we need to take on board and learn from. In the end, digging up Parliament Square was a good piece of Agit-Prop theatre but I think personally a semi-permanent land squat action like the ‘Pure Genius’ (mid-1990s LAND IS OURS action on disused Guinness owned land) thing in Wandsworth (London) a few years earlier could have had more lasting value and brought issues like the scandal of land speculation, homelessness, and the fact that we can take control over our own circumstances by growing and building our own into a wider public focus.

The problem is RTS/guerrilla gardening wasn’t clear what it was about and that left people confused and I think at times out of their depth, and some people perhaps felt manipulated.

G: About the time I finished writing and drawing my book "Permaculture – A Beginner’s Guide", I started to think "Well what I am I going to do with it now?" – the obvious answer was to resurrect ‘Land and Liberty’, which had died a bit of a death by that time, and publish through that.

Around the same time, I showed a draft of the book to Andy Goldring of the Permaculture Association. He really liked it and offered the Association’s support in getting it published and mentioned that some people who lived near him at part of Cornerstone Resource Centre (a Co-Op within Radical Routes) were starting a Printers Workers Co-Op. Things just seemed to come together at the right time, so ‘Land and Liberty’ was reborn, but with a perhaps slightly more "business like" attitude, although the ethic is still at heart "punk". I don’t do my printing blagged on work photocopies anymore but instead try to work with other ethical enterprises like "Footprint Workers Co-Op", "Sunrise Screen Print Workshop", "Eco-logic Books" etc. Things are priced a little more realistically than in the past (i.e. they’ve gone up!) but I hope this will lead to a more sustainable project where I don’t find I’m constantly underselling myself. A portion of all money also goes back to permaculture and tree planting projects including a forest garden I’m setting up.

Available at the moment are:

• Permaculture – A Beginner’s Guide
• Happy, Caring, Healthy and Sharing (a book for young green vegans) and
• Some posters and t-shirts and shortly I’d like to re-print ‘Well Fed – Not an Animal Dead’ (a vegan cookbook-now available again) and ‘Our Allotment’ (another children’s book for eco-punk kids!), plus some new stuff and who knows? One day maybe willow sculpture, rare Essex apples and permaculture design consultancy!