Cultivating Confusion

Why is it that land degradation, the most serious global environmental threat, is little understood, and receives far less attention than other concerns such as global warming or ozone depletion?
This paradox can be explained in terms of a psychological and cultural alienation from nature, dating from the invention of agriculture, the origins of Judaeo-Christianity and the earliest civilisations.
The remedy lies in recognising the spiritual relatedness of the whole of nature, with humankind a strand in the web of life. Central to green spirituality is the need to develop sustainable ways of providing for human needs, such as "Permaculture", a system that embodies "conscious design for sustainable human benefits".

The essay was originally written at the invitation of the Quaker Universalist Group (QUG) for inclusion in their pamphlet series. I am grateful to the QUG editorial committee for their comments, which enabled me to make considerable improvements in the way I expressed my ideas. Regrettably, in the end, I was unable to agree to the changes felt necessary to make the pamphlet acceptable to a Quaker readership. I decided to publish the essay privately because many people - members of QUG and others - have expressed an interest in my ideas.

Forward

I have called this essay "Cultivating Confusion". The title is a play on words. I use "cultivating" both for its connection with farming and gardening, and also with the sense of encouraging chosen ways of thought and action.
The word "confusion", although it means bewilderment or perplexity, also contains, from its Latin roots, the sense of "pouring together". A state of confusion contains the potential for creativity and profound change, in which disintegration and collapse may be part of a new beginning.

Reductionist thinking and insistence on understanding how the world works has led us to replace its profusion with simplified agro-ecosystems that we think we can control. I believe we need to cultivate confused, humble, mystical, contradictory thinking as an antidote to arrogant and harmful rational thinking. (Of course there are situations requiring clear thinking, as long as we do not oversimplify and get attached to narrow, short term solutions.)
Our best hope of providing for ourselves in a sustainable way, on the minimum of land so that we can give much of the world back to the wild, is by working with nature in our production of necessities such as food, fibre, fuel and building materials through the confused profusion of natural farming systems such as Permaculture. This is "cultivating confusion" in the practical sense.

These confused ways of thinking and living are components of the re-emerging religion of "green spirituality".
Readers familiar with the work of "New Age" biologist, Rupert Sheldrake may recognise his influence on the ideas expressed in this essay. However, they will not find a close coincidence, probably because my exploration has been focussed on agriculture, whereas his have been centred on science. Difference does not necessarily mean disagreement. It is always possible to find "evidence" to support one's ideas in mankind's huge library of recorded thought and history. But that evidence tends to reflect what one is seeking rather than any absolute truth. Cultivating confusion leads to complementarity rather than agreement.

Introduction

The aim of this essay is to reintroduce some fundamental religious ideas that have a long ancestry and strong pedigree, but which have been lost by urban, civilised society. My subject can be called "green spirituality" or "ecospirituality".
There are many strands of green spirituality to be discovered in the modern world. There is the spirituality of the few remaining native peoples, who still live close to the earth, and know that we damage the web of life at our peril. There are Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, which have a tradition of respect for all living things, non-violent conduct and living simply. There is the "creation-centred spirituality" of Matthew Fox with its roots in Christian mysticism, its celebration of life and belief in panentheism, or God in everything and everything in God. (Adams)

In fact, there is so much good news about greenness - spiritual and more materialistic - that there is a grave danger of complacency. And complacency actually compounds what I believe to be the primary cause of the ecological abuse which continues unabated, in spite of our increasing awareness. The primary cause is human arrogance; the belief that we are the highest form of life on earth, and not only higher, but separated from other life forms within the citadels of our minds, immune from the devastation we cause by the wasteful ways we meet our material needs.
In his book Our Own Worst Enemy, the eminent psychologist Norman Dixon says, "Only the most blinkered optimist could deny that the present outlook for humanity is bleak, and growing bleaker, and it is entirely our fault. The trouble is that people dislike being told this."

People have been told enough times that "it is entirely our fault" to be used to the idea of collective guilt. However they tend not to translate this into the humble acceptance of "it is my fault" which is a necessary step towards restitution. This curious phenomenon is exemplified by the motorist stuck in a traffic jam on the M25 bemoaning the fact that there are too many cars on the roads; also by the holiday maker on a Greek island complaining how tourism has destroyed its rustic beauty.

A new strand of green spirituality is growing which is rooted in the soil. Its followers love trees, worms and compost, and grow their own food in mingling spirals of companion plants. They know the collective guilt of mankind, and work humbly but gladly to heal the wounds of the earth. They have much to learn, for so much ancient knowledge has been lost, but already they have much to teach, and a commitment to passing this on to others. They live materially simple lives, flowing with the rhythms of days and seasons, and are fulfilled and happy. We can all join them, but most of us are too proud, or too busy. My aim in writing this essay is to bring us down to earth, rub our noses in the degraded soil we have bled of its goodness, and then make our fingers itch to plant a garden, or a balcony, with fruit and nut trees, vegetables, or a few culinary herbs, and to know that this is what is spiritual.

In this essay I will try to show how "confusion", as a state of mind and as an environment for living, can lead us back to the green spiritual path we strayed from so long ago in human history. I will offer some ideas about how we might have come to leave that path in favour of the rational road to ruin. I shall describe how our abuse of the living world has progressed and accelerated over the past ten thousand years. Finally, I shall introduce "Permaculture" - permanent agriculture or permanent culture - which is a burgeoning movement for sustainable living, whose seeds have taken root in all continents of the world. Native Americans have said that they do not have a religion but a spiritual way of living. So it is with the Permaculture movement. Its spirituality is manifested in the confused relatedness of living systems in which people have found their places as links in the web.

The importance of confusion

There are basically two ways of learning. The first is by "common sense and life-sized" observation, experience and trial and error. The second is by analysis - taking things apart to find out how they tick. I shall call the first way "wisdom" and the second way "science". Both ways have value, but they can both go wrong if we get attached to the conclusions reached. ("Conclusion" is such an apt word, with its sense of heavy finality.) Wisdom tends to be complicated and confused, broad, deep and unspecialised. Science is clear and precise, but narrow in focus, with a multiplicity of specialisms. Rarely do the two manifest in one individual. When they do, the result is the kind of enlightenment that can change the world.

James Lovelock is an independent scientist specialising in atmospheric gases. He is popularly known for his "Gaia hypothesis", and he is regarded with deep suspicion by many of his peers. He discovered, through his meticulous analysis, that the living world is complicated - so complicated that we shall never explain it completely using scientific models - and that we tamper with it at our peril. (A telling example of Lovelock's path from chemistry to geophysiology can be obtained by following the references to dimethyl sulphide (an important chemical in the sulphur cycle and cloud formation) in his book The Ages of Gaia.)

For all I know, there may be many scientists like Lovelock. But science as a whole seems to embody the belief that it is possible to understand and explain the world, and that humanity will benefit if this process continues. Gary Zukav, in his book about the new physics, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, says, "All that the mind can ponder is its ideas about reality. ... Therefore, whether or not something is true is not a matter of how closely it corresponds to the absolute truth, but of how consistent it is with our experience." Zukav suggests that good scientists are well aware of this, and explorations along such lines would seem harmless enough. But the threat lies with the application of science; with technology.

Technological reality

Technology can, and does, translate science's "ideas about reality" into reality. This is the frightening thing. Technology has translated Einstein's idea about the equivalence of matter and energy into the atomic bomb. Agricultural technology has translated biological science's ideas about what makes plants grow into mono-crop fields and the agrochemical industry. These things become part of a new reality. But this does not mean that the original ideas about reality were the whole truth about that area of knowledge. Lovelock realised that his understanding about the subtle and vital cycles of dimethyl sulphide in the atmosphere was a tiny whiff of knowledge from an enormous bouquet of even more subtle cycles and webs in nature. He would be worried if technology were to use his understanding to rush in to spray dimethyl sulphide from aeroplanes to try to take control of cloud formation. He would know that they might succeed, but they would mess up so much else in the process.

What has happened is that precise and simple scientific ideas about reality have been translated into technological reality to such an extent that the other, more complicated, realities of nature that we have not been able to analyse are being disregarded and progressively destroyed.

What we need in order to redress the balance is less science and more wisdom, less rationality and more intuition, fewer short term, simplistic "solutions" and more thoughtful observation, common sense and learning by experience. We need more confusion.

The hierarchy of importance

There are a lot of very grave problems is the world today. But from the perspective of green spirituality, the most serious is the harm human activities have done to the living planet. The degree of destruction we have carried out is horrendous. Most people, even those involved with the environmental movement, do not realise its full extent. This may be caused by the very attitudes that have allowed the destruction to continue, in particular that people are more important than anything else.
It is natural for any individual to regard himself as more important than any other. The experience of being oneself is intrinsically different from the life of any other individual, however near and dear. I assume, from a wealth of circumstantial evidence, that another human being feels much the same way as I do. As for individuals from other species, the more they resemble me in appearance and behaviour, the easier it is to imagine what their life experiences may be like. This leads to an anthropoid hierarchy, with apes, cats, bears and smiling dolphins at the top, and nasty creepy, slimy things at the bottom.
Understandable though such an ordering may be, it does not make it "right" or "true" or "good", or any other adjective indicating benefit or helpfulness or how to live life well. Indeed, putting ourselves at the top has led very rapidly, in planetary timescales, to gross abuse of the natural world and its life support systems, and threatens soon to make the planet unfit for human survival.

Evolution

In his famous theory of the origin of species by natural selection, Charles Darwin chose to use the metaphorical concept "Struggle for Existence" as a framework for his explanation of how life forms developed their roles within ecosystems. Although Darwin made clear that every "struggle" implied a complementary dependency, his followers seized on the competitive imagery alone, and adopted the idea of "the survival of the fittest", whereby Man, as the fittest of all the species, is the ultimate achievement of evolutionary creation. However, from the point of view of the other thirty million or so other species, Man's arrival has put evolution into reverse. Tens of thousands of species are now becoming extinct each year as the result of our activities (Gradwohl and Greenberg). Most of these casualties are at the bottom of the "anthropoid hierarchy", and tend not to excite our sympathy very much, but all were vital elements in the web of life. Only one or two species a year would become extinct by natural selection.

Of course we are different from other species. We have a unique power to manipulate things and accumulate experience which has allowed us to adapt to a wide variety of habitats which came to include the whole earth. However, the successful organism is one which is suited to, or fits into, its environment, adjusting it to a modest, temporary extent, and forming an essential component of that environment for the benefit of other species within it. A species which progressively destroys its environment and moves on is doomed. Like a forest fire, it will die out when all is consumed.

Curiously, one seldom hears anyone speaking with pride about the growth of human numbers from a few million to five billion in only ten thousand years. It is scarcely even the way we have manipulated our environment; the farm landscapes, the urban architecture, the brightly lit supermarket displays, that we admire. It is one of the main organs we have used to achieve these changes and this expansion; our big brains, that we admire most about ourselves.

Unconsciousness

Is a big brain something to be proud of, or is it a handicap which will destroy us? Does it give us consciousness of all that is around us and our relationship with our environment? Not at all. It shuts us into a fundamentally unconscious psyche which filters out most of our sensory input, throws up our few conscious thoughts, and drives our largely habitual behaviour. Surely an organism which is in direct touch with its sources of energy and nutrients, and able to receive and respond to stimuli, is more conscious, more aware of its environment, and able to interact cooperatively, than a human ego shut in its programmed prison.

The human unconscious is riddled with fixed attitudes. One of the most pervasive is a kind of neurotic optimism which blinds people to the full horror of what we have done to the world, and to each other. Matthew Fox, who uses the term "Via Negativa" in his book Original Blessing, does not flinch from recognising the pain and fear of the nuclear age. There is a fully conscious "Via Negativa" to green spirituality, which is primarily concerned with the terrible abuse of land and ecosystems. Only by opening up to our self-pity and guilt concerning the rape of the earth, can we let go of despair and find a creative way through.

The central goal of green spirituality is to engage with the relatedness of the natural world, rather than to try to be apart and above it. This focus brings a different perception of the relative importance of the various manifestations of environmental damage from the mainstream environmental movement.

James Lovelock, whose wisdom is imbued with green spirituality, has criticised the environmental movement for having mistaken priorities. He has said that its priorities have been based on concern over threats to human health before threats to the planet's life support systems. In particular, they have put cancer causing problems such as "anything radioactive" and "industrial toxic waste", before problems which harm the living planet as a whole, such as deforestation, land degradation and disturbance of the ecosystems of coastal waters. Lovelock has upset many Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace activists by saying this. They defend themselves by pointing to their tropical forest and North Sea campaigns. This has become a complicated and subtle ideological argument within the green movement. It is based on a common misconception about what "the environment" means.

The environment

To many people "the environment" is something external and peripheral. Their attitude towards environmental problems can be likened to their concern that their house needs redecorating, or there is some rot developing in the bathroom window, but that there are other concerns which are much more important. The increased interest in recent years in recycling, "green consuming" and support for environmental pressure groups is now waning because it never reached the heart of people's lives and consciousness.

A similar attitude has been the basis of the biological sciences. It has been assumed that the planetary environment consisted of its geology and its climate, and that life evolved within the constraints of that environment.

Central to green spirituality is the belief that there is no such separation. We are our environment, we create it, it creates us. There is no difference between life and inanimate matter, all is interacting, exchanging, evolving and disintegrating. The only distinction that can be made between matter and spirit is that our rational minds tend only to perceive the space and time dimensions of matter, they are unaware of the "spiritual" dimension of relationship or connectedness.

If the separation between "us" and "out there" were only a problem of the loneliness of the human psyche, it would be sad, but not so very terrible. But the cultural sickness that has afflicted Western civilisation since ancient times has led us progressively to destroy much of the rich profusion of the planet, replacing it with simplified and controlled urban and agricultural landscapes.

I believe that it is essential that we recognise what we have done in order to engage with the process of healing and restitution. It is a long and complicated story. To tell it with fury and passion in every sentence would be too much for me and for my readers. I can only tell it like a history lesson about past battles, without the bloody carnage, or the rape and pillage. But those of you who are already aware of the horrific and evil deeds against the earth that mankind is guilty of will sense that the telling of this history tortures my soul.

Land degradation

Only three years ago, few people had even heard of land degradation. Popular books on environmental problems, such as David Attenborough's The Living Planet and Michael Allaby's Green Facts, did not include it in their Contents pages, and you would not find "soil erosion" in their indexes. Two dramatic examples of land degradation often did appear, the destruction of tropical rain forests and desertification in Africa. But the all pervasive global problem of the progressive stripping, bleeding and polluting of the land was ignored. It is still given low priority today compared with such things as the thinning of the ozone layer and "global warming" - the threat of climate change brought about, largely, by the burning of fossil fuels.

There is a saying, and a song by Noel Coward, that goes, "Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun". If the planet were still clothed with the thick coat of trees which sprang up in the rich soil left behind by the glaciers of the last ice age, and if Englishmen had not developed the spite they seem to have against trees, neither of the above problems would harm them. The shade of the trees would protect them from short wave radiation, and the leaves would flourish in the excess carbon dioxide.

Of course this is an over simplification, but it contains the most important truth about the health of the planet. If the land is permanently covered by rich and diverse vegetation, not much harm can come to it, or to us. However, by stripping off the vegetation and replacing it with grass or monocrops, we alter the local climate, eventually the global climate, and we speed the process of soil erosion so that it blows or washes into the sea, to then damage the vital ecosystems of the shallow ocean waters. Furthermore, we have entered a vicious circle of progressive clearance and degradation from which we cannot escape.

To a farmer from our culture, a stretch of forest, or other natural ecosystem, is a useless wilderness. His aim is to turn it as rapidly as possible into "orderly" fields. But a natural system is highly ordered. It is "an organically interwoven community of plants, animals and micro-organisms, of food chains and cycles of matter, an endless transformation without life or death." (Fukuoka) Clearing and ploughing, planting with selected crop plants, chopping out "weeds", scaring off or shooting birds and animals results in a system of greatly reduced order and form. Such a system is fragile, and vulnerable to fluctuations in climate and to pest and disease infestation.

Large scale monocrop agriculture is a crazy way to produce human food. There are better ways. In a letter to the magazine Food Matters, Dr F.D. O'Reilly described the characteristics of traditional Nigerian farming as follows:

1. most farmers grow on ridges or mounds, aiding drainage and soil aeration;
   
2. they practise intercropping, growing on the same plot different crops with different requirements, crops which sustain and protect one another;
   
3. they cultivate multicultivar complexes, thus planting in one site different strains of rice (drought and flood resistant) so that there is always some yield;
   
4. they comprehensively utilize the field ecosystems, harvesting voluntary vegetation, weeds and pests;
   
5. they use organic fertilizer not only from the farm but also from domestic and urban refuse.

Methods such as this are practised in South America, Russia, and South East Asia as well as West Africa. Because they feed people - sustainably - using about a tenth of the land as is required for modern farming, most of the natural vegetation of the planet could be allowed to remain undisturbed. Sadly, farmers like these are being dragged into the cash economy, which fails to bring them an adequate living. They lose their land, become wage workers on cash crop plantations, or migrate to cities, or starve, and their knowledge and culture is lost.

Our culture - the urban, industrial, market economy which dominates the world - has not realised its suicidal folly, and still seeks solutions to its self inflicted problems from the same technological base which caused them in the first place. The reason for this is that the attitudes behind our culture are thousands of years old. They have been inherited from our cultural forebears - ancient civilisations which have destroyed themselves by the same blind abuse of the land that we are guilty of.

The history of land abuse

We all of us tend to get caught up in how things are now. Our lives are so brief that it is difficult to get in touch with change and development throughout human history. Looking back to try to understand what happened is hindered by the tendency of historians, in their studies of civilisations, to overlook the importance of land use in favour of conquerors and conquest. It is hindered even more by the firmly entrenched idea that civilisation is "good".

The geographer I G Simmons recognises this difficulty: "One of the characteristics of looking backwards to times which we label as "traditional" or "ancient" is that we tend to underestimate their impact on their environment, preferring to think of a golden age of man-land harmony when the land yielded its usufruct to the honest toil of a contented peasant in a smiling sort of way. Looking at some examples of the management practices and consequent impacts of the period between the evolution of agriculture and AD 1800, however, it becomes apparent that even in pre-industrial times the manipulation of nature involved in various ecosystems might be quite intensive".

Topsoil and Civilisation, by Vernon Gill Carter and Tom Dale is a provocative book on the ecological crisis, written thirty five years before the present surge of concern. They describe what earlier civilisations have left behind: "All across the continent of Asia and into Europe and North Africa, you find the seats of former leading civilisations that are now among the backward areas of the world. You need not search to find such areas: just call the roll of the ancients, and then look at the lands they lived on, as they are today. You will see what the man meant when he said that civilised man has left a desert in his footprints as he moved from place to place across the face of the earth."

Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield in Land Degradation and Society describe the Mediterranean region from whence our own civilisation arose: "The evidence of degradation is widespread and striking; whole regions with their human works, have gone out of cultivation. Little remains of the indigenous forest cover, and large montane areas, .... that are now almost bare of soil. .... It has long been accepted as established that the heavy decline in agricultural potential of the region has been due to millenia of exploitative agriculture.

Carter and Dale introduce their study of what civilised man has done to the natural environment in the strongest terms: "He cut down or burned most of the usable timber from the forested hillsides and valleys. He overgrazed and denuded the grasslands that fed his livestock. He killed most of the wildlife and much of the fish and other water life. He permitted erosion to rob his farm land of its productive topsoil. He allowed eroded soil to clog the streams and fill his reservoirs, irrigation canals, and harbors with silt. In many cases, he used or wasted most of the easily mined metals or other needed minerals. Then his civilisation declined amidst the despoilation of his own creation or he moved to new land. There have been from ten to thirty different civilisations that have followed this road to ruin (the number depending on who classifies the civilisations)."

I have included these rather hefty quotations from some notable experts on land degradation to add the weight of their authority to my own pleas for more attention to the appalling destruction of which human civilisation has been guilty. I have found people most unwilling to give these issues any sort of priority. But - ten thousand years of stripping the earth bare! How can we think people are so clever?

Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean regions are not the only parts of the world to be so abused. "Civilisation" has spread to virtually all parts of the world and brought its drastic farming methods with it. Some of the first explorers to reach North America reported that they could smell the scent of flowers from miles out to sea as they approached the coast. A few decades of land clearance, much of it by well meaning Christian settlers, were enough to remove the flowers forever. Industrial fumes and stinking polluted water are more likely to greet the ocean traveller now.

Progressive degradation

The land has suffered two stages of degradation. The first is the loss of natural ecosystems with their genetic diversity. The second is the various processes of gradual degradation of soil productivity. Three of the most serious of these processes are erosion, salinisation and toxification.

Most natural ecosystems lose soil through erosion but human activities such as heavy grazing, deforestation, frequent fires and cultivation increase the rate of loss by many times. Simmons states that blowing, washing and gulleying have been the associates of human societies for at least ten millennia, with few if any zones immune.

Carter and Dale describe the effects of centuries of erosion in Syria where archaeologists excavating the ruins of Antioch "had to dig through as much as twenty-eight feet of water-borne silt to uncover some of the former palaces. This was silt that had washed off the cultivated and deforested highlands in the watershed above."

Soil erosion is not just a problem of ancient times. Its effect continues today, including in Britain. It reduces the productivity of the land to very low levels and is only very slowly reversible. The particles of soil often reach watercourses and exacerbate floods, silt up harbours and reservoirs, and change the components of aquatic systems. It is estimated that the world's rivers carry to the sea some 25 billion tonnes of soil every year. Almost a third of the soil of the world's arable land has already been eroded away.

Salinisation is another serious problem of agriculture, ancient and modern. Deposits of dissolved salts from irrigation water build up on the surface of the soil, reducing its productivity. Land is being abandoned at the same rate it is being taken into irrigation schemes.

The third type of degradation, toxification, is a problem of modern agriculture. It is caused by the use of fertilizers and biocides, coupled with the production of large quantities of wastes by intensive animal husbandry and the accumulation of metal ion concentration on land fertilised by sewage sludge. 40-50 per cent of the nitrogen from chemical fertilisers enters the runoff and as little as one per cent of the chemicals applied to control insect pests, plant pathogens and weeds may hit the target organisms, and the rest reaches non-target species or surrounding ecosystems (Simmons). The amount of slurry produced each year in Britain would cover all six lanes of the M1 from London to Leeds to a depth of 42 feet (Friends of the Earth).

Environmentalists and conservationists in this country cherish the older man-made landscapes on which nature has applied scar tissue to her wounds, and which have become wildlife habitats. Since 1945 140,000 miles of hedgerow have been uprooted and most of our woodlands and wildflower meadows have been destroyed to make way for fast-growing conifers, fodder and cereal crops. At the same time wetlands are being drained and healthlands ploughed.

Climate change

There is a common misconception that land degradation, or progressive desertification, is caused by climate change. This is only half true. The other half of the truth is that land degradation causes climate change. Forests, in particular, are vital components of climate systems. They absorb and recycle the rain and alter the albedo, the reflective characteristics, of the land surface. Felling a single tree destroys the microclimate it creates. Clearing large stretches of forest changes the regional climate, turning rain cycles into extremes of flooding and drought.

It is estimated that the area of forest cleared worldwide since 1940 is equal to the area of the whole of North America. Climate systems are very complex. Even the most sophisticated Global Climate Models which scientists have set up, cannot replicate historical climate change, or make reliable predictions. However, it is certain that deforestation has adversely changed the global climate, and the disrupted climate brings further land degradation to compound the vicious circle of the effects of large scale agriculture.

I must mention a ghastly possibility for the future which I dread. It is that, because of the distorted priority being given to "global warming", fossil fuels will be replaced by "renewable" biofuels. Although burning these fuels would not add to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, they will bring about a new generation of massive plantations of sugar, oilseeds and other agricultural raw materials. Already, Brazil is planning to extend its sugar and cassava plantations to eight million hectares in order to produce enough alcohol to fuel all its cars. This is an example of the over-simplified, technological fix which appeals to industrial capitalism.

Genetic engineering

The latest spectre which has arisen to haunt us is genetic engineering. The prospect is being held out of being able to build plants and animals with desired characteristics by manipulating their genes. The public is tempted into welcoming this technology by the promise that older, damaging technologies like nitrate fertilisers and pesticides would become unnecessary because nitrogen fixing and pest resistance could be spliced into the chromosomes of any crop. The prospect makes me shudder. It must be time we said "No" to technical solutions that are interfering with nature.
Of course, one of the reasons people do not give land degradation the priority it deserves is that they have little personal contact with the land, as workers or consumers.

Alienation

In modern farming, human farm workers are very largely replaced by machinery and chemicals. A graphic illustration of this is given by Blaikie and Brookfield. "On a ranch in the heavily eroding Columbia Plateau, by 1970, seven men, equipped with three self-propelled air-conditioned combines, a "bankout" wagon .... and three trucks handled harvest operations which fifty years earlier had required more than a hundred men and three hundred work animals."

As farming has progressed, the human consumers of the products of farming have got further and further away from the processes that provide for them. Not only are we separated from farmland to be enclosed in towns and cities, but the food we eat gets less and less like the living plants or animals from which it came. Layers of processing and packaging separate us from the grain, the root, the joint of meat, as ranks of middle men play games of Chinese whispers to transform the products of sun, soil and rain into profit.

We live on a finite planet. In the past we were able to move on to new land, new continents even. But there is very little good land left. It is desperately urgent that we change; how we live, how we provide for our needs, and how we think.

What has gone wrong with us?

So much do we take it for granted that human understanding is admirable, and that our ability to change the world puts us above the rest of nature, that we do not think to ask the question, "What went wrong with us?" We may be worried about the consequences of our actions, but more to ask, "What can we do?" rather than "What happened to us that we allowed this to happen?" But unless we discover what it was that went wrong with us, we will be unable to unravel it. This would hinder the process of discovering how to think and behave differently, and the destruction would continue.

I believe that it is quite probable that a uniquely damaging cultural change, a kind of historical accident, took place at a particular time - several thousand years ago - and in one particular area of the world - the area of the ancient near east we call "the cradle of civilisation". During the intervening two hundred or so generations, the global human population has expanded from a few million to five and a half billion. Imagine that expansion as a pyramid, or huge family tree. A cultural change affecting a few thousand people at the top of the pyramid would be passed on to the vast numbers of their descendents and could affect the culture of the entire western world.

The transition from primitive hunter-gathering to agriculture is a central part of what went wrong. However, it cannot be the sole cause. Human groups have discovered how to domesticate plants and animals, independently, in various parts of the world at various times from about ten thousand years BP (before present) onwards. Not all these groups have made drastic and irreversible changes to natural systems. As I have already mentioned, there are still today examples of sustainable, small scale farming and gardening in many parts of the world, and many of these are of very ancient origin.

It will never be possible to prove beyond doubt any theory about human cultural change that took place so long ago. We are talking about a time before written records, although, when cultural knowledge was passed down by word of mouth and later recorded, those writings may provide valuable clues.

Explanations

I shall offer two "explanations" of what may have gone wrong. One is speculation of my own, and can be regarded as a kind of "thought experiment" in which I ask you to try out the idea that "the mind" is a pattern recognition device which has led us to impose regularity on the world we inhabit and to invent patterns to occupy any spare mental capacity. The other is the theory of the philologian John Allegro, who has discovered the common origins of Judaeo-Christian and Classical mythology in an ancient fertility cult. The beliefs and rituals of the cult led to a neglect of the development of sustainable farming practices in favour of worshipping a fertility deity in the sky.

My intention in including these "explanations" is not really to explain what went wrong historically. Rather it is to try to undo what is wrong with us still, which is our arrogance and certainty of our rightness and importance. Even those of us who criticise materialism, and aim for a simpler life style, and fairer shares for all, are caught up in the assumption that people are more important than animals, animals than plants, and plants, especially food plants, than ecosystems. So we all need to work on the idea that we are not superior, that we are not right. If we can really work these certainties loose - and it is very difficult - then, and only then, can we put a new way of life and thought and spiritual relatedness in its place.

The first assumption to demolish is that Man has a superior mind and consciousness. I am putting forward the idea that mind is nothing special, and that having a very large mind has actually resulted in Man becoming less aware than other life forms.

The evolution of the mind

Consider how it was during one of the earliest explosions of diversity in life 700 to 500 million years ago (the Precambrian and Cambrian periods). During these periods, multicellular plants and animals (metaphyta and metazoans) evolved from unicellular organisms. Their cells differentiated to become specialised in particular functions. It is not known how early a cellular specialisation with a function one could call "mind" evolved. More is known of skeletal form because of the fossil record, so I suppose we can put a date on the earliest discovered brain case. But the first development of "mind" may have been much earlier. That we can only guess at.

Plants acquire energy by absorbing sunshine. Animals have to ingest energy from other organisms: plants or other animals. Virtually the only sensing and responding a plant needs to do is to orientate itself in the direction of sun and water. But to an evolving metazoan, the ability to recognise food, predators, competitors, mates, hosts and habitats would be a tremendous advantage over taking a chance on being in the right place enough of the time to survive and reproduce. This requires some mechanism for sensing a pattern in the environment and comparing it with a data bank of remembered patterns and their associations. Our primitive ancestors must have acquired this ability very early on, perhaps right back in those Cambrian or even Precambrian times.

So, in order to challenge the assumption of Man's superiority over other animals, I am putting forward the idea that all Homo sapiens possesses is a larger capacity data bank of patterns and associations than the earliest multicellular animals had, but not one fundamentally different.

It is consistent with the assumption that the business of the mind is to recognise regularities that for most of human history we have assumed that everything is regular: that anything apparently complex can be resolved into simple components (cells, atoms etc.) with predictable behaviour, and also that regularity and simplicity are desirable because they give us control and power.

Chaos

The realisation is now beginning to dawn in scientific circles that in selecting meaningful patterns, we filter out most of what is going on out there. Most of the universe, from the sub-atomic through the biological to the inter-galactic realm, is chaotic, irregular, unpredictable and uncontrollable. James Gleick, in his popular science book about "Chaos Theory", tells how the study of complex, or non-linear, systems is being applied to a wide range of scientific fields including climate systems, turbulence in heart valves and the modelling of wildlife populations. Of course, true to Man's compulsion to find order within disorder, new branches of mathematics are being devised to try to bring this chaos under some form of control.

An attribute of chaos which is interesting scientists is its intrinsic creativity, its capacity for spontaneously producing pattern and form. Something meaningful springs out of a random mess of matter and energy, and having appeared tends to perpetuate itself. This tendency of form to persist, drawing in further matter and energy to replace what falls away, so that the material changes but the form continues, can be regarded as a fifth dimension - relationship - which makes life possible. It is the "spiritual" dimension beyond the four dimensions of space and time. Form is born spontaneously out of chaos, and we will never be able to "explain" how, because chaos itself is outside the realm of the rational mind.

We do not easily perceive or interact with the chaotic world because the function of our minds is to match patterns in the environment with those in our memories. To the big headed metazoans we really are, the rest of the intrinsically irregular and random world is of no interest. (I have been intrigued by an example of my own tendency to perceive only regularity, and to filter out randomness. There is a digital clock in my lounge at home, and it quite often happens that I look up and notice it showing 22:22. Obviously, it usually shows other times, but I don't notice those.)

The more mind the better?

To return to the evolutionary theme: why would the genus Homo have acquired big headedness? What edge might that have given us on the more modest animals in the environment?

During most of the two or three million years we have been around, we have been hunter-gatherers - probably mostly gatherers: of plant foods, grubs and insects, and left over scraps of meat from the carnivores' kill. We learned to recognise countless varieties of plants and animals, to distinguish edible from inedible material, and to remember their nutritional and curative effects.

We also learned to cooperate with our extended family or tribal group in the collection, preparation and sharing out of food to make up a balanced and sufficient diet. We learned to pass on that knowledge down the generations long before we had thought up methods of recording information on any external medium like cave walls or portable artifacts.

This strategy allowed us to make a living in almost any terrestrial environment, and we spread in all directions to occupy tropical, temperate and arctic regions of the earth; forests, grasslands and deserts; mountains, plains and sea shores. There was no limit to what environment we could adapt to through our learning, remembering and communicating capacity.
This was brought home to me vividly a couple of years ago by a television programme on the Amazonian Indians with David Bellamy. He was escorted into the forest by an eight year old girl, who was in fits of giggles the entire trip because of her amazement at Bellamy's ignorance of the world, in particular of what they could eat, and what they could not. She was the wise woman and he the untaught child.

Those must have been very fulfilling times. There was plenty of vital knowledge and skills to acquire, a lot important socialising to do, fascinating variety in the world around, but reassuring routine and ritual to mark the days and the seasons.

Then, around ten thousand years ago, we invented agriculture. We discovered that we could tame selected edible wild plants and animals, confine them to a small region around a settlement, and thereby get our food, with perhaps more physical effort, but without the need for so much detailed knowledge of our habitat, and the need for complex systems of cooperation.

Mental redundancy

Suddenly, over a few generations, we had made most of the big brain redundant. The immense bank of knowledge Bellamy's young escort needed for survival was no longer necessary. (The following serves to illustrate the change. The Kayapo Indians of central Brazil collect fruit from no fewer than 250 plants. 1,950 known tropical plants have potential as vegetable foods. (The Rainforest Foundation) In contrast, 95 per cent of our global nutritional requirements today are derived from a mere 30 kinds of plant, three quarters from only eight crops (Myers)).

Evolution is full of instances of once useful organs and limbs becoming redundant. Often they wither away like the horse's other toes and our appendix. Such was not to be the fate of the human mind.

So what did we do with all the spare brain capacity? I do not really know, but I am putting forward the idea that this turning point of human history was the original source of many of the characteristics of "civilised" life: the frustrations and compulsions of the psyche, as well as art, music, literature, religion and science. Of course, I refer to the latter group pursued for their own sake; not to be confused with similar activities carried out by indigenous peoples for practical and social purposes.

What I suggest we did was to find internal, imaginary occupations for the mind, to make up for the complex interactions with the external world we no longer needed for survival.

To sum up my theory: the human mind developed along with a way of life which demanded intimate knowledge of and relationships with the natural world. We then discovered a way of taming nature and simplifying it that required physical toil but relatively little intellectual effort. We were left with spare mind which built castles for itself in the sky. Because the function of mind is to recognise patterns, the castles of the mind reflect the regular, recognisable, meaningful parts of the real world. Hence we know about shapes, rhythm and rhyme, and predictable and repeatable behaviour of things. We cannot cope with confusion.

At this point I will remind anyone inclined to dismiss my theory as "nonsense" that this is just a "thought experiment" designed to dislodge certainties and challenge human arrogance. I am not asking anyone to believe it, just to try out the idea. As an excuse for not making sense to everyone, I also offer this quotation from the lovely book, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.

"Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another."

The Zukav test

As an example of what Gary Zukav calls an "idea about reality", does this speculative theory of mine pass the test? Is it consistent with our knowledge and experience of human behaviour and history?

Changing the function of the mind from recognising significant patterns in the environment to making patterns in the imagination could well have brought about the cultural changes we know took place in the early history of civilisation. Enclosed, designed habitats - cities - would be preferred to wild places. Larger and larger farms would be needed to supply those cities. Citizens would have more power and influence than land workers. Esoteric speculation would be valued more highly than practical skills and knowledge.

Over the course of history, we have increasingly moulded the world to conform to our mental inventions - we have regularised it, tidied it up. We have turned wilderness into plantation monoculture, teeming river into poisoned drain, curious child into obsessed or bored specialist in office, laboratory, production line or fast food bar.

However, there is a flaw in the theory, in that it suggests that farming will always lead to gross destruction of the natural world, and civilisation divorced from nature. However, as I stated earlier, there are parts of the world where small-scale, sustainable farming and gardening have been practised for thousands of years, and where the culture has remained close to nature.

My second "explanation" of what may have gone wrong is better than my first in that it does provide a reason why agriculture and culture have become so alienated from "mother" nature only in what has become our "Western" civilisation. However, some may find it even more controversial. I offer it partly because it is backed up by as extensive a body of evidence as could be provided about so remote a period of history, but also because it questions one of the most dominating sets of certainties of our culture, the Christian religion. Of course Christian certainties have been subjected to a lot of questioning over the past three hundred years, and some people would argue that they are not particularly influential any more. However, I think they still underlie our attitudes at a very deep level. The following theory may shed light on that too, in a very surprising way, by arguing that it is not the Christian religion as written or preached that influences us, but the ancient cultic religion that underlies it.

The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross

As I have related above, early attempts at large scale agriculture were terribly destructive. With human beings' undeniable intelligence and foresight, we should have been able to see that large scale deforestation and farming progressively reduces the productivity of the land and disrupts the local climate. Something must have blinded us to the consequences of these practices, and insisted that they continue. A possible agent is religion; a set of beliefs in the supernatural, and rules governing the conduct of life, policed by a priesthood. What might the characteristics of that religion have been, to make us adhere so blindly to practices that destroyed our environment, and would, inevitably, destroy us?

The fascinating and controversial book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, by the philologian John Allegro offers a temptingly plausible explanation. Allegro's thesis was derived from the study of ancient Sumerian, the oldest written language known, dating from the fourth millenium BC. The ancient tongue provides a bridge between the Indo-European and Semitic languages, and led Allegro to the conclusion that Old Testament and Classical mythology derive from a common culture based on a fertility cult which worshipped a sacred mushroom. The mysteries of the cult were passed on by word of mouth long before they were written down, and its origin may have coincided quite closely to the beginnings of farming in the Middle East, perhaps 7000 years BP.

Survival depends on regular food supplies. Early man did not have a specific role in the ecosystems he inhabited. As a late arrival at the evolutionary party, he had to make do with the leftovers. His diet consisted of a bit of this and a bit of that, wherever he could find it. Knowledge of where to look and for what was essential. As I described above, his enormous memory capacity fitted him for this marginal role.

The invention of farming brought predictability, if not always security, of food supplies. Farmers were able to regulate their diet by cultivating chosen plants and taming particular animals. However, they were still dependent on the rain coming in the growing season. If it did not, their children and animals could starve.

As farmers developed their powers over the land, they yearned for power over the rain. What is it, they wondered, that comes from the sky and makes the earth fertile and bring forth nourishment? Seeking parallels with what they knew about, they likened the rain to semen from a divine male organ in the sky. Accordingly, means had to be found to pleasure the god to make the rain come.

The sacred mushroom

Certain plants were identified with seemingly magical properties which were thought would help in communicating with the deity. The most important was the hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita Muscaria. This mysterious plant was born without seed, often after thunder which was believed to be the "word" of god. The mushroom was thought to have an affinity with the god because it bore a strong resemblance to a phallus in its early stages of growth and, expanding to maturity, had a shape that suggested the burden of a female groin. When consumed, it opened the consciousness to knowledge of the deity. The mushroom was accordingly worshipped as the son of god.

The strategy of appealing to the god of fertility to ensure a good harvest did not always work. But when the rains failed to come, or the soil became barren, instead of seeking reasons in the workings of nature and their farming practices, our cultural ancestors looked heavenwards and tried to appease the god, using the sacred mushroom as intermediary.

Inevitably, the soil continued to degrade and the forests which regulated the rainfall and raised the water table were progressively destroyed. The famines, floods and droughts which resulted were interpreted as evidence of the god's anger and, instead of being discredited, the religion was pursued with increasing fervour. The priests advised the people that the god desired them to seek new lands, and promised they would be fertile. The concept of journeying and progress was born into the culture.

Fortunately for the people, there was then plenty of new land to move on to. They and the mushroom cult thrived for thousands of years in the region known as the "cradle of civilisation" in and around ancient Mesopotamia.
The story so far would be sufficient to account for the deserts created by civilisation. I will go on to outline Allegro's examination the origin of the New Testament stories because it is central to his thesis. I recognise that this is very contentious, but I think that one could reject this next part without rejecting the whole idea of a powerful fertility cult during ancient times, which blinded our cultural ancestors to the effects of their farming practices.

Christianity

Allegro believes that the Jewish Revolt of AD 66 was a crisis in the history of the cult. Some of the followers, in a drug induced frenzy, challenged the mighty power of Rome and provoked it to swift and terrible action. Thousands were killed. The remnants of the sect had to go underground. The ancient mysteries, passed by word of mouth through generations of priests, had to be written down lest they be lost. But they had to be disguised to prevent the uninitiated penetrating the secrets. The disguise took the form of stories about the life of a man called Jesus, a personification of the sacred mushroom, who was the son of god and performed miracles. Like the mushroom, he was sacrificed in order to save the people, but rose again, as the mushroom did from its invisible and unsuspected spores.

By some irony of history, the Jesus stories were adopted as historic truth by a group who called themselves "Christians". This had been one of the names of the priestly hierarchy of the cult, and meant "anointed with the juices of the mushroom". Most of the writings from this transitional period were destroyed as blasphemous. Little remained by which the religion could be traced back to its origins.

The book in which Allegro sets out his thesis contains ample philological evidence to support his conclusions. But because this is difficult for a non-specialist to understand, a general reader cannot use the evidence to satisfy any doubts he may have.
Some Christian believers will reject Allegro's theory out of hand, as his colleagues in the Faculty of Theology at Manchester University were inclined to do. But now may be an appropriate time for it to get a hearing. Many Christians have much less attachment to the literal truth of bible stories than they had only a few years ago. Like spiritual seekers from all faiths or none, Christians are discovering that spiritual experience is beyond words. The words that may come to mind afterwards to describe the experience are likely to be cultural in origin; symbolic, mythic messages with no necessary connection with historic truth.

In any case, this is just an exercise in working loose dogmatic beliefs and perceived certainties. I am not asking anyone to switch to believing instead that Christianity derives from a mushroom cult. However, the theory seems well founded, and to pass the "Zukav test" in being consistent with observations of our history and culture, and could explain many aspects of our present, deeply rooted, psychological and social sickness.

The Zukav test

Most importantly, Allegro's theory provides a possible explanation for the population explosion; from a few million people six thousand years ago to five and a half billion now. Other cultures, such as the indigenous tribes of the tropical rainforests, have social practices which effectively control their reproduction to levels the ecosystems they inhabit can support. However, worship of the fertility god may, Allegro suggests, have led to unrestrained procreation, as farmers copulated in the fields to encourage the fertility god to ejaculate and cause the rain. According to the fertility cult, it was a sin to waste seminal fluid. The rule persists in the Roman Catholic condemnation of birth control. Attitudes about menstruating and barren women, masturbation and homosexuality may also originate from this original sin of wasting the seed.

The theory may also explain male domination in our society. Although women had their own special roles in the ancient cultic practices, since the god was maleness deified, priests had to be male. We see this bias perpetuated in the modern resistance to female clergy. Perhaps, as crops repeatedly failed, and more and more effort was devoted to appeasing the god, male superiority and domination grew to be an inevitable part of the culture.

We can identify some of the modern cultural attitudes which might have resulted from this early nature worship gone wrong. All important knowledge is assumed to reside in the male; it is esoteric and cerebral, rather than practical, earthy and homely. Power over nature has been the goal, and more important than harmony and cooperation. Progress and mobility are thought essential; sustainability and stability are patronisingly dismissed as evidence of weakness, ignorance and failure.

The collective unconscious

This powerful early religious influence is only tenable as an explanation of how we got ourselves in the present dire situation if we allow that none of us is consciously aware of why we think and behave the way we do. Our constantly flitting consciousness is fed from an enormous reservoir of unconscious attitudes, drives and habits, some picked up during life, some almost certainly originating in some collective unconscious influencing us all. This makes it believable that a mystic tradition that spanned thousands of years has reverberated down to the present day, open to the unconscious mind, though disguised in conscious belief and practice as a fragmented story of one man's life and death. It is not surprising, therefore, that our early heritage of a male dominated, power and progress culture is more influential than the encrypted version, Christianity, whose prescriptions of loving our enemies were, according to Allegro, only introduced to fool the Romans, and whose stated moral standards we conspicuously fail to live to.

If it had not been for an obsession with religious practices designed to communicate with a fertility god in the sky, our ancestors might have attained the intimate understanding of the natural world which is characteristic of some indigenous and peasant peoples today. They could then have established sustainable ways to grow food, fibre, fuel and building materials, and regulated their families to levels the environment could support, and we would not now be faced with an ecological crisis.
What I have been attempting to do by putting forward these two "explanations" of what went wrong with mankind is to demolish the edifice of human arrogance by questioning some of our most deeply rooted assumptions and beliefs. However, it is worth pointing out that the period in which we achieved such destructive dominance is only ten thousand years in the life of Homo sapiens, which is thought to be of ten times that duration. During most of human history, and of course before the emergence of our species, our lives were closely integrated with the rest of the natural world. With that in mind, it is no wonder that what I have called "green spirituality", which is actually a re-integration into the web of life, is having such an immediate appeal to many of those who encounter it.

Once one has made the mental leap of putting back together the material realm of space-time and the "spiritual" realm of relationship, one can forget the term "spiritual". Many people who have become involved with the new ways of thinking and living dislike the word, for its associations with organised religion. However, the mental leap is enormous. It has to clear the black hole of cultural habit which still dominates the world. Anyone like myself, with a scientific background and a strong tendency to rationalise, has to work hard to allow the intuitive flow to work its magic. Perhaps this is why the philosophy and practice of Permaculture appeals to me so much. Not only does it combine the characteristics of science and wisdom, but it recognises that each of us has things to offer and things we seek, and that the exchange and flow can satisfy us all.

Permaculture

Remember the mad dogs and Englishmen baking and scratching in the midday sun? Sensible creatures find themselves a shady tree. Under a tree, it is not only shady, but cool, moist, fragrant and still. This is the microclimate of the tree and, in Permaculture, one of its most important functions.

A definition of Permaculture is that it is "the conscious use of ecological principles in designing self-sustaining food, fibre and energy producing ecosystems". It is based on using the maximum number of beneficial relationships between all the elements of the environment. It involves protracted thought leading to minimum action. An important rule is that no element is introduced into the design if it has only one function.

To return to the tree: no tree would be introduced into a Permaculture environment just for its microclimate, important though that is. Other functions that a tree may have are: the provision of fruit, nuts and seeds; edible flowers, leaves and sap; and, importantly, leaf litter for mulch. A tree might be lopped, pollarded or coppiced at intervals to provide construction materials, fuel, and leaves and bark for animal fodder. Some trees fix nitrogen, for example the black locust which also provides seeds for fodder and good timber. A tree can also be used to provide hedging plus - always in Permaculture - at least one other function. For none of these benefits is it necessary to kill the tree. This introduces another principle of Permaculture which is that every component is as permanent as possible, and perennial or self-seeding plants are prefered.
A complementary principle to the one of multiple functions is that each needed function must be provided by more than one source. So, for example, water would be provided from rainwater buts, a hydraulic ram taking water from a stream or pond and, perhaps, from the mains supply.

Another example is salad which, judging from supermarket shelves, is, for most people, basically lettuce, tomato and cucumber. Recently I enjoyed a salad from a Permaculture plot which consisted of ten different species of leaves and herbs - and this was in winter! In summer, there would be twice as many - and all of them perpetual or self-seeding.

The lazy way

A central component of a Permaculture system is energy conservation. This would affect the orientation and insulation of buildings, use of water flows and solar energy, recycling of waste, and the division of a plot into zones to minimise journeys and the need to carry materials from place to place. Permaculture aims for a lazy and stress free way of life.

Other principles to aim for in this lazy methodology are: no digging, no weeding and no brought in fertilisers. These are avoided by the magical word "mulch". This is one of many ideas borrowed from natural forest ecosystems, where loads of organic dross falls to the ground and is drawn in, rather than being dug in, to the soil.

The reason work is avoided in Permaculture is not really so that we can have plenty of time to do other things than gardening. It is because of the recognition that "work is an unmet need". If something is not provided by the ecosystem, human labour or fossil fuel energy has to be expended to provide it. There is a complementary principle: "pollution is an unused output".
This is well illustrated by listing the needs and outputs of a chicken. The chicken needs food, water, grit, shelter, a perch, dust, scratching, air, light and other chickens. It provides eggs, manure, scratching - pest and weed control and land clearance, noise, entertainment, feathers, (maybe) meat, and more chickens. In a battery farm, most of the chicken's needs are not met by the battery environment and so have to be supplied using fossil fuels. Also, most of its outputs are unwanted and unused and so are regarded as pollution. In a Permaculture situation, the aim is to arrange that all the chicken's needs are met, and all its outputs used, within the ecosystem.

Permaculture is primarily a set of design principles. The actual techniques employed are not original. The aim is to pick out the most useful ways and means from ecological models, traditional farming methods and, with considerable caution, modern science and technology. The design sequence taught in Permaculture is very similar to the one used in many other situations, for example by computer systems analysts in the design of commercial information systems. This means that many people who are not ecologists or gardeners have something to offer to Permaculture.

The term "Permaculture" was coined by Bill Mollison, who started the movement. Mollison began in a temperate region of Australia. He then applied his methods on arid Aboriginal land. He has also worked out systems for the dry and humid tropics, and for aquaculture. His methods can be applied in virtually any climate or part of the world, making them an important method for solving world hunger in a sustainable way. Unlike conventional agricultural methods, Permaculture builds and nourishes the soil, and can be applied to the recovery of even seriously degraded land. These methods have already been applied successfully in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada, Nepal, India, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Denmark, and a good start is now being made in the UK.

A programme in Channel 4's "Visionaries" series in 1990 was devoted to Bill Mollison and Permaculture. He is a charismatic character, well known for his sayings. One I like particularly is, "My one desire is to green the planet. I cannot do it on my own. I think it might take three of us." In spite of the fact that the movement has been expanding rapidly in recent years, in a funny sort of way, there are still just "three of us". There is a rule in Permaculture that if something needs to be organised, then no more than three people should do the actual organising - in other words, "No committees". This must save a lot of time!

There is a world Permaculture network whose main function is to provide training for Permaculture Designers. The International Institute, based in Australia, has developed the curriculum of the Permaculture Design course. Graduates of the course go on to spend two years carrying out around ten designs, or other relevant work such as research, teaching, architecture, community administration and finance (using "green" currency or "LETS" - local exchange and trading system). Their work is assessed by members of the Institute, who award a Diploma of Permaculture Design to successful graduates. Only then are they permitted to charge fees - preferably in LETS units - for their work.

Permaculture philosophy

The professionalism and internationalism of the Permaculture movement might seem out of keeping with its down-to-earth focus, and the green spirituality I see in it. But the people involved are keenly aware of the philosophical and ethical principles of the movement which can be summarised as: Earth Care, People Care and Limits to consumption and population. Although Permaculture is directed at meeting human needs sustainably, experience shows that Permaculture could enable the present population of this country to be provided for using only a tenth of the present cultivated land area. It is a central aim of Permaculture that the other nine tenths should be returned to the wild.

I have singled out Permaculture from many other encouraging strands of green living and philosophy for two main reasons: its breadth of vision and its practicality. It is directed at achieving wholeness and sustainability for the entire earth and all its people. It is about what we can do, rather than what we think others should or should not be doing - remember that leaving the provision of our material needs to unscrupulous economic forces has led to catastrophe; it is time to take responsibility ourselves.

The Permaculture movement is growing because it does not require drastic political or life-style changes - and can readily take root in the muck and magic of popular interest in gardening. It can be practised on the balcony of a city flat, in a garden or on a community farm. To join, you do not have to live on a commune, give up things you enjoy, or accept a package of religious belief and practice. Anyone can start doing Permaculture, or link what they are doing already to Permaculture ideas.

The name "Permaculture", expanded to mean "permanent culture", takes us beyond the central theme of sustainable farming and gardening. From a planetary perspective, the human species is currently behaving like a monstrous parasite which is progressively destroying its host. Permanent culture suggests a human society with the characteristics of a healthy life form, where the thriving body of the culture endures, while the individuals making it up are born into it, play their part and then fall away to be recycled by the wider body of the living earth.

But - in talking about the philosophy and meaning of Permaculture, I am falling into the trap of intellectualism - the separation of mind from nature which has led us to neglect and abuse our environment. The spirit of Permaculture is to be discovered in observing and doing, not in theorising.

The methodless method of nature

The techniques of Permaculture have been gathered together from near and far, and so has the inspiration behind it. One of the people who have breathed life into the movement is the Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka. He has some wonderful sayings. This one I like especially.

"Natural farming, the true and original form of agriculture, is the methodless method of nature, the unmoving way of Bodhidharma. Although appearing fragile and vulnerable, it is potent for it brings victory unfought; it is a Buddhist way of farming that is boundless and yielding, and leaves the soil, the plants, and the insects to themselves."

This poetic description may seem to contrast sharply with the account I have given of Permaculture methodology with its analysis and design, and set principles. But in the West, we have to start from where we are. We seem to need such things as an organisational structure, an international institute, courses and diplomas.

However, Fukuoka is right. In reality there is no method. We have more to unlearn than to learn. Every Designer designs in his or her own unique way. Every Permaculture plot is different, and develops the way it develops. Every element in each plot is its own changing form and relationships. In the end, the only way is to let go and let grow.

That is cultivating confusion.

REFERENCES

Adams, Anne, "Quakerism and eco-spirituality", Quaker Green Concern, 1990
Allegro, John M, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, Hodder & Stoughton, 1970
Blaikie, Piers & Harold Brookfield, Land Degradation and Society, Methuen, 1987
Carter, Vernon Gill & Tom Dale, Topsoil and Civilisation, University of Oklahoma Press, 1955
Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species, Oxford University Press, 1859
Dixon, Norman, Our Own Worst Enemy, Jonathan Cape, 1989
Food Matters Magazine, Farmers World Network, Arthur Rank Centre, NAC, Stoneleigh, Warks, 1991
Fox, Matthew, Original Blessing, Bear & Co., 1983
Agriculture leaflet, Friends of the Earth, 1987
Fukuoka, Masanobu, The Natural Way of Farming, Japan Publications Inc, 1985
Gleick, James, Chaos, Cardinal, 1987
Gradwohl, Judith & Russell Greenberg, Saving the Tropical Forests, Earthscan Publications, 1988
Hesse, Hermann, Siddhartha, New Directions Paperbook, 1951
Lovelock, J E, The Ages of Gaia, Oxford University Press, 1988
Mollison, Bill, Permaculture Two, Tagari Community Books, 1979
Myers, Norman, editor, The Gaia Atlas of Planet Management, Pan Books, 1985
Leaflet, The Rainforest Foundation, 1990
Simmons, I G, Changing the Face of the Earth, Blackwell, 1989
Sheldrake, Rupert, The Presence of the Past, Collins, 1988
Sheldrake, Rupert, The Rebirth of Nature, Century, 1990
Zukav, Gary, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Rider Hutchinson, 1979

"Green" living :

Permaculture Association (Britain), London WC1N 3XX

(The following are now (in 2004) obsolete, but are included for their relevance to the paper as published in 1991)
Life Style, Margaret Smith, 1 Manor Farm, Little Gidding, Cambs PE17 5RJ
The Movement for Compassionate Living, Kathleen & Jack Jannaway, 47 Highlands Road, Leatherhead KT22 8NQ
Quaker Green Concern, Graham & Vi Walker, Rose Bank, Lucton, Leominster, Herefordshire HR6 9PH
Whose World?, The Old Vestry, 395 Liverpool St., Salford M6

Chris Marsh graduated in mathematics and made her career in business systems analysis and management consultancy, with a break for child rearing and school teaching. Early influences inclined her towards socialism, pacifism, environmentalism and atheism. After serious illness, she discovered the personal growth movement and spiritual exploration. She joined the Quaker Universalist Group in 1987 and became a member of the Society of Friends in 1989. She now divides her time between environmental education, studying and writing. She considers that the ability to communicate ideas is essential to full understanding, but that, at the deepest level, experience is more important than words.