Last Sunday (4 July 2004) I did weird thing: I ducked out of an important meeting about embarking on a Permaculture Diploma on the excuse that I couldn't cope with the host's dog. It is true I have a problem with dogs, having been attacked by one as a child. Usually dog owners are sensitive to this kind of thing, and willingly confine their dogs in another room. This owner said hers couldn't be shut away from people, changing this when I said I couldn't stay, but blaming me: 'You should have said before you came.' Anyway, I went. I felt unwelcome.

Later I realised that it was really that I have a problem with 'permies': people involved with permaculture in Britain - which includes myself and my partner and several people I like and respect a good deal. There is a history to this.

Back in the 1980s I took on a personal mission to tell people about land degradation worldwide. Helped by my partner, I got together a collection of slides depicting devastating soil erosion, salinisation, desertification and industrialised agriculture. We also made slide sets on the kinds of environmental issues that interested people at the time: acid rain, ozone depletion, the Greenhouse Effect, toxic waste, nuclear waste, tropical forest destruction, and wrote scripts to go with these. I was on the Friends of the Earth speakers list, and through that and other contacts I got to speak to children and young people in schools and colleges, and to all sorts of adults' groups and organisations. I might be invited to talk about recycling, say, but I would find a way to get something in about land use and our responsibility though food etc. After the talk I would pose the questions 'What needs to change?' and 'What can I (the individual) do?'. I would write up what people said and send it to them as a reminder. This work was rewarding but exhausting and depressing because it showed how alienated most people are from the land.

My mission had a history too. I've been an environmentalist since childhood, taking on these concerns from my father. At some point I got interested in the Soil Association and their campaign to promote organic farming. But them I read a book called Topsoil and Civilisation by Vernon Gill Carter and Tom Dale, first published in 1952, which told me that farming had been devastating the land from long before modern chemical mechanised farming, indeed for 10,000 years. Later I read Fire and Civilisation by Johan Goudsblom (Penguin, 1992) which showed how our species, Homo sapiens, and even Homo erectus before us, had been drastically altering land and ecosystems by means of fire, initially to drive out prey animals, later realising that clearing the underbrush regularly resulted in new grass and other pioneer plants for grazing herds to feed on: a kind of pre-domestication herding system. Despite our low numbers compared to modern times, we had a huge impact: possibly responsible for the extinction of large mammals in North America and elsewhere; probably turning natural forests to park-like landscapes, prairies and eventually deserts, bringing about severe local climate change (causing flooding and drought instead of the widespread recycling of rain across land masses that extensive forest makes possible).

I tried to get global land use issues taken on by Friends of the Earth, getting a motion on the subject passed at the members' conference one year. While I was working as a volunteer at Friends of the Earth Head Office I wrote a paper on the subject for Jonathan Porritt, then FoE Director. He told me he completely agreed with my argument about the importance and urgency of these issues, but said that FoE couldn't take them on because it was a political lobby group which could only work on a small number of well-defined campaigns with associated policy changes that were within Government's remit: like tropical timber labelling or removing sulphur from power station emissions. It couldn't tackle the bigger picture. So I had to do it myself.

So what's all that to do with 'permies'? Well, for a few years I worked at my education project, but there didn't seem to be any solutions to offer people. And then I heard about permaculture. In Permaculture: A Practical Guide for a Sustainable Future, Bill Mollison says:

We have abused the land and laid waste to systems we need never have disturbed had we attended to our home gardens and settlements. If we need to state a set of ethics on natural systems, then let it be thus:

• Implacable and uncompromising opposition to further disturbance of any remaining natural forests, where most species are still in balance;
• Vigorous rehabilitation of degraded and damaged natural systems to stable states;
• Establishment of plant systems for our own use on the least amount of land we can use for our existence; and
• Establishment of plant and animal refuges for rare or threatened species.

Permaculture as a design system deals primarily with the third statement above, but all people who act responsibly in fact subscribe to the first and second statements. That said, I believe we should use all the species we need or can find to use in our own settlement designs, providing they are not locally rampant and invasive.
…
It is my belief that we have two responsibilities to pursue:

• Primarily, it is to get our house and garden, our place of living, in order, so that it supports us,
• Secondarily, it is to limit our population on earth, or we ourselves become the final plague.

Both these duties are intimately connected, as stable regions create stable populations. lf we do not get our cities, homes, and gardens in order, so that they feed and shelter us, we must lay waste to all other natural systems. Thus, truly responsible conservationists have gardens which support their food needs, and are working to reduce their own energy needs to a modest consumption, or to that which can be supplied by local wind water, forest, or solar power resources.

Wonderful stuff, and there's heaps more, in this book and many others, and examples of permaculture in practice in many parts of the world, all about designing 'agriculturally productive ecosystems with the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems', about the ethics of 'care of the earth, care of people and setting limits to population and consumption (or 'fair shares')', about the principles of working with nature, making the least change for the greatest possible effect and so on.

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The strength of my panic reaction to permie groups is not just because of my personal feeling of not belonging, it is because others have been put off too. Permaculture, with all its wonderful world changing potential, has not become 'mainstream friendly'. It has not reached all those ordinary gardeners with thousands of acres between them of land in which they could grow food. The few opportunities in the early days to reach the mainstream: a couple of programmes about permaculture on TV, for example, were squandered because the Office of the Association could not cope with the enquiries because it was insisting on living in a pigsty.

But also ...