To: Office and Council of Management

Permaculture Association (Britain)

Dear colleagues,

My resignation

This letter is my notice of resignation as Chair and as Trustee of the Permaculture Association (Britain) (PAB), and is my attempt to explain why I have ‘reached the end of my tether’, as it were.

I think you all know that my background in environmental education focussed on land degradation was what led to my ambition for permaculture to fulfil its promise as an agricultural revolution. You also know that I was unhappy about the ‘early adopters’, a group including some highly motivated and capable people who saw permaculture as ‘not just gardening’, but a set of ethics, principles and techniques for bringing about whole-life change for small communities, some in deprived urban areas, others on small plots of land in the Celtic fringes. This sounds worthy stuff. My concern, however, has been that those groups in the margins of society took over and hid away what could have been a valuable intellectual asset, depriving the wider community of permaculture as defined as a ‘complete and self-sustaining’ alternative to the existing forms of orthodox agriculture and horticulture. The opportunity was lost of initiating a programme of serious research to discover how to carry out this new form of agriculture, to show how it could be more high-yielding and energy efficient than conventional agriculture on extensive monocultures with agrochemicals, machinery and irrigation, and an improvement on traditional ‘organic’ mixed farming, and on conventional commercial horticulture. That would have been a challenging programme, and needed an organisation focussed on that research as its primary aim. PAB as a membership organisation for those interested in marginal, alternative lifestyles and small community-building has never been geared up to do any kind of land use research. Indeed, until recently it has struggled to survive and provide a service to those mainly low-income members.

I have had two phases of involvement in PAB (formerly ‘PcA’). The first was around 1990, when I discovered the concept of permaculture from books, and eagerly latched onto it as the ‘solution’ to offer the groups I was working with on land degradation issues. When I got in touch with PcA and met the people ‘doing’ permaculture, mainly giving and going on courses, I realised permaculture was other than the ‘complete and self-sustaining’ new agriculture I felt was needed. I soon drifted off, just helping with the new magazine and going to the occasional Convergence, but still talking of permaculture as if it was the intellectual asset and subject of research I had hoped it would be. My second phase has been this one, triggered by someone at a Convergence in Bristol saying that PAB needed to become ‘mainstream friendly’. I tried to persuade myself that the ‘community’ side was essential to the land use revolution I had hoped for, and that research might still be done into the productivity of home and local gardens, and that perhaps the Permaculture Projects Network could be the focus of such research and give rise to case studies and demonstration sites where serious research into land use designs, methods and yields was taking place. I became a trustee – how did that happen? – and soon after that the decision was made to put on the NetTogether. I had spoken against that, since the event looked like a continuation of the permaculture I had found so unsatisfactory. It proved an all-absorbing project for the staff and most of the trustees. Furthermore, the opportunity was missed to introduce at the event the ideas in the business plan, which had been worked on over the same period, which might have re-orientated PAB towards giving more attention to serious local research and associated promotion and outreach.

My kind of permaculture isn’t going to happen, I now realise. I have wasted too much time on trying to make it that, at least in my own mind. It may seems contradictory to say this, but I don’t think that what permaculture and the PAB has become is ‘wrong’, although I have concerns, particularly as it gets involved in what I call ‘future threats’: climate change and peak oil, which could result in new waves of land degradation in the mistaken belief that the cultivation of sugar and oil seeds for biofuels is part of the solution. The fact that widespread recognition of the ‘future threats’ could result in some localisation of food growing in particular, is similar in my mind to the old ‘trickle down effect’ of capital expansion and wealth creation; it can’t be relied on. If only PAB as a body had been raising awareness of the current, horrendous levels of land degradation, and promoting the ‘complete and self-sustaining’ alternative form of agriculture which this country and the world needs! But land use and agricultural research, the propagation of the findings, and promotion of proven methods, are never going to be PAB’s main objectives.

I can’t help feeling sore at the time I have wasted. Looking back 25 years, maybe I should have embarked on formal studies in soil science, and come up with my own formula, research programme, and catchy name for a revolutionary form of agriculture which would be ‘complete and self-sustaining’. If I hadn’t had arthritis, maybe I could have done some solo research on the home and local gardening side of things, and written books about that.

What I have written here won’t be new to you, as I have said it all before, with much passion and frustrated anger sometimes, but perhaps trying to explain one more time will mark some kind of closure for you as well as for me. I have also said before that my major complaint and criticism is not directed at anyone personally, but it is human nature to take criticism that way; we all do that.

I am sad that I have to resign, but I feel sure now that this is the right decision, and not just another running away, a recurring pattern in my life. Maybe free of ties to PAB I can do something towards that mission of 25 or more years, find another ‘complete and self-sustaining’ agriculture to promote. Maybe I’m too old for that. I am finding my current research fulfilling, losing myself in old books by obscure dead authors, and yet somehow and for me inevitably the land is what it’s all about: ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin’, as Voltaire famously said.

With all best wishes and love,

Chris Marsh

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