I believe permaculture plays an essential role in spurring change for designing nature’s future. Permaculture embraces the farming philosophy that our agriculture system should be sustainable and locally sourced, mimicking the natural patterns found in ecosystems. While watching the movie in class, what most impacted me was the message permaculture conveys about human’s relation with the environment. One of the farmers interviewed in the movie brought up how the narrative around climate change is often about how we should be “less bad”, “reduce our damage” or “minimize our harm”. Climate change and our actions to mitigate it are this way perceived negatively: the only thing left to do is to minimize our negative actions on the planet.
On the other hand, permaculture works on the principle that there is a way of establishing a positive relationship between humans and the environment. Rather than doing “less bad”, permaculture asserts that we can do great things with our land and work harmoniously with nature. Permaculture allows the kind of space we need to think about nature and our place within it in positive terms.
This weekend I went to Durham’s farmers market and I thought about the way I buy and consume food on a regular basis. Local farmer’s market, just like permaculture, remind me to put a face on the product I’m buying and that everything I eat is originally sourced from the ground. It might sound obvious, but I think that there is an increasing risk of forgetting that everything we eat is at the beginning in its natural state — produced by nature and untouched by humans. Foods that are highly processed erase that awareness and almost normalize human’s heavy intervention in what we eat. If we thought more often about how certain products are mass produced, cultivated with lots of chemicals and need many hours of transportation, I think we would naturally be inclined to move away from our large scale agricultural system and work towards permaculture.
Durham’s Farmers’ Market — http://durham429.web.unc.edu/central-park/
photo of Emma Westlund
