Permaculture is the basis of a sustainable future, as agriculture is the basis of human society, for it is from these human practices that we are able to practically place ourselves in the ecological system of earth. (Place our muck just as the wild’s muck, into the nature’s system.) Without an attention to permaculture, the future would be just a project in the illusory air. I think in the design of nature’s future, permaculture should play a role that is so primary that it becomes ordinary and normal, like Kevin’s houses in the Pacific Edge, which becomes not a isolate site of residence but a open space of various human activities and nature’s growth.
The whole notion of permaculture would be a great cure for the kind of Anthropocene arrogance Jay Purdy criticizes, which regards of “traditional environmentalists as philosophically naïve and insist that, in the future, conservation should serve human interests.” The people in the film we watch are not just using natural resources for sustainable only human interests. What permaculture does is actively rearranging of human space to make the artificial natural. In fact, some of the urban and suburban examples in the latter part of the film are not exactly about agriculture, like the rooftop renovation, and the reinvigoration of the desolate area into a park by rearranging the rainfall. Permaculture in this sense resolves, in practices, the conflict between, on one hand, Anthropocene means normalized human intervention, and, on the other hand, we cannot keep holding an anthropocentric view of nature and future.
