Permaculture is Dead (and Weltanschauung is to Blame)

Section 1: Introduction: The Death of a Secular God

Let’s start with a statement that might ruffle some feathers: Permaculture is Dead.

Hold on – before you close the tab or sharpen your pitchfork (or hori-hori), let me clarify. I’m not talking about the valuable, practical techniques: building soil, harvesting rainwater, designing resilient systems, companion planting… that stuff works. I’ve dedicated over 16 years of my life to that work, and its utility is undeniable. What I’m talking about is the Idea of Permaculture with a capital ‘P’ – the one often presented, and eagerly adopted, as THE Answer. The infallible system, the pathway to ecological salvation, the modern secular ‘god’ meant to guide us out of crisis. That Permaculture, the one promising a neat ethical package of ‘Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share,’ feels like it’s lost its divine mandate. It needed to die, at least for me.

It reminds me of Nietzsche’s infamous declaration, “God is Dead.” He wasn’t cheering; he was observing that the central pillar upholding Western meaning and value – its Weltanschauung (pronounced roughly “VELT-ahn-show-oong”), essentially a comprehensive philosophy or framework through which we understand the world and our place in it – was crumbling. He worried about what would fill the void. In our own era of ecological anxiety and social fragmentation, Permaculture emerged as a powerful contender to fill that void for many. It offered a seemingly complete Weltanschauung for the ecologically conscious.

My own journey led me right into its embrace. After realizing an envisioned graphic design career meant city life glued to a screen, I pivoted back to my first passion: food. Discovering gardening, homesteading, and then Permaculture felt like finding the map. Awareness of a dark future looming, the urgent need for a huge shift… it all converged. Permaculture wasn’t just interesting; it felt necessary. I more or less avowed myself to a version of it: living simply and pouring my energy into the hard, physical work of growing food and tending the land. It was demanding, yet deeply rewarding work that I genuinely came to love, immersing myself in the connection to the soil. It felt like the only ethical path forward.

But over time, observation and hard-won self-reflection revealed deep inconsistencies within this adopted worldview. This post is about exploring how that idealized Permaculture faltered, particularly in its promise of ‘People Care.’ It’s about how the very comprehensiveness of its Weltanschauung ironically enabled blind spots and justifications, a dynamic perfectly captured by a quote from Naval Ravikant. And ultimately, it’s about how recognizing this ‘death’ forced me onto a different, hopefully more integrated, path.

Section 2: The Allure of the Answer: When Permaculture Became a Weltanschauung

It’s easy to see why Permaculture took hold with such force, evolving from a design system into a full-blown Weltanschauung for so many, myself included. Its appeal is potent:

• It promised coherence: In a world feeling increasingly disconnected and specialized, Permaculture offered a holistic framework seemingly linking everything – soil, water, plants, animals, energy, structures, and crucially, human communities and ethics. It presented a map for integration.
• It offered ethical clarity: ‘Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share’ is simple, memorable, and feels morally sound. It provided what seemed like a straightforward compass for navigating complex choices in a troubled world.
• It provided tangible action: Unlike passive anxiety, Permaculture offered concrete skills and actions. You could do something – build a swale, plant a guild, save seeds. This sense of agency is incredibly attractive when facing seemingly intractable global problems.
• It fostered identity and belonging: Connecting with others who shared this worldview, who “got it,” was powerful. It created community, shared language, and a sense of belonging to something important, something counter-cultural and hopeful.

For me, and I suspect for many, it wasn’t just about designing better gardens; it was about designing a better life, a better world. It became the lens through which everything else was interpreted – critique of industrial society, personal lifestyle choices, visions for the future. It provided that sense of purpose, that feeling of being on the ‘right side’ of history, battling entropy with integrated design. It was, in effect, the operating system.

Section 3: Noticing the Gaps: Where Theory Met Reality

The first crack in my permaculture worldview appeared in 2010, though I didn’t recognize it at the time. I was doing an internship at Green Phoenix Permaculture, a learning center in Upstate New York. Some fellow interns had gone away for a weekend workshop with Susun Weed, a renowned herbalist. When Susun heard they were working at a permaculture learning center, she jokingly jabbed: “Oh, permaculture—that’s that thing for people who don’t know anything about farming.”

At the time, her comment really irked me. I was a true believer in the whole permaculture thing, despite deliberately not following the standard path of getting a permaculture design certificate. But as time went on and I gained more experience, I began to see the uncomfortable truth in her observation. Permaculture had become this worldview where you could be doing something that wasn’t any better than conventional farming or homesteading—but if you called it ‘permaculture,’ suddenly it sounded more advanced, special, and successful.

Years later, my friend Scott captured this dynamic perfectly when he quipped: “All you need to get a permaculture design certificate is a free weekend and $1,000.” His joke highlighted how the certification process had become more about paying for a course than demonstrating actual competence or wisdom earned through experience.

Susun’s early warning and Scott’s later observation began to make sense as I spent more time immersed in this Permaculture Weltanschauung. What felt so coherent on paper started revealing inconsistencies when it met the messy reality of human interaction. It wasn’t a sudden shock, more like a slow dawning, a growing sense of disconnect. I began observing patterns where the pronounced ethics, especially ‘People Care,’ didn’t always line up with how some proponents actually operated.

You’d come across individuals deeply invested in the global vision, yet perhaps less skilled in straightforward communication, or coming across as dismissive towards differing viewpoints. There sometimes seemed to be a tendency towards rigidity – holding the permaculture principles as fixed rules rather than flexible guidelines. This could lead to impatience or dismissal of those outside the immediate circle – like conventional farmers working within different constraints, or newcomers just starting their learning journey. You might also notice groups forming that felt a bit exclusive, even if unintentionally.

I experienced this gap firsthand in a professional context. I took on contract design work for a company firmly rooted in the permaculture world. The woman who hired me was initially inspiring, and our working relationship felt solid. We agreed during negotiations that a formal contractor’s agreement would be put in place. However, that contract never materialized, and in the flow of starting the work, I let it slide. Later, when an invoice wasn’t paid according to its “Due on Receipt” terms, I inquired. The response was, “We do a 30 day payment cycle” – a detail never communicated to me. Not too long after, communication from her ceased altogether, although whether it was related to the payment query, I can’t say. Despite being listed as a team member on their website, I heard nothing for months. Eventually, her business partner contacted me to tie up some loose ends, with no explanation for the previous silence or her absence. After that final bit of work, communication stopped again, and I later found I’d been removed from their website team page without any notification.

Instances like this, while perhaps seeming mundane in the business world, take on a different weight within a movement explicitly championing ethics like ‘People Care’ and ‘Fair Share.’ The lack of clear agreements, unilateral changes to terms, and poor communication culminating in seemingly being ghosted – it directly undermines the message.

This disconnect wasn’t limited to business dealings; it sometimes showed up in the behavior of well-known personalities within the movement. I recall teaching as part of a core team for a 10-day skills-based design course. We learned on short notice that a prominent figure in the permaculture world was essentially going to drop in on the first day while on a US tour for a video series. Initially, it sounded like an exciting opportunity. When he arrived with his cameraman and his associate, the dynamic felt … off. The associate mirrored the prominent figure’s style closely. While the main figure was chummy with the course host (another familiar face in the subculture), he was noticeably distant towards the rest of the teaching team, projecting an air of superiority – a definite “visiting guru” vibe, which his associate seemed to echo. The cameraman, interestingly, was incredibly friendly and personable. That evening, the prominent figure gave a talk at a local church, promoted as a significant event. It was standing room only, costing $15 for entry. He was a captivating speaker, but the talk itself pivoted heavily into promoting his new website – essentially a social network for permaculture designers, teachers, and practitioners – and his online PDC. The feedback from several attendees afterward was disappointment; they felt they’d essentially paid for an advertisement. The following day, as the course began, I remember him observing, walking around with his hands clasped behind his back, peering at things. The overall impression was aloof and disconnected. Frankly, the whole encounter was a huge turn off.

Experiencing these kinds of things firsthand – the professional disregard in one case, the perceived ego and commercial self-interest layered over a community event in another – really underscored the hypocrisy I was sensing.

The key issue, repeating itself in different forms, wasn’t simply seeing human flaws. It was noticing how the strong belief in the mission’s importance, or perhaps the status gained within the movement, sometimes seemed to allow behavior that directly contradicted the core ethics to be overlooked or excused. The focus on ‘Earth Care’ and the big picture of ‘Fair Share’ occasionally overshadowed the day-to-day necessity of professional respect, clear agreements, humility, and empathetic ‘People Care.’ The grand objective, or the personal brand built upon it, could sometimes make room for being, well, a bit of a dickhead without facing much internal critique. It was this accumulating pattern – the gap between the ideal and the practice, highlighted by personal experiences like these – that made the idealized worldview start to feel less stable, less complete than it first appeared.

Section 4: The Mirror on the Compost Pile: Naval Ravikant’s Insight

For years, the ideas and experiences I’ve been describing bounced around in my head. There was this persistent tension: a deep passion for what permaculture principles and practices had brought into my life – the connection to land, the tangible skills, the ecological understanding – coexisting with a growing unease about the gaps I observed, where the whole ethos seemed to disconnect from the sometimes inconsistent reality of how some of its proponents behaved. I wrestled with this dissonance, trying to reconcile the inspiring vision with these observations.

Then, one day, almost unrelatedly, I encountered a quote from the entrepreneur and thinker Naval Ravikant:

“Your family is broken but you’re going to fix the world.”

It was like a lightning strike. Suddenly, all those disparate thoughts, observations, and uneasy feelings coalesced. This simple sentence seemed to capture the crux of the issue I couldn’t quite articulate. It offered a potential key to understanding the patterns I’d seen and the tension I felt.

The power of the quote, as I interpreted it, lies in its understanding of human psychology. The “broken family” doesn’t necessarily mean literal relatives; it felt like a metaphor for unresolved personal issues, communication difficulties, emotional immaturity, unhealthy relationship patterns, maybe even past trauma – the messy, often difficult stuff close to home, within ourselves and our immediate interactions. And “fixing the world”? That’s the grand external mission, the noble cause – in this case, designing food forests, healing ecosystems, building resilient communities through Permaculture. Naval’s insight suggested that sometimes, the intense focus on the latter – the world-fixing – can become an elaborate, often unconscious, way to avoid dealing with the former, the “brokenness” within.

This lens helped contextualize what I’d seen. Could the dismissal of outsiders, the poor communication, the focus on personal brands over community well-being, stem partly from this dynamic? Was the fervent devotion to the “world-saving” aspect of Permaculture sometimes compensating for underdeveloped skills or unaddressed issues in the personal sphere?

Crucially, though, the quote hit me on both the macro and micro level. It wasn’t just a tool for analyzing the movement or others within it. It turned the mirror directly back on me. I had to confront my own “brokenness” – my own struggles with anger, my own communication deficiencies that I was actively working on. The quote’s central theme – trying to fix the world from a broken home, so to speak – wasn’t just something they did. So have I!

Was my intense dedication to the hard physical work and the ecological mission also, in part, a way to sidestep some of my own interpersonal challenges? It forced a difficult but necessary acknowledgment: To what extent was I participating in the very pattern I was finding fault with? Recognizing my own potential entanglement in this dynamic was a vital, humbling part of the whole realization. It highlighted how easily outward actions, particularly negative ones towards others, can be an extension of our own internal landscape – how harshly we treat others often mirrors how harshly our inner critic treats ourselves. It shattered the illusion that simply adopting the right ideology guarantees right action or personal integration. If we struggle with genuinely caring for ourselves, how can the ‘People Care’ ethic manifest authentically towards others? The quote wasn’t about assigning blame; it was about understanding a potentially universal human tendency, one that I was not immune to, that operates on both large and small scales.

Section 5: Walking My Own Path: Beyond Labels and Dogma

These realizations about the potential pitfalls of the idealized Permaculture Weltanschauung didn’t appear in a vacuum; they landed on fertile ground prepared by a long-standing personal inclination. From the beginning of my journey into this work, long before the specific disappointments with behavior became clear, I felt a resistance to simply adopting the standard labels and paths.

Even back then, I consciously chose not to take a Permaculture Design Course (PDC). This wasn’t initially driven by a critique of the movement, but more by my own nature. I’ve never been drawn to rigid labels or conforming to the ‘beaten path’. There was a strong desire to learn through deep study, hands-on experience, trial and error – essentially, to figure things out for myself rather than receiving a pre-packaged certification or identity. I wanted the knowledge and skills to be genuinely internalized, integrated through my own process.

The later observations – the disconnect between ethics and actions, the patterns illuminated by Naval’s quote, Susan Weed’s prescient jab about permaculture being for people who don’t know farming, and Scott’s quip about the PDC being just a weekend and $1,000 – served to reinforce this initial instinct. Witnessing the potential for dogma and the ways the ‘Movement’ identity could sometimes shield questionable conduct made me feel validated in my choice to seek knowledge and build competence more independently. It confirmed my sense that true integration required more than just adopting the terminology or completing the standard course.

This perspective naturally shapes how I position myself and my work today. It’s why, even though my current work operates under the name ‘Mountain Run Permaculture’ – acknowledging the term’s recognition and my respect for many of its practical principles – my intention is fundamentally different from embracing the full-blown Weltanschauung. Using the name isn’t about claiming allegiance to the entire ideological package or suggesting I’ve perfectly mastered all its tenets, especially the interpersonal ones. Far from it; the self-reflection prompted by these experiences is ongoing. Instead, it’s about trying to embody a more grounded approach: focusing on the practical application of ecological design principles while consciously stepping away from the performative aspect of the ethical pronouncements. It’s about not using ‘People Care’ as a slogan or shield, but trying (imperfectly, like anyone) to integrate responsible conduct into the work itself.

Crucially, it’s also about rejecting the notion that Permaculture is THE singular answer. I’ve always maintained that permaculture is part of what I do, a valuable source of tools and insights, but it’s not the whole story. My approach draws from a wide range of sources, experiences, and disciplines. Permaculture principles are integrated into a broader framework, not followed as exclusive dogma. This integrated perspective, drawing from many streams, feels essential for avoiding the pitfalls of any single, all-encompassing worldview and is the foundation I continue to build upon.

Section 6: Conclusion: Life After the ‘Death’ – Towards Integration

So, when I say “Permaculture is Dead,” what does that ultimately mean? It’s not a cynical dismissal of valuable ecological knowledge or a rejection of the need for regenerative practices. Far from it. It signifies the necessary death of Permaculture as THE Answer, as the infallible ideology, the comprehensive Weltanschauung that promised holistic salvation but sometimes failed under the weight of its own dogma and the imperfections of its adherents.

The journey I’ve described, marked by observation and uncomfortable self-reflection, suggests that when any potentially useful system hardens into such a totalizing worldview, it risks creating blind spots. It can inadvertently provide cover for behaviors that contradict its own core tenets – particularly when the demanding, immediate work of ‘People Care’ gets overshadowed by the grand narrative of ‘Earth Care’ and ‘Fair Share’.

Naval Ravikant’s stark insight – “Your family is broken but you’re going to fix the world” – was pivotal precisely because it named this dynamic, operating on both the macro level within movements and the micro level within individuals. Recognizing that tendency, not just in others but profoundly in myself, was essential. It highlighted how easily outward actions, particularly negative ones towards others, can be an extension of our own internal landscape – how harshly we treat others often mirrors how harshly our inner critic treats ourselves. It shattered the illusion that simply adopting the right ideology guarantees right action or personal integration. If we struggle with genuinely caring for ourselves, how can the ‘People Care’ ethic manifest authentically towards others?

But the death of an idol doesn’t have to lead to nihilism. In fact, letting go of Permaculture-as-Weltanschauung feels liberating. It clears the space for a more honest, humble, and genuinely integrated approach to emerge. It allows us to pick up the useful tools and principles without the burden of ideological purity tests or the need to defend the indefensible actions sometimes carried out under its banner.

This path forward demands prioritizing authenticity over performance. It means recognizing that ‘People Care’ isn’t just a bullet point in an ethical triad; it’s the difficult, ongoing, foundational work of self-awareness, communication, responsibility, and basic human decency. It requires acknowledging that we all have our ‘broken bits’ and that tending to them is inseparable from any meaningful effort to heal larger systems. It means drawing wisdom from many sources, integrating knowledge critically rather than subscribing wholesale to a single doctrine.

For me, this ongoing process involves trying to codify my own framework, drawing from 16+ years of direct experience – the successes, the failures, the joys of the physical work, and the hard-learned lessons in human dynamics. It’s not about creating a new dogma, but about fostering a practice grounded in reality, committed to continuous learning, and striving – imperfectly – to bridge the gap between noble ideals and everyday actions.

Ultimately, perhaps the most regenerative act we can undertake is to cultivate wholeness and integration within ourselves and our immediate relationships, ensuring that our efforts to ‘fix the world’ arise from that grounded place, not projection or avoidance. The principles of ecological design are powerful; they become truly transformative when wielded with humility, self-awareness, and a deep, practical commitment to caring for people, starting with how we care for ourselves and extending naturally outward to how we treat each other.

It’s a continuous practice, this tending of inner and outer landscapes. And on that note, I’d better get going. Plenty of work to do.