Is Permaculture Just for Rich People?
One of the commissioners at the Food Inquiry said their impression was that permaculture was mainly for rich people. They have an important point.
Why Permaculture Has a Reputation for Being Expensive
It’s a fair impression, and there are real reasons for it:
Permaculture Design Certificates typically cost several thousand rand and take two weeks away from work — which is part of the reason I don’t have one.
Much of the movement’s literature assumes land ownership, time wealth, and the ability to absorb years of low productivity while a system establishes itself.
The aesthetic — food forests, cob buildings, mandala gardens — can signal lifestyle consumption rather than practical food production.
Too often, the movement centres the designer: the expert who arrives with knowledge to apply, which can reproduce the exact top-down dynamic it claims to reject, just with composting toilets instead of tractors.
These are serious issues.
The Movement Isn’t the Same as the Principles
I want to separate two things that often get conflated: the permaculture movement as it currently exists, and the agroecological principles that movement describes.
Those principles — observe before acting, waste nothing, stack functions, use edges, let the system do the work — are not new, and they do not belong exclusively to permaculture. They describe how subsistence farmers, Indigenous land managers, and smallholders across Africa and the Global South have farmed for centuries.
Why These Principles Matter
From this angle, I love “care of people, care of planet, return of the surplus,” and the ten permaculture principles. They’re a way of emulating and respecting non-extractive systems, where peasants and subsistence farmers have so much to teach me. Rather than teach expensive courses, I believe in breaking things down into much simpler units through repeated contact, so that people can figure out their own priorities and how to apply these principles.
We keep trying to be an example of meaningful production — and meaningful remediation of waste — on our urban permaculture farm. Skills like these can be shared and replicated because they generally need far less capital than larger-scale agriculture. We’ve learned to apply them hands-on — for example, by growing fruit trees in Cape Town.
Maybe We’ve Been Asking the Wrong Question: Could Permaculture Make Rich People Less Greedy?
I also want to reframe the question a little — to “How does permaculture relate to economic inequality?” or, more provocatively, “Could permaculture help the rich become less greedy?”
We’ve all heard that once we have enough money to cover our basics, having more won’t actually make us happier. And yet it’s incredibly hard to step off the hedonic treadmill and live according to our values, because norms and school and neighbourhoods and work take over. Permaculture offers an off-ramp — a framework for thinking and living in terms of values, gradually subtracting things, and maybe making radical simplifications.
The final ethic, “return of the surplus,” is a reminder of abundance — and that it’s possible to share that abundance. Permaculture principles offer a practical framework for returning to our basic humanity, and for living modestly with a sense of enough.
Imagine if the super wealthy had a sense of enough — how much more could be shared? That’s worth working towards. It’s so worthwhile to imagine food and living systems so irresistible that they satisfy our needs and let us feel safe enough to let go of our greed.
No system will ever be perfect, but building modest, human-scale systems is a very meaningful way to explore our amazing world.
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