What I've Learned About Strategy from Permaculture

I’m up on an island in British Columbia teaching permaculture in a beautiful ecovillage called O.U.R. Ecovillage: One United Resource. A permaculture course, as I teach it, is pretty full-on, three sessions a day, morning, noon and night, with lots of hands-on projects, which will explain why I haven’t been writing a lot at the moment.

But today I have some time to catch up. Awhile back, I put out a podcast about what I learned about strategy from permaculture, and now that I’m immersed in teaching it, it’s on my mind again. So let me begin with my personal definition of permaculture: a system of ecological design that takes nature as our model to meet human needs while regenerating the environment around us.

Permaculture draws from many different sources: indigenous practices, traditional farming methods, biological and ecological science and systems theory. While it began focused on food growing and land management, it’s grown to incorporate built environments, economics and social permaculture, and become a global movement.

Permaculture informs strategy because, in essence, strategy is design, that is, a vision of what we want and a plan for how to get there. In permaculture, our designs are constrained by three core ethics: care for the earth, care for the people, and care for the future. Or sometimes “earth care, people care and fair share.” Future care implies taking you’re your fair share, limiting consumption and returning surpluses back into the system rather than extracting them.

These three ethics could serve as a foundation for a just and sane society. We cannot survive if we don’t care for the earth or the life support systems that sustain us. To do that, we also need to care for other people, to understand that we are all interconnected and in relationship, and that it’s our responsibility to provide a viable future for those who come after us.

By following these ethics and learning from nature, we can create abundance. Permaculture doesn’t preach scarcity, nor condemn us to a grim life of food lines and scratchy gray wool garments, but rather envisions lives in which we enjoy healthy and delicious food, time to share with friends, family and neighbors, leisure to enjoy the beauty of nature, lives in which we work hard at satisfying tasks that provide for real needs, and also have energy left to create celebrations, art, beauty and pleasures of many kinds. We do this not by endlessly consuming more and more resources, but by using what we have around us more intelligently, efficiently, and sensitively to close loops and create regenerative systems.

What are the lessons for political strategy? First of all, when we understand strategy as design, we start with a goal in mind. We must know what we want, not just what we don’t want. We need to hold a clear vision of what our longed-for world looks like and feels like. I’ve learned the same lessons from creating ritual and casting spells: having a clear vision of what you want is what directs the energy in needed to get it.

Secondly, in permaculture we do a site analysis. We look at the terrain and ask “What are the forces impacting us? What are the limiting factors? Resources? Opportunities? Dangers?” On a piece of land, we might be looking at sun, wind, soil, from which direction a flood might come or a wildfire burn more most fiercely. In political activism, we might ask what resources we have of time, energy, personnel, or money, who our potential allies might be. What groups are already working on this issue how could we support their efforts rather than reproducing them? What groups might be aligned with us that we could build coalitions with? What are our limiting factors and constraints? They might be ethical constraints: for example, we will not spread false information or carry weapons to a protest. They might be limits of money, energy, media access or something else. Once we know what the limitations are, we can embrace them if they are actually helpful, like ethical constraints, or look for workarounds if they are limits on resources.

Where are the opportunities presented to us right now? Are there particular issues that can galvanize support? Potent anniversaries? We can’t always anticipate what event will capture public attention, but we can be prepared when something does to organize and mobilize quickly.

What are the dangers? Are there potential mistakes we could make that would be devastating to our cause, and how can we avoid them? Are there tactics that will increase our physical or legal danger, or potentially anger or endanger those who might otherwise support us? Are the potential benefits of those tactics worth the risk? I’ve seen us argue a lot, in the movement, about whether certain tactics are violent or nonviolent—breaking windows, for example. Rarely have I seen us stop and ask, what would breaking windows accomplish? What message would it send? What additional danger might it create? Are there goals it would achieve that make the increased risk worthwhile? What potential allies might it attract? Repel? How does it fit into our overall goals?

Sometimes there are there dangers we must accept, if we want to take action at all. At this political moment, it can be very hard to predict what the consequences might be for resistance. Can we provide support to mitigate the risks? For example, if we plan a strategy that includes civil disobedience, we must also organize for jail support, legal support and collective solidarity.

Once we’ve done our analysis and formed our plan, we might think about strategy somewhat like creating a garden. First, we must prepare the ground. In the garden, that might mean composting and amending the soil, or planting a cover crop. In organizing, what education and outreach can we do to prepare people for the actions we might ask them to take, or to build solidarity for actions we intend to engage in. In Miami, in 2004 when we organized a mobilization against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit, we literally planted a garden together with local residents in public housing as we were preparing for the mobilization. A local permaculturalist had brought 100 ground cherry plants that we carried through the mostly Black neighborhoods and gave away before the days of action. On the day of the big march, when the police attacked and chased marchers into the neighborhoods, people took protestors in and hid them. Months after the action was over, some protestors remained in the area and continued to help cultivate the garden.

We need to cultivate relationships even more than vegetables, the relationships that can provide support and solidarity in the long run, because the moment of crisis is too late to begin building the support when we need most need it.

When we’ve prepared the ground, we can plant seed. We might plan a series of actions that build on each other over time, perhaps starting with very safe tactics and building up to more confrontational actions. The No Kings marches are an example: starting with small, local actions they built a coalition that organized multiple major marches in a year, culminating in possibly the larger political protest ever in March of 2026. Some activists criticized the marches, saying that peaceful protest is not enough, that we need a general some more militant form of action, perhaps a general strike. But a general strike does not arise out of nowhere. The marches, the letter writing, the trainings, the affinity groups that have formed can all be seen as seeds that can sprout into longer term and committed actions. The No Kings organizers themselves escalated to a Mayday action of No Work, No School and No Shopping, with hopes to build toward a general strike sometime in the future.

When we do take action or plan a campaign, we need to also consider how to build in resilience. In the movement, we talk a lot about resistance, the ability to stand up against oppression. But we also need resilience: the ability to bounce back after a disturbance, to return after an attack, to stand up after you’ve been knocked down. That resilience comes from many sources: from diversity of people, of perspectives, of groups and organizations that make up our movement, from having multiple sources of leadership and vision, but most of all, from the relationships we build along the way of trust and solidarity.

And finally, we must have a plan for the harvest. What are we going to do if we win? A campaign, an issue, an election? What does victory look like, and how do we build on it for the next campaign and the ongoing struggle?

Mamdani won the race to be Mayor of New York, against the odds, with some specific ideas about how he would govern. And as soon as he was sworn in, he began to implement them, starting with free child care. The more specific we are about how to realize our ideals and how we would use power when we have it, the more we can achieve, and the more trust and support we can build.

So even when you feel like you’re losing, begin the planning for when you win. Envision a world of liberty and justice for all, and plan the steps and the policies that could make it real.

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