“We’re Still on That Treadmill”: Privilege, Reflexivity, and the Disruptive Potential of Permaculture

ABSTRACT Permaculture, short-hand for “permanent agriculture,” is an ethical system and set of engineering and design principles, aimed at growing food locally while building community. Many adherents believe that it carries the potential to transform and re-localize our economic system. To explore these views, we interviewed 56 permaculturists in the western Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. Findings demonstrate that participants view the non-hierarchical, self-reliance, and exchange-based aspects of permaculture as potentially liberating. At the same time, they feel stuck and embedded within existing capitalist market relations, exemplified by land ownership, costs of implementing permaculture landscapes, and the need for employment-based income. Many tensions likewise emerge from their own class positions and the privileges associated with, and benefits accruing from, current capitalist modes of exchange and ongoing settler colonialism. We conclude by discussing implications for theory and empirical research in environmental sociology and cognate areas.


Introduction
Permaculture is an ethical system and set of design principles, aimed at growing food locally while building community.With adherents now numbering in the millions worldwide, permaculture is a movement for change, and one that might challenge traditional, monoculture forms of agriculture.In diverse climates, permaculturists work to build more resilient communities through ecological and social design principles.In doing so, the movement fosters egalitarian ideals, known by permaculturists ("permies") as the principle of "fair share" or the idea that surpluses are to be shared with the community, resource hoarding and accumulation are to be avoided, and any surplus organic materials beyond what the community needs should be returned to the earth.
In following this "fair share" idea, some adherents have argued that permaculture rejects the logic of capitalism, whereby exchanges carry a monetary value and the objective is wealth accumulation.In doing so, they have argued that permaculture begets the potential for a more egalitarian world, one free of class antagonisms and their associated poverty and dispossession.As it is envisioned, permaculture is more than a set of principles for how to grow food; it is a liberatory and revolutionary ideology.Yet "permies" continue to live and work within national and global economies, where land is mortgaged and owned, and where commodities are exchanged for money.They also garden on, and occupy, land stolen from Indigenous peoples, who themselves practicedand still practicemany of the approaches to food production and community that are commonly enacted via permaculture.
These tensions expose several key questions for the current analysis: In what ways do practitioners of permaculture see it as being emancipatory and challenging the logic and practice of capitalism?To what extent do they acknowledge its limitations in doing so?In what ways do practitioners find themselves still embedded in capitalist market relations?Lastly, to what extent do they exhibit reflexivity about the ways their permaculture practice is shaped by their own privileges?
This study uses interview data drawn from 56 permaculture practitioners in the western Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, in both Calgary, Alberta and dispersed through rural areas of interior British Columbia.Using data from those interviews, we show the tensions that exist between the "fair share" ideals, and many of the systemic and economic barriers that permaculturists face in fulfilling them.In doing so, this work teaches us lessons about the hegemony and durability of global neoliberal capitalism.

Review of Literature
Perma-what?
Permaculture is a systems-based design approach with strong ethical guidelines.It can best be understood as "a holistic system of design, based on direct observation of nature, learning from traditional knowledge and the findings of modern science … Permaculture aims to restructure society by returning control of resources for living: food, water, shelter, and the means of livelihood, to ordinary people in their communities, as the only antidote to centralized power" (Veteto and Lockyer 2008, 48).Regarding permaculture, Morel, Leger, and Ferguson (2019) write "In the design of farming systems, permaculturists promote complex multi-strata polycultures involving perennial plants, crop-animal integration, high levels of habitat diversity, whole-landscape water management, and sustainable on-site energy production" (559).What practices or approaches define permaculture?As Hemenway (2015) notes, "If we think of practices such as organic gardening, greywater reuse, natural building, renewable energyand even less tangible activities such as more equitable decision-making and socialjustice methodsas tools for sustainability, then permaculture is the toolbox that helps us organize and decide when and how to use those tools" (xii).
Most social science research on permaculture focuses on eco-villages or intentional communities (Ergas and Clement 2016;Litfin 2013).As useful as that work is, most permaculturists do not live in eco-villages, but either on urban residential lots or on dispersed rural properties.Another line of work looks at community food-producing efforts such as community gardens (McClintock 2010), food sovereignty and local food movements (Alkon and Mares 2012), and food justice initiatives (Ballamingie and Walker 2013;Millner 2017), though little focuses specifically on the set of practices and ethical precepts that compose permaculture.
More than simply a strategy for garden design, however, permaculture contains within it a set of ethical precepts.The three main permaculture ethics are generally understood as Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share.In particular, the latter ethic is useful for this analysis because, as we shall see, the prescription to return surpluses and to share abundance fairly with others, stands in direct opposition to the value system embodied by capitalism.For many permaculturists, their practice is a form of prepping, or anticipation of "the end of the world as we know it" (Ford 2021, 469).

Capitalism and Market Relations
Early theorists like Max Weber held that waged labour, long working hours, and the production of products and services for the marketplacepillars of capitalismwere embedded in the ethos of colonial Americans via Christian scripture (Weber 2001(Weber [1905]]).More recently, environmental sociologists have written of the "Treadmill of Production," an idea that sensitizes us to the ever-increasing intensity and singular focus on profits of our economic system (Schnaiberg 1980).Ecological Marxists add to this body of work by showing how capitalism's "growth imperative," the need to grow the economy by 2-3 percent each year to stave off recessions, correspondingly results in accelerating environmental decline (Foster 2002).As Magdoff and Foster (2011) write, "We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing pace.We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and therefore more expensive consumption" (49).This school of thought emphasizes how the value system that underlies capitalism is ultimately driving environmental decline.
In service of the "fair share" ethic researchers note that permaculturists share tools, seeds, time, produce, and many more resources without expectation of economic remuneration (Lebowitz and Trudeau 2017).The early founders of permaculture saw it as a means of stepping off the treadmill, by encouraging local food production and reinvigorating local networks of interdependence that the capitalist system had broken (Holmgren 2002).These early "founders," however, did not fully understand, appreciate, nor give credit to the deep roots of agriculture established and practiced by communities of colour (Carlisle 2022) or how the design practices of permaculture or ethical precepts stem from Indigenous Knowledge, honed for thousands of years (Gashute and Hale 2023).Nor did they understand the tensions of establishing permaculture practice on land stolen by colonial states (Lundahl 2020).But as Carlisle (2022) reveals, "the more I learned, the more I came to see that regenerative agriculture was neither a relic nor a fantasy.It had always been here, but on the margins" (11).Hence, work on regenerative agriculture should be liberatory, but should also acknowledge that the ideas are not new, but rather have been suppressed.Acknowledging that, however, also means recognizing "how many hours of Indigenous labour went into building up the soils that supported the past two hundred years of European agriculture [and that] the US food system is almost entirely built on the work of Black and Brown people" (Carlisle 2022, 163).These communities, however, have employedand continue to employstrategies of resistance, emphasizing the connection between agriculture and freedom, which has "value for urban farmers and gardeners today who are reconnecting with the soil as a strategy of self-determination and self-sufficiency.These black intellectual traditions paved the way for current conversations about sustainable, organic, and local food, as well as food security and food sovereignty" (White 2019, 61).Many of these approaches derive from decolonial writing and research on permaculture.As Datta (2021) explains, decolonial work involves "a lifelong process of learning, unlearning, and relearning" that is done "to embrace ways of challenging and countering acts of oppression while advancing Indigenous knowledge(s), perspectives, histories, experiences, spirituality, and realities" (1).In permaculture, a decolonial approach often involves not just growing and harvesting food, but cultivating spaces for learning, healing, cross-cultural communication, storytelling, and relationship building.As such, a decolonial permaculture "not only creates a new common space for all, [but] it is also about challenging power and uneven relationship networks" (Datta 2019, 773).
Permaculture-inspired installations can be very costly, and how-to guides for permaculture and urban farming often include recommendations for how to access start-up capital for these projects, including recommendations to "partner with a developer" or "apply for grants" (Hanson and Marty 2012, 77).Questions understandably arise about the ability of permaculturists to break free from capitalist market relations.Daftary-Steel, Herrera, and Porter (2015) explain this incompatibility; businesses who are trying to be self-sufficient through urban agriculture are not able to make a profitable living as the cost and time to grow and care for these plants results in expensive products which are unaffordable to many people (23).The cost of land limits what many permaculturists are able to do; an average sized garden in Vancouver, BC is only four square metresnot large enough to support a family (Hallsworth and Wong 2013, 12).In many instances, growers are limited by the unrealistically high property values (Daftary-Steel, Herrera, and Porter 2015).The commodification and this steep cost of land is not accidental, however.In her work on the Karuk tribe of (what is now) California, Norgaard (2019) shows how "over the past century and a half, traditional Karuk land management practices that generated profound ecological abundance in the Klamath Basin have become criminalized and largely replaced with successive extractive waves of removal of gold, fish, and timber as commodities for sale" (25).What was once an ecologically rich, sustainable, abundant, and shared landscape was stolen, commodified, and treated under capitalism as an extractive hinterland.
Despite the Fair Share ethic, it should not be assumed that permaculture is necessarily anti-capitalist.This approach is reflected in some of the ways that scholars write about permaculture.Lebowitz and Trudeau (2017) contend that capitalism has embraced the environmental sustainability mantra as it can be readily used to accumulate profit.At the same time, permaculture sites require land to be owned and those who work and live on the land often become renters, in a fashion that mimics traditional modes of profit.As Ergas (2021) says in her study of an ecovillage, "the owners pay a mortgage and must ask residents for rent, thus reproducing capitalist economic relations" (83).This, she argues, "interferes with villagers' vision of relating to each other in a non-hierarchical manner."At the same time, urban agriculture has been found to increase property values and contribute to gentrification and displacement (Voicu and Been 2008)making it part and parcel of a historic and ongoing process of displacement of BIPOC communities.
Questions remain, then, about how aware of these inequalities in access permaculturists are, and to what extent their praxis ameliorates these conditionsi.e. to what extent permaculturists practice reflexivity.

Class Privilege, Settler Colonialism, and Reflexivity
Practitioners of permaculture are likewise embedded within the system of inequality and social stratification created by capitalism and colonialism.However, as is often the case with privilege, those who have the most privilege are also unable to see their own privileges and therefore to understand how their social location and positionality affects their practicea phenomenon known as reflexivity (Friedman, O'Brien, and McDonald 2021).
Despite scant research into the area, permaculture practitioners appear to be a privileged population; indeed, certain privileges are necessary to fully participate.Permaculture is learned mainly via Permaculture Design Certificate courses which run many thousands of dollars.As Ergas (2021) learns from one of her participants, courses cost between $1,800 and $2,600 USD for about one month, yet "the fact that nearly half of my interviewees were able to attend these courses speaks to their level of affluence" (87).In an international survey of permaculturists, Ferguson and Lovell (2015) find that "participation as a practitioner … appears to be constrained by access to resources (49)."They also find that permaculture practitioners are diverse in terms of gender, but homogeneously white (Lundahl 2020).For these reasons Massicotte and Kelly-Bisson (2019) find that the cost and inaccessibility of these courses dilute the transformative potential of permaculture.There are also issues of racial inclusivity, a topic that these alternative agriculture movements have, for the most part, avoided.Current uses of landscapes, including by permaculturists, are of course the product of ongoing settler colonialisma process that has displaced Indigenous people, as "settler colonialism is a land-centered project entailing permanent settlement" (Kauanui 2016, 1).Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson (2017) notes that she "cannot think of a system that is more counter to Nishnaabeg thought than capitalism" (77).

A Bit About the Two Sites
Calgary, Alberta is a city of 1.4 million people located just east of the Rocky Mountains.Alberta is particularly vulnerable to climate change (Sandford and Freek 2014) and also prone to financial booms and busts, as its economy is intimately tied to global oil prices, is poorly prepared for these busts (Billon and Good 2016), and is home to energy companies that finance organizations casting doubt on climate science (Davidson 2012).The formal permaculture community has only existed in Calgary since about 2009, however Indigenous peoples have enacted many of the ideas of permaculture for much longer.Southern Alberta sits on the hereditary homelands of the Niitsitapi (the Blackfoot Confederacy), the Îyârhe Nakoda, and Tsuut'ina Nations.This land became home to non-Indigenous peoples through the negotiation of Treaty 7 and other agreements, the terms of which have not been honoured.Prior to contact, the Blackfoot people hunted, fished, and grew food using many principles of sustainability, living withrather than againstnature (Crowshoe and Lertzman 2020).
Though living on the land sustainability for more than 6,000 years, the Blackfoot people were forcibly removed by the Colonial state, put onto reserves, and Indigenous children were sent to residential schools where many were abused or murdered (Bombay, Matheson, and Anisman 2014).The Indian Act of 1876 dictated how Indigenous peoples could live and the conditions under which they could leave the reserves.As such, many traditional foodways were significantly disrupted or severed, and in recent years Indigenous people of this region have been reclaiming this traditional knowledge and food, though little of the land itself has been returned by the Canadian state.Still, the Blackfoot people in (what is now) Southern Alberta continue to lead the way in growing food, fighting climate change, and living sustainably (Paul et al. 2023).
The West Kootenay region of British Columbia, including the town of Nelson, provides an interesting and useful contrast.Like much of the interior of B.C., the history of this region was largely shaped by migrants both returning from World War I (Koroscil 1982) and fleeing conscription into the US military during the Vietnam War (Rodgers 2014).This history earned Nelson the nickname "Resisterville," as American dissidents went back to the land (Rodgers 2014).The community embraced collectivism, and stressed "rural essentials such as canning, construction, and organic farming methods" (100).This history made Nelson an ideal place for the methods and ethics of permaculture to take root as they spread to North America during the 1980s.Today, the Kootenays are a Canadian hub for the permaculture and local-food movements.Besides a long-established Permaculture Guild, Nelson also boasts a Permaculture Design course, a local Young Agrarians group, the West Kootenay Permaculture Co-Op, a network of eco-villages, and a Permaculture Institute that was first established in 1991.The West Kootenays are the traditional home of the Kutenai and Sinixt Indigenous peoples, who have lived on the land for thousands of years and sustainably fished, hunted, and grew food.Following the arrival of traders in the 1840s, the appropriation of land by the Canadian state via Treaty 8 and the subsequent forced relocation, impacted the Kutenai and Sinixt connections to place and methods of procuring food.Both First Nations were impacted with the drawing of the US-Canada international border through their traditional territory, limiting movement, foodways, and family/kin networksthough the people of these nations also exercised agency and resistance (Lozar 2018).From 1855 to 1875 more than half of the region's Indigenous population was decimated (Taylor 2020).Contemporary Kutenai and Sinixt people have reinvigorated the connection to land and food.For instance, the Autonomous Sinixt people, along with the First Peoples Cultural Council, created and launched a "countermapping" of the region, with Indigenous place names in sn-səlxcin, the Interior Salish Dialect of the Sinixt, highlighting traditional landmarks (rivers, mountains, animal migration pathways) while omitting landmarks added by the colonial state (roads, highways, cities, etc) (Autonomous Sinixt 2021).Research shows that Indigenous people are heavily engaged in sustainable agriculture, market gardening, and other food productive practices (Taylor 2020).

Data and Methods
In Fall of 2020 we undertook a project to interview permaculturists in Western Canada.Beginning in October, we reached out on social media to local permaculture groups in Calgary to recruit participants.We specified only that the potential participant identifies as a permaculturist, and we found this varied considerably in interpretation; people reached out who had been practicing permaculture for many years and some reached out who were new.Participants were offered a $25 gift card to a local garden store to thank them for their participation.In Calgary, we recruited 35 interview participants, and conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with them from October 2020 through April 2021.
Beginning in April 2021, we reached out on social media to permaculture groups in the interior of British Columbia.Participants were offered a $25 gift card to a regional seed company.We then conducted online interviews with 21 B.C. practitioners, wrapping up in November 2021, and giving us a total sample of 56.Interviews lasted between 40 and 180 min, with a mean of around 85 min.
Interviews would have ideally taken place outdoors, at each participant's garden or property.However, the COVID pandemic made that impossible.Our university also restricted inter-provincial travel during the entire duration of data collection due to the pandemic.Thus, conducting our interviews on Google Meet proved the next-best option; as Lareau (2021) says, the quality of online interviews is typically about 75-80 percent as good as face-to-face interviews, so this approach proved the prudent choice.
Recordings were then transcribed verbatim, some by the second author of this article, and some by a professional transcriptionist.Following transcription, we gave participants an opportunity to edit their transcripts prior to data analysis, in order to make sure that writing originating from this work accurately portrays their experiences (Mdee 2016).
Both authors developed codes for the qualitative data through consultation with the interview guide and reading the transcripts.We then loaded the transcripts into NVivo, where they were coded by both authors, a process called descriptive or pattern-coding (Maxwell 2005).
Of the 56 participants, 78 percent (n = 44) identified as women, and a couple identified as nonbinary.82 percent of participants (n = 46) had a spouse or long-term partner with whom they cohabited.Their occupations varied, but included Registered Nurses, teachers, dental hygienists, full-time farmers, musicians, petroleum engineers, herbalists, public servants, landscape designers, property managers, and COVID contact tracers.Though we did not ask specifically about educational attainment, nearly half mentioned having a post-secondary degree.The vast majority (n = 43, or 77 percent) owned their home and/or land.Only three out of 56 (5 percent) identified as BIPOC, including one South Asian participant, one Central Asian participant, and one who claimed to have "indigenous heritage"numbers consistent with both participant complaints that the permaculture community is too white, and also with research suggesting that this is the case (Ferguson and Lovell 2015).40 out of the 56 (71 percent) had completed the Permaculture Design Certificate course.
In the analyses that follow, all participant names were replaced with pseudonyms.The Human Research Ethics Board at Mount Royal University approved the study.

Findings
Despite the "fair-share" ethic of permaculture, our participants grappled with many contradictions.To demonstrate this, first, we discuss how they viewed permaculture as liberatory, and as a direct challenge to the values that undergird a capitalist economy.Second, we show how they discussed their embeddedness within capitalist market relations.We follow this up with an examination of participants' degree of reflexivity regarding their class privilege and lack of awareness of settler colonial logics and dynamics.

Emancipatory Ideals
Many of the permaculturists voiced hope that permaculture may prove liberatory, and a challenge to global, corporate, neoliberal capitalism, introducing alternative ways of living, producing food, and exchanging goods and services at a local level.Julie-Anne hopes that with permaculture, we can "figure out how to keep our seed stock alive and to be resilient and to help one another and to get off the hamster wheel a little bit … I don't think it is the only way, but I think it offers a lot of solutions or alternative answers to what we have kind of been force fed." Rebecca specifically contrasts this approach to the values of capitalism, saying "I think permaculture comes down to cooperation.It is cooperation between community members, it is cooperation between people and the earth, cooperation between that, and I mean capitalism doesn't support cooperation."Marshall also articulates these values very clearly in his statement that permaculture "counters capitalism because capitalism does not want to see everyone as equal and in my understanding of permaculture, everyone is equal, and we are all connected, and we are all here to help each other out … .Capitalism cannot exist without exploitation and permaculture is non-exploitive in theory."To this end, many of the permaculturists viewed capitalism as peaking or beginning to fade out; as Karen tells us it "is bringing humanity out of this era of patriarchy and … hierarchical structures based on profit."She says, "it will make capitalism obsolete."In short, this was a commonly held view that the values of permaculture stand in direct contrast to the values of capitalism and would help to replace capitalism with a more humane system focused on equality and cooperation.Without saying as much, or attributing credit, participants connect permaculture to ideas stemming from Indigenous knowledge stressing cooperation, equality, and sustainability (Walsh-Dilley 2013).Though the ideals are laudable, failure to trace their roots to Indigenous ways of knowing suggests a knowledge gap in the permaculture community and a failure to engage in permaculture in a decolonial manner.

Embeddedness Within Market Relations
Despite these ethics, participants in our study revealed how they felt trapped by the larger structure, processes, and institutional demands of capitalism.Catherine tells us that "I think what challenges I have had is just that we are in a system that doesn't leave you with a lot of choice and it is extremely hard to try and make decisions that try and get out of that."Pearl adds "Does permaculture present a challenge to capitalism?Like, is it headed in the direction of communism?No.Not in the slightest." One of the specific challenges they noted is the necessity of land ownership.Despite their communal intentions, they acknowledged that in a capitalist economy, land still must be owned and mortgaged.They spoke about the high cost of land in Western Canada.Valerie tells us that "Presently we are looking to buy, [but] unfortunately … the land here is just insanely and stupidly crazy expensive."Ella-Ann shares this perspective, telling us how this cost of land prevents her from enacting the "fair share" value of permaculture: "If I was rich and I had lots of money I think the right thing to do is provide land and give land back to others who can't buy it.I think it is the management of land and the ethics behind that and the fact that the only people who can do it are wealthy is a problem."Ella-Ann's comment can also be seen as tapping into the intersection of class and race, as she wishes to use her desired wealth to "give land back," which likely refers Indigenous peoples.But, as it stands, land is expensive and held disproportionately by white settlers who work to define what permaculture is and how it is practiced.
The second way that permaculturists' work and activities are embedded within capitalism's market relations is through the cost of learning about permaculture.The PDC courses are very expensive, with the largest PDC course offered in Calgary ranging from $799 to $1,899 for what is normally a two-week intensive course, but can vary considerably.40 out of the 56 participants had completed the PDC course; though none mentioned that having completed the PDC created any observable hierarchy within the permaculture community, it is possible that is nevertheless the case.
Our research participants found this PDC cost problematic.Angela tells us that "I find that most of the permaculture certificates are not financially accessible, not accessible in terms of their time and commitment and often makes me not really want to do them … I feel like if this is something that is only accessible to people who can take two weeks off of work and spend thousands, and thousands, and thousands of dollars, then … it definitely turns me off."Angela then reflects upon how the individuals and companies offering these PDC courses must make an income from doing so, and thus are firmly embedded within capitalist market relations.She says, "I get that the facilitators also need to make a living … but there is an accessibility piece there to me that really turns me off and I hope to see a better integration of food growing processes that is inclusive to all people regardless of their income." In referring to one of the local PDC courses offered virtually during the COVID pandemic, Grace adds "It [was] running about $1,500, so they cut their price in half … Even $700 was still a choke, to be honest."She did remark as well about what a lucrative opportunity offering PDC courses can be for organizers, saying "they normally had 15-18 participants at a PDC … [During the pandemic] they had over 300 people doing their course online!… Well even do the math on 300 people times seven hundred bucks![$210,000].They would have done extremely well financially." Participants told us about how they struggled to keep capitalist profitseeking out of their various community initiatives.As part of her permaculture practice, Kaitlin found herself feeling conflicted as community members wished to use her organization for individual profit-seeking.She tells us.
"Some of our board members and people within our group wanted to do a CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] on the side together and advertise through our group, which was like a non-profit food security group.So they wanted to do that on the side and make money … I always struggled with those things because I really felt like everything our organization did should be free of charge, it is like knowledge sharing." Similarly, Yvette tells the story of how her work editing a publication came into conflict with her practice as a permaculturist.When she wanted to run a story on compost tea spraying for increasing soil health, she ran up against an advertiser in her publication.She says, "My advertisers [don't] like it because you are telling [people] not to buy new soil in the spring, that you don't need fertilizer and that you just need to keep what your garden gives you but no, no, we must throw that all away because then we can buy new and that was the message, I had got from that and it was a real smack in the face.It showed that we really are being shaped to be consumers rather than to provide for ourselves." The final way Western Canadian permaculturists found themselves embedded within capitalist market relations was by subsidizing their permaculture activities through market income and wage labour.Most participants in the Calgary portion of the sample, though fewer in the British Columbia portion of the sample, held employment in occupations, including corporate and/or fossil fuel jobs.As Jessica reveals, "I still have a normal 9:00-5:00 job in an engineering business, and an engineering business that works with the oil and gas industry, so I am living the dichotomy of working for the evil giant on one hand, and on the other using as little of that energy as possible in my house."Like Jessica, most participants were aware of those contradictionswanting to live a sustainable, locally-focused life yet depending on market income often derived from large multinational companies.Catherine is also aware of these contradictions, telling us.
"There is a lot of barriers to becoming a threat to capitalism and by people staying paycheck to paycheck … Finances [are] huge because it keeps you working which is hard because then you can't take the time to get out of the system … If we can get people off of this treadmill then they can do that and it is really hard, it is really hard.We have tried our whole life and we are still on that treadmill, or partly on it at least." [emphasis added] Bianca tells us that this embeddedness is intentional, and it serves to support the system in myriad ways.She says "one way or another they want to turn you into a slave to the system.They want to have you in enough debt and so busy and so stressed that you can't look around and then talk to your neighbours and figure out that this maybe isn't working for anybody."Like Bianca, Samantha believes that the logic of capitalism has pervaded even the permaculture movement and has stymied its revolutionary potential.Connecting specifically to the right-wing politics involved in many prepping movements (Ford 2021), she says "it is that kind of survivalist/libertarian/ I am going go to the woods or I need to buy my farm and I am going to be self-sustainable, I will need no external inputs, I am going to save myself and my family from the coming apocalypse.There is that mentality under the surface with some of this … .back-to-the-landkind of philosophy and so sometimes I see that [expressed] and I find that frustrating because it is hyper-individualism, which is a result of free market capitalism." The Permaculture of the Privileged The previous section showed us some of the ways that permaculturists remain embedded within capitalist market relations.Besides land ownership, what elements add to the cost for them?This section explores many of these barriers of cost, by looking at how and why privileged community members may have more ability to engage in permaculture practice, as well as their awareness of that privilege.
First, participants are reflective about the fact that designing a permaculture landscape can be expensive.Doing so requires buying or sourcing tools, weeping tile (perforated pipe), greenhouse materials, lumber, rocks, sand, soil, immature fruit trees, and thousand-liter rain tanks.As Samantha says, "The people I know who have been able to permaculture their urban property, they spent $12,000-$20,000 to even $30,000 to do that."Several participants mentioned that these costs are often written off as simply the necessary commitment that needs to be made, but they also found problems in this logic.Charu (one of the few BIPOC participants, though as she admits, quite wealthy and therefore still privileged) says "So, when I need these large cubic big things of soil and compost, a normal person can't afford that.It is very expensive, and it is not fair to have to say that if you really cared then you would make those sacrifices, I just find that a really awful thing to say to someone."For some participants, the cost of these implements and materials is simply out of reach.Aurora says "So, yeah, if money was no object, I would love to incorporate some of those things here in our climate which is much harsher because it would probably cost me $1 million to build that brick enclosed garden and the courtyards and fountains, all of those lovely things they have built there.Maybe if I win the lottery one day." Second, they tell us that the costs become higher for lower-income community members.Catherine says "Let's say gardening, it can be done cheap, but the thing is, if you are financially disadvantaged you tend to rent, for example, instead of owning a home, you have jobs and what ends up happening is that you don't have time.Time is a piece of it and if you don't have something like a vehicle you can't drive around the city doing free Kijiji [like Craigslist] pickups.So, I think it is easy to say as a privileged person, who is middle class, [to say] that it is cheap and that anybody can do it." Third, because of these costly activities, permaculturists are aware that buying food from the marketplace is cheaper than growing it oneself.According to Grace, "I know without COVID, we would have never made a garden because financially it is cheaper to buy your food in the city than it is to make a garden." Lily sums up the problem to many of these approaches to permaculture by pointing out how class privilege makes permaculture practices easier, but at the same time, doing that unreflexively undermines the larger project.She says we think "we need some guru to teach us how to be with nature, and then we hire them or if we are affluent enough we will hire a consultant and we get our place all permied up, or we just get some landscape gardening or maybe like water catchment for the cabin that we visit once a year … but it kind of misses the point."Not all were that reflexive about costs and accessibility, however.In her interview, Chelsea tells us that "It is easy to do whatever you want on a small scale in your own backyard without waiting for the government to make the changes that you want to see.So anyone can be doing something to improve the quality of their soil, can improve the nutrient density of their food, to create a bit of ecology and to be nurturing pollinators, to be building nurturing spaces for ourselves" [emphasis added].She then, however, tells us about the complex engineered system that she has implemented on her propertya system costing many thousands of dollars.So, despite her claim that "anyone can be doing something," her particular approach is one afforded through economic privilege.Heather similarly notes that "Five years ago we super insulated our house and then we put solar panels on our house, so we heat our hot water and have some of our electricity via the solar panels, so we are trying to use less fossil fuels."She also mentions purchasing new electric vehicles.Like Heather, many other participants describe how their implementation of solar panels, purchase of a hybrid or electric vehicle, and other consumption choices are consistent with their permaculture ethic.True as that may be, these are also expensive purchases that are out of reach of many.
Although the contradictions between claiming "anyone can do this" while engaging in expensive forms of consumption and landscape design most certainly occurred in the interview data, other participants were more reflexive about the ways their permaculture practice may not be accessible to all, and about their own intersecting class and racial privileges.Brenden says "It is probably related to privilege … because our perspective on what is a fair share is probably somewhat informed by our experience of privilege, and so it may not be accurate, so I think having a place to live and land to grow food on, access to health resources, I think all of these things should be givens, and at the same time I also feel like I have a lot of space, and probably there are people who have way more space and way more things, but I feel like, wow, I have tons.The fact that I have my own car that I use once a friggin' week is ridiculous!Yeah, so is that really a fair share?"Comments such as Brenden's also highlight one way in which settler colonialism is ignored by many of the participants; his comment that "I also feel like I have a lot of space" overlooks how indigenous people were violently removed from that very land to make room for the colonial stateand ongoing and systemic process (Kauanui 2016;Wolfe 2006).In a similar vein, Jessica tells us that.
"I am a very privileged person, I have my own house and I can go to the grocery store and buy all the vegetables that I want and I have the privilege of having the time to learn about where they come from … .So one of the coolest things I have seen, and not just in Calgary but particularly in a lot of larger American cities is this ability to do this guerrilla gardening where you actually take the gardening to the streets.So you get groups that take over public spaces … People who take over the meridian strip of grass between the road and the sidewalks and they start to grow things there and they attract kids, like this is where your food comes from!Food doesn't come from a plastic bag at the grocery store, right?"Jessica acknowledges that many people do not have the privileges that she does, but she applauds those who take and reclaim space (even when against the law) for gardening and growing food.
This reflexivity also leads participants in the permaculture community to critique the community and its leaders.As Annika tells us "my instructor, I have to criticize him on this.He's a brilliant man but he believes that everyone should move away from cities, as if we magically all have enough money to go and buy a house and buy land in small towns … But that is leaving people behind who can't afford to do that and I don't think that is people care" (one of permaculture's core ethics).Angela is more critical of the larger permaculture community, saying "I have been in a room of permies that I have thought "this is so white and so privileged" and this movement has so far to go."She adds that "I don't think that it is okay to call yourself a permaculturist and not be informed by justice and be aware of privilege and oppression and the ways that land is not fairly shared and that resources are not fairly shared.I think that we, if we are going to say that this is really about fairness and that we are guided by the ideology of fairness then I think it is not just enough to share our crop.I think we need to be advocates and be open and learn from others and share a piece of the really privileged pie that a lot of us have been handed."Once again, though, Angela's comment states that permaculturists were "handed" their good fortunes and land, ignoring the historical and ongoing efforts of the colonial state in making such land available, enforced through Canada's Hudson Bay Company, Indian Act, Residential School System, and now the criminal justice and legal systems (Dhillon 2015;Logan 2015).As Wolfe (2006) writes, "settler colonialism destroys to replace … The ideological justification for the dispossession of [indigenous people] was that "we" could use the land better than they could" (388)(389).This failure to recognize settler colonialism is, of course, a vestige of privilege for participants, but also more than a bit ironic considering how many core ideas of permaculture originate from Indigenous Knowledgethough they are rarely given proper attribution or credit from permaculture writers and teachers (Lundahl 2020).At the same time, Angela's comment raises larger questions about fairness; though fairness is clearly important to her, she fails to outline in her interview what a fair outcome would embody.For instance, in the context of Western Canada, fairness would logically entail the returning of stolen land to Indigenous peoplesfor instance, "Crown Land" which accounts for 89 percent of Canada's land area and is still held by the state (Martens 2021).Yet such "land back" efforts, though championed by numerous pro-Indigenous social movement efforts, are not mentioned by Angela or other members of these permaculture communities.

Conclusions
The question posed at the start of this article was whether permaculture, as it is practiced and understood, is liberatory and presents a challenge to capitalist economic arrangements or whether it is ultimately embedded within those arrangements.Consistent with work in the field of ecological Marxism (Magdoff and Foster 2011;Foster 2002), most participants in the study harboured concerns about the logic and effects of capitalism (greed, resource hoarding, and competition).They embraced permaculture in part because of its "fair share" ethic which stresses the return of any surpluses.They held out hope that permaculture might present a challenge to global, neoliberal, corporate capitalism.However, consistent with the "Treadmill of Production" theory (Schnaiberg 1980), they found themselves highly dependent on capitalist modes of exchange, land ownership, financing, and employment arrangements.As Catherine told us, "we're still on that treadmill."They discuss their market labour, buying land and holding mortgages, enrolling in expensive permaculture courses, and spending many thousands of dollars to implement a permaculture landscape at their property.Though they hoped to live the ethics of permaculture, they nevertheless lacked ideas for how to break free from capitalist market relations, and in some cases, failed to demonstrate reflexivity about their own class privilege and ongoing settler colonialism that has made land "available" to them for permaculture practice.As such, for these individuals in Western Canada, practicing permaculture meant living contradictionsresisting in small ways, but often acquiescing to larger market forces, economic relationships, and settler logics.
Given that, the more salient question here is: For whom is permaculture liberatory?For the mainly white participants involved in both the permaculture communities in Calgary and in the Kootenays, aspects of permaculture did resist the logics of capitalism, while at the same time hitting walls that prevented a more robust resistance to capitalism.Discussing and practicing permaculture did not encourage them to resist the logics of settler colonialism nor to acknowledge/address the historical (and ongoing) dispossessions that made land available to them.Given that most of the participants had completed formal permaculture training, this omission from the interviews also suggests that formal courses (i.e.Permaculture Design Certificate) are engaging in ongoing process of Indigenous erasure by failing to sensitize practitioners to how permaculture continues to privilege certain people while excluding or erasing the knowledge systems of other groups.Considering these severe limitations, we would be wise to feel suspect about the revolutionary potential of the permaculture community.The lack of decolonial focus also likely explains the absence of BIPOC persons in the permaculture community, which has been noted in other research (Lundahl 2020); there is presumably a reluctance to participate in organizations and movements that continue to reproduce and reify inequalities, though future research should explore this topic further.According to White (2019), this means developing a commons-as-praxis approach which "engages and contests dominant practices of ownership, consumerism, and individualism and replaces them with shared social status and shared identities of race and class" (8)something mostly missing from the accounts of permaculturists interviewed for this article.
Despite the contradictions examined above, most of the participants were aware that a transition away from capitalism was necessary and/or inevitable.This was notably more so the case for British Columbia participants (who were more likely to live on rural land and less likely to work in traditional employment) than Calgary participants.Yet like many people, the permaculturists in the study worried about how this transition would be felt economically at a local level.Ergas (2021) writes that "the energy and material production transition needed to stave off climate change will devastate our economy and may well be an impossible undertaking to "keep this version of civilization going"" (201).What is needed then, are alternative versions of civilizationwith new modes of habitation and exchangeand permaculture, despite all of its limitations, provides one such blueprint.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).