Head over here to read David Holmgren's review of my book "The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture."
I often receive books to review from publishers, but recently I was sent an inscribed copy of a book, The Garden, directly from the author, Mathew Ingram. A year after my extended interview with him in June 2023, I received the manuscript for factchecking the material that he had written about my connections to the counterculture of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. This exploration was part of his wider thesis that the emergence of organic growing and agriculture had a strong crossover with philosophical and spiritual influences in the Western world from Eastern and Indigenous cultures. He suggests that the alternative hippy counterculture of those years had a pivotal role in drawing together the search for sustainable relationships to nature in the material realm, and the search for inner harmony and growth in the spiritual realm.
With the business of life (and perhaps because I am approaching 70 years old), I had completely forgotten about our connection when Mathew’s 500 page inscribed tome arrived. As an author, it’s a bit shameful to admit that I don’t read so many books connected to permaculture and its kindred subjects these days, but once I started this one, I couldn’t put it down.
Permaculture co-originator Bill Mollison’s apparently hard-line dismissal of both hippy vegetarian counterculture and any notions of what he called ‘woo woo’ spiritualism suggested to Ingram that permaculture might not be an important strand supporting his grand narrative. But in the book, as with many other pioneers of organics and kindred ecologically-informed working relationships with nature, he used my own origins and inspirations to make that case. It was of course an honour to have a researcher be so thorough in his reading of my work and include me in his panoply of visionaries, pioneers and practitioners as diverse as Steiner, Lady Eve Balfour, Fukuoka, John Seymour, John Todd, Vandana Shiva, Eliot Coleman, Patrick Holden and Paul Hawken, amongst others.
While the lack of footnotes to each and every reference, along with a few typos and rare errors (such as mixing up carbon to nitrogen ratios in composting) might frustrate the more academically inclined reader, I found the story of people, events and consequences of all these connections and crossovers an enthralling read. It confirmed and filled in my own scattered and sketchy understanding of this history of both organics and the counterculture. Further, I found myself imagining all the other permaculture pioneers from Declan Kennedy in Germany to Robyn Francis in Australia, who might be included to reinforce his thesis, along with Albert Bates in the USA whose story is featured in the book. Perhaps inevitably, the story is strongly biased in the Anglo-American and, more generally, English speaking world, but where does one draw the line between a book and an encyclopedia?
While I wholehearted concur with his thesis that the counterculture was a primary influence in the emergence of working ecological relationships with nature in gardening and farming, I noted his acknowledgement of the role of progressive collectivist politics of the left, in my own and many other of the organic pioneers. On the other hand I think Ingram perhaps underplays the contribution to organics of agrarian social conservatives from the libertarian right. I agree with his dismissal of some academic attempts to portray a strong connection between fascist ideology and organics, given that fascist ideology was so popular in the wider society in which organics emerged in the 1930s. However, as a young man immersing myself in Australian and New Zealand organic networks in the 1970s, I was surprised to see how many of that older generation came from the other end of the political spectrum to my own second generation, radical leftist heritage. Over the last half century, I have come to see the threads of wisdom from that lineage in its fruitful fusion with the left.
None of this undermines the strength of Ingram’s thesis about the counterculture, which in many ways was outside of the left-right political framework. And in any case, maybe once the Trumpian revolution runs its course with a reformation of both agriculture and health along ecological principles, someone will write the book about how socially conservative values, including Christianity, were the primary wellsprings of the new organic orthodoxy. As always, the victors write history.
But to return to Ingram’s thesis… If his research throughout was as thorough as the parts with me, then I am really impressed at this effort spanning so many sources, including more than 300 cited books. As the people and events featured reach back some generations, it is timely in capturing firsthand recollections and reflections from so many older people still alive to pass on their aural history. These stories are a great source for understanding how a significant proportion of a generation reacted to the evidence that their ordinary everyday lives, and the systems that shaped them, would be seen by future generations as crimes against those future generations and Mother Nature herself.
Ingram avoids the tendency to either romanticise or demonise the counterculture and the working relationships with nature it imagined, spawned and rediscovered.
He explores issues that have since become centre stage in any consideration of humanity’s future: from the practical question of till or no till and every variation between; the place of domestic livestock and wildlife in human habitats; the acknowledgement and/or appropriation of indigenous knowledge; the role of technology, for better and worse, in finding our place in nature; to the ways in which we can contribute to regenerating Mother Earth that reflect our earthly and etheric natures.
For a general audience, this book is a window into how those at the fringe have been the creative sources of so many progressive and hopeful signs in a world of accelerating stresses and confusions. Thus I see it as an antidote to the current rising demands for conformity to current orthodoxies, which ironically includes some of those that the counterculture have helped create.
As we say ‘the action is at the edge’. This design principle works both spatially, in the interface with nature, and conceptually. The latter being characterised by the derided fringe-thinkers prepared to ignore the shackles of orthodoxy and chart their own path to the future in the brave hope that, if it is fruitful, others will follow.
For all those deeply embedded in permaculture as a lived reality, a conceptual framework and a global movement, I think this book is a must-read for delving into the many kindred spirits, influences and actions that precede and parallel the origins, rise and spread of permaculture over almost 50 years.
And I think I now have to delve back into Ingram’s Retreat: how the counterculture invented wellness, which itself laid the foundation for this further exploration into the now ancient organic maxim ‘healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals and healthy people’.