Video Games Helped Me Fall in Love with Permaculture

Fast forward to me at 28 years old, down a rabbit hole on YouTube around midnight. I stumbled over a video by a man named Geoff Lawton called “Greening the Desert,” which my knee-jerk response was to flag as ‘cringe’ (sorry, Geoff). Even so, I let it run a full minute before little bells started going off in my head and my attention was piqued.

“This is like a really hard puzzle in a video game.”

The video talks about a project undertaken in the deserts of Jordan — a salt flat with minimal water and summer temperatures spiking around 50°C — the most extreme version of what people think of when they say the word “desert.”

The video goes on to talk about all the things permaculture has become stereotyped for over the years: “swales on contour,” “organic mulch,” and a version of the famous line “All the world’s problems can be solved in the garden.” The result was the creation of a patch of self-sustaining food forest that not only stood its ground against the desert’s extremes, but slowly grew in size over time.

I was hooked. I’d just been given a glimpse of something we as a species are capable of — bringing vibrant, self-sustaining life to a near-wasteland — and I wanted to learn more.

One of my favourite early video games, “Megaman X,” does a brilliant thing early in where they pit you against a boss you have no hope of defeating — but they don’t tell you. You spend a few minutes fighting with everything you’ve got, and eventually your health bar runs out, you’re pinned to the ground, and the guy laughs at you. It’s humiliating, especially at the age I was when I played it.

But then, a mysterious hero shows up out of nowhere, shoots the bad guy with a high-powered blast, and saves you from certain death. This might sound cheesy, but where climate change felt like the invincible bad guy, Geoff’s video was my mysterious stranger.

A year prior, I’d been working as a sustainability consultant in an up-and-coming firm. We did assessments for small businesses, wrote carbon reports detailing how changing business practices could help create less pollution, and worked to help stop (or at least slow) the scariest effects of climate change.

It was both inspiring and wildly depressing. We were on the front lines, learning about all the harm industrialization was causing, about what was needed to change our fate, and how heavily the deck was stacked against us.

But after watching this video, I’d gone from feeling depressed about the state of the world, the growing threat of climate change, and how powerless I felt to help, to suddenly having hope again. Maybe if I studied hard enough and applied myself, I could still help solve a small part of this problem that seemed impossible to tackle just moments before.

So, Why is Permaculture Like a Video Game?

Permaculture as we know it began as a concept from Tasmania, Australia, in the 1970s, and might be described as “a try-hard’s approach to organic farming.” If conventional farming were a video game (which is actually a fairly popular genre), this would be like trying to play it on the hardest difficulty setting: no synthetic fertilizers, minimal access to resources, and restricted access to insecticides.

Before you even think about what kinds of crops to plant, you have to learn the parameters of the game — and more importantly, what all is at your disposal.

Your landscape (the level of the game you’re on) is a puzzle with specific instructions hidden throughout, and there are several things you need to consider if you want to score enough points to win, including (but not limited to):

• Understanding all the forces that affect your site including sun, rain, heat & cold, wind, gravity, soil fertility, wildlife, human activity, and knowing that each of these forces is a valuable resource.
  

• Understanding the broader context of the site: what’s happening on nearby sites, what’s coming in from “off-screen,” where things go when they leave, and whether they’re better or worse for moving through your design. Everything comes from somewhere, and goes somewhere after you’ve engaged with it.
  

• Learning to let the design do the work for you; this is about building wealth in the landscape in a way that lets you spend as little time, money, and resources as possible each ‘round’ on maintenance. The less you need to tend the landscape (cutting lawns, trimming hedges, pulling weeds, ploughing fields, buying seeds and fertilizer, etc), the richer you’ll be in the long run.
  

• Productivity is key, because productive systems support life. The bigger and stronger your plants, the more wildlife you support, and the more fruit, meat, wood, textiles, and medicine you can access each round, all of which are needed to survive (earning you more ‘points’) — and all of which is built from carbon molecules which we need to prevent from turning into air pollution.
  

• Biodiversity is important, because diversity is stability. The game is going to throw all kinds of curve balls your way, from flash floods to fires, heat waves to cold spells. Your design needs flex to expect the unexpected, to be able to pivot if the level suddenly changes. Having more species on the board gives you more “lives” to play with as conditions evolve. If one species dies in a heat wave and that’s everything you planted, it’s game over. But if ten of the thirty species in your level get wiped out, congratulations — you’re still in the game.
  

• Lastly (for this article), the game is scored on both stability and growth. Growth is how you get more points — both plant growth and the growth of different populations — but stability defines how many rounds you get to earn points for, and the more rounds you play, the higher your final score.

You can design the most wildly diverse system imaginable, with species from all over the world and hundreds of different fruit trees, berry bushes, and annual crops scoring (a totally arbitrary) 5,000 points per round. But if your design collapses after one or two rounds — for example, certain species become invasive and wipe out everything else, then die off in a major flood — your final score might be 10,000.

Similarly, you could strip everything off the land, plant a whole bunch of a single thing, score points for a single round, then watch it all go to crap the following year without intensive management — in essence, spending all the points you just earned because your system is too reliant on outside intervention.

However, if you can come up with a system that earns just enough points on the first round but is self-sustaining and grows over time, it keeps gaining more points round after round. After a while, your ecosystem skyrockets, and scoring a measly 10,000 points looks like child’s play.

This final example is the goal of good permaculture design. You want to help nudge landscapes towards diversity, stability and growth as a (somewhat) self-perpetuating cycle, making them more vibrant, more resilient to disaster, and more supportive of life.

The goal is to create little pockets of paradise that get better each year, and by doing so, you're not just getting by with short-sighted design — you're “hundred percent"-ing with inter-generational land stewardship and thriving, nature-inspired ecosystems.

Okay, but Isn’t Permaculture About Farming?

This is where my excitement really took off. For most of its ~50 years, permaculture has been discussed around establishing systems of “permanent agriculture.” Its definitive textbook highlights (among other things) a code of ethics, a guide to long term planning, a handful of organic farming practices, how to identify infrastructure locations, and ways of incorporating livestock.

But this conversation has been changing, and the concept shifting from “permanent agriculture” to just “permanent culture”. Students of permaculture are now asking, “What if we planned to still be living here (in cities, not just on farms) in 50 years? What about a hundred years? What about a thousand?” At its core, permaculture is long-term systems thinking for landscapes, and landscapes come in all forms — including urbanized ones.

Looking at a map of your city, you might not see fields of crops, orchards, irrigation ponds, or wood lots along the main streets — but the city is still part of its local watershed and ecosystem, affected by all the same forces that come into play around gardening, and affecting everything around it.

Cities have stormwater systems to help deflect rain from pooling and causing damage, but rain is a resource — a valuable one that we don’t often harvest and end up wasting. At a time when fresh water is becoming more scarce, this is an area we need to improve in, and quickly. Some cities are already implementing these kinds of strategies, as with Portland’s “Green Streets”, or Philadelphia’s “Green City Clean Waters” initiatives.

Cities affected by worsening heat waves might feel like they have an overabundance of sun, when what they really struggle with is a deficiency of tree canopy. Trees that drop their leaves in the Fall are perfect for this because they offer shade in the summer, mulch in the fall, and let sunlight through in the winter. In addition to simply planting more (and more appropriate) trees along our streets, policies like Toronto’s Green Roof Bylaw help bring new construction into the equation, ensuring all new builds come with green roofs, helping to both manage stormwater and reduce the heat island effect in otherwise heavily paved urban centres.

Citizens try to escape cities to get out to the country to see more beautiful, natural environments. Such cities could be described as having a deficiency in beauty or a lack of accessible wildlife. If we think of cities (or parts of them) as wildlife sanctuaries, all of a sudden these areas become nursery grounds for endangered species, beacons of eco-tourism, and safeguards for local food security. Projects such as the Beacon Food Forest in Seattle give residents somewhere within city limits to spend time in a woodland-inspired setting, where every tree, shrub, and plant offers nuts, fruit, berries, or other vegetal food and medicine.

The point is that cities might not be farms, but they’re definitely ecosystems. Oftentimes, the city-systems we build under-serve our need for life services compared to how well they could with more care and intentional, holistic design.

Cities are made of extensive infrastructure that demands constant upkeep while offering limited wildlife shelter, food, and water security compared to their full potential. They’re often inefficient, unstable, and static, like the tutorial level in a video game — and we’ve already agreed that winning this game is about nurturing stability and growth over time.

Now, I understand that the strategies that work for organic farms — hillsides lined with water harvesting swales, diverse fruit forests, and integrated systems of wildlife management — can’t just be plugged into an urban centre without disaster ensuing. Urban centres need different strategies if we want them to offer the most they can, and some of the classic permaculture solutions might not seem to fit.

The point isn’t to use the exact same strategies in cities as work for farms, but to approach the problem like picking up a controller for a new game. We have a good idea of what to expect if we press some of the buttons; we just need to figure out how this particular game works — and how to get good enough to master it.

So, if we’re looking for the best way to play the game, what are the rules that will help shape our strategy moving forward? What do we know about the game?

We know the importance of different types of resources, and that easily collecting them is critical for not only survival, but quality of life.

We know that food, fresh water, and shelter are priorities for every living thing, and that living things depend on each other for ecosystem stability.

We know that heat waves, fires, floods, and hurricanes are becoming ever more common fixtures in our lives, and that we don’t want to fall victim to them.

And most importantly, we know how to design to address all of these challenges.

Ready, Player One?

I strongly believe that studying the principles of permaculture — how to think in more efficient, elegant, ethical, and integrated systems — is fundamental to getting past the upcoming levels in the terrifying game of Climate Change.

As nexus points for human activity and massive consumers of energy and resources, cities are prime locations to apply our knowledge of more efficient systems-building and long-term resilience, leading to the most good for the majority of our citizens.

The principles and approaches of permaculture design are about more than just organic farms; they’re about how to ensure life continues to thrive on this planet for the next ten thousand years and beyond.

I believe that the game is going to keep coming at us whether we bother to learn the rules or not, bring us closer each moment to sliding down a bottomless pit — no doubt infested with Koopa Troopas.

The challenges we face are only going to get harder, but we’ve got the controller in our hands and a good understanding of how the buttons work. However, unlike in video games, our species only has one life to play with. So, let’s put in the effort and get it right the first time.

Written by Zack Simon

Zack is the founder of Patchwork Ecosystem. Based in Nanaimo, BC, his focus is on operational sustainability for local businesses and permaculture methodology for landscape management.

October 7, 2024