Cognitive Permaculture 101

Permaculture is a means of designing and embodying complex, dynamic, intelligent, creative, and adaptive living systems that work with the holistic laws of nature rather than against nature. It is essentially indigenous TEK (traditional ecological knowledge) adapted to modern, industrial contexts.

Despite the hype around artificial intelligence and "smart" devices these days, the reality is that the social project of civilization is fundamentally defined by its orientation against nature and the correlate belief that human need and purpose is to control, conquer, and "rise above" the "brute," "primitive" nature of the non-human world. Permaculture is a set of principles and practices that diverges from these false premises, proposing instead that human life is optimized by our more thorough integration with the natural intelligence of living systems as they have evolved over billions of years.

All our best sciences now support this perspective -- and the evidence is beginning to dovetail with what indigenous peoples have known forever: humans are part of nature, and our unique intelligence is not in any way separate from the rest of natural intelligence. Human intelligence is optimized to the degree that we make use of our wild, instinctual nature rather than through a supposed "transcendence" of that nature. Permaculture, in a nutshell, is the practical application of this indigenous-scientific TEK.

What is Cognitive Permaculture?

Cognitive permaculture is permaculture adapted and applied to human growth and development on both the individual and collective levels. It is an approach to psychology that understands everything we call "cognitive" to be ecological phenomena. Ecological psychology, in a nutshell.

Here is just one example of this. If you look inside our brains and bodies, you will not find the "stuff" of modern psychology: concepts, ideas, beliefs, perspectives, emotions, fears, stories, etc. All these phenomena are, in the most literal sense, actually embodied, embedded, and enacted in the tangible behaviors and environments we construct and engage on a daily basis.

So, if we want to address maladaptive psychological patterns/habits, for instance, we do so not by manipulating brain states (as is characteristic of modern, pathologizing medical science and psychiatry) but by assessing and reorganizing the literal elements and activities of someone's holistic cognitive lifeworlds -- i.e., their whole life situation, not just "internal" psychic happenings. This is the essence of cognitive permaculture.