Scott Pittman, Permaculturalist
Last March during a permaculture design course in the Costa Rican jungle, students convened under a hot tin roof to discuss the merits of mycelium and the pros and cons of keeping chickens in the backyard. When the long conversations that transpired amid a din of birdsong, crickets, and tree frogs inevitably turned to politics, the lead instructor, Scott Pittman, responded without missing a beat. Asked what to do about the likes of Trump, Scott replied with a roguish grin and an undeniable twinkle in his glacial-blue eyes, “Well, up to me, I’d compost Donald Trump.”
And thus an underlying pattern of regenerating waste into productive matter arose, and the proverbial fire of the compost toilet was lit.
Permaculture—a system of design that mimics nature—provides a handbook to build resilient, efficient, and beautiful communities. Scott has hosted permaculture workshops in places as far flung as the Carpathia mountains in the Ukraine to the Peruvian Amazon. Scott, at age 76, boasts over three decades of experience in the field. He taught alongside permaculture giant Bill Mollison for several of those. Scott fondly refers to Mollison, widely considered the grandfather of permaculture, as an old troglodyte. Irreverent, deeply insightful, and truly revolutionary, Scott possesses a dogged determination to dismantle and reinvent the stuff upon which society is built.
Scott is currently working on his forthcoming book, “The Dharma of Permaculture” from an ashram in Costa Rica’s Cloud Forest. It will combine his decades-long experience in permaculture design with his more recent interest in spirituality. Durga also resides in the ashram where she manages the center’s expansive permaculture gardens. She spends most of her time capturing nitrogen, planting ever more fruit trees, and designing beautiful and intricate water systems. In a past life, she believes she was a beaver.
RW: One of the missing elements in permaculture for both of you is the realm of spirituality. Why should we include it?
SP: For me, spirituality is the missing component in permaculture. The real teaching that happens on any subject has to come from the heart. And so the question arose:
‘What is that heart space? What does it look like?’
I started off with a sort of physiological search. How many junctions of nerve cells are in the heart; how is it connected to the brain? That led me to dig deeper and to finally realize that the heart is a symbolic organ that exists beyond the physiology, which led me to wonder, ‘What is that same symbol in nature?’
Trees don’t have hearts, and yet they speak a kind of truth. And it didn’t take me long—it wasn’t rocket science—to realize that what I had been searching for in permaculture was beyond the physical.
RW: Durga, why do you think it’s important to incorporate the spiritual element into permaculture?
D: Well it’s very abstract, but I’ve been finding that we can apply the same rules within permaculture to ourselves. Like observation for example: self-observation, self-inquiry, observing your own patterns of behavior before actually acting in the world.
R: Why is it important to start at such a small internal scale?
D: I don’t think it’s small. I think it’s bigger than the outside. For me, it’s far more effective to work from that level first, and then what happens externally speeds up. I think it’s a more powerful frequency to work with.
R: It seems like that falls within the principle ‘Small is beautiful’ in some ways?
D: It’s curious because now that I think about it, small is beautiful, but beautiful is not small. Beautiful can shape and encompass and change a lot, not just one single beautiful detail.
S: Through observation of natural systems, different people have come up with a long list of natural principles about nature and how it works. I think you get a much better and more holistic understanding of nature, of those natural principles, when you include the roles of human behavior as a component of the planetary ecosystem. What is our dharma? What is our role? How do we behave?
Once I became interested in the yogic path as a way of seeking and started to meditate, I found that I had sort of opened a can of worms. There are more questions now than there are answers. What are the rules of spirit? What are its principles?’
R: And what have you found?
S: I haven’t found it all. It continuously unfolds. It’s sort of like I’m peeling an onion. Every layer exposes another and another and another. What I have found is that the yogic path is one of the most clearly articulated of all of the paths that I’ve ever run into. I want the rules of spirituality. I want to know what steps one takes. I want the handbook.
R: You think that there is one?
S: I do, and I think yogis have generated that handbook. I think it’s in the Upanishads, in the Vedas. Much like the teachings of Christ, the same message is said over and over again.
R: Which is?
S: Well it’s mainly a message of love, but it’s a message of love that’s not as cliché as most of our notions about love.
R: How is it different?
S: It has less to do with the physical, less to do with the object, and more to do with who we are.
R: That seems like a big topic to tie into permaculture.
S: Yes, it’s huge. It’s frustrating. But I think permaculture has always been a huge concept. I think most people mistake it for a technique for growing carrots. It’s way bigger than that.
I don’t think gardening and building a house and eating alot of peaches is going to deal with climate change or continual war or heinous acts against humanity. I don’t think any of the things most people are practicing now in permaculture, even the most devout permaculturalists, are addressing this. To me, the most important questions we should address right now involve man’s inhumanity to man, what we’ve done to the planet, and how we’ve shifted the whole energy field of life into this precipice teetering scenario. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only solution to those things has to come from spirit. Because we can’t deal with them materially. It is too late for that.
R: Those are massive questions. Where’s the entry point into beginning to address them?
S: You start in the garden. You start where you are, wherever you are. And you start reconnecting to life principles. There are so many things imbedded in permaculture that are implicit that need to be made explicit.
R: For example?
S: Beauty. Creating Beautiful carrots. Creating Beautiful homes. Creating Beautiful surroundings. This is the beginning of lifting our energetic level to the point where we can begin to cope with dark forces of our own creation.
R: Durga?
D: Beauty, or Sundhanam, is one of the trinities we study in yoga. We also have Truth, Satyam and knowledge, Shivan. Beauty is key because it is what you see out of wisdom and truth. Beauty is the manifest part. But we’ve lost the ability to see what is beautiful. That is the reconnection that is missing, that needs to be made through permaculture, or self-inquiry, or meditation, or whatever works for you. The capitalist system and the media are trying to tell us what is beautiful, so developing a capacity for discernment is crucial.
Even if you’re doing all of this positive stuff—gardening, and building composting toilets, and all that—the magnitude of the crisis is too much to deal with materially. I think reconnecting to spirit is the way out of disillusionment, because spirit is more powerful than matter.
S: In some ways I think this is happening with younger people. By disowning the existing system, essentially making it irrelevant to their lives and their decision making, people are searching for ways outside of the box.
R: But how do you do that if you’re operating within the system?
S: Well, that’s hard. But I think a lot of people aren’t actually operating within the system. I think a lot of them are operating, barely, on the edges of it.
Again, I’m not meeting normal people, because I’m meeting people through my teaching, particularly young people. They’ve developed a kind of laser-like eyesight on discerning bullshit. So that gives me hope.
I’ve left the kind of rationalist world I once lived in— of trying to fight it from within. In many ways I’ve known for a long time that you can’t fight from within the system. I’ve already done that. I did it in the 60’s. It’s kind of like pissing up a rope.
R: What does it take to break out of that?
S: It takes bravery. I think we need more examples of people that do it and survive. Because it’s always been cast as survival, right? ‘If you don’t follow the rules, then you’re going to be hungry for the rest of your life, or your children are going to be hungry, or whatever.’ That kind of fear has kept a lid on all of this for a long time. I think there is a kind of fearlessness developing. There’s nervousness as well, but there’s also fearlessness.
R: Once you break out of the system, if that’s possible, you’re still hoping to affect it in some way, right? Or do you have to let go of your hopes to impact it?
S: I think once you realize it’s hopeless, you also realize that you can’t affect it.
R: That’s depressing.
S: Why?
R: Because the system still exists.
S: But it’s winding down.
R: But so many people are implicated in it.
S: Yes, but that keeps us in the game. It’s that compassion that keeps us playing by the same rules that we’re against. ‘Oh, I’ll do it, I’ll gather thousands of people to close down Wall Street.’ That’s a great impulse, wrong answer. I think I’ve gone through the depressed stage.
R: What’s on the other side of that?
S: You only create new paradigms by stepping out of the old ones. I am trying to develop the tools—because I don’t have the tools, the intellectual tools, the emotional tools, any of them—because the paradigm I’ve always been in doesn’t allow for them. Maybe it allows for very superficial ways of dealing with feelings and thoughts, but they’re very carefully manipulated. So I am thinking my way through the next steps. I have a feeling they lie in teaching. I have a feeling that there needs to be many of us. And it may be many of us working in our garden, you know, smiling at people as they walk by. It may be as simple as that. I don’t think it will be with placards and sticks, and I don’t think it will be through revolution.
R: The process of finding a home in a new paradigm involves a certain amount of uprooting. How do you make that initial upheaval less traumatic?
S: Initially, it’ll be traumatic. For me, it’s been surprisingly less painful than I thought. When I made the decision, I had to tell a person I’d been with for almost 20 years that I was moving to an ashram in Costa Rica. Ultimately she accepted it because I did it and I’m here, and she’s come to visit and likes it too, but she’s much more imbedded in security and parts of the old paradigm than I am. She’s concerned about her child’s security, his education, and how he’ll get his PhD. But the only thing we can ultimately do is save ourselves. I don’t think it’s possible to save anyone else. Maybe as an example we can inculcate a certain amount of courage in others to go to their own ashram, or to their own mountaintop, or whatever it is that they need to do for their own learning.
R: What keeps these big moves and the resulting introspection and self-work from being insular, from being isolated?
S: Nothing. It’s either a decision to just sit and meditate or it’s a decision to sit and meditate and try to teach and talk about it.
R: How does permaculture tie into the realm of relationships? Does it give us a framework to enter into them responsibly?
S: It certainly gives us a home. It gives us a hearth. Which is a nurturing place for those relationships. I don’t think it tells us much about how to make them work. That involves a deep exploration of the principle ‘Care of people.’ I think we are far too enamored with outcomes. A lot of times we destroy relationships because we already have a predetermined beginning, middle, and end, to our story. And it disallows us to just be in the moment, to be in a joyful moment with someone, anyone. And not look for the outcome, not look for the consequence.
R: What are some of the biggest concerns about our current state?
S: The thing that looms largest in peoples’ minds, either as a vague or concrete idea, is climate change. If you follow Guy McPherson, you’ll learn that we have already gone through so many tipping points it’s absurd to think that we can turn it around. So that’s the big one looming. Unfortunately, I don’t see anything at all that can be done about it. I mean if we all stop driving cars today, and stop generating electricity, we could slow it down. But even if we did that we couldn’t stop it, we could just slow it down. No one’s going to do that. I mean no one. Unless you see the sky catch on fire, you’re not going to get serious about pollution.
R: Well so what do we do about that?
S: You don’t. You do something different. What I’m doing is creating a refuge for what I think is inevitable. I am meditating in the hope that I can reach some state of higher being so that I could, with the cooperation of everyone around me, stop it. But that’s like developing superpowers. How do you talk to people about that? Because that’s what it’s going to take. I think technology is wimpy when it comes to dealing with problems of this size.
Ultimately the solution to me is that we have to transcend ourselves. In that transcendence I think we will find a lot of answers that don’t exist right now. But that is harder than selling the Brooklyn Bridge to someone. It doesn’t mean we don’t do it anyway. I am just going to keep meditating and hoping for the light, and hoping that that light’s powerful enough that it’ll generate some results. In the meantime I’m growing vegetables, I’m cleaning up soil, I’m enriching soil, and I’m not getting depressed about any of it.
R: What keeps you from being depressed about it?
S: I don’t know, I mean, it’s so beautiful. You know, we haven’t reached the end of the story yet, in spite of thinking we know how it’s going to end, we haven’t reached the end of the story. As long as we live in this kind of beauty—and it’s amazing how much beauty is left, I mean there’s tons of it all over the place—it’s not over.