By Lisa Rayner, Coordinator
Flagstaff Post Carbon Outpost
Author of Growing Food in the Southwest Mountains.

Both permaculture design and research into the nature of psychological trauma were born out of a need to heal. A comparison of the two fields demonstrates an intrinsic similarity between the principles of permaculture and the principles of trauma theory. During the coming decades of declining net energy and ecological collapse, both will be vitally necessary to the survival of human communities and ecosystems.

It is not a coincidence that the conception, gestation and birth of permaculture occurred during the energy crises of the 1970s. As David Holmgren emphasizes in his Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002), permaculture originated as a response to the needs of energy descent. The United States had passed its peak of oil production in 1970. Soon afterwards, geologists began to apply the bell curve pattern first observed by M. King Hubbert to global oil production. Those early predictions indicated that the global peak would occur in the mid-1990s (If not for the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, the prediction may well have come true). In addition, ecologists, such as the authors of the much-misunderstood 1972 study Limits to Growth, began to issue shrill warnings that the planet was headed towards ecological overshoot.

With the advent of $60 crude, many people are beginning to understand that the peak of world oil production is now at hand. Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (2004) also makes it clear that human civilization has passed the limits of ecological overshoot and is now headed toward collapse unless we quickly pull back from those limits. The ecological footprint of humanity has now overshot global carrying capacity by more than 20 percent.

I have a very visceral understanding of overshoot and collapse. That is because I have experienced overshoot and collapse within my own body. I am a trauma survivor. This experience has given me the ability to understand our civilizational predicament in a way that people who have never experienced severe psychological trauma do not posses to the same degree.

During the same decades that permaculture was evolving, another field of research was also developing, the understanding of psychological trauma. As Dr. Judith Herman exposes in her landmark book Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence — from domestic abuse to political terror (1997), discovery and denial of the effects of violence on human beings, from abused children to soldiers on the battlefield, came and went in a repetition of decades-long cycles of awareness and dissociation. Feminists working with abused children and battered wives initiated the present state of awareness. However, it was the lasting psychological effects of combat on soldiers returning home from the Vietnam War that led to the first inclusion of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as an official psychiatric diagnosis in 1980. Researchers came to the realization that “shell shock,