The Vegan Book of Permaculture by Graham Burnett
Author Interview
Permaculture (constructed from the words permanent and agriculture) is the holistic approach to creating regenerative, self-maintaining, low input/high output, non-exploiting systems for present and future generations to live, grow, and thrive. Graham Burnett is an internationally respected authority on veganism and permaculture and the author of The Vegan Book of Permaculture. His latest book, Make Compost, Not Work!, is a collection of gardening columns written for the Idler magazine over the last 20 years and is available from Spiralseed. Welcome to the 25th in my series of interviews with authors of books about animal rights, veganism, and related issues.
How did you become vegan and discover permaculture? Are they, in your view, part of an alternative view of the world and our role in it?
One of my earliest memories is walking in the countryside with my grandad on a Sunday morning in the mid-1960s. We sometimes stopped and stroked some cows in a field, and then an hour or so later, we returned home, and my nan was serving up roast beef for lunch. My grandparents were very lovely, but I saw a disconnect even back then. At five or six years old, I was too young to articulate why, but I think I knew instinctively it wasn’t something I wanted to be a part of. I hated the taste and texture of meat. I cut up the beef on my plate into tiny little pieces so that I could swallow it without chewing.
I became vegetarian at the age of 16 in 1977 before finally joining the dots and taking the step to veganism in 1984. It was in the air through the anarcho-punk scene I was involved with and the animal liberation message promoted by bands like Crass, Conflict, Flux of Pink Indians, etc. I, with many of my peers, became involved in protests and activism through the Hunt Saboteurs Association and other direct action groups.
Around this time, I also came across a small pamphlet written by the then UK Vegan Society secretary Kathleen Jannaway called First Hand First Rate. This made clear to me the wider connections between animal farming and environmental damage, as well as raising my awareness of the hidden violence behind our food systems.
Shortly afterwards, Kathleen left the Vegan Society to find the Movement for Compassionate Living and promote what she called ‘ecological veganism’. Her seminal publication Abundant Living in the Coming Age of the Tree hugely influenced my thinking with its vision of a tree-based culture very different from anything seen thus far in human history. All our needs for food, shelter, fuel and fibre can be met from managed woodlands and food forests rather than oil and fossil fuels. It was a manifesto for vegan permaculture, even though that wasn’t the term she used.
I came across the word permaculture a few times during the 1980s and early 90s. I thought it had something to do with ‘herb spirals’. So, I bought a copy of Graham Bell’s book The Permaculture Garden when it was published in 1994 in the hope of gaining a few handy tips for my allotment. It contained nothing about herb spirals, but for me, it was a switching point, a book full of ‘solutions thinking’ rather than ‘problems thinking’. It flipped me away from a mindset of constantly resisting what I was ‘against’ to instead focus my energies on what I was ‘for’. I attended a Permaculture Design Course in north London. It introduced me to inspiring people and exciting projects in the capital and beyond. Most of all, I realised that permaculture, like veganism, is about The Art of The Possible. About creating the world we want to see rather than constantly fighting against the world we reject.
What is Vegan Permaculture?
Permaculture is a design philosophy that mimics the relationships found in natural systems, emphasising the use of renewable resources, diversity and cooperation. It can be applied to food growing, soil restoration, water management, shelter and community building. It aims to create more regenerative human habitats.
Underpinning all permaculture systems are fundamental ethical values around caring for the earth and its inhabitants and the fair and just distribution of resources. These fit well with the vegan philosophy of compassionate living and the precept of doing least harm. In seeking to exclude the use of animal products and cruelty as far as is possible and practicable, a veganic ‘take’ on permaculture asks whether it is enough to care for our non-human fellow earth citizens whilst our relationships with them continue to be exploitative. Or should we actively promote their recognition as self-willed beings with an intrinsic right to exist free from harm?
For example, in ‘traditional’ permaculture, animals might be used for food, labour, and fertility (manure). However, in a vegan permaculture system, these functions are fulfilled through plant-based alternatives. This includes creating polycultures, agroforestry and forest gardening, greater use of perennial crops, and employing techniques such as green manuring, vegetal compost mulching and other ways of using organic matter to enrich and rebuild soil health and encourage plant growth.
It’s important to point out that a veganic permaculture system is far from ‘animal-free’. How would we exclude earthworms who build our soil and maintain its fertility? Or bees who pollinate our fruit trees and vegetables? Why would we wish to? We actively design to include features intended to attract wildlife: Ponds for frogs, toads and dragonflies. Log piles provide habitat for slow worms, beetle banks and flowering plants to bring in ladybirds and hoverflies who keep populations of slugs and aphids in check. They’re essential to maintaining healthy, productive ecosystems. What we don’t include are those animals commodified as ‘system components’ that we believe perpetuate exploitative relationships with our non-human fellow earth citizens, such as pigs, goats and chickens, whose primary function is the production of meat, milk, and eggs.
Although veganic permaculture aims to create self-sustaining, resilient edible landscapes that are ‘stock free’, in reality, members of several of the Kingdoms of Life (plants, animals, fungi and bacteria) work together for mutual benefit. In a forest garden, for example, deep-rooted comfrey plants mine nutrients from the subsoil, making them available to fruit trees and bushes. Mammals and amphibians, including hedgehogs and frogs, deposit fertility via their droppings, whilst birds and bees buzz around the canopy layer. Meanwhile, insects and arthropods patrol the undergrowth and leaf litter, checking and balancing pest populations and playing their role in the cycles of growth and decay. Fungi and bacteria continue the process, breaking down dead matter into rich humus via mycorrhizal networks, all players with their place in the symphony of the soil. Based on the structure of natural woodland, the forest garden is a complex web of which humans are an integral part as we manage, maintain, and harvest from these biosystems.
Vegan permaculture is equally about people-care, recognising the importance of cooperation and mutual aid. By working together, individuals and communities can create sustainable systems that provide for their needs while protecting the environment. This can take the form of community gardens, co-housing developments, working for social justice, addressing issues around food sovereignty, regenerative economics, ‘green’ transport and other aspects of social living.
You recently celebrated the tenth-anniversary publication of your book, The Vegan Book of Permaculture. How has vegan permaculture progressed in the last ten years?
I can’t believe it’s been ten years since my book was published! But the story goes back much further than that, as the very first edition of what later became The Vegan Book of Permaculture was produced in 1985 as Well Fed Not An Animal Dead, a handwritten 16-page A6 sized zine/booklet full of recipes and arguments for veganism. I made it because I got fed up with people constantly asking me what I ate and wanting to know why I hadn’t died of malnutrition. It was surreptitiously printed on the workplace photocopier when my boss wasn’t looking, and I’d hand out copies at punk gigs or to anybody interested. Veganism was still quite a ‘fringe’ idea back then, and there wasn’t a lot of literature available on the subject at the time. Most vegan meals would be prepared and cooked from scratch using basic ingredients like fresh vegetables, grains, pulses and nuts rather than the processed vegan convenience foods that are about these days. Although we did have good old Sosmix, which was quite a staple back then, and ironically quite hard to find nowadays!
In addition, a few of us who were involved with the local Southend on Sea anarchist group decided to have a go at growing our fruit and vegetables as this seemed the next logical step. We took over a derelict allotment and ran it as a punk collective. As most of us were vegetarian or vegan, we did our best to avoid not only artificial chemicals but also slaughterhouse by-products often taken for granted by many organic gardeners (for example, blood, fish, bone or animal manures). Back then, our allotment ‘bible’ was another Kathleen Jannaway publication, a small photocopied pamphlet called Growing Our Own—a guide to veganic gardening. It was based on 28 years of experience in her garden using only vegetal-based composts and green manures to maintain fertility. This somewhat grainy, hand-typed publication was, as far as we knew, the only manual available on the subject.
Fast forward four decades, and ‘plant-based’ lifestyles are now mainstream. And whilst still somewhat niche compared to the vast number of glossy vegan cookbooks and magazines available, there is now an abundance of resources supporting ‘stock-free’ growing. These include books (such as my own Vegan Book of Permaculture), YouTube channels, courses, research papers, forums, and Facebook groups, all promoting sustainable growing methods at scales ranging from window boxes to large farms.
The Vegan Organic Network even offers a Stock Free certification system similar to the one provided by the UK Soil Association. Examples of successful veganic growing projects include Tolhurst Organics, OrganicLea Workers Cooperative, and Tree of Life Veganics in the UK, and Woodleaf Farm, Khadigar Farm, and the Farmageddon Growers Collective in the USA. Things are moving in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go!
Your book is a fascinating vegan mix of personal health, growing food, garden design, community empowerment, and more! What will a reader of The Vegan Book of Permaculture learn that they won’t from any other book on gardening?
Well, I guess the ‘gardening’ aspect of my book is a bit of a trojan horse as permaculture is about much more than food growing, but it’s often where people find their way in. I self-published my book Permaculture A Beginners Guide in 2001 after borrowing the standard textbooks Permaculture One and Permaculture A Designers Manual from my local library and finding them quite hard for a newcomer. I saw the need for something lighter and more accessible as an introduction to these ideas and remembered the ‘Beginners Guides’ books published by a workers co-operative called ‘Readers and Writers’ in the 1970s. These appealed to me with their use of graphic formats to present complex political or scientific concepts in ways which were easy to understand without being ‘dumbed down’. Titles included ‘Ecology For Beginners’, ‘Freud For Beginners’ and ‘Einstein For Beginners’, so why not a graphic ‘Permaculture For Beginners’?
As well as explaining how permaculture principles can be applied to all aspects of life, from personal well-being to designing climate-resilient future settlements, my book included a vegan-friendly ‘take’ on permaculture. Because of this, Maddy Harland, the editor of Permaculture Magazine, invited me to write a book of vegan recipes. Somewhere along the line, this grew into a somewhat larger work; that is, not only a book of animal-free recipes which can be made with non-imported ingredients but one which also explores the application of vegan permaculture principles and design, in contexts ranging in scale from the personal to community and landscape levels.
For me, vegan permaculture is about more than substituting plant-based ingredients for those using products from the slaughterhouse when these are still part of the corporate capitalist global food production system. Whether plant or animal-based, our current global agricultural model has massive social and environmental implications and effects. Just a few of these are soil degradation, pollution, loss of genetic diversity and the exploitation and dispossession of agricultural workers in both the ‘West’ and two-thirds of the world. Perhaps most seriously of all, in the long term, industrialised agriculture massively contributes to climate change by clearing forests and releasing soil carbon into the atmosphere through massive ploughing and industrialised cultivation of land for growing annual crops and grains.
Permaculture is about personal accountability and paying attention to energy flows and cycles. It’s as easy to lead an unsustainable, unaccountable vegan lifestyle based on imported, monoculturally grown and over-processed soya-based convenience foods as it is to live as an unsustainable and unaccountable omnivore. It’s important that we all develop an awareness of our own ‘energy budgets’ and the ‘ecological footprints’ of how we live and begin to work to steadily reduce these. My hope is that vegans, and anyone else for that matter, will take away a mixture of practical advice, some tools for change and maybe even a sense of hope for the future from my book.
Looking forward to the future, do you feel optimistic or pessimistic about our ability to stop animal exploitation, halt climate change, protect the environment, and encourage people to go vegan?
Well, I’m typing this in early January 2025, and it’s easy to be pessimistic about the future when looking at current trends and the state of the world right now. But this too shall pass, and maybe it’s important to take the longer view. I recently heard it said that When artists see the breakdown of hope their job is to inspire people again, and to me, permaculture is as much about art and creativity as it is about science or gardening techniques. Perhaps it’s the role of vegans and permaculturists to be a part of the change we wish to see in this world. It’s clear that ‘business as usual’ can’t continue as it is. Western expectations for meat and dairy to be constantly available three times a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year are globally unsustainable.
As the world becomes increasingly aware of the devastating effects of the climate crisis and the depletion of natural resources, we need to find new ways of living in harmony with the Earth. The social ecologist Murray Bookchin asks us to radically reimagine our agricultural landscape, and we will all need to at least think about lifestyles and diets that are less dependent on animal products and the inputs these entail if all Earth Citizens are to live and eat well in a sustainable future and move towards a future of abundance and peace for all.
In 1991, Kathleen Jannaway wrote in Abundant Living in the Coming Age of the Tree that
We are faced with the challenge of providing for the needs of a rapidly increasing world population from the diminishing resources of a finite and endangered planet. Fundamental changes in the values and practices of the dominant world system, which has created a situation in which millions of people and animals already suffer extreme deprivation and die prematurely, is essential. What is needed is a trend towards compassionate living the vegan way, with the emphasis on the use of trees and their products. As people face the challenge of environmental crises, as the supreme importance of using awesome intellectual powers with compassion for all sentient beings is realised, an evolutionary leap will be achieved. An era of truly abundant living will dawn in which humans, at peace with themselves, with each other and with all living creatures, will reach heights of creativity as yet unimagined.