Posts by Robert Scott

A Critical Review of Permaculture in the United States

Posted by Robert Scott on January 1, 2010. 14 comments.

Read the complete text: HTML | PDF AbstractPermaculture involves the systematic design of ecological systems that sustain human communities and the natural environment. Since its introduction in the United States in the 1980s, it has spread via publications and educational workshops. The author was trained in permaculture design in 2000, and spent seven years developing […]

From the author:

I first submitted this article to a refereed journal for purposes of blind review. As could be expected, a "permaculture expert" was sourced as a reviewer for the manuscript. I was sad to see reviewers comments as they impugned my claims and suggested that I had never studied permaculture. The manuscript was rejected from four separate journals under these circumstances.

The rejection of this article was unfortunate because it aimed to bring permaculture into the refereed literature in the first place. Whether intentional or not, it seems that permaculture practioners used the review process to block the point from being made – or rather, they contributed to a decision not to publish this article in a refereed journal. Thus, I'm making it available here. People can decide for themselves whether my arguments have merit, and whether I'm qualified to make them.

The text and illustrations published here were composed and revised between 2007, 2008, and 2009, after my work for the Urbana Permaculture Project.

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