Researcher’s Blog 01 - Permaculture in the Philippines: When and where did it start?

Permies convene in Los Banos at the 2nd Philippine Permaculture Convergence held last year.

Phase 1 of PRPH’s research is to find out how the permaculture movement began in the Philippines. Though it’s impossible to pinpoint ‘who’ exactly is responsible for this (everyone has their own story!), it is possible for us to identify the key figures in the movement and then start from there.  

By now a lot of people must have heard about ‘permaculture’ especially those in the organic farming and backyard gardening circles. And probably you…because you have access to our Facebook page or this blog site. But did you ever wonder when it arrived in the Philippines?  

For sure ‘permaculture’ has been taught in agriculture schools and undergraduate courses. And even graduate courses. But the topic, according to some, was only mentioned ‘in passing.’ It wasn’t really discussed thoroughly. 

If you ask permaculture designers (also known as ‘permies’) here how they learned about permaculture, I’m sure they all have different stories to tell. But what we do know is that permaculture began in Australia in the 1970s and was immortalized by the book, Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual by Bill Mollison (1988). He’s the co-founder of permaculture along with DavidHolmgren (if you’re a UP student you can borrow a copy from the UPLB MainLibrary).

When our research team traveled the country to interview permies, there was one common theme in their stories: The Internet. This was not surprising at all because I myself am a ‘student’ of Google and YouTube.

If we check Google Trends, there was a sudden spike in Google searches for ‘permaculture’ in March 2005 in the Philippines. This was 7 years prior to me discovering permaculture.

So the best place to start looking for permies is online. In social media, in particular. And on Facebook to be more specific. The research team searched for permies in public databases (i.e. Permaculture WorldwideNetwork), searched on Google, asked for referrals, and we also posted a survey using Google Forms. Then in 2018, we were able to come up with a list of 144 self-proclaimed practitioners using this methodology. But do these people know each other? Is it possible to create a social network using this list of names? We can do this by creating a social network map or a sociogram. A sociogram consists of actors (or nodes) and links (or edges) to help visualize social relationships. Using social network analysis as a tool, we can find out who are the prominent nodes using an index called Degree Centrality. Which basically is the number of links attached to a node. In other words, yung pinaka-sikat (popular). Social network statistics was obtained using Social Network Visualizer, a free software which you can download here.

To make the long story short, one particular node stood out…Node 2. It had a DC score of 48 out of a possible 143 (33.56%) connections. The closest DC score was 31. We then ranked the nodes according to DC score and asked them one by one if we can visit them. We visited the first 12 people to respond to our request. And Node 2 was one of them.

If you’re a permie, you probably know Node 2. He’s Bert Peeters. The same Bert Peeters who taught you permaculture in Cabiokid, Nueva Ecija or any Philippine Permaculture Association (PPA)-led PDC course. Bert was also my teacher back in 2014 in Cabiokid. This was finally my chance to ask him, “Bert, how did you get into permaculture???” To those who don’t know him yet, Bert is a Belgian development worker who has been in the Philippines since his early 20s. He speaks fluent Tagalog and is currently the Executive Director of PPA.

How did he come across permaculture? He heard it from Columban priest, Fr. John Leydon, in 2000. From there, he searched it online and attended courses in Scotland and Australia where he met Geoff Lawton—whose video, Introduction to Permaculture Design, was the first permaculture video I watched.

Then we learned the backstories of the other 11 permies we interviewed together with their family, friends, and employees for a total of 19 actors. I then made a sociogram which I called a ‘Mentorship Network Graph’ (see photo) tracing the passing on of permaculture knowledge. Red nodes are external sources, yellow nodes are the ‘actors’ we interviewed, and the white node, that’s me. I wanted to see how I was related to all of them. We can see from the graph how Bert is connected to Geoff Lawton and Geoff is connected to the founders of permaculture itself…Mollison and Holmgren. Bert is a mentor to almost all of the yellow nodes except for nodes 10 and 11 who both came from the United States. It’s also interesting to note that node 13 also got her permaculture exposure from a Catholic network in the US.

The sociogram doesn’t suggest that permaculture in the Philippines began with Bert Peeters. It only shows how influential he is in the movement today—a movement that is also growing online. Even his students have formed permaculture networks of their own. For sure there are some people who knew about permaculture even before Fr. John Leydon or Bert Peeters did. It was just good timing. The early 2000s was the era when the internet started to go mainstream in the Philippines. Facebook started in 2004 and YouTube was founded in 2005. It was easy for people to look for resources and courses.

It was just good timing.

That’s it for this blog! There’s more to Phase 1 that we would like to share. Stay tuned!

*I hope to do this regularly until I write the draft of my dissertation manuscript in July.