I first came to permaculture, like many others, with a deep sense of longing; seeking hope in a world that to me can often feel hopeless. It felt like a revelation—a system that made sense of the ecological unraveling occurring all around the world, and offered not only a critique of modern life, but practical, grounded tools to begin again; to design something better. The ethics resonated and the design principles inspired. Even with its somewhat fleeting and often ambiguous identity, It felt like something solid I could grasp onto, if I just reached out and wrapped my hand around it.

And I must admit, it is solid, in many ways. Permaculture offers a framework rooted in care, restraint, observation, and regenerative integration with the systems of human habitation around us. It gives us a kaleidoscope through which we can envision and manipulate our relationship to the land, to each other, and to the systems that sustain us in a way that most certainly is more healthy and reciprocal than the status quo. But as with many frameworks that emerge in a capitalist world, what begins as a liberatory path can become, almost silently, another form of enclosure.

Enclosure, historically, refers to the privatization of common lands in feudal and early capitalist Europe, when shared life-giving forces, the living systems essential to survival and community—forests, fields, pastures—were fenced off, seized, and converted into private property. This process didn’t just change how land was used; it fundamentally altered relationships between people and the land, breaking apart communal life and replacing subsistence and reciprocity with wage labor and ownership. What was once held in common became a commodity, and what was once shared became controlled.

Today, enclosure is not limited to land. It occurs any time knowledge, culture, or community practices are extracted from collective contexts and repackaged as proprietary systems or products. Think of the transformation of ancestral agricultural practices into patented seeds. Or the turning of folk medicine into branded supplements. And in the permaculture world, enclosure shows up when ideas rooted in Indigenous land stewardship or communal agrarian subsistence are marketed through $1,200 online courses, gated certifications, or branded consulting models based on spectacle and cults of personality.

This enclosure isn’t always malicious. It’s often subtle, quietly unintentional, and most certainly could even be well-meaning. But it still functions to separate people from the commons of knowledge and practice—creating gatekeepers, establishing hierarchies, and reinforcing individualistic, transactional modes of relating. Permaculture, when caught in this trap, ceases to be a shared toolkit for collective self-determination or community resilience and instead becomes another niche market—something you “buy into,” a brand you follow, a lifestyle to consume—another way to buy your way to sustainability.

It’s worth taking a moment here to clarify that capitalism is not simply the act of buying and selling. People have always traded, bartered, and exchanged knowledge. What makes capitalism distinct, as Karl Marx and later Murray Bookchin argued, is the culture of extraction, hierarchy, and domination it produces: labor and land turned into commodities, profit and growth prioritized over real needs, and relationships reshaped by competition instead of reciprocity. Selling a class, a landscape design, or a service is not inherently “capitalist”; what matters is the underlying logic. When exchange is rooted in care, sufficiency, and community, it begins to move outside the capitalist framework and toward something regenerative. But when exchange takes the form of high-priced, one-size-fits-all programs that are detached from local contexts, packaged as brands, and delivered impersonally, knowledge itself becomes a commodity. This is where permaculture, despite its intentions, often risks reproducing the very system it seeks to resist.

So when I say that what begins as liberatory becomes another form of enclosure, I mean that even frameworks born from ecological literacy and awareness of the more-than-human world paired with an honest and ethical intent can become mechanisms of alienation when they are absorbed into capitalist systems. The challenge, then, is to stay alert to when this shift happens, to recognize the fences as they go up, and to decide whether we want to live inside them, or remember the commons that once stretched beyond the horizon.

I can only speak to my personal experience, and to me much of the “permaculture world” seems adrift in contradictions. While its core ethics and its language of Right Livelihood—an inappropriate and ubiquitous (in the “permie” world) reference to Buddhist teachings—are often front and center, I’ve observed that many of the most visible figures in the field operate more as entrepreneurs than community builders. Whether they know it or not, their work tends to reproduce the very capitalist logics permaculture claims to subvert: individualism, brand identity, commodification of knowledge, and competition over cooperation. It often feels less like a movement and more like a marketplace. Even a “social network” being developed over the past few years as a place for permaculture folks, which seemingly claims to be advertisement-free, was full of promotions for classes that cost money, at least it was when I deleted my account. Is this ideology in disguise? A contradiction baked into the model? Or simply the inevitable result of trying to make a living inside a system that permits no other way?

This is not a condemnation of permaculture as a concept—far from it. I still use its tools. I still teach its principles, albeit sparsely. I still find great value in the way it encourages us to observe, to design with intentionality; to live within the limits of a finite planet. But I no longer consider it an aspiration or a destination. As many wisdom teachers have reminded us through the centuries, the teachings—like a boat—are meant to help us cross a river, and they are not meant to be carried forever. As the Buddha himself said, likening his teachings to a raft, we should abandon said raft once it has served its purpose.

If you are on the permaculture train, I applaud you, it’s a great ride, but I also invite you to look around and ask: where is it really going? Is it fostering collective care and ecological reciprocity, or is it just another form of “green” entrepreneurship? Has it challenged the dominant system or capitalist materialism? Or has it merely carved out a comfortable niche within it?

This is not a rejection. It’s a reckoning. And like any reckoning, it starts with telling the truth, even if it’s just the truth of my own experience.

Teaser image credit: Constable – A Boat Passing a Lock, 1826, 03923. By John Constable – https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/a-boat-passing-a-lock-148679, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104600686