Why We, as a Couple, Care About Permaculture (A Two Physicians' Perspective)
We don’t believe we would care so much about Permaculture if we hadn’t studied medicine.
Imagine being told that your existence is nothing more than a cosmic accident - that you, your loved ones, and everything you care about are simply random assemblies of atoms and molecules bouncing around in a meaningless void. This is the mechanistic worldview that dominates our culture, from university classrooms to hospital corridors. According to this perspective, life has no inherent purpose. We’re just chemically-conditioned collections of matter with a semi-permeable membrane creating an arbitrary boundary between “inside” and “outside,” between “self” and “environment” - that is the biochemical definition of life that we learn in medical school.
In this worldview, free will is an illusion. Ethics become pointless. Care becomes irrational. Love becomes merely a chemical reaction designed to help genes survive.
This isn't just abstract philosophy - it shapes how our institutions operate and how we treat each other.
In this edition, in 8 minutes or less:
#1 What happens when we truly embrace the idea that life is cheap and random?
#2 As physicians-in-training, we couldn't accept what we were seeing.
#3 Permaculture revealed itself as perfectly aligned with medical ethics.
#4 Becoming Part of the Solution
What happens when we truly embrace the idea that life is cheap and random?
In healthcare, we witnessed this firsthand during medical school at a top hospital in one of the world's largest metropolises. Life was treated as cheap.
The mechanistic model justified a cold calculus: some random assemblies of atoms (people) are simply better than others. Natural selection demands we fight for survival using our advantageous characteristics.
But the consequences extend far beyond hospital walls:
- Environmental destruction becomes logical when nature has no inherent value
- Social disconnection increases when relationships are just survival strategies
- Mental health crises multiply when existence feels fundamentally meaningless
- Ethical systems collapse when there's no reason to “do no harm”
Consider this telling example: Recent research has proved that lifestyle changes (light exercise, proper nutrition, sleep, and stress management) are far more effective at treating high blood pressure than any pharmaceutical intervention. Yet these remain “secondary” treatments while we prescribe less-effective drugs with side effects as the primary approach.
Even more striking: studies show that the greatest risk factor for heart attacks and strokes isn‘t diet, exercise, alcohol, or tobacco — it’s the quality of our close relationships.
Yet instead of systematically encouraging human connection as a public health strategy, we create protocols to prescribe more drugs.
Why?
One approach can be packaged and sold, creating dependency. The other is free while building a better world.
As physicians-in-training, we couldn't accept what we were seeing.
Studying and practicing medicine was interesting because you could experience situations on the edge of living - pain, recovery, deaths, births, tragedies, and normal life. We also saw many things that didn’t fit into the current newtonian model of reality. Some examples were cases of near-death experiences, radical remission, and what we dismissively call the “placebo effect".
During this period, we discovered scientific work explaining the "mindbody" model of reality and quantum physics. We learned from pioneers like Dr. Bruce Lipton, the HeartMath Institute, Dr. Joe Dispenza, Viktor Frankl, and more recently, Gabor Maté, whose book “The Myth of Normal” brilliantly dismantles the mechanistic worldview in the first part of it. The revelation was profound: Reality isn't random ("God don't play dices"). We aren’t accidents. As Viktor Frankl wrote in "Man’s Search for Meaning," we can give our own meaning to existence - but more than that, reality itself appears to be a loving intelligence that organizes into life. These are conclusions drawn from the application of quantum physics in the field of biology, that, as Dr. Bruce Lipton, the cell biologist who first described epigenetics, puts it, is the most relevant science of the 21st century.
We didn‘t see our future in conventional medicine. Since we’d always loved nature, we began exploring alternatives. We discovered Masanobu Fukuoka, who developed “do-nothing farming” - broadcasting seeds in clay balls following a logical approach, without tilling, weeding, fertilizing, or fighting pests, yet achieving yields equal to or greater than the high-tech industrial farms of Japan.
Then we found Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who synthesized Fukuoka's insights with Agriculture, Design methodology, and Ecology into a comprehensive science they called Permaculture.
Permaculture revealed itself as perfectly aligned with medical ethics
Permaculture is defined as: “An ethical design science for creating productive landscapes and human settlements that provide everything we need (food, shelter, materials, energy) while conserving the environment indefinitely.”
Ethics seeks to answer fundamental questions about what is right and wrong, good and bad, and how we ought to live.
Notice that word “ethical” built into the science itself. For us, this was a perfect match, since the first and most important thing for a physician is "to do no harm**." That is very difficult to discern, because even an established treatment or good advice that works for 99% of the population might do harm to another human being who is consulting with you. You have to take each prescription very seriously to attain a good level of certainty that you are helping people and not harming them (just look at how many side effects a drug can produce, or how a surgery, procedure, or drug is banned because it is found out that it doesn’t offer the benefit that was believed it could deliver. Nevertheless, during the time it was approved, if you had not adhered to it, you would have been scolded by the medical community). We dare to say that it looks as if the currently established medical system systematically harms people (at the same time, we do recognize that there are many technologies that have saved and continue to save many lives).
“First, do no harm.” But Permaculture went further - it showed us how to actively and realistic have a positively constructive impact on the world and its inhabitants, both human and non-human (although it continues to be a challenge to achieve this).
The reason we care about Permaculture lies there: It is a science (a systematic way governed by logic and free of dogma which can be iterated upon) to provide a healthy lifestyle, healthy food, clean air and water, build supportive communities, and remediate polluted spaces (pollution is a big health problem today, because there are many toxic substances accumulated in our bodies from unethical industrial activities that medicine has no idea about regarding the negative consequences to our bodies and doesn’t know how to address, since it is a situation without precedent — not to mention the effect on plants and animals).
It is how we discovered how “to do no harm” and, hopefully, to do some good.
Becoming Part of the Solution
Here's what Bill Mollison discovered through his calculations:
If just 10% of the global population switches from being primarily consumers to being producers using permaculture design principles, humanity's net effect on the environment shifts from destructive to regenerative.
Think about that. We don't need everyone to change everything overnight. We need one in ten people to embrace a different way of living - one that produces more than it consumes, heals more than it harms, connects more than it isolates (while the others need to reduce their consumption levels to sensible levels).
Permaculture isn‘t dogmatic and doesn’t propose going back to the agricultural age and abandoning technology. While many approaches achieve these goals, like regenerative agriculture, Fukuoka’s do-nothing agriculture, and syntropic agriculture, Mollison compiled universal ecological principles into a framework that can be pragmatically applied in any climate, with ethics and iteration built into the foundation. It addresses not just food production, but housing, energy, water, and community design
It is comprehensive approach to human settlement that regenerates rather than depletes or pollutes the environment - and you don't need permission to take part of it.
Tomorrow will be a great day
You can continue accepting the mechanistic worldview - that you're a random accident in a meaningless universe, that ethics are pointless, that the best you can hope for is to consume efficiently while the world degrades around you.
Or you can recognize what quantum physics reveals about reality: that consciousness and matter are intimately connected, that your choices matter, that love and wholeness are fundamental features of reality rather than accidents.
A very wise healer once said: “Take care of your fellow human as you would take care of yourself.” This is both a principle of ethical behavior that does good while avoiding harm, and a practical definition of love.
For us, Permaculture is a non-dogmatic, scientific, powerful tool to live an ethical life (doing no harm and maybe doing good) by building a reality in which life makes sense, and every living being on Earth, human and non-human, can have a space to live - while enjoying nature and life.
Does it sound preposterous that a fun hobby like gardening could mean so much?
