Lately, two words have been circling in my orbit, surfacing in conversations that on the surface have nothing to do with each other: permaculture and perma-state.
They sound similar, but they carry radically different energies. One belongs to the language of ecology, sustainability, and renewal. The other belongs to politics, control, and systems designed never to change. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling: what happens if these two words started to meet each other, in the same conversations, in the same rooms?
Here in the UK, and across the globe, we see signs of what could be called perma-states. Not always the overt authoritarian regimes we immediately think of, but power structures, bureaucratic and cultural systems that harden themselves against change.
Immigration systems that normalise hostility. Welfare policies that discipline rather than support. Policing and surveillance that protect the status quo instead of people. Public institutions more concerned with their own survival than the communities they claim to serve.
This is permanence as control, permanence as fear. A system clinging so tightly to itself that it strangles the possibility of renewal.
Now contrast that with permaculture. Here, permanence is not rigidity but resilience. Whereby the system is not characterised by stasis, but by cycles of growth, decay, rest, and renewal. It is permanence through adaptability, diversity, and interdependence.
It’s an ethos that sees abundance, not scarcity; that treats care as the condition for thriving, not an optional extra. It is permanence rooted in life, not power.
At first glance, permaculture and perma-states belong to different universes, one earthy and ecological, the other political and bureaucratic. But they are not really separate worlds; if we look closer, we see how they collide every day in our lived realities.
Because social justice, ecosystems of care, and politics, domestic and global, are not isolated islands floating in the ocean of life. They are currents in the same water. The structures that govern our economies and borders shape how communities eat, breathe, and live. The ways we treat each other socially ripple out into the policies written in parliaments. The ecological collapse of one region is tied to the social or political collapse of another.
Until we centre this connectedness, in environmental work, in social movements, in economic models, in political practice, we will remain stuck. We will continue patching wounds in one area while tearing open new ones in another.
And it suddenly dawned on me, a question I’ve been grappling with for months, how does one connect and work for far homeland when they’re drained and consumed in their near one? A question that’s by no means personal, but rather collective amongst all of us, whose lived experiences and realities spread across geographies that are oceans apart. Here is where Syria comes in for me, not as an isolated story but as a mirror.
For decades, Syria epitomised the perma-state: rigid, violent, unyielding. And even now, post-Assad, the danger is that fragments of that same logic reassert themselves in new forms. But Syria is not an exception, is it?
It is rather an extreme expression of a global pattern: systems clinging to permanence at the cost of life, creativity, and care.
What happens there echoes what happens here. And what we allow here enables what is perpetuated there.
And swap Syria with Sudan, Congo, Gaza … the list goes on, and the logic remains.
So maybe it isn’t a coincidence that these two words, permaculture and perma-state, surfaced in my world at the same time. They point us to the same fork in the road.
Will we build systems that cling to permanence through fear, control, and extraction? Or will we root ourselves in cycles of care, regeneration, and interdependence?
I don’t have answers, and I couldn’t predict the future, but I know one thing: liberation will not come from permanence at all costs. It will come from creating conditions where life, in all its cyclical diversity, can breathe, heal, and flourish.
Photo by Karmishth Tandel on Unsplash
© Reem Assil 2025, All rights reserved.