The Land Was Never Unprotected: Indigenous Stewardship, Colonial Dispossession, and What Permaculture Came to Name

Before there was a word called “permaculture,” there were Ohlone land tenders managing California’s oak forests through controlled burns. There were Kenyan smallholder farmers practicing intercropping and soil-building passed through generations. There were Haudenosaunee agricultural systems — the Three Sisters — that fed communities and built soil health simultaneously. There were West African agroforestry traditions in which shade trees, food crops, and nitrogen-fixing plants coexisted in designed, productive relationships for centuries. Colonialism didn’t find “unprotected land.” It found land that was tended — and then removed the people who tended it.

What the Study Is Actually Showing

A Frontiers in Science study identified 16,825 unprotected sites spanning approximately 164 million hectares — land that harbors rare and threatened species with no formal conservation status. These lands are called “unprotected” because they lack official designation from Western conservation frameworks. What they actually lack is the presence of the communities that cared for them — communities removed through colonial land seizure, forced displacement, and legal frameworks that defined Indigenous land tenure as no tenure at all.

The mechanism that replaced Indigenous land management is also now documented: intensive agriculture for food and feed production is a key driver of global biodiversity loss. This is not coincidence. It is the predictable consequence of replacing ecological knowledge systems with extractive ones. You cannot remove the stewards and expect the land to remain whole.

Who Knew This First

The principles that permaculture systematized — observe the land before changing it; build biodiversity; close nutrient loops; work with water rather than against it; integrate rather than separate — are Indigenous ecological knowledge, expressed in different languages across every inhabited continent.

The Akan of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire practiced agroforestry — integrating trees, crops, and animals into a single designed system — for generations before Western scientists gave it a name. Yoruba land practice embedded human settlements within ecological systems, not against them. East African farming communities in Kenya and Uganda used rotational intercropping and soil-building techniques across centuries of continuous cultivation. In the Americas, the Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash planted together — demonstrated companion planting: each species supporting the others, building nitrogen, suppressing weeds, and providing yield from the same ground simultaneously.

This was not subsistence improvisation. It was sophisticated, accumulated land knowledge — and it worked. The 164 million hectares now identified as ecologically “at risk” were, in most cases, managed by these very communities before colonial dispossession severed the relationship between people and place.

What Permaculture Named But Didn’t Invent

Bill Mollison and David Holmgren coined the term “permaculture” in Australia in the 1970s. Permaculture aims to reduce waste, prevent pollution, maximize sustainability, protect wildlife, and improve the land’s resiliency and biodiversity. Their contribution was real: they created a design framework, a vocabulary, and a movement that spread regenerative land practice to people who might not otherwise have encountered it.

But the framework they built is a transcription — a translation of Indigenous ecological knowledge into language legible to Western institutions. The principles permaculture teaches were already being practiced, in living communities, for thousands of years before Mollison and Holmgren named them. Naming that source is not a critique. It is an act of honesty — and of repair.

Land, Colonialism, and the Architecture of Loss

The displacement of Indigenous land stewards was not incidental to colonialism. It was its mechanism. Colonizers needed to sever the relationship between peoples and their land in order to extract both — the labor of the people, the resources of the land. Legal frameworks that defined Indigenous land tenure as vacancy or “nobody’s land” made that severance appear justified.

The result is what the Frontiers study now quantifies: millions of hectares of biologically critical land with no steward, no protective status, no relationship. The connections between colonialism and global health policy trace directly from this rupture — the same logic that removed communities from their land also removed them from the conditions that sustained their health for generations. The public health case for reparations as healing cannot be separated from the question of whose land this is and who holds the knowledge to tend it.

What Reclamation Looks Like

Ubuntu Village’s programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria do not bring permaculture to communities. They support communities in practicing what they have always known, with the resources and recognition that colonialism denied them. Smallholder farmers — who already supply the majority of food consumed across the Global South — practice the intercropping, soil-building, and water-conservation methods that permaculture manuals codify. They do not need instruction. They need land security, market access, and the acknowledgment that their knowledge is not tradition to be preserved but technology to be resourced. Our piece on whether farmers can feed the world shows how smallholder farmers already do — and why investing in their autonomy is one of the most direct paths to a sustainable food future.

The same intelligence that makes forest mycorrhizal networks so resilient — where trees share nutrients, communicate stress, and support the weakest members through underground exchange — is the intelligence that Indigenous land stewardship has always mirrored. The forest did not invent community. These communities taught us to see it in the forest.

Protecting What Was Never Truly Lost — Only Taken

Protecting the 164 million hectares the study identifies requires more than conservation designation. It requires addressing the land relationships that colonialism severed: legal recognition of Indigenous land tenure, the return of land to the communities who know it best, and investment in the agroecological knowledge systems that sustained these ecosystems before “protection” was needed at all.

Permaculture can be one vehicle for spreading that knowledge — but only if it is taught with its origins named, and only if the communities who originated it are centered in the work of reclamation, not cast as beneficiaries of someone else’s framework. The land was never unprotected. It was dispossessed. That is a different problem — and it has a different solution. —MM

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2024.1349350/full

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44185-023-00034-2

https://www.britannica.com/technology/permaculture

Cultural Land Management: Lessons from Indigenous Peoples

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• ‣ Colonialism and Global Health Policy
• ‣ Reparations and Healing: A Public Health Argument
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