Permaculture is vague and hand-wavey but some core notions IMHO are thinking about the suitability of sites for agriculture of a given nature, whilst increasing

Permaculture is vague and hand-wavey but some core notions IMHO are thinking about the suitability of sites for agriculture of a given nature, whilst increasing biodiversity (including non-agricultural biodiversity) and reducing reliance on foreign inputs. These are good ideas that generally lead to higher outputs for a given land area and a stronger and more resilient ecosystem. The catch, however, is labour. You need to be OK with harvesting by hand, eating in season, weeding by hand, etc. And even if you do the full "food forest" approach (note: 5 years to get started) you are going to need a lot of land to support relatively few people. It's primarily a lifestyle thing and not practical at societal scale. That said, however, it is "better; for our bodies, for the soil, for the water and birds and bees". If you can't see this, you are perhaps insufficiently schooled in biology or being mislead through the use of a simplistic accounting approach typical of traditional agriculture, which externalises costs such as soil and water degradation and assigns no value to sustainability, freshness, local processing, genetic diversity and so-on. (Full disclosure: I am no farmer, but I operate in the food area and have an interest in related systems. I am from Australia, the origin of permaculture.)