Industrial agriculture exemplifies a reductionist and instrumental world view that effectively pulls people away from richer, more diverse, and more sustainable relationships to land, thereby distorting wider human-nature relationships. Permaculture, as a term and social movement, was envisaged as a technical and philosophical response to this situation, one that might foster real change. This thesis addresses the limits and possibilities of permaculture, especially in terms of its philosophical assumptions and through the tangible lens of how soil is understood and engaged within various forms of permaculture. The thesis highlights a tension between the ways in which permaculture often enables people to be physically back in the land whilst still sharing some aspects of industrial agriculture’s anthropocentric ideology and impeding people from spiritually and ethically reconnecting to soil or a broader nature. It suggests that, despite its advantages we need varieties of permaculture that require deeper and more ethical understandings and conversations with soils as diversely creative and living matrixes.