OK, Permaculture: Yes, I know what it is

I'm not going to say that I don't know what permaculture is, because I hate clichés. Let me say, however, that I might possibly be wrong about some things I think I know. My intention here is to put forward my take on permaculture, with which others may differ. I welcome any comments, as usual, and any designers, consultants, or permaculturists of any kind may feel welcome to weigh in on anything I say here. Just one rule: if you disagree, have an argument, not an "opinion". We don't do relativism here.

I am a Permaculture Design Consultant myself, and I've been familiarizing myself with this sprawlingly multidisciplinary composition of ethics and design principles since about 1993 or so. So far, the best literature on the subject, for my money, are Permaculture: A Designers' Manual by Bill Mollison and Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability by David Holmgren. Mollison and Holmgren co-composed permaculture many years ago.

I intend to go more deeply into the various aspects of permaculture in later posts. The titles of my two favorite permaculture books already say a lot: "design" and "beyond sustainability" are both significant concepts here. Permaculture is primarily an organized design science. Its multidisciplinary quality is due to the fact that what is being designed is our entire mode of existence, not anything in particular...or rather many particular things, but with the generalistic intention of a good life for all beings. The rampant lack of any design in the planning of human life as we know it is a prominent feature of modern life, but little noticed because we mostly see the circumstances of our life as features of the landcsape that "just happen" without our having to think about them. Nothing could be further from the truth, for a lot more than thinking has to be done in order to maintain this way of life: massive, intensive subsidies in energy go to support a way of life where one person leaves a carbon footprint the size of a blue whale or two. We have massive amounts of knowledge in physics, but we don't use it in our houses. We know a lot about ecology, but we don't use it in our gardens and we don't apply it to what we actually do.

If we actually applied all that we know to what we do, the results would seem miraculous.

Permaculture teaches that a person should account for one's home economy before going out and trying to fix political or broad-scale corporate ecological problems. Taking this advice and considering the home first, most modern homes are uninhabitable without electricity, creating a situation of unhealthy dependency on capital-intensive entities over which the customer has no control. Meanwhile, it is an utterly trivial matter to design and build houses so that they take care of themselves. If a house is positioned so that its long axis faces the sun (irrespective of where the road is), then very simple techniques of passive solar design can create a building that cools down as the weather heats up and vice versa. Then the garden may also be fairly simply designed to assist the house, providing for major percentages of a family's food needs. As for what food can't be grown at home, permaculture is equally applicable to agriculture serving whole communities...the point being to sustain communities, not "feed the world" in a way that has never worked for anyone except agribusiness.

Remember, there is no "world" anyway, right? It's all, as Levy Bryant says, a composition (see my last post, & links thereon).

Permaculture is a rational approach to living in a way that works. I have seen examples of permaculture design realized that surpass my own fantasies of the Garden of Eden for beauty, utility and livability. But my task here is not to describe the beauty of the places I have seen, but rather convey the beauty of permaculture itself, for even in scientific terms, permaculture is a truly wondrous composition in which may be applied any science, craft or art and find it interconnected with that which is already there. It is not immutable, and as design science is a changeable, evolving process, aspects of permaculture are non-dogmatic, and falsifiable where appropriate. For example, philosophies such as Object Oriented Ontology are eminently compatible with permaculture, despite its focus on "systems" and its sometimes teleological or nature-as-intent basis, for it is a simple matter to alter such language and still retain permaculture as a viable, pragmatic methodology.

In my own experience, the method is to "not do" at least as much as you do. As long as you do one basic thing right, everything else seems to happen almost by itself. Take good care of your soil and its biota, and abundant yields of good food and flowers just happen, almost as a by-product, like water flowing downhill is a by-product of gravity. And here we find perhaps the greatest challenge to us as designers: being able to let things go and happen as they will, once we have laid the groundwork. I find this personally daunting at times. It is a humbling experience to learn first-hand that although I can bring elements of what I might think is a "system" together, I can't actually connect them; one does not have the power to create, but only to assemble. But it is also a liberating experience to simply put the elements in the right spatial relationship to each other and watch in amazement as they form a composition, often in ways I did not expect.

Permaculture bridges the imaginary firewall between "human" and "nature" through physical practice. Unlike deep ecology, which sees a world separate from the human that should be left in its "pristine" state and untouched, permaculture designers see their job as the assembly of artificial ecosystems. There is no longer any question of the pristine: we have tampered with ecology across the whole face of the earth and cannot turn back the clock. If we simply allow things to continue the way they are, then we make a decision in favor of misery, poverty and destruction. We have ramped up such a massive extinction rate that there is now no choice but to assemble recombinant ecologies: edible landscapes, in which anything that adds to the diverse vitality and fits in a harmonious way should by all means be included. There are no "invasive" or "non-native" species (except ourselves, if we choose), and proscribed diets that eliminate animals from the edible landscape actually create unsustainable conditions. No one is advocating factory farms here (in fact, "farms" in general would look more like meadows, swamps or forests under permaculture), but an ecological community will obtain its food, irrigation water and fuel from where it lives, and vegetarian agriculture is simply not viable in every region under such low-impact circumstances. Enlightened omnivorousness seems, historically and anthropologically, to be the best dietary survival system for human populations.

There are many facets of permaculture design beyond building, energy and food. One may begin at any facet of the crystal and end up at any other. It is rooted in philosophy and ethics, chaos theory, pattern mathematics, climate, forests, issues of place, and even politics and economics. I will get into all of these at some point, and if readers have any specific areas of it they wish to know about, please feel free to ask. For now, suffice it to say that there are few things in life more worthwhile than permaculture.

Till next post, I leave you with some advice from Bill Mollison: "I would say, use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything. But if you lend your skills to other systems that you don't really believe in, then you might as well never have lived. You haven't expressed yourself." 


Or, as I like to say: Follow your hunger. 

I'm hungry

I am a tall, slim, neurologically sensitive, introverted and yet physically active person. I am therefore hungry most of the time, and I love to cook.

It is lunch time and I have been sitting and designing this blog all morning, drinking tea and coffee. There are vegetables from a local CSA (community-supported agriculture) in my fridge, waiting for me to make a dressing to dip them in and eat them. Cut vegetables lose 50% of their nutritional value in the first hour after harvest, and though mine are still a lot fresher than any you can get from any store, they need to be eaten soon. For my two dogs (children of my dear wife Deb's previous marriage, and very dear to me themselves), it is also lunch time. It would be better if I took care of these things right now.

But I want to talk a bit about what hunger means.

Western civilization (particularly in the USA, which I know best by far) is characterized by a universal state of chronic dissatisfaction. We are generally very hungry people, despite the fact that we consume at least six times as much of everything as we could possibly need. It is no wonder: the circumstances of our existence in the early years of the 21st Century make satisfaction impossible most of the time. We hunger for sustenance, health, meaningful livelihood, objects, togetherness, solitude. In general, I think we hunger for change.

It is right that we should want change. Our present mode of being really sucks, when you look at it. And my criticism of our present economic, political and social arrangements is not that they make some people very fortunate and most people very unfortunate...nothing so populistically Marxist. Rather, my criticism of these things is that they make life fundamentally impossible for everyone, regardless of empty and meaningless definitions of fortune or misfortune. Life under the circumstances we have been choosing to set is simply unlivable.

To distract the hungry, "change" of a kind has been built into these circumstances. This is the equivalent of changing the font or background color of one's blog (but not the fact that blogs depend on technology powered by ecologically and socially destructive mining), changing from one laundry detergent to another (but not the fact that one does not know how to make soap and stop littering the planet with plastic bottles), changing from Republicans to Democrats (but not the fact that we have no democracy and no longer live in a republic), or changing from Coke to Pepsi (both essentially the same, both nearly as destructive in their manufacture as petroleum, both crap). The fact that "change" was the magic word used by the Obama campaign illustrates that our hunger has grown to such a magnitude that Power can no longer distract us from examining these circumstances: they are no longer untested "features of the landscape", to be accepted as inevitable. When Power is forced to use explicit language to describe what they have previously been feeding you implicitly, you are well on the way to truly real Change: a dismantling of the circumstances of your life which you once thought inevitable, and a total reconfiguration of the infrastructure of life itself.

The only trouble is that if you just let it happen instead of taking an active and intentional part, you will most likely not find the new circumstances comfortable. Indeed, they may not be able to support your survival. This may be the case even if you do take an active role. But the active have a chance of determining the circumstances, and therefore a chance at life itself...life; not merely survival, but living. But the passive? I'm sorry, no.

I have always been a particularly hungry person. Hungry and inquisitive regarding my hunger, I have never accepted circumstances with which I was dissatisfied; I have rarely even accepted the parameters of my "likes" and "dislikes" without question. At age 11, I experimented with foods of different textures and flavors in a fashion I can only describe as Tantric, putting my least favorite foods first on the "to eat" list at the dinner table and watching how that list changed, destroying my own concepts of liking or not liking different things that are all good anyway. At age 10 I was foraging for wild edible plants in the Berkshire Hills, deconstructing the boundaries between "food" and "weeds", and also the link between "needs" and "markets". At age 12 I was hunting small game with a bow and arrow, and learning (from my sometimes angry father) that what you shoot, you have to kill; what you kill, you have to clean, cook and eat. Otherwise, no supper! At age 15, I was already refusing to accept the social parameters I was given by high school teachers and guidance councillors, that "you'll have to deal with this horrible shit for the rest of your life, so you'd better just accept it, or you will be a failure". I have rarely failed to refuse bad food. I have rarely failed to accept good food, regardless of whether I thought I "liked" it. And because of this, I have found to my sometimes great satisfaction that I have rarely failed in general.

Follow your own hunger, rather than hungers you are given to want. Cook (and if possible, grow) your own food. Learn to identify the edible and poisonous circumstances of your life, choose the edible, and spread their seeds; there is no need to weed out the poisonous, for well-nurtured edibles will out-compete them (I never "quit" smoking; I have simply not smoked in two years). Accept the bitter along with the sweet, for it quickens the blood and gets you ready for a new spring after a long winter.

Me? I'm a-go make some tzaziki and some sweet brown rice. Bon appetit!