Reading nature’s book is what permaculture is all about.
— Toby Hemenway
Permaculture has progressed from offering another way to farm and garden to providing a toolkit for those who dream of designing entire human ecologies — habitats and food production — that have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems. But the wonderful world of permaculture embodies one glaring omission. Imitation of nature, universally urged, is not extended far enough.
“Observe what happens in nature and then imitate it; adapt strategies that have already evolved,” writes Bill Mollison. Instead of fighting mama nature or trying to control her, we follow her lead. After all, she has a very long track record of nurturing life — 3.8 billion years, to be exact. We are surrounded by evolutionary success; the sustainable world we long for already exists all around us. Tapping into nature’s wisdom must surely underlie any efforts at embodying wisdom in human undertakings.
Let us then apply this excellent advice while reflecting on our toolkit itself. What makes natural ecosystems work in terms of design? We humans have barely scratched the surface in our effort to understand. But we know there is no designer or planner overseeing a pond, moving the tadpoles and reeds to and fro, no micromanager of the thicket, directing the blackberries here and the dog rose there. Yet permaculturists behave as though they are imitating that interventionist God insisted upon by evangelical Christians.
Does nature design ecosystems via blueprints and future-to-present impositions? Does it envision a billion years ahead, then implement? Does nature take a burnt-over meadow and shape it according to a plan? Perish the thought. Lifelong nature observation leads me to be confident in asserting that nature emerges and evolves ecosystems by paying attention to present needs and opportunities, that it works piecemeal rather than in grand designs, and that it relies on co-adaptations of all living creatures to one another in a dance whose result cannot be predicted.
“Permaculture looks for the patterns embedded in our natural world as inspirations for designing solutions to the many challenges we are presented today,” says Jan Martin Bang in his deeply informed-by-experience Eco-villages book. Is the time ripe for permaculture to shift its attention to the meta-level, and pattern its design process itself on the natural world? I would love to see us extend our admiration for and mimicry of nature’s ingenious design to her way of designing as well.
I proffer here a few thoughts regarding what some useful permadesign guiding lights might be. My own understanding of permaculture is small, local and unfinished; barely begun. So I hereby point to an inviting edge where creative forces play and wait for more of us humans to join them.
How then does nature design?
- Nature focuses on the never-ending journey, rather than on the destination. She does not set goals, but rather goes forth in iterative steps. Experiencing the journey itself is part of what guides the process.
- Nature works in “trial & error” spirals, loops, zero-waste cycles. The quintessential spiral herb garden serves as a reminder of the spiral cycles underlying creation. When we humans create in the presence of uncertainty, it is these flowing and ongoingly-unfolding spirals that lead us from within.
- Nature unfolds the future from the present, from what is-here-now. It is from this very moment that future arises, not from projections and plans. The present moment holds within it the seed of emergence.
- Nature self-organizes from initial conditions. Self-organization is a term bandied about a great deal nowadays, but few people seem to know what it means. Software designers build in snippets of evolving adaptations into “God’s view” designs and call it self-organization. Leaving it to the “artificial life” crowd seems fraught with risk; only when we grow the understanding and practice of self-organization within real life, our life, we make it our own.
- Nature moves from wholeness to wholeness. To cherish the land means cherishing it now, as it is, despite its woundedness. After all, even land that has been abused pulses with its own life, its own living logic, its tenacious wholeness, its integrity. To go in with blueprints, chainsaws and bulldozers, ripping up wholesale ‘what is’, to be replaced by our willful design… — isn’t that yet another wound, this one in the name of healing? Nature teaches that “wholeness is always formed by a special process in which new structure emerges directly out of existing structures, in a way which preserves the old structure, and therefore makes the new harmonious.“
- Nature uses the small and slow — gradual, tiny increments, not comprehensive designs. As Christopher Alexander has observed, “living structures always arise slowly, by successive transformations of what exists, gradually, gradually….” From many small steps, surprising new structures emerge. Might growing a very local and slowly maturing relationship with the land serve life better than installing a comprehensive design, no matter how seemingly benign?
- Nature exhibits entropy-defying directionality. Mysterious, it is, this directionality that does not project the ideal future first, but somehow arises in tandem with the very first steps taken.
- Nature plants seeds, then lets them grow to see what happens.
- Nature oscillates between periods of stability where organisms get a chance to evolve and come into their own, and periods of high stress when less resilient organisms get weeded out or diminished.
- In nature, everybody’s a designer — the hedgehog or the possum, the apple and the oak tree, the mallow and the slime mold, along with the human who lives nearby. Animals, plants, and microbes have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. An ecosystem is a community of co-designers, colleagues. There is no master designer telling the others what to do.
- Nature’s designers all evolve in response to each other; co-adaptation is one of the aspects of self-organization and proceeds via cycles of mutual responsiveness. “Design is adaptive only when it is done in steps, and each step accepts feedback from the existing structure.“
- Nature’s designers mimic each other’s evolved patterns. As moths mimic the eyes of a bird for protection from predators, so humans mimic the sophistication of a leaf when inventing a better solar cell. And life’s principles show the way: build from the bottom up, self-assemble, optimize rather than maximize, use free energy, cross-pollinate, embrace diversity, adapt and evolve, use life-friendly materials and processes, engage in symbiotic relationships, and enhance the biosphere. What surrounds us is the secret to survival.
I am resisting at this point the urge to speculate further or to sally forth with pithy, half-baked advice. That would surely go against the spirit of what I have written so far. The next steps will emerge from a community of collaborators, people who are animated by the need to extend permadesign in a more processual direction, using bottom-up, biological metaphors. So I will restrain myself! and tell a story instead. Let it illuminate the words I have summoned to express what is a-borning inside me.
There was once a woman who invited permies to her urban yard for a class. They presented the family with several attractive designs, and she chose one to implement at considerable effort and expense. When all was said and done, she discovered that the reality in her garden was completely out of touch with the reality of her small children who tripped over vegetable beds and crushed the hapless cabbages. Eventually, most of the garden was ripped out to bring back the lawn. Will the family give permaculture designers another chance? Will the land?
Once again, I end with the words of Christopher Alexander. [To see the larger passage containing this quote, go to this German forum and scroll down.]
The 20th-century mainstream view of building was goal-oriented and mechanistic, aimed mainly at end-results, not on the inner good of processes. Building was viewed as a necessary way to achieve a certain end-result. The design drawn by the architect – the master plan drawn by the planner – was the purpose, these were the goals of the art. The process of getting to the goal was thought to be of little importance in itself, except insofar as it attained (or failed to attain) the desired goal.
The mechanistic view of architecture we have learned to accept in our era is crippled by this overly-simple, goal-oriented approach. In the mechanistic view of architecture we think mainly of design as the desired end-state of a building, and far too little of the way or process of making a building as something inherently beautiful in itself. But, most important of all, the background underpinning of this goal-oriented view – a static world almost without process – just is not a truthful picture. As a conception of the world, it roundly fails to describe things as they are. It exerts a crippling effect on our view of architecture and planning because it fails to be true to ordinary, everyday fact. For in fact, everything is constantly changing, growing, evolving. The human body is changing. Trees bear leaves, and the leaves fall. The road cracks. People’s lives change from week to week. The building moves with wind and rain and movement of the earth. Buildings and streets and gardens are modified constantly while they are inhabited, sometimes improved, sometimes destroyed. Towns are created as a cooperative flow caused by hundreds, even millions, of people over time.
Why is this process-view essential? Because the ideals of “design,” the … drawing of the imaginary future, the … watercolor perspective of the future end-state, control our conception of what must be done – yet they bear no relation to the actual nature, or problems, or possibilities, of a living environment. And they are socially backward, since they necessarily diminish people’s involvement in the continuous creation of their world.
Leaving Babylon 
March 11, 2012 at 6:54 pm
Thoughtful and challenging – as usual. There are many ideas here that reflect much of Permaculture thinking – including using small and slow solutions – a Permaculture principle from David Holmgren.
March 11, 2012 at 7:02 pm
Oops – didn’t finish – or maybe I did!
But there are many heroic Permaculture designs – often created in the abstract without listening to the needs of the particular land – ie the designs can be particularly anthropocentric. Large scale earth works can be quite damaging to land.
The idea that humans are free to impose their own designs on land is the mentality of the “developer”, miner as well as the permaculturist
The word that comes to mind is synergy. How do we synergise our designs with the emergent designs of nature so that our needs – and the needs of the existing land and life communities – are both met?
There are many other principles of design that can be used by permiedesign – and I wish I had time – and a laptop! – to write more.
I hope your article generates a robust discussion.
March 11, 2012 at 7:14 pm
[…] s); })(); Via a very nice pingback — thanks leavergirl! — I discovered this post at Leaving Babylon titled Permadesign. It is a critique, almost a manifesto, regarding the direction of permaculture design and the […]
March 11, 2012 at 10:11 pm
Lots of good points in your article, leavergirl, but let me suggest some issues.
You claim that it’s not “harmonious” to rip up what is and replace it using “our willful design”, but doesn’t that jump to a conclusion? If the section we rip up is what had interrupted the otherwise harmonious surroundings (e.g., a mall in the middle of farmland), don’t we have the opportunity of re-establishing the harmony? And isn’t any design “willful”, even those of Christopher Alexander? Are you asking us to cast aside will? (Sounds like something Krishnamurti would recommend, just beyond the edge of my understanding. Help me out here.)
“In nature, everybody’s a designer”–that’s quite a personification, isn’t it? I don’t believe that trees and birds are acting with purpose to create a forest. They have roles, but their “purposes” or intentions are what we ascribe to them through our observation and analysis. Let’s not pretend that we are co-designers with the other creatures until we live with them (post-civ) as equal inhabitants of a stable community (if we eventually become indigenous peoples again). Until then our technologies and culture make us the leaders (or colonizers) even if we aim for “sustainability” and “the good of all species”.
I like your incrementalist approach, avoiding the grand design. What should we say to the visionaries, the ones fighting urgently to save the world from catastrophic climate change, die-off, mass extinction, and so on, who will be totally frustrated by the slow pace of “natural”, organic change? (That’s a rhetorical question, feel free to take many articles to reply!)
March 11, 2012 at 11:11 pm
Once there was an architecture firm which designed an unsuitable home. By your logic, architecture is fundamentally flawed.
I once saw a doctor who incorrectly diagnosed my illness. We should reject all medicine?
Actually, Alice’s garden designers neglected to assess the family’s needs, an early step in the permaculture design process. I can’t say why. Perhaps they were not good at their craft. Many permie designs retain lawn for family use if that is the wish of the clients. Perhaps you might like to look at a few designs, or even one, to get some idea of what your talking about.
What does this mean? “Yet permaculturists behave as though they are imitating that interventionist God insisted upon by evangelical Christians.” That’s a really offensive assertion. Please explain precisely how it is that we do that. Please.
“The next steps will emerge from a community of collaborators, people who are animated by the need to extend permadesign in a more processual direction, using bottom-up, biological metaphors.” Premaculture is entirely predicated on ecology, and mimicking natural systems to meet human needs, while doing the least possible damage to the environment.So how do you envisage this more processual direction which uses bottom-up biological metaphors. Could you please describe this?
I’m beginning to wonder if there was not once a blogger who wrote a lot of big words about stuff that she did not understand…..
March 12, 2012 at 11:36 am
Peter, welcome! I hope you will come back and tell more, re permadesign principles. The synergy you mention is something that must come first, doesn’t it? — And thank you for your kind words.
Paul, you bring up good philosophical issues. My words can only point in a direction, and I am relying on Alexander’s insights. I figure, better to overstate the will-lessness in the face of a culture that’s gone way overboard the other way. I am not sure about casting will aside, but surely, we need to put more attention to processes that do not rely on will… if, that is, we are serious about imitating nature’s ways.
As for some crass development in the middle of a farmland, or a farmland in the middle of wilderness, well, what I am trying to say (and I am not necessarily all that comfy with it, but am pushing my boundary) — what is, needs to be respected. The new must sensitively evolve from what is… if we brutally override and knock down what was there, how is our process any better than the one that created the icky stuff? If we rip and shred what was there, we are just doing the “ends justifying the means” trip over again, no?
Well, that’s the point, though. Nature’s designers do not have “purposes” or “intentions.” Not in that way. How do we biomimic their way of designing?
🙂
I myself get impatient too. But I suspect that the very urgency of the revolutionaries is not all that different from the urgency of the developers. Haven’t we done enough damage? Maybe utilizing the “slow and small” urgings of permaculture need to be heeded in earnest?
Angie, my post is largely based on the work of Christopher Alexander, who is a very accomplished architect as well as skilled hands-on builder. All the quotes embedded in the text of the post are his. I recommend Alexander’s books, very much. Perhaps, you will not dismiss him as someone who writes a lot of big words about stuff he does not understand.
March 12, 2012 at 6:10 pm
Angie, two more things. If you keep up with the jabs, I am going to stop responding. But if you come up with points in the spirit of the discussion, I’ll be happy to respond.
You made a good point regarding “Alice’s yard.” The permies made a mistake. As you point out, it could have been avoided if they had followed permaculture’s own guidelines better.
But you see, we humans always make mistakes. In fact, human error should join “death and taxes” as the certainties of life. And that is why I am on a path toward a fluid *process* that catches mistakes early rather than late.
March 12, 2012 at 8:19 pm
Hi Leavergirl,
My jabs are pretty benign in comparison to your attack here;
http://bethechange2012.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/looking-catastrophe-in-the-eye/#comments
but fair enough, let’s try to sort this.
Would you please respond to the question I posed earlier, in the spirit of the discussion. You made this statement; “Yet permaculturists behave as though they are imitating that interventionist God insisted upon by evangelical Christians.” I commented that I (and my permaculture partner) find this offensive and requested that you please explain precisely how it is that we do that.
Thanks.
March 12, 2012 at 9:43 pm
I think the statement “Yet permaculturists behave as though they are imitating that interventionist God insisted upon by evangelical Christians” is a just a little overdone! But it captures a really important point, without needed to critique the statement itself, or take it out of the overall context of the article – or for that matter the recent articles on un-planning. Permies are not the sole designers in a place and we should not impose our abstract designs
on a place. The Permaculture principle of “observe and interact” – or the process of slow and careful observation over time would support this approach.
More particularly any “grand design” needs to accept feedback from the place as it evolves –
again the Permaculture principle of “repond creatively to change” and “accept feedback” support this approach.
I think the more useful aspect of this piece is the critique and challege to the notion of a “Pemaculture designing/planning process and how this unfolds. I have seem many Permaculture designs that are simply overdone, too complicated, too ambitious, too big. And many of them have not asked the simple question of “what does this land need from me” rather than asking “what can I get from this land”.
My final point relates to the idea of emergence. The Permaculture principle that “everything gardens” is perhaps more useful than everything is a designer. Notwithstanding that, all living things, and probably all “inanimate” things have their own life forward energy – their telos if you like. I’m an animist, not in that woo-woo kinda way, but the kind that is supportive of the new science of an animate earth. If everthing/all living things are in a life moving forward way – how does a Permaculture design fit in with that. No answer required for that question, just something to contemplate. (This note is written on a phone – and I could write more but it’s too hard and there’s gardening to be done.).
March 13, 2012 at 1:04 am
I just feel so sad that this discussion could inadvertently turn people away from permaculture, not planning per se. The previous post here saw commenters newly determined to avoid the pitfalls of the Transition movement, and grow a food garden without being stymied by the relentless planning obstacle presented here. Please understand, audience of Levergirl, Transition and home food-growing are in no way mutually exclusive. (My family’s journey is fairly typical; we have worked, and continue to work with our land to assist it to provide for our family and friends, and to regenerate habitat and nourishment for bird and animal wildlife, the insect and arachnids, and for the magic that is soil biota.Soon we will take it to the next level and formally join with others to build local community resilience, referring to the work of Rob Hopkins and others so that we can learn from their successes and mistakes.) Also please, readers, investigate permaculture for yourselves. It operates from a position of profound respect for this planet. Unlike any other system of human provision the principles rest on a platform of ethics – Care of the earth, care of people and equity of resources. It is unashamedly about love.
Of all human endeavours, permaculture to me and many, many others around the globe, offers the least prescriptive, most intelligent attempt at positioning humans where we belong – as members of earth’s biology, who happen to have the wherewithal to inflict great damage, but who can choose to conduct ourselves with humility and kindness, by educating ourselves about the natural world and working carefully to limit our impacts.
Dr David Suzuki has stated that “What permaculturists are doing is the most important activity that any group is doing on the planet”.
And just to counteract any misgivings that these posts risk for those who may be put off by Alice’s experience or the dreaded planning spectre, I again put forward this excellent film explaining our species’ predicament with regard to an energy based growth economy, and note that the advice for survival is informed by the work of Rob Hopkins.
There Is No Tomorrow vid
And on with the gardening, Peter! Don’t ya just dig it? ;/
March 13, 2012 at 2:09 am
@Paul, if we implement our will we implement our ego, which is at the core of architecture today. In ancient times architecture was not made to make uniqueness, it was a “gift to God”.
“In early times the city itself was intended as an image of the universe – its form guarantee of the connection between the heavens and the earth, a picture of a whole and coherent way of life.” – Christopher Alexander
“Nature unfolds the future from the present, from what is-here-now. It is from this very moment that future arises, not from projections and plans. The present moment holds within it the seed of emergence.”
Thank you for many good points! And this unfolding happens through the 15 properties of life.
– N E W C O N C E P T S I N C O M P L E X I T Y T H E O R Y:
Click to access complexity.pdf
If you read the above essay you’ll see that Alexander thinks the whole universe unfolds and creates itself through these 15 properties.
– Why Monotonous Repetition is Unsatisfying:
http://permaculture.org.au/2012/01/04/why-monotonous-repetition-is-unsatisfying/
If you read the above essay by Nikos Salingaros you’ll see how tremendous much more life it gives to a building using only three of Alexander’s 15 properties.
I had my PDC last summer, it was a great experience, but we learned nothing about these 15 properties and hardly nothing about unfolding.
It’s a pity, but many ecovillages are too ugly for me to live in, having all kinds of strange roofs covered with huge solar cell panels:
http://permaliv.blogspot.com/2011/11/deep-truth-of-sheltering-roof.html
March 13, 2012 at 10:36 am
Welcome Øyvind! For folks who have not met him yet, he hails from Norway, and is often seen on the Australian permie site http://permaculture.org.au elucidating and spreading the ideas of Alexander and fellow travelers.
That’s it, isn’t it… our world is so full of ego that if people speak of will-less approaches, people panic or get confused. But this is how human habitations were built for long eons! This is not something extraordinary. Check out this article about the fractal way African villages are evolved (hat tip to Tanya).
http://classes.yale.edu/fractals/panorama/Architecture/AfricanArch/BaIla.html
March 13, 2012 at 8:53 pm
Further to an email discussion,this is an apology to Vera for calling her a bully in the previous thread. I misunderstood her style, which is intentionally “brash and provocative”. Ooops.
March 14, 2012 at 11:16 am
Another thought-provoking piece, thank you Vera.
An (entirely predictable) side-effect of my not commenting immediately is that many others have already said much of what I would have. (Thanks folks!)
Based on my limited experience of permaculture I agree with others that it clearly advocates a measured, respectful approach to any intervention. On our course were urged to observe a site for a year before deciding on any changes and those changes should be small, slow, based on feedback, etc.
So if practised well (which admittedly is not always the case), permaculture should be far less likely to produce damaging results than other approaches.
Interesting to ask though: can we be absolutely sure that any particular site, even the most devastated, over-developed site, would benefit from a permaculture make-over? Would an empty building be better off decaying naturally and being overwhelmed by native volunteer species or should we knock it down and create a food forest?
That depends on the answer to: “better off for whom or what?”. Intuitively it seems that nature would be better off all round if us western thinkers just got out of the way. But given that we’re going to find somewhere to produce and procure our food, surely better to grow it in a biodiversity-friendly, soil-building way on a disused building site than to extract yet more from that farmland in the countryside?
Or is that succumbing to some moral relativity thing (which I know nothing about … but) that can lead us down a rat-hole?
Still, overall I stand by the view that, if we’re going to develop or change anything, the permaculture approach is an eminently sensible starting point.
However, kudos to Vera for taking us to the next layer – i.e. to consider not just how to do things but how to decide to do things. Permaculture’s nature-friendly, slow-pace, organic approach to change is expressed well in the Survey and Analysis stages of the process. But those stages are followed by the Design and Implementation stages. Although these stages can also be slow, and and are often modular and iterative, it’s hard to completely avoid some top-down, over-arching decision-making at some point – a far cry from the unfolding we are seeking here. As an improvement, I love the idea of asking the question suggested by Peter Brandis: “what does this land need from me?” (although if the answer is ‘to go away’ we are back to square 1!).
Could we go further and do away with the Design stage entirely? Don’t know what we’d do instead – perhaps something like Survey, Interact reciprocally, Sense intuitively, Interact a bit more, Support anything producing any of the 15 properties, Sit back a bit, Undo the last thing if something ugly is emerging, Survey again … etc?? !!
March 14, 2012 at 11:55 am
Angie, apology gratefully accepted. It’s amazing what ongoing kerfuffle a misunderstanding can cause, eh? Glad you are back.
Now, onward to permaculture! I am still digesting all this wonderful feedback.
March 15, 2012 at 1:17 pm
The Tao has: “Heaven and Earth are heartless / treating creatures like straw dogs”.
Nature has no reason to be ‘on your side’, (only on the side of life in general, perhaps.
March 16, 2012 at 10:22 am
I laugh and I laugh. What silly people most of us are, despite best intentions. As I read the posts and comments by several bloggers (who all seem to be coalescing around each other), displays of hubris and jangled emotions are notable. I would not expect it to be otherwise, frankly, considering we are all in the (still very) early stages of the fight of our lives. It will inevitably get shrill and destructive, too, as we respond as instructed by the current culture by insisting and forcing our way through. In the meantime, I laugh.
I lack experience with permaculture because, for a variety of reasons, I’m surrounded by concrete and my feet are set in it, for now at least. So I’ve never actually gotten down in the dirt and dug around. Therefore, anything I might have to say is pure thought experiment. But let me offer a couple bits not specifically about gardening.
The woman who chose a permie plan to implement in her backyard but ended up reversing the whole thing is being characterized as failure, but I don’t see it that way. If the goal is the process, then it could have been a raging success because she probably learned more through that intermediate failure than any immediate success could have provided her. That’s the trial-and-error nature of, well, nature. What looks so glaringly obvious in hindsight was clearly not obvious beforehand, and it’s silly to think we can anticipate very much at all. By mischaracterizing the process as failure rather than adaptation, she simply stopped cold rather than chalking one up and proceeding with the project in a different direction. And so are self-fulfilling prophecies made.
The jibe about “imitating that interventionist God insisted upon by evangelical Christians” is right on point for some of us yet offensive to others. Just like we can’t help but to force our way through (or at least attempt it), we also can’t help but to blame and cast aspersions liberally. Our personal right-think means more than others’ sensitivities (I know I’m guilty). But it means almost nothing in the end: words on the wind. Seeing how we’re immersed in words as a medium, there’s lots more of that to be expected from all quarters. I’m glad some rapprochement was achieved, though.
March 16, 2012 at 4:33 pm
@Tom:
The point is, as I see it, to be on Nature’s side or the side of life in general, rather than ‘our own’. Willful pursuit of our own ends has resulted only in the present state of affairs, which now threatens ‘life in general’ on this planet, including our own survival. The quote you selected from the Tao Te Ching is one of my favorites, however the TTC also says:
Heaven and earth are long lasting.
The reason why heaven and earth are long lasting:
Because they do not live for self
Therefore they last long.
Thus the sage puts his body behind,
Yet his body is in front.
He regards his body as external
Yet his body remains in existence
Is it not because he is selfless
That he can fulfill himself
‘Fulfilling the self by being selfless’ – this what I see Alexander, and Vera, and others like them proposing. The way to be ‘long lasting’, i.e., ‘sustainable’ or at the very least, ‘durable’ (a term ecologist and homesteader Guy McPherson prefers).
March 16, 2012 at 4:43 pm
And lest I be accused of indulging in East Asian mysticism for my previous post, I should add that similar perspectives can be found quite well within the Western canon of thought as well. Consider this well known passage in the context of ‘design without planning’ or Taoist ‘wu wei’:
Therefore I tell you, fdo not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his ispan of life?And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, t I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’
We should look to the ‘birds of the air’ and the ‘lillies of the field’…
March 16, 2012 at 8:29 pm
“The point is, as I see it, to be on Nature’s side or the side of life in general, rather than ‘our own’.” Thanks to a nature mystic for clarifying this different approach. I am so used to the usual strategy of identifying with some part of the world (e.g., progressives, or humans, or “our local community”) and designing a new world “in our interests”, that it is difficult to make the shift to a larger perspective. What does being on the side of life in general call for me to do, if anything? I’m trying to become more aware of interventions which inadvertently cause more harm than they serve life, and I’m coming to believe that preserving civilization’s institutions in any recognizable modern form usually falls in that category.
March 17, 2012 at 5:01 am
Very kind of people here to respond to my post. I’ve only just found this interesting site. I feel a bit out of my depth…. To clarify… I picked up an assumption in this post that following ‘natural processes’ might be a good tactic for the individual attempting to grow food and so on. I was simply trying to say that you can only push this idea so far. Certainly nature feels very benign when the apples come cascading off the trees in the autumn. However I’ve met permaculturalists who say that it’s not ‘natural’ to prune apples. They also then say that their system is so effective that most of their time is spent merely harvesting their crop. I discovered that the reason they spent most of their time harvesting is that their apples are so tiny – it takes ages to pick them up. (That’s why everyone else prunes their apples).
The revelation that nature does not care for any particular individual came when my terrier bitch, Ivy, gave birth. I was ‘midwife’. She was pacing up and down half the night, then at first light raced down into the garden and produced a pup in the hedge. We dried it and shook it and safely returned mother and pup to the house. Ivy then launched another 5 pups into the world at half-hourly intervals. How much did nature ‘care’ for that first pup? The others would have been enough to keep the line going. How much does nature care for the infant born to a starving woman in an African village?
I think the word ‘hubris’ – pride – has been used in this thread. It is pride to assume that ‘nature’ is caring for you. On the other hand nature might work very well with you.
I do think that relieving yourself of pride is a good thing. However you might notice that politicians say that you should relieve yourself of personal pride in order to be ‘patriotic’ or that religious leaders say that you should be ‘humble’ or company bosses say that you should be ‘obedient’. That is NOT what I mean by reieving yourself of pride.
I was led to this site when a recent post on Transition Towns and planning was posted to the Energy Bulletin. One of my deep concerns about the TT movement is the ingrained pride and feeling that nature must sort it out for humanity. One TT workshop session involves role play whereby you must imagine yourself 200 years in the future talking to a descendant living at that time. MY initial reaction was that I was more concerned (like my dog) with my dinner tonight than the world 200 years hence. Secondly I realised that the people around me had so much pride in themselves that they actually thought they could have such a significant effect on the future. I think such pride is very much a carry over from the expectations of the middle-class in the fossil fuel era.
March 17, 2012 at 12:49 pm
Peter, that’s the spirit in which I meant my provocative statement about imitating God the Planner. Nature does not plan. If you impose your plan upon the land, whom are you imitating? And thank you for pointing out what should be an obvious starting point: what does this land want for itself? What do the willows by the creek want? What do the hawks and woodpeckers want?
It seems to me that starting with a drawn plan means starting with human abstractions. Just like architects influenced by Alexander are learning to go to the lot and place their stakes intuitively, on site, in response to the feel of the place and the views and all that is ineffable and cannot possibly exist on a flat piece of paper… so should permies, IMO, begin their designs with being and moving on the land. The map is not the territory. The territory is primary.
I recently saw a vid made by a well know permaculturist who went to Israel, picked a dry, salinized hunk of land near the Dead Sea, and showed how to grow things there by digging a swale, surrounding it with compost and planting trees and bushes on the sides. It worked… as a demonstration project. Yet there was no concern over the creatures that lived there (the assumption was, nobody lives here) and for the values of the people who lived nearby. Predictably enough, once the permies left, the villages went back to doing things the old way, and the project was abandoned. Is this really permaculture? The land mattered not a whit. Only the design mattered, imposed on it by humans who knew better. Or maybe it was all about publicity, I don’t know. Like Angie says, permaculture is about love. Can you just run in and out like that, without learning to love the land and make a commitment to it, and call it permaculture?
What I love about the way you come across, Vanessa, is that you are always willing to take the next step, to start thinking about how it could be different, make at least a stab. A bridge emerges. I will piggyback on that soon with some ideas of Alexander regarding the process he recommends, and which I think is very applicable to permaculture as well.
Brutus, if we can work out some of the kinks while the going is good, hey, we’ll be ahead. As for Alice’s yard, the process she used was kinda like the process this civ uses… full sail ahead, and find your lessons only when way too much damage has been done. We need a process (the very same trial and error) that catches us before we over-commit, no? I cast my vote for early adaptation rather than a late scramble to undo a great deal of damage.
March 17, 2012 at 1:20 pm
Paul: what does being on the side of life call for? A poignant question. I think we are all discovering the answers to it, as we walk away from Babylon, the world where Thingness rules…
Welcome, natural mystic!
I prefer the term durable too. “Sustainable” has been stolen. Thank you for sharing wisdom from both ends of the Earth!
Welcome, Tom Rainboro. I disagree with the particular bit of Tao you posted. The one who came up with it forgot to look at his own self as part of nature. Nature did care for that pup — through you, you who are her, also. How could you think that *that* somehow does not count? I know, I know, the nihilists have done a number on us… but we don’t have to pay attention to them any more.
The thing about pruned trees is, they bear bigger apples, but their branches break easier in bad weather. Nothing is quite as clear cut as the human mind wishes… But perhaps there is a way to prune that works for the trees as well as for the humans…?
To restate what I am trying to say is this… of course nature cares for you. She cares for you through your dog, your family, your friends, the warm sun and the sweet soaking rain. Where is the hubris in recognizing that and being grateful?
200 years! OMG. That takes the cake. That is exactly the sort of planning madness I hope my writing can counter a bit. That reminds me of a story of a little farm in Missouri. The landholder invited a number of people to help begin form a community there. So they duly began to meet, and planned, and crafted policies. Then he finally threw his hands up in frustration and said, look, I don’t need a pet policy. I need to fix the roof over the shed. 😉 And threw them all out.
March 17, 2012 at 6:56 pm
o no! Now I’m so confused; I don’t know where to turn. Nature did a good thing by making me rescue the pup, but did a bad thing by making me prune the apple trees!
March 17, 2012 at 7:03 pm
Tee-hee. Nature did a good thing making you. 🙂
March 17, 2012 at 7:05 pm
Actually, nature may have done a terrible thing by making you save the pup. Who knows what harm it will cause, for example by scaring away the local wildlife, or contributing to an exponential increase in the local dog population, not all of whom will be well cared for.
Your point is well taken, Tom, let’s be careful about attributing intention or value to “nature”. Being “on the side of life” is not going to be easy to figure out.
March 17, 2012 at 7:21 pm
Nobody’s attributing intention.
Yeah, well, Paul, maybe nature was not thinking of all the wildlife you would scare away in your lifetime either! 😉
Value? Nature is clearly on the side of life. And doing a crack job of it here on Earth. May have overplayed her hand with the human monkey though.
March 17, 2012 at 7:25 pm
Vanessa, maybe permadesign needs to begin with centers? See this excellent summary of Alexander’s key ideas.
Click to access NatureOfOrder.pdf
March 18, 2012 at 1:14 am
Vera, here’s another essay on Generative processes, by Besim S. Hakim: http://www.intbau.org/archive/essay19.htm
March 20, 2012 at 7:22 am
Lots more to assimilate here, all fascinating.
Vera: thanks for your thoughts, and for the Nature of Order link. That is indeed an excellent summary, which I’m still absorbing. I shall ponder the concept of centres in permaculture design; I can see that in ecology (and mimicked in forest gardening), keystone species already likely correspond with that aspect.
March 21, 2012 at 4:05 pm
Thanks V, for giving us much to think about, and for modeling how to tend a comments thread like a somewhat chaotic garden. Some thoughts:
1. It seems to me that, as one commenter said, it is anthropomorphizing to say that nature ‘designs’ or to say that nature even cares. Nature adapts, mostly to other elements of itself. Evolution, which is tautological (it occurs because it works) tries a million random different things every second and those that don’t die produce what we call evolution. It’s all random, as Stephen J Gould showed so starkly and brilliantly in Full House. We can no sooner follow nature’s staggeringly complex lead than transmute ourselves into gargoyles. Human models and constructs are merely complicated, mechanical, temporary and fragile. We cannot and must not count on them.
2. I read all 1060 pages of Edible Forest Gardens to learn that permaculture is about spending 20 years studying the pre-catastrophic-agriculture ecology of the place you live, and in the process intervening patiently to introduce and reintroduce native and native-compatible plants in such a way that evolution just might allow them to take hold. It’s the perfect model of how to behave in a complex system (Snowden’s probe-sense-respond strategy). What we call design in such efforts is just hoping that we understand well enough so that a larger proportion of our interventions take hold than if we just planted stuff randomly. The celebrated indigenous permaculture ‘gardens’ of Central America were basically discovered, not designed, and were secreted away so humans couldn’t fuck them up with their design experiments. This works in places where the pre-cat-ag vegetation naturally supports a healthy human diet. It doesn’t work where most humans live now, which is why indigenous migrants to non-tropical-forested places evolved to eat mostly fish and meat and self-limited their numbers to what wild game was sustainably available — small numbers. Until we discovered and tried to replicate cat-ag, which as Jared Diamond has explained turned out to be a very bad idea. The idea that we can ‘do’ permaculture sustainably anywhere is, in my opinion, sheer hubris (as others have intimated in this thread).
3. So what to do? If we want to be on nature’s side (assuming she/it has a ‘side’) we should do for ourselves what she is in the process of doing to us — quickly reduce our numbers to sustainable levels (at one point that might have been perhaps 2B, but with the damage we’ve done to carrying capacity now might be 1/4 of that), and have those that are left migrate mostly back to areas that support humans with a healthy human diet without cat-ag. We won’t do the former, for religious and cultural reasons and because it is too late to organize to do anything on such a scale even if we were capable of doing something in a coordinated way on such a scale, which we are not. So we’re left to do what we can, which is to do as little harm to the world as we can, love and care and look after each other, learn what will help us deal with the collapse that we have unleashed and might help the survivors begin to create a better way to live (mostly, learning to build and live in community again), and be present, relishing every moment of this amazing and unpredictable experiment called life.
March 21, 2012 at 5:01 pm
Dave, glad you decided to drop in!
Much to think about. I just quickly want to respond to your questioning whether nature cares.
Hm. I seem to not be getting through with this one. If *you* care = nature cares (because, well, ain’t you nature too?).
More later! What fun.
March 22, 2012 at 6:16 am
Dave – you raise some interesting points and you also raise some issues that are contestable. I would love to discuss at length but don’t have the right technology to do so.
The charge of being anthropomorphizing when we talk about being “on nature’s side” or “nature designs” is quite limiting. This charge can be a bullying concept used to silence nature and silence those of us who believe that earth others as well as places have their own agency and patterns of unfolding. Of course the language used when we say “nature gardens” or “nature designs” is more metaphoric-poetic than scientific.
It is not “evolution that tries a million random things”. That seems to me to be a case of anthropomorphizing the concept of evolution! Rather species – at an individual and community level – adapt and change in response to changing patterns of place and energy flows.
This comment: “We can no sooner follow nature’s staggeringly complex lead than transmute ourselves into gargoyles” seems rather exaggerated. We can follow natures lead – and certainly there have been communities of humans who have practiced that art of following, or being synergistically in tune with “nature” – or place. That is, we can create our own human patterns of existence that resonate more fully with place.
“The idea that we can ‘do’ permaculture sustainably anywhere is, in my opinion, sheer hubris.” Really? We need to be a lot more careful here – with definitions of sustainability – and making such a broad generalization about doing Permaculture that implies a hubristic attitude. Most – but certainly not all – Permaculture projects that I have visited are based on a humble attitude of working with nature’s place-based energy and patterns. Sure it’s only a start and we have much to learn but the practical implications of Permaculture remain profound and distinctly a move away from the domination-control approach of most modern thought.
March 22, 2012 at 4:06 pm
Sorry to come across as ‘bullying’ — just trying to be clear and (since I know many of the commenters) a bit provocative. I don’t have any problem with nature metaphors as long as we don’t take them so seriously as to believe we can create complex systems that effectively mimic natural systems — there’s a million years of overwhelming evidence we can’t. That’s not to say that permaculture is foolish — it’s far better than cat-ag, it’s just not a solution that will allow billions of humans to live on this planet without destroying it.
March 22, 2012 at 5:54 pm
Good thoughts to share here, Dave, and nicely organized 1-2-3. Yes, Leavergirl is quite the permablog garden tender.
I liked Pbrandis’ challenge to your challenge, as i think if you combine the two overlapping views we have, well, basically mine! Ya’ didn’t come across to me as bullying a’tall, no more than Leavergirl’s post did anyway. Maybe Angie will have something different to say on the matter, but i believe in nothing more than if we shy away from “outing” whatever-it-is’s “dark side”, doing so by shining the light of scrutiny on it, we get nowhere different and it’s mostly mind games we’re out of time for. So i really appreciate what’s been said here.
The example i gave elsewhere taught me a lot. In sum, my friend-at-the-time, a Certified Permaculture Designer, left his S. America project after less than a year when his stuff got burglarized by the local boys, which was fortunate for him due to the major coup and quake soon to follow. Whatever exotic species he brought and planted could easily already be on their way to taking over the island. So much for “due diligence” and requisite follow-up; heck, he didn’t even do much planning compared to what you’re supposed to. If we can’t put the breaks on the hubris (which he et al tend to exhibit in great abundance), and so many hesitate to call it out for what it is, well, some of us here are convinced of the coming collapse of industrial civ for good reason, it sure seems.
March 22, 2012 at 6:41 pm
Thanks Dave – to be clear: I did not mean to imply that you were bullying. I was trying to make the point that when we ascribe emotion, feelings, intentionality, agency – or whatever – to nature then the charge of anthropomorphizing can easily be made to dismiss such ideas. This happens when, for example, we say that non-human animals exhibit love for each other. Surely, love is a human emotion so we can be accused of anthropomorphizing. A bit off topic – sorry.
Our ability to fully mimic natural systems will always be doubtful but there are excellent examples of this being done through Permaculture food forests on a scale big enough to suggest that we can do this.
I have enjoyed this conversation – and always enjoy spirited and intelligent argument and discussion. (btw Dave – I also enjoy your blog!)
March 22, 2012 at 11:25 pm
OK, now i see the B-word was used…but yeah, good points, both of you. As for Permaculture food forests being done “on a scale big enough to suggest that we can do this”, well, do what exactly, fee d them billions? Of course we can “do it”, but can we avoid blowing it in the process without some sort of safeguards to curb our excesses…and ain’t THAT quite the can-o-worms, in other words, how would we even start to do that if we’re not even all prioritizing it here yet? Geez, what a pit we civilized humans are digging and falling into still, in our desperate blindness… I think that’s why these sorts of blogs like Leavergirl’s and Dave’s keep dragging us back to the drawing board–it’s where we need to be in some ways, right?
March 22, 2012 at 11:55 pm
Hi
Did anyone here eat breakfast?
Where did it come from?
Was the land happy to provide it?
Is there a less destructive way to deal with the fact that breakfast will be eaten tomorrow, (and maybe in 200 years)?
My family has a garden where the mycophage ladybirds are feeding on my grapevines’ powdery mildew, where the umbelliferae flowers of parsnip and carrot feed nectar to wasps who lay parasitic young into cabbage moth caterpillers that wouls otherwise destroy the broccoli and cauli’s, and the lacewing larvae dine on destructive aphids and scale. Carabid beetles living under bits of scattered rotting wood munch on slugs and reduce their damage to our lettuces.
There are now spinebill honeyeaters and parrots of many varieties and insectiverous birds feeding among the graincrop which feeds our chooks and ducks. We have frogs and lizards. The sparse ancient Australian topsoil is protected, and the soil biota improving, as we dig in green manure crops and dynamic accumlator plants, and lay fallen timber or dig small diversion swales along contours to slow rain run-off over impacted old grazing land.
We source a huge variety of food here, two years after commencing a permaculture garden. Our fruit and vegetables are open pollinated varieties that yield viable seed. Monsanto has no hold over my family.
We have 50 bottles of pasata made with friends, many jars of preserved stone fruits and jams, chutneys, salsas and so on.
A homeless student of my permie-teaching husband, lives here in exchange for garden help.
My teenaged girls say they love living like this.
We ate breakfast this morning, from a developing productive “imitative ecosytem” and some locally grown and exchanged foods, and some organic staples. No chemicals to accumulate in the cells of my daughters and trigger some oncogenetic disruption. No broadacre Roundup-ready corn and soy.
Two years ago there was one non-indigenous bird species present on the expanse of lawn that was here. In fact the representation of all phyla were very limited.
Like the planning aspect or not, I can guarantee that my breakfast did less damage to the land, to our earth, to other creatures, people, and to us, than a breakfast sourced from a standard supermarket.
Given that we all eat, I recommend permaculture thoroughly, hard work though it can be. This life feels authentic.
Laugh away, Brutus! Don’t you love laughing? We laugh at ourselves a lot. The girls’ suburban school friends love coming to our whacky funny home. They love our “colourful” food. I am proud to offer the next generation a glimpse of another way of living on earth, away from chinese manufactured stuff.
So, hey, sorry, I’m gonna keep sticking my neck out, and boring you people with our transformation from middle-class consumers, post climate change catastrophic wildfire, possibly get into ugly arguments (well, I’ll try not to – it’s the Irish in me?) and even make “public apologies” and stuff that feels yuck, in order to share with this generation that there are better ways to live. Believe me, it’s much easier not to read some of the stuff in these threads, and to just go about our business with other like-minded people who are preparing for energy descent using pretty bloody good planning tools.
And yes this computer is full of rare earths and made in China. We still have a car. That’s a lovely thing about Transition, you do it at your own speed…
Best wishes to all.
March 23, 2012 at 2:20 am
It’s possible I’m about to be reassured, again, that your issue is not with permaculture and Transition, but with Planning.
To Tom and Vera’s exchange: (“One TT workshop session involves role play whereby you must imagine yourself 200 years in the future talking to a descendant living at that time… I realised that the people around me had so much pride in themselves that they actually thought they could have such a significant effect on the future…..”
“200 years! OMG. That takes the cake. That is exactly the sort of planning madness I hope my writing can counter a bit.”)
I would ask you to please consider the following work:
“In Future Scenarios, permaculture co-originator and leading sustainability innovator David Holmgren outlines four scenarios that bring to life the likely cultural, political, agricultural, and economic implications of peak oil and climate change, and the generations-long era of “energy descent” that faces us.
“Scenario planning,” Holmgren explains, “allows us to use stories about the future as a reference point for imagining how particular strategies and structures might thrive, fail, or be transformed.”
Future Scenarios depicts four very different futures. Each is a permutation of mild or destructive climate change, combined with either slow or severe energy declines….” http://www.futurescenarios.org/
Even though we won’t be here in 200 years, I think our intellectual and applied responsibilities are to get going (if we can), do some hands on, and to really promote constructive prepararatory responses to the mess we’ve made, as do some other contributors here.
Go, we of active “hubris”, I say, with (a bit of) courage of my conviction!
But if this is another “jab”, I give up. Don’t come to my private email again please.
March 23, 2012 at 2:53 am
P.S. Because it’s too late to edit– Would clarify that when i wrote, …”do what exactly? Feed them billions? Of course we can ‘do it’, but…” I didn’t mean that of course we can feed the billions that way, but rather agree with Dave above on that point. I meant, say, ‘Of course we can do large-scale permaculture, but does that mean it’s all good to just plow forward with a semi-new set of beliefs, without any solid movement or whatever having come to terms with the downsides? Like how we might still be gonna blow it precisely by the nature of that plowing forward prematurely (both in this way too soon, and ironically too late, to change the basic outcome of the game)’?
March 23, 2012 at 3:09 am
I’m on a roll (You’re all asleep up there…xxx)
Hi Dave Pollard. I’ve read a couple of hundred pages of David Jacke’s Edible Forest Gardens, but aim to get all the way through the 1060 you’ve read, and I’m in love. He takes the best of entomology, soil biology and chemistry, especially mycology and the whole under-appreciated world of communicating mycorrhizae between plants, along with relevant learning from all areas of science and history. He gives useful appedix after appendix on beneficial insects and the plants that nourish them and much other practical stuff. You in the north east of America have been handed a gift. I’m thrilled to just cross reference (don’t ya love the interweb?) and explore our own bioregional species. It’s amazing how many beneficial species we share!
But the book is not permaculture. It’s a study of food forests, which may or may not be a component of a permie design, Suburban yards can’t lend themselves to this scale, but permaculture still has a place in helping people get the best from back and front yard productive gardens, while doing less harm in their need to eat.
March 23, 2012 at 10:40 am
A quick note: some commenters report not being able to get through, or they have to wait for approval for some of their comments (and not others), yesterday my own comment demanded approval… i have a feeling there are too many hands in the WP pie. So bear with me until I figure out what is going on. And do let me know if you are experiencing problems posting.
March 23, 2012 at 11:23 am
Vanessa, it did not occur to me that keystone species could be among the centers. I think you are onto something important! I was thinking of the centers as special places on the land… every land has some, and when a person is standing there, one knows… it’s an esthetic-experiential thing. (?)
Dave, interesting you criticize speaking anthropomorphically about nature, and resort to it in relation to evolution. I think it illustrates how hard it is to find the words that leave behind the “objective,” distancing way of speaking of instrumental rationality. I basically jumped into it because I wanted to make a point, and make it poetically. Nevertheless, I also want to speak in a way that expresses a more animistic way of being in the world. Derrick Jensen speaks about it, so:
And someone over on kulturCritic added:
Recently, someone here said, you can’t leave Babylon unless you understand in your own being how to grow soil. He was right. And I think similarly, one can’t leave Babylon unless one is willing to relax all those reflexes that pull us back in alarm from the animistic precipice with the help of the big guns of secularism like Stephen Jay Gould of blessed memory.
Thank you for bringing up Cynefin (probe-sense-respond cycle). My last unplanning post will talk about the way the programmers have taken off with Alexander’s ideas while his fellow architects mostly ignore him. And since the programmers are already making headway following nature’s lead, why not permaculturists? Btw, peer-to-peer will fall flat if it stops with humans only. All creatures are our colleagues and peers.
As for your claim that humans cannot possibly find a durable way of living, would you explain more what you mean? After all, if snails and slime molds can do it, why not humans?
Peter, thank you, you said it far better than I could have. “We can follow natures lead – and certainly there have been communities of humans who have practiced that art of following, or being synergistically in tune with “nature” – or place. That is, we can create our own human patterns of existence that resonate more fully with place.” Amen to that.
Permaculture, of course, is no cure for human hubris, as Jay D’s story re permie friend’s misadventures in S. America illustrates so well. Nothing is, outside of the human — though having a wiser design process might help. Permaculture is a path well worth walking; a path of durable human culture.
Dave said: “it’s just not a solution that will allow billions of humans to live on this planet without destroying it.” Cough cough. This blog is about leaving Babylon, not about saving Babylon from itself, however many billions of humans it intends to crank out. 😉
March 23, 2012 at 12:33 pm
Angie, your place sounds exotic and paradisical. You are clearly further along the path than most of us, and your girls are lucky indeed. Have you tried using chisel plow or the Keyline plow on the compacted land? I am told it can speed recovery significantly. But of course with a small acreage that may not be needed — how big is the land you’ve turned to permaculture? Do you aim to be mostly self-sufficient in food (apart from a few staples and spice etc.)?
To your second post: calm your feathers, grrl, nobody is attacking you. Or is it spines? (tee-hee!) Or maybe you just need that red carpet rolled out for ya, hm? Ok ok, here it is:
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We’z glad you here.
As for scenario planning, no, I don’t find it useful. So shoot me. And I already know what a descendant in 200 years will be saying to us: You %&*!! **&$)% *%^&8##@ers!!!!! It makes my ears ring.
It’s good to hear people are recommending Edible Forest Gardens. I have The Earth Care Manual, and it’s a bit on the dry side. And I wonder whether forest gardens are as useful in the northern latitudes as they are where the sun is more plentiful. Still though, the Eastern Indians did transform those forests into food-producing landscapes. Maybe we should all follow Ian M.’s example, and every year plant a nut or fruit tree and a bush somewhere… anywhere where they are not likely to be disturbed.
March 23, 2012 at 1:45 pm
And oh btw, the eejits at the Corn Refiners Assn are trying to get the U.S. government to rename their nasty corn syrup to “corn sugar” because the sales of their crap-drinks are down. People are catching on, and their stupid idea is to try to hoodwink us! Boggles the mind. So, if you want to bend their ear and pinch it, you can send an email here.
http://www.sweetsurprise.com/contact
March 23, 2012 at 2:41 pm
Entering this particular post’s discussion kind of late, i still don’t want to dominate it…so good to see the subsequent excellently clear comments of where people are at and hopefully helping each other understand “it all” better. Definitely am learning from it all, always, which i think is big key… Anyway…
Leavergirl, very relevant “indigenous” quotes in comment 43, and added to what you have to say; that also is where i am stretching to in whatever life i have left, getting beyond the metaphors of “listening to the land” and really “hearing” stuff with all senses much more than ever. Which of course applies directly to permaculture, and my critique of apparent blind spots (which naturally are not just “its” blind spots, but of the human condition at present, a condition i believe can be changed with an appropriate focus).
Key point re: solutions that won’t scale sufficiently for billions of humans to adopt to save civ; that this blog is about leaving that, not enabling that. Then of course we beg the question of what of the all the “towns” in need of or already trying to engage in “transition”? To what? I guess we each must answer all that for ourselves, because can local gardens and farms feed all? Should they? What does THAT enable, if population isn’t being dealt with, which it isn’t… Ah, well we know what Daniel Quinn so controversially said about that.
Angie, i loved your sketch of your sort of “model” life there halfway around the world and where the toilets are draining the other way around (it was much more elegant than what i just wrote!); it seems to me to fit in beautifully. In fact, through a sort of ‘full-spectrum deep ecology’ lens, i now can see that, like the amazing display of new natives which have sprung up from the “forest floor” of the nearby ecological reserve that burnt badly three years ago, you and your family are “fire followers”. You have risen from the ashes of that huge trauma, in a big way rejuvenated and spreading those seeds of example among fellow fire-followers, and those seeds of physical renewal in the actual soil under your feet. Thank you, what an inspiring, peace-inducing image!
March 23, 2012 at 5:40 pm
Leavergirl, just out of curiosity, why did you write that the branches of pruned trees break easier in bad weather?
March 23, 2012 at 5:55 pm
Hi, thanks for the article
I recently attended a presentation where the farm manager from a university showed off his permaculture retrofitting. Throughout the lecture he recommended and quoted Christopher Alexander. His design made heavy use of fossil fuel machines, in-ground pvc water lines, EPDM pond-liners, plastic greenhouses, propane fueled hydronic heating, etc. When asked about his justification for the use of so much petroleum he responded “Well, after peak-oil these systems will still be functional”.
When I first read Mollison’s Designer’s Manual I proceeded to slowly and intuitively reconfigure my surroundings. After taking a PDC I felt encouraged to draw maps and plan out designs at the request of family members for their yards. Despite my plans I proceeded intuitively, and slowly (my family doesn’t understand why the maps I made don’t match the plantings I did).
If I misunderstand the concept of permanence, then my systems are likely to be just as limiting as those that surround me now. My point is that cultural practices (like the burning regimes of American Indians), rather than implemented systems (like the university farm described above), are both more permanent and less restrictive.
I’m on the verge of becoming the manager of a large acreage my family is purchasing with the intention of establishing food production using permaculture principles and practices. I am intensely interested in establishing cultural practices, rather than designing implemented systems.
Thanks for this discussion.
Peace
March 23, 2012 at 6:07 pm
Not experience, I’m afraid. I saw it recently, someone I kinda trusted. I am not sure I will remember though. Why? Not so? I figured… it kinda makes sense, wild apple trees shoot straight up… (?)
March 23, 2012 at 6:18 pm
Thanks so much JayD. I was beginning to think I must be writing in a foreign language (Aussie retained “u” in “colour” etc and the fact that I can’t spell to save myself, notwithstanding).
And you, dear Brutus, hold onto your sides, cos I’ll thank Vera for the red carpet, I suppose, but did I really ask for one? Unfortunate impression I’m putting out there for someone trying with sincerity to live humbly. Oh well. I’ve got a big “b- word” radar, it happens to some of us for good reason, which is why I’d prefer not to disagree on this site……
I don’t want to shoot you, Vera. I’d just love you to consider that we need to plan and act. Imagining 200 years hence is a powerful and valuable process of creativity from which we can infer what those of the future would have had us do to help them and all others on this precious planet. I see it as using our gift of empathy. Indeed I reckon we should be imagining with all our hearts what those without the power to effect change, like the poor, like children, like the victims of the disgraceful meat industry, like all the species being annihilated in their hundreds each year would have we of the privileged first world do right now.
Is that shrill, Brutus? I wish I knew how to sound reasoned and calm in the face of this emergency. Have you read Richard Heinberg’s The End of Growth? Do you love any young people?
March 23, 2012 at 7:27 pm
Hey osker, it makes me mad that your farm manager presenter called his quite violent retrofit a permaculture project. He sounds more like a survivalist than my kinda permie. Like any movement permies interpret the principles to their individual tastes, and some quite utilitarian and may I say selfishly motivated people are dipping in to pick up on elements of creating a more self-renewing productive garden and then calling themselves permies, just as we see happen when say extremists cherrypick from religious texts to suit their bigotry.
Permaculture designs are not static. They are very much a tool of analysis, in terms of external influences and internal conditions that then help inform placement of elements so they have the best chance of succeeding. As new areas of shade, new microclimates, areas of improved soil and hydration develop, a permaculturalist may choose to draw up a new design. Or not.
Some PDCs are better than others, some Permie books too. It’s a human endevour so subject to human problems. Still think it’s a hell of a lot kinder than business as usual.
“Do you love young people?” above, is a provocative rhetorical aimed at the non-sociopathological 99 out of every 100 readers here, to try to push that button that makes you fight for what you love rather than roll over in a despondency of helpless nihilism. (Maybe we really can do this! I found an enraged tiger in me when our girls were about to burn. I fought harder than I knew I could, with clearer decision making than is possible from addled depressed me. Mind you I had been planning and preparing for bushfire for years. It saved us. That and good luck, of course.)
Lordy, I hate zealots. Better give this a rest, hey?
March 24, 2012 at 7:52 am
Leavergirl,
I enjoyed your article. But.
What came to mind while reading your piece, is that one of the big factors in nature is, I think, the disaster.
The drought, the flood, the avalanche, the wildfire, the volcano, to a lesser extend the earthquake. The displacement of one species by another. The shift of a migratory pattern. The arrival of mankind in the vicinity or upstream or up wind.
Nature adapts species to prevailing conditions; then winnows and adapts survivors of disasters to again prevailing conditions.
Taking played out farm land and re-sowing with what might have been native grasses or instituting the series of successions that should restore previously prevailing old growth forest is no more natural than tearing out landscaping to plant a more resilient garden.
I also think you and others were a bit harsh in condemning the failure of “Alice’s yard”. “You made a good point regarding “Alice’s yard.” The permies made a mistake. ” As you wrote, Alice made a choice of designs; it isn’t clear to me that any of the other designs would have failed for any reason, let alone ignoring the presence of children.
I also think that anyone intending to devote resources to permaculture without raising their children to live, and play, in a sustainable fashion, is tragically naive. Food, except among the rich and wealthy wannabe, is usually taken to be, um, important? sacred? Choosing to let children play instead of work, and to destroy food to boot, displays an appalling lack of sense about why they are investing in permaculture (or any form of gardening) and also an appalling lack of discipline in their lives as well as their parenting. The children suffered a whole lot more in their home life than a mere social notion “will the parents try permaculture again?”
March 24, 2012 at 11:24 am
Welcome, Brad Kruse! Your observation about crises that nature wreaks is astute. I tried to make a hint about it in my post where I say that nature imposes sudden hardships that put pressure on less resilient organisms. Nature certainly does winnow, and that is part of the pattern that works. To me, it suggests that we ought to be open to such winnowing in our gardens and fields, and welcome it as a time when the more resilient organisms will stand out and come into their own. It seems to me that the various landraces of chickens or goats et al (and plants) evolved that way. People noted who dealt well with the sudden brutal freeze, or the drought. And one of the weak spots of modern ag is that it no longer does do this. In fact, many of the manicured cultivars and modified organisms cannot make it through such periods of stress.
Should humans imitate nature and tear out this and wipe out that, then substitute their designs? I am suspicious of both… the damage we do when we rip and tear, and then again, when we impose our will onto the land, seems to warn away from such a pattern. Nature has forever. Humans don’t, and the damage we do now will haunt us for generations. The precautionary principle springs to mind…
The trouble with Alice’s yard is not the design she chose. The trouble is with the process, which went like this: envision > plan > implement > fail. Had she used a better process, errors would have been caught early on. Does that make sense?
And here I was hoping, Angie, that I’d get a pleased chuckle out of ya. Bummer. 😦
Welcome, Osker.
On one hand, it’s good to hear that Alexander’s ideas are spreading. On the other hand, the manager’s design can hardly be called durable, even if the fuels are not going away overnight. As their price goes up and up, he will find himself modifying. Maybe such a beginning is better than nothing… My argument with him would focus on pointing out that a system where more calories go in in energy than come out in food should perhaps be called by another name.
Going slowly and intuitively will serve you well with your marvelous new undertaking. And cultural practices is where it’s at! Let no one talk you out of it. And it may be, that your oldtimer neighbors at that new land will be a source of such cultural practices. Others, we can find in tribal accounts. And some, we have to evolve in our communities… A heartfelt good luck!
Jay D, Transition to what? Like you say, each locality has to make those decisions. As far as food goes, Babylon is cranking enough food to feed upwards to 18 billion people. There is no shortage of food. There is shortage of access. There is stupendous waste. In any case, those who worry about saving civ have a lot of work cut out for them as land degrades and water disappears.
There is no reason why small communities cannot feed their own people mostly from what grows in the area. They used to do it not so long ago, after all, nah?
March 24, 2012 at 2:57 pm
And check out this fine post by Charlotte Du Cann, on EB; it ties in with what we’ve been talking about, it seems to me…
http://energybulletin.net/stories/2012-03-23/map-not-territory
March 24, 2012 at 7:11 pm
Leavergirl,
My thought was more along the lines that a human invading a particular space, makeover plan in hand, could be thought to be the equivalent of a natural disaster. Any given region or place is likely to overcome any given assault in time — or be changed in subtle or radical ways.
I am not sure that permadesign is any more dangerous, risky, or disruptive, than any other human assault on a patch of the earth.And unless we each consent to remain engaged only with the patch of the earth we presently occupy — we have to accept that we *will* be assaulting other patches of earth.
As for Alice’s yard, the story claims there were several designs. That is, there were various approaches to achieve differing goals. The choice of a design that wasn’t suitable to the family dynamics that Alice wasn’t willing to take responsibility for isn’t sufficient for me to conclude that either the process or the design were necessarily flawed. Except, of course that Alice chose one design (critical decision point), and implemented only the part that involved the garden (indeterminate whether this was a contributing factor), and not the part about her and her family living with and in support of the design (fatal flaw in execution).
I guess we need to agree to disagree, here. Enjoy the day!
March 24, 2012 at 10:28 pm
Leavergirl, thanks for the reference to the post by Charlotte Du Cann. She wrote, “… we are still human beings commanding the planet for our own use. Even the deep green practices of Permaculture assign wild nature to an unspecified region known as Zone 5. Not in my garden. … The ur-problem is that we are living in our minds and we look at the planet from that mind.”
Yes! I, for one, understand intellectually how we are completely dependent on the rest of life/nature, we are enmeshed, interconnected, not separate; and yet my heart does not feel that connection, I don’t identify with the world in my gut. I have grown up as a true child of civilization, enjoying nature at a distance even when gardening. I contemplate nature as an object, and look for ways to coax a yield from it (Permaculture design principle 3: Obtain a yield) while attempting to reduce the many ways in which I diminish its capacity.
I think you, and Charlotte, are pointing in another direction. Your critique of planning is a critique of the hubris of controlling the world, of treating it as a complicated object to be manipulated for our particular ends (through permaculture, for example). I am sympathetic, but I am also so stuck in the modern ways of thinking that it is difficult to imagine a different way. How do we make such a radical transition in worldview? I suppose I’ve become a disciple of yours now, because I’m committed to reading future posts to learn more!
March 25, 2012 at 3:25 am
leavergirl/pruning trees. Initially I thought ‘pruned trees don’t lose their branches around here’. Then I wondered why you had written it. Then it occurred to me that such forthright statements were something that I had come to expect from permaculturists here in the UK.
My understanding is that permaculture is concerned with design principles. One of those principles is ‘observe and interact’. It seems to me entirely possible that practioners at different ends of the earth could validly have different observations and therefore different interactions/implementations. In fact in my own county of Devon (roughly 50×50 miles) we have over 1000 named varieties of orchard apple and in my own garden 10 varieties that I’m trying to train as espaliers. Even among those 10 varieties the budding pattern demands different pruning regimes. Permaculture as a concept is about 30 years old I think. Nobody has been practising it long enough for it to be ‘permanent agriculture’ (compared to say low input sheep rearing that has been active on the downlands of S England for over 1000 years). The one ‘agroforestry’ project that I visited was really ‘agro-scrub’ having been pastureland very recently and only on the very first stages of reversion back to mature woodland where much of the energy may go to producing timber rather than food. So I suppose I’m trying to make a point about (some) permaculturalists, rather than permaculture. Another worry is that the speed of the conveyor belt taking some people from permaculture student to permaculture practioner to permaculture designer to permaculture landlord advertising for people to pay hundreds of pounds a week to help put up a barn seems remarkably fast. It would help if there were more practioners of the principles compared to those trying to sell the principles.
Natural crises/disasters. I’m glad someone brought this up. I’ve never ever seen anyone mention the importance of barns. In the past you had to expect the crop to fail one year in four. You had to be able to survive a poor harvest. You couldn’t ship food in from around the world. One current curse of the place where I live is the ‘barn conversion’ – traditional barn converted to residential accommodation for non-farmers.
March 25, 2012 at 7:02 am
This is Dumb and Dumber.
Do u eat?
Yes?
Not a trick question.
If you eat, and your food comes through mainstream commercial production it hurts the earth, and the PLANNING behind the desecration of mega-massive broadacre areas of your country (and mine) is truly foul.
Ok then.
Or wrong?
Have I missed an intellectual something?
Human being. Eats food….or gets hungry,, sick,,,dies.
u know what? You need not ask your lawn/land/willow/ whatthefuck how it feels about you growing food. You can just be sufficiently in the real world (watch Food Inc again) to know that every little bit of food you grow, rather than debate, is better all round than commercial food.
No, it won’t save the world. Why would I think it could? No I’m not into total self sufficiency.
The tedious thing about this thread, from leavergirl’s very first non-informed assertion in her opening statement, all the way through, is that SOME people have set up straw-man arguments and then caned permaculture eg, p/c feeding the world is hubris, blah.
NO, you duffers.
Grow some food for yourselves. That’s all.
Or not. Your choice.
If you find “obtaining a yield” offensive because it hurts the land, you may also think people who hurt pets are reprehensible, while you buy and eat meat? Maybe?
Out of sight, out of mind.
Anyway, should you choose to make use of the bit of arable space in your custody (be it a collection of balcony pots, a courtyard, an urban yard, or larger area, maybe a modest food forest space), it’s worth taking a look at the wisdom derived from ancient Asian intense cropping, all the way through the latest learning in Integrated Pest Management, especially nurturing beneficial parasitic and pollinator insect species, and the chem and biol in soils and horticulture, and so on, along with making the best of physical space in your garden (zoning) to help reduce your time input.
Oh.
Permaculture in this site is a dirty word. Yucky planners. As some of us speak out for it, unfortunately, I can see it sounds a little desperate.
Forget permaculture!
Watch this instead
March 25, 2012 at 10:13 am
On the subject of planning, I have been thinking about the aboriginal peoples of the American and Australian continents. They had plans of a sort–soil grids, fire-clearing, stupifying poisons for fish–techniques and cultural knowledge that worked well enough to enable them to live and thrive for a good long time.
How could they plan to meet the Spanish with their pigs and the diseases borne by those pigs? How could the Australian indigenous peoples plan for an invasion and a cultural tsunami of religion and greed?
What is outside our experience is not often amenable to planning. The very best planning will not sustain your farm in a seven years drought (Dust Bowl) or an 18-year global darkening (post volcanic activity of Thera).
What we can do instead is cultivate our intuitions–our total apprehension of reality that is more than the reasoning mind and much humbler than the dominating mind. This capacity for intuiting a path or practice can be kick-started by contemplating or dwelling in wilderness. It can be deepened by the work of grappling with the exigencies of feeding from tended land. It can be developed to a high polish by being in community and by being committed to supporting and nurturing one another instead of tearing and rending at each other.
But if we prefer our egos, our plans, our children (no one else’s children are worth a toss–we can verbally trash them to our heart’s angry content, send them to war, put them in the permacultish compost, whatever) and our absolute “rightness” to the power of deep intuition, so be it.
In that case we can all plan to kiss our ifs, ands, and buts goodbye.
March 26, 2012 at 10:38 am
Hei Vera! We have just published an essay at the blog of PRI-Australia, by Nikos Salingaros and some of his friends, which goes straight to the core of your theme here:
– Geospatial Analysis and Living Urban Geometry:
http://permaculture.org.au/2012/03/27/geospatial-analysis-and-living-urban-geometry/
I reprint the introduction to the essay here, hope you find it useful.
“This essay outlines how to incorporate morphological rules within the exigencies of our technological age. We propose using the current evolution of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) technologies beyond their original representational domain, towards predictive and dynamic spatial models that help in constructing the new discipline of “urban seeding”. We condemn the high-rise tower block as an unsuitable typology for a living city, and propose to re-establish human-scale urban fabric that resembles the traditional city. Pedestrian presence, density, and movement all reveal that open space between modernist buildings is not urban at all, but neither is the open space found in today’s sprawling suburbs. True urban space contains and encourages pedestrian interactions, and has to be designed and built according to specific rules. The opposition between traditional self-organized versus modernist planned cities challenges the very core of the urban planning discipline. Planning has to be re-framed from being a tool creating a fixed future to become a visionary adaptive tool of dynamic states in evolution.”
March 26, 2012 at 11:36 am
Dear bloggerista—In your Osker-reply paragraph in comment 53, the first line is all that you’re actually referring specifically to “Alexander’s ideas”, is that right?
Your views on present day ag-tuality and potentials definitely differ in some ways from my present stage of understanding of all that. Two things from above. First, yes, the stupendous waste is not to be under-estimated…or over-. But I’ve never heard from any credible-sounding source that this Civ is cranking out enough food to feed upwards of 18 billion people. Would love to be convinced of that…or would I? Scarier than i even thought, if the system is really THAT broken, to imagine how to fix it in time. But on the other hand it’d leave a lot more maneuvering room for feeding folks to help minimize suffering. Easier to believe if you include all the grown food being fed to livestock plus that being converted to biolfuels, etc.(?) On the other hand, If you include those sectors, we’re talking about a lot more than “access to food” issues, it sounds like.
Second, about there being no reason small communities cannot feed their own people, well, in general, all things being freed up enough to do so, of course i agree and that’s what i wanna see. Yet, as you mention, i’m thinking also about the current, and coming ever-stronger, grounded reality for countless communities which are already in the grip of complications like climate change. This on top of how so many were already having trouble getting by, combined with local growing challenges even in the best of recent times. Many of us are, or were, well-situated for relative sefl-sufficiency, sure. But many…well, just picture the higher latitudes, those not-so-“temperate zones”, with the human populations of those areas in total. And the cities…
For sure it’s much more about access and distribution of food than overall quantity, as Francis Moore Lappe and countless others have been saying for a long time. But the times they are a-changin’, and, so, seems to me, we’d better acclerate that transition to whatever we each are up to transitioning to.
March 26, 2012 at 12:10 pm
Angie, I’m both drawn to and repulsed by your words (you cover a lot of ground!)… Very drawn to stuff like that “subversive” TED talk you linked to above, which should be required viewing for everyone who can. Turned off by whatever is behind comments like “Dumb and Dumber”…I just can’t quite get where you’re coming from in not appreciating where we’re coming from. Hard to believe you don’t think that every fresh-shining dream deserves to be subject to “CON-structive criticism. Otherwise, it smells a lot like “The Such-and-Such Movement Can Do No Wrong”-ism, no? I do think the critique needs to be clarified, but this is part of that process, and you are here helping…unless you aren’t. Please realize that permaculture isn’t a “dirty word” here, and the scrutiny of it isn’t “DE-structive criticism, but one “thing” we have to be looking at, as i see it, is what might be missing or improvable in the tools already at hand for an emerging culture that needs to adopt new ways. Some of the “old ways” have a huge role to play in the mix, but not if kept as sacred gift horses that should not be looked in the mouth. So i’ll try to see you as offering constructive criticism of our criticism, and keep trying to “get” your whole message; clearly you have a contagious passion.
Perhaps it would help to give a tad of context—I don’t know about hardly anyone else here, but I’m not some walking head who thinks the way he does because he doesn’t get his hands dirty. For the past few years my part-time job, as well as many hours of volunteer work, is ecological restoration field work in human-degraded habitats and eco-reserves and parks. And this is the first year since ’07 that i haven’t been able to immerse myself in a quite sizable organic garden, where two of us “produced” a couple dozen varieties of produce. Now i no longer can live there and have only one token tomato plant in a little clay pot so far…but at least it’s a SunGold, the best-tastin’ ‘maters i’ve ever had; and i sure miss those world-class raspberries…but that’s a roll i’d better not get started on…
March 26, 2012 at 3:14 pm
Brad, dissensus is always the default here. But, I am not sure what you are saying. Are you saying that if Alice chose a better plan, she would have been ok?
Paul, we are all stuck in modern ways of thinking; so let’s get unstuck… Over on KulturCritic they have been talking about the very thing. Whether it’s possible. I remember the story in Original Wisdom by Wolff, where the anthropologist experiences an opening to another way, and it stays with him for good. (He is helped by a Senoi wise man, but nothing much happens, except they walk around the jungle, a number of times, and one time, he is suddenly left alone and has to find his bearings and find a way back. That’s all it took… )
You understand the quest. I am so glad you are planning to stick with it. But please please, be a colleague rather than a disciple, we are making the path as we travel, all of us! 🙂
Tom, I dunno about the pruning. Everybody seems to be the expert, and says something else. I was taught in the NY master gardener program to prune as flush with the branch as can be, and now Patrick Whitefield says that’s all wrong, and you should give the buds at the end of the branch a chance to regrow and heal the wound. And you are right — the early and late heavy snows in Colorado create different conditions for fruit trees than Devon.
“Another worry is that the speed of the conveyor belt taking some people from permaculture student to permaculture practioner to permaculture designer to permaculture landlord advertising for people to pay hundreds of pounds a week to help put up a barn seems remarkably fast. It would help if there were more practioners of the principles compared to those trying to sell the principles.”
Ah, but you just opened a very full can of red wigglers. I have my hands full, but some brave soul should tackle this one sometime soon!
Gkayb said: “What is outside our experience is not often amenable to planning. The very best planning will not sustain your farm in a seven years drought (Dust Bowl) or an 18-year global darkening (post volcanic activity of Thera).”
Great examples. I’d say it’s never amenable to planning. All you can do is live as resilient life as possible, so that when those calamities strike, at least you have a fighting chance.
“What we can do instead is cultivate our intuitions–our total apprehension of reality that is more than the reasoning mind and much humbler than the dominating mind. This capacity for intuiting a path or practice can be kick-started by contemplating or dwelling in wilderness. It can be deepened by the work of grappling with the exigencies of feeding from tended land. It can be developed to a high polish by being in community and by being committed to supporting and nurturing one another instead of tearing and rending at each other.”
Amen to that. That reminds me… it’s been way too long since I’ve been immersed in the wilderness… Therein healing lies, and reconnection. Thank you for the reminder.
“In that case we can all plan to kiss our ifs, ands, and buts goodbye.” Tee-hee. A good use for planning!
Øyvind, will study it. I gave it a quick look, and I was wondering… yeah, but how? If all the decision makers are vested in building unlivable cities, what is Salingaros and friends aiming to do that will change it?
Jay D:“In your Osker-reply paragraph in comment 53, the first line is all that you’re actually referring specifically to “Alexander’s ideas”, is that right?”
Oops, no, I was referring to the manager of that fancy fossil fuel “permafarm” he recently saw. Thanks for catching that, I fixed it.
As for food cranking by civ, a pretty smart guy who frequents Astyk’s discussions, Greenpa, came up with it, admittedly on the back of the envelope. But nobody there challenged him on it. Yes, I imagine he counted all food produced. He runs a blog, you can ask him yourself. I will fish out the URL. I sounded pretty credible to me at the time. He now says, civ produces enough for 12 billion… just to allow for a margin of error.
http://littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/
March 26, 2012 at 6:40 pm
The work of Peter Andrews encapsulates many of the points raised in this very interesting discussion. Armed with a tractor and fore end loader, Andrews was building small dams and planting noxious weeds in dying creeks and waterways of Australia. Is he a reckless over grown beaver, or someone who is synergistically in tune with nature and can read the land? He appears to know how to make small alterations to watercourses so they rehydrate dried up valley bottoms and flood plains. From natures repair kit (the weeds) he selects the heavy hitters, the noxious thugs that government decree must be eradicated. Irrational hubris or small interventions informed by the landscape? See this film http://www.abc.net.au/austory/specials/rightasraintwo/default.htm it may also give insights into the brutal nature of environmental malfunction faced by Angie and her family
While Andrews is tackling issues in valley bottoms, the real cause of the problem is an infiltration problem in the hills/watershed; namely, the loss of glues produced by soil bacteria, fungi, and earthworms that bind soil particles together. For further insights, see http://vimeo.com/12697101 view from 5 minutes to17 minutes.
March 26, 2012 at 8:27 pm
Tom wrote, “Another worry is that the speed of the conveyor belt taking some people from permaculture student to permaculture practioner to permaculture designer to permaculture landlord advertising for people to pay hundreds of pounds a week to help put up a barn seems remarkably fast. It would help if there were more practioners of the principles compared to those trying to sell the principles.
LG replied to Tom, “Ah, but you just opened a very full can of red wigglers. I have my hands full, but some brave soul should tackle this one sometime soon!”
OK, then, soon it is…seein’ as how i’ve already been messin’ with that can-o-worms here anyway, as i see it as a key part of the discussion. In short, on that point Tom is absolutely right, and nicely sums up the crux of what i was complaining about. “Conveyor belt” is a great useful image to me here, and not far enough off to call a bad metaphor, methinks. If “hubris” is too hard to define and control, standardize, whatever, and too psychological for some people to deal with, we can, at least try much harder with what we CAN be clearer on. Like top-prioritizing true “due diligence”, and the “precautionary principle”, and basing design approaches much more on “the speed of nature” despite the allure of diving in headfirst-and-fast.
March 26, 2012 at 9:07 pm
Leavergirl,
It looks to me that if Alice had had the best permadesign — if it was correct and accounted for every significant element in the environment and needs for resilience — I still question if it would have worked for her.
But the story claims there were several designs presented, and she chose one. That is not to say that the one she chose was the one best suited to her needs.
On the other hand, raising children to have such little regard for food and the garden, raises doubt in my mind that Alice really invested in permaculture. She might well have wanted someone else to do the hard stuff (like put together a design based on her life, her property, and her needs). She might have thought that having that great design — she was done.
Those kids should have been working, should have been intimately engaged in nurturing the garden. They shouldn’t have had that much time to play — it is work that builds character, not play, and not play that puts food at risk. There is a serious disconnect here, between the supposed values of a permaculturalist, and kids rolling over the cabbage, repeatedly.
I hesitate to state flat out, “Alice was a loser, and a distraction to the permaculture community”. But she doesn’t impress me as a parent, let alone someone interested in sustainable food production.
I certainly don’t consider Alice as being a significant data point, when considering whether permadesign as a practice is useful.
March 27, 2012 at 5:18 am
Oh boy, Brad. Of course children should play. That attitude belongs with the survivalists/preppers, not the permies.
JayD, I’m all for meaningful critique. I owe LG another apology if Dumb and Dumber wasn’t taken in red carpet type jest or even as in the brash and provocative spirit of the thread.
While I agree with Vera that planning can be a woeful activity that gets in the way of great outcomes (worked for years in a government service), permaculture and transition offer everyday people an intelligent resouce to help us reduce the damage we do to earth and earthlings. Unless we can provide at least some of our own food, we are captives of the oligopolies controlling devastatingly violent agri-business systems and resource consumption. Developing small independent local economies operating outside the big Capital paradigm will be a hugely subversive legal action.
Criticism is great, JayD but not if it turns people away entirely by setting up non-contextual propositions, such as p/c entails planning and is disruptive of backyard nature and therefore wrong-minded. Within permaculture there is plenty of criticism and review.
I’m going to try to stay away from this thread now (again….), and am totally looking forward to you taking on the DGR, Vera. It is very worrying that they are canvassing through social media for young people to engage in terrorist activites, with a dishonest “no innocent civilian will be injured” assurance. Even though you and I see some things differently, I’ll do anything to support your work to expose these manipulative violence-mongers.
March 27, 2012 at 11:30 am
I can’t participate meaningfully in such a wide-ranging thread with so much information, energy, and sometimes attitude. Too many people trying to score points or win arguments for my taste (as opposed to contributing perspectives). Angie in particular called me out a couple times (comment nos. 38 and 50), which I don’t really mind, I suppose, but could interpret rather negatively. Curious to see Dave Pollard drop into the discussion and then drop back out as it grew contentious.
In my sole comment prior to this one (no. 17), I was trying to be light. My comment about “shrill and destructive” was with a prior experience in mind. I participate in an online discussion group that has waxed and waned over time but is populated by some pretty smart people. In the aftermath of 9/11 (now 11+ years ago), the strain everyone was feeling sent the discussions over the edge to tearing at each other. I suspect that we (modern Western societies) are today still in a twilight period, before serious and sustained strains are felt, yet even now the tendency to fight over rhetorical scraps informs our behaviors. I don’t want to fight and will handily yield all arguments to someone who applies force (yells louder or longer). I don’t want to be filled with anger and acrimony even as we begin our descent.
March 27, 2012 at 4:48 pm
I’m still here Brutus; just don’t have anything particularly valuable to add to this discussion. I can’t see the point in debating what is/isn’t permaculture, and as long as our expectations are modest, whatever we choose to do, or call it, to reduce our dependence on industrial ag and cat-ag, it’s all good.
Besides, Paul generally says what I’m thinking before I get around to writing it anyways 🙂
March 27, 2012 at 5:08 pm
If we can each tune our Sensitivity down a notch or two (it’s a small dial you’ll find in the corner of some keyboards 😉 ), we’ll continue to have a great discussion regarding subjects that are barely addressed in other blogs. We’ll watch the comments with curiosity, and keep our critical faculties sharpened but refuse to take offense. (Conversation in a blog is tough, you can’t read a person’s expressions or hear their tone of voice, it’s so easy to read incorrectly between the lines. Oh well, you work with what you’ve got.)
March 27, 2012 at 11:25 pm
Vera, I think we need to gather and educate an army to fight back! Tacking a summer course at ISB can be a good start: http://www.biourbanism.org/neuroergonomics-summer-school/
March 28, 2012 at 1:42 am
Well, i hope i for one came across as among those contributing perspectives more than trying to score points or win an argument. I acknowledge Angie’s point too, yet the acrimonious parts of her comments repulsed me and it didn’t seem the acknowledgement was reciprocal toward the direction the post was exploring, so i said so and expressed my confusion about why.
Will be thinking about how much it could mostly come down to debating what is or isn’t permaculture. Hmm…
Anyway all, please rest assured that my words came from a keyboard with the Sensitivity control dialed way down. I see it as just trying to sort stuff out here…personally i’ve heard so many perspectives about issues by now, i crave more consensus more than more dissensus, with the pervasive human tendency for denial as the closest thing to an “enemy” of the process…but that’s just me; or not just me. It’s just that “I got this feeling that it’s later than it seems.” Bye for now, friends.
March 28, 2012 at 2:12 am
Flemming Funch writes: “In this permaculture garden in Mouscron, Belgium, over 2000 types of fruit trees and 5000 kinds of vegetables grow freely in a 1800m² jungle, much more productively than any manmade monoculture could achieve. Abricots, palm trees, lettuce year round. Soil hasn’t been turned or watered for 40 years. No pest problems. No artificial anything.”(Video in French)
Jardin des Fraternités Ouvrières: Visite de la RTBF
March 28, 2012 at 8:42 am
Brutus, did you think I was cross? NO. I absolutely loved that you were laughing. I imagined your good natured laughing somewhere in the US and it made me smile. I tried to thank you. I even popped in an et tu ref for fun?
Thanks Paul, I’m always looking for that sensitivity button these days. Find it, and a little peace for a while, then it’s gone.
It’s lonely surviving a climate change event. Wonder when someone will start the “Touched by Climate Change” support site? (that’s a gentle joke, wink). Like everyone who’s seen dreadful suffering I want to do my bit to prevent more.
From my heart: I’m scared. For all of us, maybe in the same way that 9/11 survivors still are. And a bit desperate – pinning so much hope on permaculture to help us step graciously into the final chapter of this human epoch, that, at times, I’ve forgotten a foundational ethic, Care of People.
Damn.
March 29, 2012 at 1:11 am
Dave Pollard
I’m intrigued by the Belgian garden. Have you been there? I’m wondering why there is no such place in England (where I am). I’m also wondering how there can be 2000 TYPES of tree per 1800m sq – that’s at least 1 tree per square metre, PLUS the 5000 TYPES of veg in the same area (how could you count them?), PLUS the lettuce. How can you harvest in such a ‘jungle’ I wonder? I won’t watch the vid cos I have little French. If it’s in Belgium then the climax vegetation might be oak forest. Beats me why it hasn’t started to move that way after 40 years. Here in Devon the ash saplings would be noticeable after 5 years and ash/oak/birch/wilow/holly after 40. Are you in Canada? Do you have such gardens there? Frustratingly it seems that the further you go from here the better the permaculture gardens are.
March 29, 2012 at 11:43 am
I could not find any mention of this garden in English (or Czech). The tree per meter data given seems questionable. The video shows fruit growing along the tight pathways, but does it grow in the thick of the thicket? Quite obviously, this is a labor of love for the people who apparently tried thousands of varieties to find the right ones for the place (maybe they have also hybridized them, I don’t speak French). Let’s hope that more information will appear soon. Any readers in Belgium who could visit and update us?
I find it interesting that the now known permacultural gardens or farms (like Sepp Holzer’s, for example, or this one) were evolved long before permaculture was a concept or practice. They were not created via a design, but through many years of trial and error while following faint whispers of inspiration. If permaculture designers want to be true to “being scientific” then they would study and emulate how such places came into being and pass that knowledge on in their permadesign classes or writings, no?
March 29, 2012 at 4:51 pm
Sorry the video is not available in English. If you put this page into Google Translate you’ll get a better idea of what they’ve done: http://www.bio-logiques.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=175:fraternites-ouvrieres-a-mouscron&catid=100&Itemid=518
What I like especially is that it is a Worker’s initiative — started 30 years ago by unemployed workers who decided to learn about growing their own food.
I’m in Canada and don’t believe there is anything like this here, though I am aware of several in Central America that have likewise been around for decades.
March 29, 2012 at 6:13 pm
Here’s a 300 year old food forest in Vietnam:
and one in Morrocco that may be 2000 years old:
This is the kind of thing people do in here Thailand as well and I believe it goes back thousands of years; long before the advent of intensive field crop agriculture.
Permaculture is nothing new. What is new is intellectualizing it… communicating it in specialized language about “design” i.e. books, courses, certification.
To me it’s a very poor way to change people’s relationship with the biosphere but maybe it’s the only way that industrially educated minds can be pried open a crack, I don’t know.
April 2, 2012 at 2:59 pm
Part of the problem, after reading through this interesting essay and the comment exchange, is the division between Permaculture as a tool (and a very good tool it is), and Permaculture as an ideology.
A tool can be used with humility but an ideology requires every knee to bow down before it, because ideologies are universal in their scope. The fact that there has been such a semantic struggle to define what counts as design or undesign, and what to call the process by nature designs/creates/evolves/just IS should be instructive to those who wish to use Permaculture as a tool. As people like Wendell Berry have pointed out through the years, the problem is not that we don’t not understand how the nature world works well enough, it is that we can’t seem to acknowledge that the way the natural world works might always remain in many respects a mystery.
Approaching the use of Permaculture with this sort of humility in mind, we would be less concerned with whether we are sinning against Permaculture by using deliberate “design”, and use an approach that says, “Using Permaculture here will be more like a journey where I will travel towards a destination, but know I will never reach it.”
This is one reason I am pretty well convinced that no one who does not live in a place will have much success designing a Permaculture environment for that place. Even someone who lives in a place (even if they have lived their their entire life), will not, unless they are exceptionally perceptive, know enough about a place to design a perfect Permaculture environment. In agonizing over the question of how nature does its “work”, we might have missed an important element; time. Most of the natural processes that concern us unfold over a time period measured in seasons at the very shortest. Thinking we can short-cut these temporal barriers seems to me a bigger problem than the method of design we use. Rather than let our design (insert the word of your choice if design offends you) unfold over the course of a lifetime (or even many lifetimes), we want our “permanent” designs ready-made.
April 3, 2012 at 11:54 am
Welcome, Rade. I agree… people want their permaculture garden or farm yesterday already… especially when they are paying someone to design and implement it.
I think that the best a permaculturist by hire can do is to aid those who live on the land.
April 3, 2012 at 11:03 pm
This is a wonderful and thoughtful post. The idea of modelling the design process after natural co-evolution seems so terrifically obvious, yet brilliant. It is a wonderful lens, an exertion of thought and attention that I look forward to applying and following to see where it goes.
Thank you.
April 4, 2012 at 10:12 am
Back when the formal garden was in its heyday in England, I understand most took decades or longer to establish and mature.
I know that the modern approach is to trade money for time, and to buy pre-packaged solutions from the glibbest vendor. This fuels our economy of consumers and vendors.
But that seems to be the choice, about having to abandon the pre-packaged approach and invest the time and effort into a sustainable result. Permaculture might feed some people, but won’t put nearly as much money in the pockets of vendors. That makes it a bit revolutionary.
On the other hand, I imagine real estate vendors in the next decade will be extolling the {begin snark} “2/3rds hectare of permaculture garden, designed by USDA/Monsanto certified PermaDesigners just last week.” {end snark}. You heard it here first.
April 4, 2012 at 10:17 am
Wondering where I can find the RSS feed (for a reader) of this blog? Did I look in the wrong place – or is it not here?
Regarding 1 three per square meter – first of all trees grow in layers, some or bigger than others… this food forest looks more than a junggle than an orchard (as we think of it these days).
With love,
Ria
April 4, 2012 at 11:50 am
I’m very much in sympathy with Rade’s separation of permaculture as a tool and permaculture as an ideology. It’s certainly a place I go to for interesting ideas but I find many of the practitioners pretty frightening. For a start there seems to me to be a common disdain for many other forms of knowledge and skills. For example the idea that you can quickly design a plan for a piece of land is very much against smallholders’ (‘homesteaders”) tradition here that you don’t do anything major on a piece of land until you have been there for at least a year-seems sensible. Or, for example, permaculturalists often seem to favour the introduction of exotic, ‘invasive’ species on the grounds that they can be very productive, which is actually due to them perhaps having no pests or predators in the local ecological system.
When the first Permaculture government is in power am I in danger of being raided at 3am because I am a ‘digger’ not a ‘mulcher’? That’s sometimes the feeling I get.
I like Brad’s reference to permaculture ‘real estate’ – what do you think of this example? http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-04-03/sub-arctic-dreams-fresh-veggies-march
April 4, 2012 at 2:51 pm
I think there is an unresolved tension that drives many Permaculture advocates (and this applies to the wider sustainablilty movement) towards looking for “quick” solutions. One the one hand having children is seen as contributing to overpopulation and leading to more carbon emissions, but on the other hand if we view creating a Permaculture environment as something that will not be completed in our lifetime, then our children become an important part of moving forward (they are certainly a “natural” solution to creating a long-term solution, and they certainly fall under the guideline of “small and slow”). While we can’t be sure our children won’t rebel against our vision of Permaculture, by assuming they will do, so we grant too much power to the modern vision of the “nuclear family as consumer” since teen rebellion and nest-leaving is mostly unknown outside western industrial society. Furthermore, viewing the work of Permaculture as a multi-generational work allows us to slow down our efforts and work more closely with the rhythm of the natural world. People are fond of quoting the Iriquois law of the seventh generation, without realizing that was not an abstract idea for them, but a real concern for their own flesh-and-blood offspring.
April 4, 2012 at 4:21 pm
Not to do anything for a year, observing the land through the seasons, is stressed in the lit. Yet when permies go through the course, they produce a design for the host’s land. A disconnect, no? Do as we say, not as we do? I think the temptation of the commercial “landscape design” model is very strong.
April 5, 2012 at 1:14 pm
In 22. above LG says “Nature does not plan” which seems accurate because ‘nature’ is our abstract concept and not a homogenous self-aware entity with reasoning/verbalizing/imaging/mapping as a habit. It is shorthand standing for the totality of ongoing life and geological processes apart from intentional human urban/agro activity. And for some a living spirit who Is and Does, but does not Intend.
So, Nature does not plan. But I think I can say that Nature strategizes without cracking the metaphor.
Seed dispersal: many strategies based on wind, water, bird, animal fecal deposits, squirrel burying behavior, etc.
Pollen movement: again, air strategies, insect/nectar/scent strategies, even imitating female wasps for nuptial flight pollen distribution.
Light capture: evergreen and deciduous strategies, broad-leaf, narrow leaf, root rhizome, etc.
Reproduction: parthenogenetic, asexual, sexual, spore, budding off, seed, egg, viral dna injection, nurturance, non-nurturance, dual-parent care, single-parent care, group care, etc.
I cannot make geologic processes fit the notion of strategizing, though, so perhaps it would be more precise to say that Life strategizes?
In that sense, permaculture strategies can be used, tested and trialled without planning much of anything except to see what happens next.
Companion planting, high diversity, density of species, etc. are means to an end (tools). Whether the end is to discourage pests and weeds for this year’s produce or to establish self-renewing soil for seven generations ahead, “natural” planning would consist of trying multiple strategies to meet multiple exigencies, as imagined/defined by typical local threats and average weather conditions.
Under global weirding, ‘typical’ gets thrown off the TimeTrain. So planning becomes contingency planning for wild, atypical variations under odd but possible combinations of conditions. Hence, a community approach, with many variations is the most ‘natural’ way to achieve some sort of success in feeding/soil building or (your intended end here).
Yes? No? Maybe?
April 5, 2012 at 3:03 pm
I like it. Don’t much care for the term “strategizing” because it’s been stolen by the military and corporate people for their purposes, that are tied up in goals. But in the absence of something better… I still use it. Yes, multiple strategies and “seeing what happens” is part of what nature does.
I picked up the term “enlightened trial and error” somewhere. Makes sense?
April 5, 2012 at 3:08 pm
Nipboot and Ria, welcome!
Ria, I skimmed a translated text that described what they do in that Belgian garden, and it seems (if I got it right) that they pinch off the main growth on the trees, basically keep them bush like, rather than tree like. I am still not clear how such a thicket of fruit trees can get enough sun to bear fully. (I see that you’ve already subbed to the blog. I confess I don’t understand RSS. Is it something I should add?)
And thank you for your good words, nipboot. I hope you come back. 🙂
April 5, 2012 at 9:49 pm
I gotta share with you all something quite horrifyingly insane. The “farm of the future” courtesy of the USDA, painted for the Nat’l Geographic in 1970.
The caption reads: Grainfields stretch like fairways and cattle pens resemble high rise apartments… Attached to a modernistic farmhouse, a bubble-topped control tower hums with a computer; weather reports and a farm-price ticker tape. A remote-controlled tiller-combine glides across the 10-mile-long wheat field on tracks that keep the heavy machine from compacting the soil. Threshed grain, funneled into a pneumatic tube beside the field, flows into storage elevators rising close to the distant city. The same machine that cuts the grain prepares the land for another crop. A similar device waters neighboring strips of soybeans as a jet-powered helicopter sprays insecticides.
Across a service road, conical mills blend feed for beef cattle, fattening in multilevel pens that conserve ground space. Tubes carry the feed to be mechanically distributed. A central elevator transports the cattle up and down, while a tubular side drain flushes wastes to be broken down for fertilizer. Beside the farther pen, a processing plant packs beef into cylinders for shipment to market by helicopter and monorail. Illuminated plastic domes provide controlled environments for growing high-value crops such as strawberries, tomatoes, and celery. Near a distant lake and recreation area, a pumping station supplies water for the vast operation.
[Click on graphic to see it rendered in crisp detail.]
April 6, 2012 at 12:26 pm
It looks like the Kingdom of Heaven as envisioned by Zeitgeist Movement techno-cultists.
Insane might not be the best descriptor, since on a certain level the above picture and description represent rational thinking applied to agriculture to an extreme degree. Within the framework of a worldview where all limits can be overcome by technology, such a system of food production (because farming is too sacred a word for this abomination) is perfectly sane.
For the last 300 years we have been sold on the idea that reason and rationality are the functions that ought to rule our lives, much to the ruin of authentic human society and our own psyche.
April 6, 2012 at 1:30 pm
Well, I would like to add another definition to the word “insane.” The first is, of course, “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”. Let’s add: “rational thinking applied to anything to an extreme degree.”
Gah. (Psst… in a world of domination, reason is turned into just another boss. This one lives inside us though.)
April 6, 2012 at 2:22 pm
Here’s how to corner the water market in case anyone is interested
http://exiledonline.com/how-limousine-liberals-oligarch-farmers-and-even-sean-hannity-are-hijacking-our-water-supply/
April 6, 2012 at 4:10 pm
The odd thing is, if those plastic domes were solar thermal concentrators covering cattle/humanure dung lagoons, they could be capturing methane, processing the best possible fertilizers on the spot AND powering dozens of small, group-owned organic farms and dairies clustered across the same area depicted as that Martian Space Farm.
But the image needs a slow, smelly old, ramshackle Composting Train cycling around from city, to lagoons, to farms, and looping back to the city with cars of harvested produce. It can be coal-fired, trash-burning, solar-powered, or horse drawn. Or, heck, why be stingy, use ALL those methods.
The concrete cattle towers with their green-grass floors would just do as a spiral tent city for mobile work forces camping in stacks. They would need a few firepoles to get to work quickly from the upper tiers. The Howard-Johnson looking farmhouse would have to become a 24-hr 6-shift cafe with streams of dirt-covered people going in and out all the time.
Sure would mess up the nice neat look of the RoboFarm, wouldn’t it?
Golly, you would need a clinic for people and animals, maybe a theatre or concert stage–even trees! Just too, too humantic. Would not do.
April 6, 2012 at 6:04 pm
I cannot agree that the past 300 years have held up reason and rationality as “the functions that ought to rule our lives.” Religion, city-state, nationality, ethnic group, maleness, and money have all been held up as the institutionalized functions that ought to control women, rule over children, own property, and determine the distribution of clean air, clean water, education, and food.
None of these functions has the least relationship to reason, though they do to rationalization.
Reason and justice both dictate that women should rule. Women should rule not only their own minds and bodies, but also the food, education, medicine and water needed to rear and socialize their children. They do the work, they ought to have the power. The opposite has been true.
For much longer than 300 years.
War is the function that has been held up as the most honorable, most worthy, most important function that ought to rule our lives.
War does rule our lives.
War is not a reasonable activity. It is a hormonally-motivated activity, chiefly male, largely adolescent, that can be ramped up and exploited by cool, long-headed people for serving their own self-interests.
War is rational only to the degree that it can be stimulated, governed, and directed for the benefit of non-combatants–mostly arms merchants, looters, and mercenary equipment suppliers.
War profiteers are not the only beneficiaries–only the first, greediest, and biggest. The lions to the pack of hyenas.
War has made everyone who is not a lion into hyenas. We all fight for the scraps left after war has gobbled its share.
There is no economic activity anywhere in the world that is not touched, robbed, or polluted by war. Wars of pride and profit consume an enormous amount of materials and human labor that if directed by and for women could by now have fed and educated every woman’s child–brought health and water to every village on the planet.
Instead, all this labor and material wealth has been devoted to death, destruction, disease, and domination. And porn.
Abortion and contraception and homosexuality have been outlawed, banned by male religions. Why? To ensure a steady stream of warm bodies to be killed in the thrills of war.
We mustn’t kill babies now, there won’t be enough teenagers to kill later.
After the women have struggled long and hard, expended their time and labor to raise them, when the calves are fatted, then go ahead and kill them. In war. Of course, if there are too many toddlers in one place, they can starve or die of filthy water. 40,000 or so per day, isn’t it? Just keep the women breeding until the next war.
Overpopulation has been ignored everywhere but China and China still prefers female infanticide to male infanticide. Therefore, they have a large number of young men who are statistically unlikely to find a woman of breeding age to mate with or marry. Gang rape is their stochastic solution. (At least one rapist’s sperm has a fighting chance to get at an egg.) War is likely to be another.
In Africa, boys as young as ten are impressed into war and girls the same age made captive to supply involuntary sexual services to warriors.
The hunger games have been around for a long, long time.
Reason and rationality do not come into this picture. They left the picture along with shame, love, and reverence for life as soon as men started to worship a God made in their own image. And their God is a jealous god who will have no other god before him. And the gun is his profit.
April 7, 2012 at 6:25 am
Hello Leavergirl: Haven’t seen your comments with Kulturcritic. Any reason(s) you care to mention? i found some of your postings, particularly re: my ‘opting out’ of the civilized charade engaging, and it’s apparent you’ve read Quinn, probably Jensen, Keith, et al? i’m currently about to read your postings to get a deeper understanding of your thought processes, and more. Best, r
April 7, 2012 at 10:28 am
gkayb, the only “humanizing” element in the whole pic is the chapel (maybe) on top of some other structure — perhaps the painter imagined seeking forgiveness there for what he wrought? I found the rolls of beef (the things that look like piles of culverts) pretty nauseating.
Did the critique of reason make you uneasy? After all, that unreason has been instrumental in harming people, does not imply that reason hasn’t been, eh?
relentless, things got a bit busy here and I fell off the wagon at Sandy’s. Am rushing over to see what is happening! Welcome, will be looking forward to your take on this long thread. (Yes, for Quinn, Jensen and Keith, though I am wondering hard about those latter two lately.)
April 7, 2012 at 11:50 am
Well, that “pic” depicting “the farm of the future” courtesy of USDA via Nat’l Geo has been haunting me since last night, like a recurring nightmare you keep waking up from glad your room and life aren’t like that…in this case, this moment i can look out the window and see a beautiful bay, with very different foreground. Whew…but when I look at i the artist’s rendering reprinted above, online or in mind, how disturbing, depending on the exact context (degree of seriousness) in which it was “designed”, printed, promoted, of course.
Fascinating how different people’s reactions will be so differing along the contiuum of approval–to–revulsion. Like here, some flirting with how to improve it, when to me it’s a great example of a futuristic “fixer-upper” so far gone you might as well ‘doze’-and-dump (recycle, etc. of course) and go totally back to the drawing board…especially if those dwelling towers are for cows…Holy steerdung! Leavergirl, you’re working with some context-providing captioning or something you referred to with the image, or else how would you know the culvert lookalikes are “really” gargantuan cylinders of beef? (Wouldn’t that be unlikely such an “efficient system” would stack ’em out in the sun, even briefly?) No doubt not being an ‘animal product person’ helps me turn away from such a specter…and vice-versa.
April 7, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Just another touch of bizarro, in the whole thing. The caption reads: “Beside the farther pen, a processing plant packs beef into cylinders for shipment to market by helicopter and monorail.” And those culvert-like cylinders are right in front of the helicopter… what is one to think but… ughhhhhhhhh! (No doubt they are nuked and then covered in plastic, just like the kind of plastic most supermarket meat comes in… you gotta hack it with a cleaver, nearly.)
But you know, I think these people really were mad. Just look at Le Corbuisier’s drawings of things he proposed to do to cities (most did not let him, but a few did). Or … there was an article published in the 60s where some engineer blithely rambled on (with the appropriate numbers and all) that humans could keep on reproducing into trillions, just short of planetary heat death. Oh, it would mean that nobody could move around, and exercise would require permission, but hey! WTF WTF WTF???????!!!!!
April 7, 2012 at 11:50 pm
@Vera, I just came across the blog of Ross Wolf, and he has some very informative essays on early modernism and Le Corbusier, with a particular focus on the Soviet Union:
– Industrialism and the Genesis of Modern Architecture: http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/industrialism-and-the-genesis-of-modern-architecture/
– The Graveyard of Utopia: Soviet Urbanism and the Fate of the International Avant-Garde: http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/the-graveyard-of-utopia-soviet-urbanism-and-the-fate-of-the-international-avant-garde/
– The Soviet Avant-Garde: International Reflections of the OSA-ASNOVA (Constructivist-Rationalist) Split: http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/the-soviet-avant-garde-international-reflections-of-the-osa-asnova-constructivist-rationalist-split/
– The Spatiotemporal Dimensions of Abstract Art and the Genesis of Modernist Architecture: http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/the-spatiotemporal-dimensions-of-abstract-art-and-the-genesis-of-modernist-architecture/
– The Stalinization of Post-Revolutionary Soviet Art and Architecture: http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/the-stalinization-of-post-revolutionary-soviet-art-and-architecture/
– The Sociohistoric Mission of Modernist Architecture: The Housing Shortage, the Urban Proletariat, and the Liberation of Woman: http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/the-sociohistoric-mission-of-modernist-architecture-the-housing-shortage-the-urban-proletariat-and-the-liberation-of-woman/
– At the Intersection of Nature and Architecture: Modernism’s Response to the Alienation of Man: http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/04/02/at-the-intersection-of-nature-and-architecture-modernism%E2%80%99s-response-to-the-alienation-of-man-2/
Surely here’s much more interesting stuff as well, but I think the above essays can be good as starters.
April 8, 2012 at 12:17 am
No, the critique of reason here was not it–I had been reading back issues of the Ward Nerd and the contrast between all the pious religious coverage this weekend compared with actual behavior of people who profess religion yet act against it was just overwhelming. I begin to think that war is a biochemical response triggered by overcrowding, like aggression in white rats, or lemming migration.
April 8, 2012 at 4:00 pm
Øyvind, I just read Scott’s Seeing like a state, where he describes in great detail how the mad modernist planners and gigantism cultists readily collaborated back and forth between America and the Soviet Union. A brisk movement of ideas and people. Here is a mad mad story for ya: the major American proponents of gigantic modern farms were offered a sweet deal by Stalin: practically unlimited land, and nearly unlimited numbers of intimidated muzhiks to work for you, and the crushing power of the state behind you! So they got together in a Chicago hotel and in two weeks designed the soviet state farm (sovchoz). (And no, it does not have a happy ending.)
I am running out of suitable interjections.
April 8, 2012 at 4:02 pm
Aha, I see. Well, maybe. But then again, who said that “war is the health of the state”? He wuz right. So by hook and by crook, it always heads thataway…
April 13, 2012 at 9:37 am
Leavergirl: As for Keith and Jensen…my personal take is that they are simply finding that the old methods, re: protesting, hoping and continuing the sham of abiding by the authority’s laws are not stopping the planetary decimations, they’re only getting far worse. Every single day, even here in the semi-boondocks, i see, hear, smell, taste and feel the utter destructions. So as not to be misunderstood, a commonality when mediated words are employed (sound familiar?), i do no advocate violence. That said, my patience level is heading into the rock bottom zone, while those who believe hope is going to save this beautiful World are living the delusional existence. My take is: “Hope derails action.” That does not translate as violence. Keith and Jensen are frustrated, as most of us are, and at least are attempting to voice alternatives to the same old things that aren’t working. Do i agree with all they promote? Nah, but i admire their outspokenness in a culture that wants to shut down free thought. No one has to listen to them but may find thoughts that even they have not mentioned, thoughts that reside between the lines, or as i prefer, between the frames, for this culture is truly a scripted culture, and it isn’t necessary to follow their scripts. i prefer living between the frames, for me, that’s where the answers, some of them, lie.
However, i am mainly writing to mention that i absolutely loved your take on Permaculture, or its disconnection from the Whole. Though we do differ in methodologies, we appear to be nearing the same end result. With me, to my knowledge, the only primal plant backbreeder, my ‘permaculture’ doesn’t really take us ‘forward’ but it returns us to a deeper Earthly reality, but it would surely fit into the permacultural theorizing, though it’s not a ‘theory.’ It’s something i live WITH (perhaps the most important, underused and misused word in the King’s Language, and i truly appreciated your ‘proper’ use of it in the article) When i have more linear time for a further description of my quite radical ecoweb experiments, i will send them forth. Also note my ‘……’ for many words, for i employ them for lack of the exact words, which generally do not, can not exist in this current culture.
i’ll be back. Thank you LG!
April 13, 2012 at 10:16 am
Relentless, what “underused” word were you referring to above?
I’d be interested to read more about your “ecoweb” when you can emerge from between the linear timeframes. 🙂
April 13, 2012 at 1:27 pm
Relentless — thank you! A well-nuanced statement of the feelings those of us who have moved past denial are coping with. I should note that Derrick and Keith do not advocate violence per se. They advocate direct action, which is a series of actions of increasingly greater direct resistance-to-aggressiveness that are pursued until one finally achieves ‘success’. Increasingly, but not always, that may require sustained non-destructive obstruction and occupation (‘block it’), property or material destruction (real or threatened)(‘break it’), or reclamation and expropriation (seizing back land/property)(‘take it”). It’s all about doing what is necessary but only what is necessary.
My reason for applauding but not participating in such direct actions (aside from a certain degree of fear and/or cowardice) is that the machine we are trying to fight is a Hydra, and every such ‘victory’ will inevitably be drowned out, sooner or later, by a thousand defeats.
April 13, 2012 at 2:54 pm
Jay D: the word “With.” The EcoWeb is a term i began using about 12-13 years back. Essentially, it is a space, let’s call it ground zero, where you begin engaging life synaesthetically (all senses used simultaneously), ‘allowing’ life its unfettered ability to evolve without the attempt at controlling anything from that original starting point(. Then, like strands it expands outwardly in all directions, engaging other ecowebs (not from my 24 acre space, but with other ecowebs), like spider webs, covering all the ‘space’ in between, until finally, much larger areas are affected…if it didn’t have such a negative connotation i’d call it infected! It’s really a return to a more primal environmental sanity, though, of course, it’s evolving within our temporal fields. Even though i’m a ‘plant breeder,’ i’m not at all breeding lifeforms by controlling them much whatsoever any longer. They’re pretty much on their own, though granted, due to the horrendous environments today, i had to start with a modicum of nurturing WITH the entirely. Then, if the results seem to me to be in concert-harmony—with that environment (and again, not controlling the outcome), if a new plant lets me know it ‘wants’ to grow and evolve (this is not meant to sound mystical, more an intuitive direct perceptiveness), i’ll offer it to like-minded ecowebists. Yeah, i know, perhaps a bit ‘out there,’ however, i’m beginning to see results that to me, are in harmony. Ask more, if this isn’t what you were seeking. Thanks for asking. r
April 15, 2012 at 7:40 am
Leavergirl! As someone in the process of transforming a farm to a permaculture village, and as I have been digging deeply (Sic) in to the subject I was fascinated to read your blog. I was just about to write “excellent post when I stopped. Suddenly, after thinking about it I realised, though that you kind of missed the point. All you said is right, but it is still not the point.. scrolling through the comments I see several of them are on their way there, but let me stick in my pennies’ worth.
I get that you are saying we cannot design nature. Permaculture courses tend to end up in a plan that requires bulldozers and draining and that seems like it is not working like nature as she doesn’t do that kind of stuff.
What you missed out was to talk about ecological maturity. Nature works to mature eco-systems. These systems, given the conditions around them, develop to, put simply, reduce throughput of water to a minimum, reduce release of nutrients to as close to zero as possible, and to maximize take-up of solar radiation.
Any attempt to design a settlement (I mean a place that provides food, water and shelter) should include 1) A design to maintain or increase the ecological maturity of the area 2) A design to produce food 3) A design that houses and heats/cools to a level of comfort.
If you miss out any of these you either get hungry, cold or end up stressing the ecosystems around you.
That people have been doing design work on gardens is relevant and necessary but as peak oil effects draw closer we need to be taking a wider view and looking at it from a settlement perspective.
May 21, 2012 at 7:29 pm
In response to Jade, comment #79, regarding Permaculture as a tool vs. as an ideology. David Holmgren, co-founder of Permaculture, is always up for critiqueing permaculture when it is called for. He has said the following:
“we should remember that the best of ecological design in any field, will often be informed by a range of traditions, concepts and frameworks that may have developed prior to or in parallel with Permaculture concepts and design principles. To quote another systems thinking adage, “the map is not the territory.” Just because something is not labeled Permaculture, does not exclude the possibility that it might be an excellent example of Permaculture principles. Similarly, just because something might be labeled Permaculture, does not insure that it is an appropriate application of all or even most of the design principles. What we can do is use Permaculture ethics and design principles as guidelines in considering the proliferation of creative design and action from any and every source. With these tools, we can find the best solutions in the most unlikely places, and avoid the risk that such useful thinking tools could lose their open-ended, organic, and flexible nature, that is their greatest strength. ”
On Transition and Permaculture planning, Holmgren has said:
“and I’ve been involved myself locally, with the idea that’s come through Transition, with the idea of what’s called the Energy Descent Action Plan, or Energy Descent Action Planning, where we could do this in a slightly less chaotic and more planned way. But, my comment on that is that what that requires is a very, very different sort of thinking than what is characterized as local government or community planning in the past. Not just because the things we need to do are different, but because we have to give up that idea that we can lay it all out as a plan, and we have the resources and the budgeting and then we will just implement it. It’s much more chaotic than that.”
About Permaculture Principle #7: Design from Patterns to Details, he has said:
“A lot of this is about pattern recognition, and of course Mollison has written a lot about this, and another author who has influenced a lot of Permaculture thinking is Chrisopher Alexander, on Pattern Languaging. There are repeating patterns in nature and in human systems that can be taken from one context and applied as a general pattern in another.
The most common example in Permaculture site design is zone and sector planning. Zones and sectors are generalized patterns that allow us to place things in the system. They don’t tell us everything, but offer general principles.”
About Principle #9: Use Small and Slow Solutions:
“This principle has a lineage that goes back to when I first met Mollison. The year before, in 1973, a really seminal book was published, called “Small is Beautiful” by E.F. Schumacher. It was a part of a recognition that the dominant idea in Western society that “Big is Better” is actually problematic. And the idea of “slow” being part of the new paradigm is a more recent thing, and a bit harder to communicate, especially given the computer revolution, which has allowed the romance with speed to continue on a new trajectory, even though speed in the physical domain reached its zenith in ideology when I was a kid. I was promised trips to the moon and holidays to Mars. We’ve now pushed off this obsession with speed into the digital domain. The recognition that slow things are actually good takes a little bit of getting used to. ”
About Principle #12: Creatively Use and Respond to Change:
“Like the other principles, this is an expansion of what has often been previously taught in Permaculture about use of evolution and succession. Since most our agriculture started as using plants that are effectively weeds, they are the early stages of pioneer succession. Yet nature is always pushing things toward a mature ecosystem with more perennial plants, including trees, and things that are more stable than things that just pop up out of bare ground. There were reasons why we cut down the forest and grew these crops, but the primary Permaculture insight was, if we could get more of our human needs from systems that are more ecologically mature, then there would likely be less land degradation from that. So we wanted to move more toward food forests and systems like that, and that was making use of ecological succession rather than fighting against ecological succession all the time. There are other models of ecological succession that are also useful, including the pulsing model that I use in the book. But these are all part of a more general principle of how we use and respond to change. This operates at two levels. One is us operating as God – deliberately intervening to creatively make use of change. The other thing is that change comes from above from larger scale systems that we can’t control, and we have to respond to that. It’s no use saying ‘oh, wouldn’t it be good if it was different’ – we have to flexibly work with that. Whether it’s peak oil and climate change, or whether it’s the behavior of fickle Greek gods, there’s always been forces at a larger scale that will actually just sweep great changes that we have to flexibly respond to.”
December 18, 2012 at 6:42 am
Hi Leavergirl,
Loving the blog, just found it today. I share your feelings about permaculture design.’Designs’ or systems need to evolve as the wants and needs of the users evolve. In terms of human systems I feel the best job a ‘permaculture designer’ can do is pass on a method or process, which a systems user can use to make decisions,rather than a static single design.
I have not managed to read all the above comments so forgive me if I am repeating something already stated, but thought I would add mine so can at least say ‘hello’.
December 18, 2012 at 9:53 am
Nick, welcome, and I hope you’ll keep on visiting! Yes, it bears stressing that the static design so beloved of people who run permaculture classes is no more than a device to get the conversation started. There is another thought… perhaps we should start our land thinking not via zone one, but via zone wild… and identify one or two places on the land that are special, and meant to be preserved, and enhanced by the design. Then go from there. What do you think?
March 5, 2015 at 6:00 am
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