I Have No Idea What I'm Doing 47: S00:E04 - "Permaculture"

Thinking about the three ethics.

Thinking about the three ethics.

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Scope of this episode

I want to explain the value of permaculture
I will try to avoid jargon

It can be alienating
Also, I am dummy and have lots to learn




What is Permaculture?

Permaculture is hard to define

Permaculture, as an idea, is sprawling and all-encompassing. It can be difficult to easily define because it is almost like a whole ideology or culture.
It is a system

The thing about it is, it’s not sectarian

This is why you’re just as likely to find it practiced by anarchists or free market chuds


Though there are prominent and foundational figures, there’s no czar of permaculture and there’s no codified creed.


There is a “founder”, but it sort of acretes concepts and practices like a sort of katamari damacy
Perhaps the best way to define it is to begin by explaining its origins.


Origins

What is it’s root? Where did it come from and why was it created?
Tasmania, 1978

The term permaculture was coined by David Holmgren, then a graduate student at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education’s Department of Environmental Design, and Bill Mollison, senior lecturer in Environmental Psychology at University of Tasmania, in 1978.


1979–1983 Eastern Australian drought - Wikipedia


Ethics, Principles Methods, Developments

Ethics

The Three Ethics

Earth Care: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply.
People Care: Provision for people to access those resources necessary for their existence
Fair Share (Setting limits to population and consumption): By governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles.




Principles

Observe and interact: By taking time to engage with nature we can design solutions that suit our particular situation.
Catch and store energy: By developing systems that collect resources at peak abundance, we can use them in times of need.
Obtain a yield: Ensure that you are getting truly useful rewards as part of the work that you are doing.
Apply self-regulation and accept feedback: We need to discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems can continue to function well.
Use and value renewable resources and services: Make the best use of nature’s abundance to reduce our consumptive behavior and dependence on non-renewable resources.
Produce no waste: By valuing and making use of all the resources that are available to us, nothing goes to waste.
Design from patterns to details: By stepping back, we can observe patterns in nature and society. These can form the backbone of our designs, with the details filled in as we go.
Integrate rather than segregate: By putting the right things in the right place, relationships develop between those things and they work together to support each other.
Use small and slow solutions: Small and slow systems are easier to maintain than big ones, making better use of local resources and producing more sustainable outcomes.
Use and value diversity: Diversity reduces vulnerability to a variety of threats and takes advantage of the unique nature of the environment in which it resides.
Use edges and value the marginal: The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system.
Creatively use and respond to change: We can have a positive impact on inevitable change by carefully observing, and then intervening at the right time.


Methods

Food forests

What is a Food Forest? – Project Food Forest
Forest gardening - Wikipedia


Water capture and storage

Contoured earthworks AKA Swales

Swales - Appropedia: The sustainability wiki
Greening the Arizona Desert - The Tucson Swales with Matt Powers 2016 - YouTube


Check Dams

Check dam - Appropedia: The sustainability wiki




Greenhouses
Rotational grazing

How to green the world’s deserts and reverse climate change - Allan Savory - YouTube
Running out of Time - Documentary on Holistic Management - YouTube


Composting systems
Urban food production
Grey water use
Aquaculture
Renewable energy and heat

Rocket stoves

http://www.ernieanderica.info/rocketstoves


Pressurized air

Lost Technology – The Trompe.
Compressing air underground could help the planet shift to renewables
History and Future of the Compressed Air Economy - Resilience




Natural building

Rammed earth, Adobe, etc.


Earth ships

Earthship - Wikipedia
EarthshipGlobal
Life during lockdown in an Earthship, an off-grid, sustainable home - Insider








Why is it important?

Water loss

Runoff
Pumping more ground water than is absorbed
Floods


Soil loss and fertility

Traditional agriculture treats topsoil as a consumable resource

Every second, North America’s largest river carries another dump truck’s load of topsoil to the Caribbean. Each year, America’s farms shed enough soil to fill a pickup truck for every family in the country. This is a phenomenal amount of dirt. But the United States is not the biggest waster of this critical ical resource. An estimated twenty-four billion tons of soil are lost annually ally around the world-several tons for each person on the planet. Despite such global losses, soil erodes slowly enough to go largely unnoticed in anyone’s lifetime.
(David R. Montgomery. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Kindle Locations 61-64). Kindle Edition.)

It takes time to naturally build topsoil

The United States Department partment of Agriculture estimates that it takes five hundred years to produce duce an inch of topsoil. Darwin thought English worms did a little better, making an inch of topsoil in a century or two. While soil formation rates vary in different regions, accelerated soil erosion can remove many centuries turies of accumulated soil in less than a decade. Earth’s thin soil mantle is essential to the health of life on this planet, yet we are gradually stripping it off-literally skinning our planet.
(David R. Montgomery. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Kindle Locations 296-298). Kindle Edition.)

Example: Rome

Rome had flourishing agriculture that fed the city, but soil-loss and fertility loss became a major factor in the ‘fall of rome’

In 1916 Columbia University professor Vladimir Simkhovitch argued that lack of dirt caused the decline of the Roman Empire. Soil exhaustion and erosion had depopulated the Roman countryside in the empire’s late days; he pointed out that the amount of land needed to support a Roman farmer had increased from the small allotment given to each citizen at the founding of Rome to ten times as much land by the time of Julius Caesar.
(David R. Montgomery. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Kindle Locations 794-797). Kindle Edition.)

The economics of empire pushed for more and more slave-labor high-value crops
This lead to worse and worse agricultural practices with tremendous erosion
Rome relied more and more on expanding their empire and turning formerly mixed-use land into intensive cereal or olive production
Much of the desertification of Northern Africa can be attributed to Roman imperial agriculture




Inevitable contraction of globalism
Carbon sequestration
Resilient and diverse food systems
Regenerative


What are examples of it in practice?

Zaytuna Farms

Zaytuna Farm - About Us
Theory in Practice: A Tour of Zaytuna Farm - YouTube


Polyface Farms

Cows, Carbon and Climate - Joel Salatin - TEDxCharlottesville - YouTube
How Joel Salatin’s Farming Style CAN Feed the World - YouTube
Joel Salatin: Stacking Fiefdoms - YouTube
Sustainable Abundance Joel Salatin - YouTube
How Joel Salatin brings out the “Pigness” of the Pig - YouTube


Greening The Desert Project: Jordan

https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org


Al Bayda

Al Baydha Project - Wikipedia
Retrospective video https://youtu.be/T39QHprz-x8
Rain for Climate - Al Baydha project
Al Baydha – Experimental Design


Brad Lancaster

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond by Brad Lancaster
Evolutions Within the Dunbar/Spring Public Commons


New Forest Farm

https://newforestfarm.us
How Mark Shephard’s Farm THRIVES under Sheer. Total. Utter. Neglect. - YouTube




What comes next?

Shortcomings and issues

It takes more human labor

Gee, if only we had a mass of people without jobs who would find this work rewarding and enriching…


Once again: capitalism

It doesn’t scale and isn’t as profitable under the economic and social system as it is
It isn’t a capital-based system




Reading/Viewing/resources





[Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway
Chelsea Green Publishing](https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/gaias-garden/)




@BuildSoil - Twitter
One Community - Open-source Permaculture
Hope in a Changing Climate - by John D. Liu (2009) - YouTube
The Paradigm Shift leading to Survival and Sustainability - John D. Liu - TEDxWageningenUniversity - YouTube


Individual Experimentation
Get involved with local permaculture