WTF is Permaculture??

This is a question (although not always so colorfully phrased) comes up to practicing permaculturists often enough as to be a running gag; that awkward moment at any given dinner party when the permies look at each other with raised eyebrow to silently ask: who's gonna answer that question this time?

Googling (yes that's a word) 'what is permaculture' at the time of this writing yielded 5,222,000 or so results - you may have even heard of permaculture, described as anything from an idealist-hippie-lifestyle, to a survivalist-response-to-peak-oil-and-the-impending-collapse-of-industrial-civilization-as-we-know-it, to "Revolution Disguised as Gardening".

Photo: from 'The Lexicon of Sustainability' PBS series & traveling art show.

Permaculturists themselves have described permaculture varyingly as:

• an international social movement (and its regional extensions),
• a worldview and theory of human-environment relations,
• a design framework,
• and/or a bundle of practices.

So.... WTF IS PERMACULTURE??

Very simply put:  Permaculture is a framework for sustainable design.

Bill Mollison, who coined the word permaculture, defines it on page one of 'Permaculture: A Designer's Manual' (his 576-page treatsie on the subject) thus:

Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems.

Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material and strategic components in a pettern which functions to benefit life in all its forms.

Because permaculture offers a framework for the this type of design, may I suggest that this  framework can be adapted and applied towards designing resilient human systems of any kind. 

While permaculture was initially conceived of as a tool to design & redesign our agricultural & food production systems, permaculture practicioners quickly realized that you cannot address food systems without addressesing waste management, water, energy prodction, social & economic systems, conservation, cultural diversity, and many other areas affecting human & ecological well-being. 

We discovered that permaculture design can be a useful tool to help us design solutions for the challenges we face in sorts of different contexts, whether we be building tools or working to create healthy, resilient communities.

In over 30 years of putting permaculture design principles into action & practice - in practically every possible bioregional & cultural context around the world - at some point in their practice, permaculturists everywhere stumble into the same blinding flash of the obvious: that everything in the natural world is interconnected.

The calling card of permaculture is good design - aka 'Uncommon common sense'.  Placing elements where they will create mutually beneficial relationships with other elements in your system, backing up your major functions, and patterning after natural systems are some of the design principles the permaculture designer will utilise to create a robust & effective design.

However, it is the ethical foundation which underpins the permaculture design approach that makes it so powerful as a design science.  In crafting a permaculture design, decisions are made through the ethical filter of: Care of Earth, Care of People, and Fair Share of Resources.

Every design decision made through a permacultural lens must pass through this filter : how does this decision take care of earth / people / steward our resources?  Utilizing this ethical filter acknowledges that the resources we have access to are nested within the biophysical limits of the ecosystems we live within, and that without respecting this fact, there are no people to care for, nor are there resources available to share.

It is perhaps this ethical filter which is the cause of so much confusion when it comes to defining permaculture; the power of these 3 simple ethical principles to frame & shape our decision-making (and therefore our worldview) can be deeply personal.

But that, my friends, is a topic for another post at another time.

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Matthew Lynch
Essays on permaculture
Honolulu, Hawaii
February 2013

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PS  For further reading, Toby Hemmenway (Field Director of the Permaculture Institute (USA) and best-selling author of Gaia's Garden) has posted a very well articulated essay exploring what exactly permaculture is, by starting with the question: 'What permaculture isn't'.

 

 

Improved cookstove design

Because so much time is spent in the cook-house, stove designs are a leverage point we can focus on improving to create multiple benefits:

• Better air quality means better health
• Faster cook times
• Less fuel required
• More time to spend on other activities

By controlling only two factors - airflow and thermal mass - we can improve stove design to optimize heat efficiency and transfer. 

How a Rocket Stove works:

A rocket stove achieves efficient combustion of the fuel at a high temperature by ensuring a good air draft into the fire, controlled use of fuel, complete combustion of volatiles, and efficient use of the resultant heat.

As the fuel burns within the combustion chamber, convection draws new air into the combustion chamber from below, ensuring that any smoke from smoldering wood near the fire is also drawn into the fire and up the chimney. The chimney can be insulated to maximize the temperature and improve combustion; according to studies this will increase efficiency by up to two percent more.

For cooking purposes, the design keeps the cooking vessel in contact with the fire over the largest possible surface area. A pot skirt can be used to create a narrow channel that forces hot air and gas to flow along the bottom and sides of the cooking vessel.

Optional baffles guide hot air and flame up the sides of the pot. For space heating purposes, the heat is transferred to a heat store which can, in some cases, be part of the structure of the house itself. The exhaust gasses then pass out of the building via the chimney.

The design of the rocket stove allows it to operate on about half as much fuel as a traditional open fire and can use smaller diameter wood. If the stove is insulated and raised from the floor, the danger of children burning themselves is reduced. Some more recently designed rocket stoves are self-feeding, using gravity to add fuel to the fire as required.

 - Wikipedia, 09/04/12 -

 

Existing stoves observed in all 3 communities look like this:

Photos: Typical cookstove in Vanuatu, built on the ground with little or no insulation or airflow control, resulting in a smokey fire (indicating an incomplete & inefficient burn); Soot on the ceiling of cookhouse indicates how much particulate matter is released into the air with an inefficient burn

Our favorite Village Crazyman had already come up with improvements to his stove design:

Photo: Sawi's improved stove design.

A class brainstorm was conducted to explore ways we could improve Sawi's design:

Photo: Class brainstorm on improved stove design.

Not surprisingly, Sawi had created another improved stove design:

Photo:  Although this design focused primarily on improving the thermal mass, it still halved the typical cooking time for a suckling pig to just an hour; it was left to the class to further improve the design by harnessing airflow.

Here are some other variations on rocket stove from our friends at Permies.com:

A_whole_lot_of_rocket_cook_stoves_(wood_burning_stoves_forum_at_permies).pdf Download this file

Appropriate Design & Knowledge Transfer

Appropriate Design.
Google 'Appropriate Design' and the first few results you get are a handful of Green Design Firms  Self-Sufficiently Sustaining their Sustainability through 'appropriate design'.

As a kid growing up, the word 'inappropriate' was often used to describe my behavior - so what exactly is appropriate design, and who or what exactly are we being 'appropriate' to or for?

 

"Local relevance and local needs are often considered key to appropriateness. A technology or practice is considered "appropriate" if its costs and benefits are appropriate to the locality in which it is used. "  - Appropedia.org wiki -

 

Local relevance.
Traditional Cultures have co-evolved closely with the place a peoples have descended from, shaping both people and place.

For example, the extensive taro cultivation of Ancient Hawaiians evolved to as a response to the peoples' efforts first to survive, and then to thrive within the ecological limits of the islands; in turn, the terraced lo'i (taro paddies) and kauhale (family housing clusters) in the ahapua'a of Ancient Hawaii forever altered the wild tropical rainforests that Ancestral Hawaiians would have encountered upon their first arrival by voyaging canoe.

Similarly (though in a radically different part of the world), the nomadic herding culture of the Mongols evolved as their people's response to first survive, and then to thrive in the extreme conditions of their place. 

Animal herds are the peoples' primary energy storage (food supply) which can survive -40C winters; animal dungs provide fuel for fires, and provide fertility for the grasslands in the delicate balance that is life on the steppe.   Over the millennia, the Mongolian landscape has co-evolved with the movement of animals & people across its rambling, arid highland plains.

The notion that 'lands belong to people' is a symptom of disconnect between people and land in modern culture - all traditional cultures that are still intact today have a shared notion of 'belonging to their land' - in other words, a universal recognition that their ability to thrive as people is nested within the ability of the landscape around them to thrive:

We take care of the land, and the land takes care of us.

'Local relevance' takes us back to this idea of designing solutions which utilize locally available resources to solve the specific challenges presented by a locale's landscape, and the culture which has co-evolved within it; in other words, solutions which are appropriate to place and culture.

Knowledge Transfer.
Gardening techniques & tricks that have been developed for a seasonal agriculture may not be appropriate for a culture that has developed a perennial agricultural system in response to its landscape.

At first glance in Vanuatu, it may appear that there are no garden beds (that we may recognize) within the village, a shift in our perception reveals a complex & diverse agroforestry system of edible & useful species planted within the village and extending into the surrounding lands.

The fastest-growing traditional crop here is likely sweet potato, which is ready for first harvest in around 3 months; compare that to the Mongolian growing season of 90 days.

So, when working in foreign lands & cultures, we must work to match our design solutions to place & people. 

Photo: Knowledge replicating out into community as one of our student's next door neighboor is now feeding her banana patches w/ organic matter instead of burning it.

For example, in the shallow topsoils of the tropics much of the nutrient is held in the biomass of the plants growing there.  The practice of burning any & all organic matter (in the interests of maintaining tidiness) breaks this cycle, turning valuable nutrients into char & smoke.

Once a foundational understanding of permaculture principles is established (in this case, the principle of 'cycling energy'), students can begin to relate these into locally appropriate action & practice.