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.

__________________________________________________________

 

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'.

 

 

The Village Economy

"How can we be
Self-reliant with our needs
So that we can become
Interdependent with our wants?"
   -Hunter Heaivilin-

Photo: Hunter Heaivilin teaches Village Design on Ifira Island, Vanuatu.

The Village Economy Game was played in order to demonstrate and give a practical experience of how to connect the products & functions of one local enterprise to the needs of another.

1. Students are asked to create an enterprise that could meet a currently un-met need that they would be interested in pursuing.
2. A functional analysis is performed to determine the needs, characteristics, functions and products of each enterprise.
3. Students are asked to find car many connections as they can with other students enterprises (this typically results in much laughter and shenanigans), and then report back to the class about the connections they managed to make.

Here's a summary of the enterpises Vanuatu Villagers came up with, and the beginnings of the many connections that were made between enterprises (see if you can make connections of your own):

Photo: Village Economy Mindmap, 2012 Vanuatu PDC

A simple shift in focus towards making these localized connections, can reduce our reliance upon external inputs while we are contributing to the vibrancy of our community.  We can reduce our waste and cycle energy (in its many forms) within our community many times before it leaves.

Once we have met our needs as a community we find ourselves with a new challenge: what to do with the surplus?  Now we can look to neighboring communities to establish trades with our surplus, enriching our quality of life and that of our neighbors.

If we are smart, we can live within the ecological limits of our lands, creating products & developing  skills shaped by our landscape - these will have enormous value in other communities but will be obsolete in others - we can seek to match these community products with communities where these are in need, and the web grows stronger.

In times of scarcity, we can meet most of our needs within our communities (and reach out to the relationships we have made with other communities if needed), while in times of plenty our collective joy can be multiplied by sharing & trading our surplus: self-reliant, and interdependent.

Photo: 2012 Oahu PDC Village Economy Mindmap Timelapse

 

Rainbow Botanical Gardens: Designing for engagement

Cornelia Wylie, a New Zealander living in Vanuatu for the last two decades has created one of the most beautiful patches of paradise within the beautiful patch of paradise that is Efate Island - and she is less than 10 minutes from Port Villa airport.

Photo: Rainbow Botanical Gardens' dam is a productive & beautiful fishpond.

Amazingly enough, most of what we toured through was only planted 18 months ago - which gives you an idea of how quickly things can grow here.

Designing for aesthetics leads many landscape designers to create an unsustainable ecosystem which requires large inputs of chemical fertilizer and pest control to maintain the aesthetics of their design. 

Cornelia, however, has a passion for sustainable agriculture - her other 100+ acre site if focused on organic food production, and integrates animals & utilizes intercropping to create a cultivated ecosystem which can provide for most of its needs (we wish we could have toured that site; you'll have to check it out for us).

See the full gallery on Posterous

Photos: Beautiful bananas; Fern shoot; Ginger & orchid; Ivory palm; Beautiful bamboo; Tropical cherry

Rainbow Botanical Gardens offers an interesting study in designing for a specific use pattern - in this case, she has designed for maximum human engagement to educate & inspire visitors to take action - namely, to make a purchase. 

In doing so, she has created a human-sized-venus-fly-trap for her landscape design & cut flower customers; when you visit, you can't help but want to take a little piece of the place with you. 

See the full gallery on Posterous

Photo: Students examine the different textures of a 'Teddy-bear Palm', and a 'Pokey Palm' - visitors to Rainbow Botanical are encouraged to touch, smell, feel, the exhibits.

Our tour group left with tomato seedlings bred for the tropics, gleaned fruit, cuttings, and the purchase of a dwarf banana variety yielding a fruit she promised us would taste like vanilla ice cream (not to mention a yearning to return home to potter in our gardens). 

Paths meander through zones themed by species, each one carefully stacked with other plants to fill each niche. 

See the full gallery on Posterous

Photo: Bixa orellana seed pod; Hendon having fun with the oily red dye from the seedpods.

We wound through twisting path of palms with countless varieties of orchids underneath, passed through an avenue of exotic red bananas, stumbled across the always-engaging Bixa orellana (red lipstick tree), peeked down an alley to a collection of bamboo varieties, then looped back to where we started in a thatched roundhouse (made from mahogany posts that were harvested on-site), and ended up next to a tropical cheery tree (favorite of the birds) on the banks of large dam filled with freshwater eels, tilapia, water lilies and hyacinth.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Photo: Using lots of edge to create the illusion of space.

Different (& beautiful) ground covers were splashed throughout, purple textures with white flowers dancing like popcorn, and nooks planted out with ginger & heleconia varieties (92 varieties in all) beckoned from the sides - her collection is the largest in the Southern Hemisphere.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Photo: Just 3 of the 92 varieites of heleconia at Rainbow Botanical Gardens in Port Villa.

By creating so much edge in her layout, she has not only managed to stack in an enormous amount of diversity very intensively, she has also created the illusion & feeling of wandering around in a much larger space.

Our group stumbled about like excited schoolchildren, laughing and pointing and (at Cornelia's insistence) touching all the new plants we were being introduced and re-introduced to, while our gracious & knowledgable hostess smiled, told stories & answered questions throughout.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Photos: Touring Rainbow Botanical Gardens.

The education focus of her enterprise is significant; over the years Cornelia has helped many Ni-Van (local Vanuatu peoples) start their own nursery business, and procures many of her plants from them when she is wearing her Landscape Designer hat.  She's also worked with the government to create what is now the only agricultural quarantine station in the Islands since the government lost their facility to fire years ago, and continues to work with Non-Governmental Organizations such as World Vision (and now ADRA) to support ongoing trainings & workshops in horticulture & micro enterprise development.

Thank you Cornelia.

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

Plant guilds in Vanuatu

"There is an enormous difference in the way we make a design in permaculture and the way an agriculturist would make it.  Really what we are up to is trying to let things function in a natural way."

  - Bill Mollison, Wilton, NH (USA) PDC 1981 -

 

Companion planting, or planting two or more plants who help each other, with each other, is one tool we can use to increase the resilience of our cropping systems. 

For example, planting dill and alliums (onion family) between mounds of potatoes can help attract beneficial insects to the umbrelliferous flowers of the dill, while the allium roots exude antibacterial & antifungal compounds which can protect potato tubers from fungal infection, and give us total yield of three crops from the same space.

Photo: Fruit & nut trees occupy the understory of this coconut plantation on Malekula Island, while swamp taro & cattle occupy the ground level.

In permaculture design we refer to this as 'guilding'.  We can use it to mimic the diversity found in natural systems and assemble our planting guilds by selecting plants occupying different niches; for example, selecting deep rooted plants to row next to shallow rooted plants, or identifying understory trees which can be planted under our canopy.

We can take this a step further by designing for maximum functional diversity; in other words, seeking to connect elements in our system so that the needs (or 'inputs') of one element are met by the products or behaviors ('outputs') of another element in our system. 

Photo: Needs / Products / Functions = Functional Analysis.

By using the 'Functional Analysis' tool to map the needs, products & characteristics of our species palette, we can begin to make these connections to create gropings of plants which are mutually beneficial when grown together.  For example, we can grow vines up a taller crop, select an edible ground cover to ramble in an understory, and intercrop nitrogen-fixing species to provide for our soil fertility needs.

Photo: A guild is a family of plants who work together. At the Department of Agriculture's demonstration plot on Efate, Piper nigrum (back pepper) grows up nitrogen-fixing 'Erythrina varigata' (Indian Coral Tree).

Students were tasked with designing their own localized guilds using these patterns, starting with grouping plant species they are already familiar with in the different niches they occupy, and then looking to re-assemble them by looking for functional relationships between the plants:

See the full gallery on Posterous

Photo: Amsen Wille from the Vanuatu Department of Agriculture presents his group's plant guild designs.

Photo: 1) Banana, cacao & Island cabbage (Abelmoschus manihot) grow in the understory of a coconut plantation, with Sweet potato (known locally as 'Kumala') as a ground cover.  Glyricidia provides fertility to the system, banana & Island cabbage provide a shorter term crop while cacao is maturing, and sweet potato lends productivity  at ground level while serving as a living mulch to protect topsoils.

2) 'Whitewood' (Endospermum medullosum), a locally prized timber crop, creates a closed canopy which few plants can tolerate.  Swamp taro (Alocasia macrorrhiza) can fill this niche and turn it into a productive space - this guild was expanded further as an alley crop between Glyricidia to provide fertility to the system.

3) Citrus is placed with nitrogen-fixing Pigeon pea (Cajanus cajun) as a nurse crop to protect & feed it in its early stages (and yield an edible crop), while pawpaw (papaya), Island Cabbage, and Chinese cabbage (known locally as 'Whitebone') give additional yields in space & time.

 

Bill Mollison said, "If you do something right, it will do a lot more right itself," and we experienced this phenomenon with this practical exercise.

Students were asked first to group plants according to niche, and then to create guilds by looking for functional relationships between these plants - and in doing so they also managed to stack crops in space, stack yields in time, and increase diversity & fertility.

 

"Our job is to put things in the right place and then let them rip."

  - Bill Mollison, Wilton, NH (USA) PDC 1981 -

 

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.