Permaculture: Designing a better world
by Vicki Wolf, July 2006

For years, topsoil in the United States has been eroding at an alarming rate due to fence-to-fence plowing, planting only one kind of crop such as corn, and over-using fertilizers and pesticides. At the same time families and communities have been eroding. Wendell Berry, American poet, essayist, philosopher and farmer, says land and cultural erosion are related. In his book, Unsettling of America, Berry describes the average American as the “most unhappy average citizen in the world.” “He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money is inflating like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstances and the power of other people. From morning to night he does not touch anything that he has produced himself, in which he can take pride. For all his leisure and recreation, he feels bad, he looks bad, he is overweight, his health is poor. His air, water and food are all known to contain poisons . . .”

To build a better world, a better design is needed. Permaculture offers the philosophy, tools and systems for building a better world by observing good health in nature and designing systems around what nature does to create a lush thicket, a clean pond teaming with life, or the diversity of a self-sustaining prairie. The designs and systems of healthy ecosystems are studied and can be applied to daily life as well as to landscapes, gardens and farms.

Bill Mollison and his student, David Holmgren, in 1978 coined the word permaculture as a contraction for permanent agriculture. “Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of stable social order,” Mollison wrote in Permaculture – A Designers’ Manual. In the manual, permaculture is defined as the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems that have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems. As an applied design system, it conserves energy; aids local self-reliance; seeks to stabilize and care for the land; and serves household, local and regional needs.

Patricia Michael, permaculture designer and teacher for more than 20 years, says permaculture is about kindness. “Permaculture is a very broad way to think and know about how to live more ethically, how to live with kindness for yourself and everyone else with joy, beauty, health and in harmony,” she says.

The basic principles of permaculture are:

• Take care of the earth
• Take care of the people
• Share the surplus and recycle excess back into the system
• Emphasize optimism and cooperation

Permaculture calls for working with rather than against nature. Thoughtful observation over an extended period of time is practiced rather than thoughtless action. Permaculture considers systems and all their functions rather than asking only one yield of them. It allows systems to demonstrate their own evolution.

Learning to ebb and flow with nature can be more productive, less energy consuming and less costly than trying to force nature to produce. Jalapeno farmers in Mexico decided they could no longer afford pesticides. They watched what happened to their crops without the pesticides. Over time they observed that the pests came and ate the plants only during a certain part of the growing season and then left. The farmers learned to work with the timing of the onslaught of insects – planting a little earlier. They let the pests come and go and still grew plenty of jalapenos. Today they have a profitable, organic jalapeno farm.

Cath Conlon began a search for the intelligence behind the ebb and flow of nature. This search was precipitated by a sense of hopelessness in her work as a psychotherapist and out of concern about her health. “In trying to discover my own wellness I kept coming back to intelligence. There is a system a higher power has built, and I can’t help but believe that there is an intelligence to all of this. And if there is an intelligence in all the systems out there, how can they not be connected,” Conlon says.

In her search for the connection between health and food and all living things, she lived very minimally on her family’s farm and observed nature. She took the permaculture designers’ certification course and started practicing permaculture.

To help others learn about permaculture, Conlon created the Blackwood Land Institute. The 23 acre permaculture farm, located 44 miles west of Houston on Highway 290, became a place for people to watch, listen and learn about nature. The farm features a 5,000 square-foot environmentally friendly straw-bale house, an organic garden, a greenhouse, a spiral herb garden, a butterfly garden, bee hives, a chicken coop, water-harvesting systems and cisterns (water-collection systems), a passive solar heating system, and a labyrinth.

People of all ages within the Montessori community around the state are on the land for 15-20 days of a school year. Conlon says they learn about building techniques, gardening, water harvesting, weather patterns, waste management, planning, designing, horticulture, entomology (study of insects), topography, native plants, organizational flow, and relationships between people and the earth. This intimate involvement with nature also leads to an understanding of invisible forces, relationships of all, and the laws of nature.

“If you are looking for a way to combine all of the systems that make up your life, this is certainly one avenue. Permaculture ties everything together,” Conlon says. “At a time when people are spread so thin, anything that helps them understand how systems coalesce is valuable,” she adds. “We are, as Janine Benyus (author of Biomimcry: Innovation Inspired by Nature) says, creating conditions that are conducive to life.”

Permaculture offers practical ways to improve ecologically and economically depleted areas on the planet, according Robert Randall, PhD, permaculture teacher, and co-founder and executive director of Urban Harvest, a Houston area non-profit organization that supports farmers’ markets and community gardening. “It is the most well thought out design perspective on how we can organize, plan and arrange things so as to get the most out of a situation with the least effort and most sustainable result,” he says.

Impermanent agriculture dominates both the developed and developing worlds. “Today’s agriculture and agri-business are unfortunately mainly interested in how to make a profit. The poor people living on the planet need to make a living day after day even if it destroys the land,” Randall says. “Permaculture teaches how to make a living without destroying things.”

Leave nature alone and it goes on and on. Permaculture incorporates an understanding of how nature managed to last all these years without human help. “Nature’s principles can be used to organize society in a sustainable way,” Randall says. “Adding modern ideas like solar and wind technology will lead to living very well sustainably.”

What would it look like for a city like Houston to be developed using the principles of permaculture? “The whole design of Houston was created with the idea that energy was so cheap it didn’t matter whether you preserve it or not,” Randall says. Houses were built with little insulation. Low-density housing is spread over 100 miles. Houstonians use the automobile for everything from going to get a newspaper to going to work.

In a permaculture city, rapid transit would be convenient and effective. Centers of activity and higher density housing would be built around transportation hubs. The goods and services people use most would be available close to housing. Small electric carts would be used to get people to and from the transit centers. Homes would be within walking distance of parks and gardens. Houses and other buildings would be built out of local building material – Houston has lots of clay, which is naturally heavily insulated. Roadways would be turned into gardens with only one lane needed for traffic.

Randall says not to live sustainably is detrimental to future generations. “Even if there is no drastic situation in the near future, think about your children or grandchildren and what it is going to be like 40 to 50 years from now.”

To learn more about permaculture, take a free introductory class, offered at Urban Harvest. A series of permaculture classes also are available four times a year. The next one begins in August. For more information, call 713-880-5540.

The following websites have information on permaculture design and workshops:
www.blackwoodland.com (Also, on this site you’ll find an invitation to “The Land.”)
www.patriciamichaeldesign.com
www.urbanharvest.org/permaculture
www.permacultureactivist.net