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These pages, while using enhancements best viewed by Netscape, should, except for special sections demonstrating fancy Web composition techniques, should be viewable by any browser.
I'm a sustainable communities builder in training and organic gardener, who earns money to pay the bills by programming computers. I work with Oracle databases, building client apps for same and for Website accounting, and used to build Websites. Once upon a time, I used to put insolvent businesses out of their misery. Before that, I sold consumer electronics and computer equipment. If you're not offended by explicit language, you can read my opinion on the Exon Amendment to the new Telecommunications Reform Act. I am a signer of the Cyberspace Declaration of Independence, and proudly display the new "flag of Cyberspace".
For additional information on any of the above projects, or simply to say hello, you can write me at loren@wombat.net. In the closing years of the 20th century, a singular event
occurred that has the potential to enrich lives by providing access to
information on demand. The internet as a form of communication is in its
infancy, with many bugs to work out(such as making it easy to use for the
computer moron, and the matter of speed and capacity.) It's potential to
enrich lives and to actually bring people together by creating communities
is evidenced by e-mail, newsgroups and chat. It is possible for people
to develop talents and express themselves-differently, but effectively
through web publishing. This web page is an attempt to facilitate the expression
of some of my own creativity. It is also to provide a forum for discussion
of some important issues(in my mind!) as we go into the 21st century. Because I don't want to spend my time learning fancy programming,
you won't find here another cute web page with fancy graphics and embedded
java applets. Doing so will lose the message. Technology needs to remain
humanistic and accessible, otherwise we are lost. This web page hopefully
will reflect an optimistic but responsible portrayal of the future of homo
sapiens, a successful if not weedy species on this speck of flotsam
on the edge of an ordinary galaxy among billions. I hope to update it,
improve it, expand it and above all, learn from it as I explore this new
communication tool.
To describe myself in a thumbnail: I'm employed as an
Registered Nurse at a local hospital and live, work and play on a 36 acre
farm with my spouse and two kids. We have a low key farming operation,
growing our own vegetables, raising cattle, and use our own wood products
for heat and building materials. We are organic, using cow manure and purchased
minerals, while relying on nature to provide by using nitrogen fixing crops,
and green manures. Working in the outdoors is very important to me as are
walking in the woods frequently and observing spring woodland wildflowers(I
seem to do less of this- regrettably- as time goes by) As you can surmise,
the health of the environment is of major concern(the word health ties
this into my livelihood-nursing-more later). To balance the budget as a
responsibility to the next generation is a trivial act, if in the meantime
we leave a toxic environment with its resources denuded, and with its inherent
beauty desecrated. We belong to an organization, Michigan
Land Trustees, from whom we bought this farm, and share many of their
values. It seems that a family value that we don't hear much about, is
land stewardship. Something else that people are unaware of, is that organic
farming-for many crops anyway- is perfectly capable of equivalent yields
to chemical farming. With either, management is key. Our backyard. Fun at Sleeping Bear Dunes
Click on your choice to upgrade:
Proud Member of the
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Loren Davidson

Welcome!
Some Personal Info:
Professional Info:
Current Projects and Interests:
(links and further content added occasionally)
Thanks for visiting. This page last modified on 6/12/97, and could use much more modifying.
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for WELCOME!


Anyway, here are some links:
My employment at a local hospital provides me with an income, a lot of challenge, and a way of helping people who truly need it. Since much of today's health problems are related to lifestyle choices, many of them ill-informed choices, as health care workers, education is a major component of our work. Of course, this education should have occurred many years earlier than when they are hospitalized. The challenges we face in reducing health care costs, would be much allieved if the necessary education and good life style choices were done early in our lives. In fact, I would venture to say, there would be no healthcare crisis if this were the case.
With the Voyager missions to the outer planets, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Galileo mission in progress, you would have to have your head in the sand, not to be aware of some of the exciting discoveries in space science and astronomy. A new perspective on our place in the universe that is somewhat humbling can be appreciated by observing the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus (making that planet the nearest thing to hell that I can think of). The possible(probable?) discovery of fossil life from Mars and its implications that we cannot be unique (already 2 examples in this solar system-although a strong argument exists that life may have originated on Mars then migrated to earth via meteoric impact before it went extinct there, since conditions were probably better on Mars during the early epochs of our solar system than on earth for life to evolve). To me this enlightening perspective of our insignificance in the scheme of things makes it all the more important to conserve and protect our planet and its biosphere. The internet is a huge repository of space images including the latest Hubble pictures, where you can see for yourself, these exciting discoveries.
Well this is my corner of cyberspace! Whether you want to hurl insults or just say hi, email me tomar@cybersol.com.
A sugar maple woods in the fall
You are visitor# since
March 29, 1997.
What is MLT?
The MICHIGAN LAND TRUSTEES a non profit 401(c)3 corporation dedicated to preserving the health and vitality of the people-land interface. MLT works out of Southwest Michigan.
What do you mean by that?
Everywhere we see the results of wasteful land practices in the name of expedience and short term profits. MLT seeks to examine and improve connections between people and the land and thus enhance personal responsibility for environmental health.
Examples?
A land and capital intensive food production system that relies on short term chemical fixes that can result in the loss of small farms, meaningful employment, soil erosion, pollution of ground water and the general wasteful use of fossil fuel resources.
Another example is forestry which as commonly practiced
now, promotes short term expedient profits as a justification of even aged
management and clear cutting when mixed aged management and selective cutting
have been shown to be the most productive of quality wood and the other
forest products that a healthy forest produces. 
So what is the MLT doing about these issues?
MLT has a 20 year history of promoting stewardship of soil and land resources. In 1978 we acquired through donation, a 36 acre run down farm and started a living-learning homesteading program affiliated with Western Michigan University. Many men and women learned small scale organic farming and self-sufficiency skills, by actually doing it. This program existed in various forms through 1984. Then interest and energy evolved to delving into permaculture.
Permaculture is the concious design of land and its biota in ways that mimic natural ecosystems and provide the stability, efficiency of resource use, and productivity found in healthy ecosystems. Appropriate productive species and varieties are used along with symbiotic structures that maximize both the "edge effect", and three story woody polycultures, and by assimilating animals-both domestic and wild-to exploit their additive and synergistic productivity. People function as components of this polyculture.
What other activities has MLT been involved in?
Many. Although MLT sold the land trust farm in 1994(It is still farmed organically with permaculture principles in mind.), the interests and activities of MLT has been diversified as is the membership and the board of directors. A newsletter is produced 2-4 times a year. The group has been involved, over the years and at present, with community gardens, a LETS program, and Moffa (Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance), among many others. The quarterly meetings of the board are always interesting and stimulating.
What does membership entail?
Five or more dollars a year depending on what you can afford. In return you receive a newsletter. Larger donations, of course, may be made to take advantage of our tax free status. Being a land trust we have a special interest in land donations which we can use to further our prime directive. Other avenues of involvement include the contribution of articles to the newsletter and contributing at the board meeting or the annual membership meetings.
We would like to hear from you!

An aerial view of the former Land Trust Homesteading Farm
You are visitor no: since
March 29, 1997
There is a citizens group that may be of interest to those concerned about CCA treated wood and human health: Citizens Concerned with Pressure Treated Lumber P.O. Box 504 Porter Square Station Cambridge, MA 02140 -- John Bower, The Healthy House Institute http://www.hhinst.com/ email: healthy@bloomington.in.us 430 N. Sewell Road, Bloomington, IN 47408 Phone/fax 812-332-5073 __________________________________________________________________ This greenbuilding dialogue is sponsored by Oikos (www.oikos.com) and Environmental Building News (www.ebuild.com). For instructions send e-mail to greenbuilding-request@crest.org. __________________________________________________________________
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clarifying just what is involved in a humane
sustainable culture - and how we can get there. We invite you to join
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by Context Institute, all rights reserved. Please send comments to webmaster@context.org Last Updated 3 July 1997 | |||
Originally published in IN CONTEXT
#28, Spring 1991, Page 50
Copyright (c)1991, 1996 by Context Institute
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Bill Mollison is a living legend. He's known as the genius of permaculture,
"the David Brower of Australia," or a crusty old curmudgeon, depending
on the source. But whether it's glowing admiration or sneering dismissal,
reaction to Mollison is invariably strong. He is clearly one of the most
interesting specimens of the human species - which he has spent years studying
from a naturalist's behavioral perspective.
He passed through Seattle recently with a film crew shooting a documentary about the far-flung successes of permaculture, a radically new (or, some have said, radically old) way of gardening, designing, and living sustainably by cooperating with nature. Ironically, we met in a downtown hotel room - filled with traffic noise - as we stalked a definition of permaculture and considered the eeriness of modern life. For a more detailed exploration, see Mollison's book Permaculture: A Designer's Manual, available for $34.95 (plus $3 shipping) from Permaculture Drylands, PO Box 27371, Tucson, AZ 85726, 602/824-3465.
Alan: Permaculture is a slippery idea to me. But from what I read, it seems that not even those who actually do permaculture really know what it is.
Bill: I'm certain I don't know what permaculture is. That's what I like about it - it's not dogmatic. But you've got to say it's about the only organized system of design that ever was. And that makes it extremely eerie.
Alan: Why "eerie"?
Bill: There's no other book about design for living. Don't you think that's eerie? I mean, how can we possibly expect to survive if we don't design what we're doing to be bearable?
Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don't just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong. For example, if you let people loose in a landscape and tell them to choose a house site, half of them will go sit on the ridges where they'll die in the next fire, or where you can't get water to them. Or they'll sit in all the dam sites. Or they'll sit in all the places that will perish in the next big wind.
But then, at least half of every city is wrong. From latitude 30 degrees to latitude 60, say, you've got to have the long axis of the house facing the sun. If the land is cut up into squares, that makes half of all houses wrong if they face the road. Even houses way in the country, and way off the road, face the bloody road. And from there, you just go wronger all the way.
One of the great rules of design is do something basic right. Then everything gets much more right of itself. But if you do something basic wrong - if you make what I call a Type 1 Error - you can get nothing else right.
Alan: When you say "we," do you mean humans in general, or Western humans especially?
Bill: Human beings in general. There are a few societies that show signs of having been very rational about the physics of construction and the physics of real life. Some of the old middle-Eastern societies had downdraft systems over whole cities, and passive, rapid-evaporation ice-making systems. They were rational people using good physical principles to make themselves comfortable without additional sources of energy.
But most modern homes are simply uninhabitable without electricity - you couldn't flush the toilet without it. It's a huge dependency situation. A house should look after itself - as the weather heats up the house cools down, as the weather cools down the house heats up. It's simple stuff, you know? We've known how to do it for a long time.
Alan: And it's eerie that we don't do it.
Bill: And that we don't design the garden to assist the house is much more eerie. That we don't design agriculture to be sustainable is totally eerie. We design it to be a disaster, and of course, we get a disaster.
Alan: There's an old Chinese expression: "If we don't change our direction, we'll wind up where we are headed."
Bill: Exactly so. I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don't understand anything about where we live, and we don't want to. We're happy to power on to the end - like Mr. Bush. He could have saved more oil than he needed from Iraq, but he preferred to go and "kick ass" - kill people - and use more oil in the process.
America is an eerie society. It seems to want to live on a dust bowl. But as one of your own Indians said, "If you shit in bed, you'll surely smother in it."
Alan: Let's get back to permaculture. What's your current best definition of it?
Bill: You could say it's a rational man's approach to not shitting in his bed.
But if you're an optimist, you could say it's an attempt to actually create a Garden of Eden. Or, if you're a scientist, you could liken it to a miraculous wardrobe in which you can hang garments of any science or any art and find they're always harmonious with, and in relation to, that which is already hanging there. It's a framework that never ceases to move, but that will accept information from anywhere.
It's hard to get your mind around it - I can't. I guess I would know more about permaculture than most people, and I can't define it. It's multi-dimensional - chaos theory was inevitably involved in it from the beginning.
You see, if you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them. We don't have any power of creation - we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.
Alan: This reminds me of John Todd and his work with artificial ecosystem assembly [IC #25].
Bill: There are lots of words for it these days. But the day I brought out my first book, Permaculture One, there was no word for it, though that's what it means: artificial ecosystem assembly. I would agree with anyone who said that if Permaculture had to be written, I wasn't the person to write it. I'm sure the John Todds and Hunter Lovinses of this world would have done a far better job than I. But it had to be written by somebody sooner or later, and historically it was just bad luck that it was me.
Alan: How did you come up with the idea of permaculture? What led up to it?
Bill: I'd come into town from the bush - after 28 years of field work in natural systems - and become an academic. So I turned my attention to humans, much as I had to possums in the forests. Humans were my study animal now - I set up night watches on them, and I made phonograms of the noises they make. I studied their cries, and their contact calls, and their alarm signals. I never listened to what they were saying - I watched what they were doing, which is really the exact opposite of the Freuds and Jungs and Adlers.
I soon got to know my animal fairly well - and I found out that it didn't matter what they were saying. What they were doing was very interesting, but it had no relation whatsoever to either what they were saying, or what questions they could answer about what they were doing. No relationship. Anyone who ever studied mankind by listening to them was self-deluded. The first thing they should have done was to answer the question, "Can they report to you correctly on their behavior?" And the answer is, "No, the poor bastards cannot."
Then I sort of pulled out for a while in 1972 - I cut a hole in the bush, built a barn and a house and planted a garden - gave up on humanity. I was disgusted with the stupidity of the University, the research institutions, the whole thing.
When the idea of permaculture came to me, it was like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I couldn't write it down fast enough. Once you've said to yourself, "But I'm not using my physics in my house," or "I'm not using my ecology in my garden, I've never applied it to what I do," it's like something physical moves inside your brain. Suddenly you say, "If I did apply what I know to how I live, that would be miraculous!" Then the whole thing unrolls like one great carpet. Undo one knot, and the whole thing just rolls downhill.
Alan: At this point, permaculture is not just a way of designing things - it's a movement. What have you started?
Bill: Well, anything that's any good is self-perpetuating. I've started something I can no longer understand - it's out of control from the word go. People do things which I find quite amazing - things I would never have done and can't understand very well.
For example, one of the people I had trained in 1983, Janet McKinsey, disappeared with a friend into the bush - two women with children. They decided they could cut down their needs a lot, and they made a very scientific study of how to do that in their own houses. They've now started something called "Home Options for Preservation of the Environment" - HOPE.
They point out, for example, that there are only four things in all cleaners - whether it's shampoo, laundry detergent, whatever.You buy them in bulk and you mix them up properly, and they all work. It doesn't matter if they call the stuff ecologically friendly or have dolphins diving around on the label - it still has these damn four things in it. Anything else is just unnecessary additions to make it smell good or color it blue when it goes down the toilet.
Alan: So would you call what they're doing permaculture as well?
Bill: Oh, I don't know what you call it. But they got there after a permaculture course. When they first came to town - Benala, in Australia - and lectured, all the women of the town said, "Oh this is marvelous, we'll all do it!" The women started to order these bulk canisters - so then the shops in the town had to change, because they couldn't sell them that other crap anymore. Then the Council had to change, to institute recycling.
So the women - and women spend the money of society on its goods - examined every item they bought in relation to its energy use and its necessity, and just eliminated those that were energy expensive and unnecessary. Simply by women learning exactly what to buy and how to buy, the whole thing can be brought back to sanity. That's spreading like mad - like every good idea does.
So my students are constantly amazing me. Here's another story: I gave one permaculture course in Botswana, and now my students are out in the bloody desert in Namibia teaching Bushmen - whose language nobody can speak - to be very good permaculture people.
Alan: What can they teach the Bushmen that the Bushmen wouldn't already know?
Bill: Gardening. Because the Bushmen can no longer go with the game, and the game have been killed by the fences put up by the European Commission to grow beef. Just like the Australian Aborigine, 63% of what they used to live off is extinct, and the rest is rare now. You can't live like a Bushman or an Aborigine anymore, so they've got to rethink the whole basis of how they're going to live. Permaculture helps you do that easily.
Alan: So permaculture seems to be as much a change in perception as anything else - a change in where one begins to look at things from.
Bill: I think that's right. For me, having suffered through a Western education, it was a shift from passive learning - you know, "this is how books say things are" - to something active. It's saying (and this is a horrifying thought for university people) that instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.
Now, they may teach sophisticated physics at the university. But they go home to a domestic environment which can only be described as demented in its use of energy. They can't see that, and that blindness is appalling.
Why is it that we don't build human settlements that will feed themselves, and fuel themselves, and catch their own water, when any human settlement could do that easily? When it's a trivial thing to do?
Alan: Perhaps because we're so wealthy that we believe we don't have to.
Bill: Well, I don't call that wealth. You want a definition of wealth from Eskimos, the Inuit? Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world. I think Americans are so poor it's pitiful, because you don't understand the natural world at all.
Alan: If you want to do permaculture, and there isn't a teacher around, where do you start?
Bill: Just start right where you are.
Alan: I read somewhere that you've said, "You start with your nose, then your hands ..."
Bill: "... your back door, your doorstep" - you get all that right, then everything is right. If all that's wrong, nothing can ever be right. Say you're working for a big overseas aid organization. You can't leave home in a Mercedes Benz, travel 80 kilometers to work in a great concrete structure where there are diesel engines thundering in the basement just to keep it cool enough for you to work in, and plan mud huts for Africa! You can't get the mud huts right if you haven't got things right where you are. You've got to get things right, working for you, and then go and say what that is.
Alan: Doing permaculture seems to be the opposite of abstraction.
Bill: Oh, I put it another way. I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you'll get a philosopher. But I could never teach people to be philosophers - and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.
When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don't grow their own vegetables, in fact they're not deep ecologists - they're my enemies.
But if you get someone who looks after himself and those around him - like Scott Nearing, or Masanobu Fukuoka - that's a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand. People like that don't poison things, they don't ruin things, they don't lose soils, they don't build things they can't sustain.
Alan: Everything you've done suggests that turning around and going another direction is really not that hard.
Bill: I think mine is a very rich life. I probably lead a very spoiled life, because I travel from people interested in permaculture to people interested in permaculture. Some of them are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so on. I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they're all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.
Alan: Permaculture involves tampering with nature, but how far do you think we should go? Should we be doing genetic engineering, creating hybrids, etc.?
Bill: The important thing is not to do any agriculture whatsoever, and particularly to make the modern agricultural sciences a forbidden area - they're worse than witchcraft, really. The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor. "Should we tamper with nature?" is no longer a question - we've tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.
If you let the world roll on the way it's rolling, you're voting for death. I'm not voting for death. The extinction rate is so huge now, we're to the stage where we've got to set up recombinant ecologies. There are no longer enough species left, anywhere, to hold the system together. We have to let nature put what's left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.
At the same time, anything that's left that's remotely like wilderness should be left strictly alone. We have no business there any more. It's not going to save you to go in and cut the last old-stand forests. You should never have gotten to the stage where you could see the last ancient forests! Just get out of there right now, because the lessons you need to learn are there. That's the last place you'll find those lessons readable.
Alan: How has permaculture been received? What do reviewers say about your books, for example?
Bill: The first time I saw a review of one of my permaculture books was three years after I first started writing on it. The review started with, "Permaculture Two is a seditious book." And I said, "At last someone understands what permaculture's about." We have to rethink how we're going to live on this earth - stop talking about the fact that we've got to have agriculture, we've got to have exports, because all that is the death of us. Permaculture challenges what we're doing and thinking - and to that extent it's sedition.
People question me coming through the American frontier these days. They ask, "What's your occupation?" I say, "I'm just a simple gardener." And that is deeply seditious. If you're a simple person today, and want to live simply, that is awfully seditious. And to advise people to live simply is more seditious still.
You see, the worst thing about permaculture is that it's extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.
Alan: So that's worst from whose perspective?
Bill: Anybody that wants to extinguish it. It's something with a million heads. It's a way of thinking which is already loose, and you can't put a way of thinking back in the box.
Alan: Is it an anarchist movement?
Bill: No, anarchy would suggest you're not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate. You can't cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things. You won't get cooperation out of a hierarchical system. You get enforced directions from the top, and nothing I know of can run like that. I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.
Alan: Given all the study you've done of our behavior and your work in spreading permaculture, do you have reason to hope we'll make it as a species?
Bill: I think it's pointless asking questions like "Will humanity survive?" It's purely up to people - if they want to, they can, if they don't want to, they won't.
I would say, use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything. But if you lend your skills to other systems that you don't really believe in, then you might as well never have lived. You haven't expressed yourself.
If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don't listen to them that much. And choose your friends from people who you like what they do - even though you mightn't like what they say.
It's us chickens that are doing it. There's no need for anyone else - we are sufficient to do everything possible to heal this Earth. We don't have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything. We can do it.
The Swedish Institute for Social Inventions (abbreviated to SISU in Swedish) is a private foundation for the promotion of good social inventions. One of our important emerging areas of activity is a "nursery" where a few social inventions are given shelter until they can be "planted out" as independent organizations.
The first plant was, appropriately, permaculture. Member Peter Norrthon had heard and read a lot about permaculture, and he wanted help to introduce it in Sweden. A SISU group has worked to this end for about two years now. It has organized a number of courses and meetings and has published information about permaculture and ecological living.
The roots of permaculture are now well established in Sweden, and soon it should be time for planting out. SISU has also contributed to introducing permaculture in Poland, and currently has a permaculture project beginning in Israel.
SISU is linked to another not-for-profit association, called SUS, with members in all parts of Sweden plus a few in other countries. SISU publishes a magazine for SUS, bladSUSet, which appears about five times a year. Each issue also appears in summary in English.
For more information about our "nursery," our "Inventors' Day" celebrations, or our publications, write to us at Peter Myndes Backe 12:5, S-118 46 Stockholm, Sweden, or contact us at tel. (46) 8772 4587; fax (46) 8642 2641; or by electronic mail through Peacenet (pns:mmehlmann). A membership/subscription for twelve months is 150 Sw kronor.
- Marilyn Mehlmann
Marilyn Mehlmann is the founder and director of the Swedish Institute for Social Inventions.
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Permaculture: A Language for Gardeners
by Peter Bane
The Hawaiian people have a phrase in their
language which expresses deep understanding of their place on the
earth, "ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono." It
translates into English as, "the life of the land is
preserved in righteousness." This feeling of deep gardening
is the sensibility we must invoke to describe Permaculture or
"permanent culture."
Permaculture is a nation without borders and with no government.
It can be found on every inhabited continent among peoples as
diverse as Tswana herders in Southern Africa, apartment dwellers
in London and Sydney, desert ranchers in Arizona, jungle settlers
in Colombia, communitarians in northern Germany, and subsistence
villagers in Nepal. More than a form of organic gardening,
permaculture is a whole system of design for the creation of
sustainable human habitats. It is about culture; the use of tools
in our adaptation to the world around us, and what that means in
the post-industrial era.
Traditional peoples around the earth have known the limits and
the languages of their places. But along with biological
diversity, these unique human adaptations are being rapidly lost
at the frontier of economic globalization. Human beings
everywhere on earth are becoming increasingly dependent upon and
subject to centralized systems of production and control. The
consequences of this colonizing process are pollution,
desertification, poverty, famine, tyranny, and genocide. To move
beyond the destructiveness of our present culture, which is based
on continuing war and industrial capitalism, we must recover and
propagate knowledge and ecological linkages that sustain living
systems: air, water, and soil. We must reclaim the lands we
inhabit as we learn again to feed, clothe, house, heal, and
educate ourselves and our children.
Permaculture is an ethical approach to land use and economics
based on:
- Care for the Earth, its air, water, forests, soils, plants, and
animals;
- Care for people, who need not only the things of the earth, but
each other; and
- Care for Community, through limiting our own consumption and
population, and the distribution of that which is surplus to our
own needs.
In the words of Australian ecologist Bill Mollison, co-author
(with David Holmgren) of the permaculture concept,
"Permaculture is the design of sustainable human habitats.
It is the design of cultivated ecosystems where we work with, not
against nature. It uses the naturally inherent qualities of
plants and animals, including humans, combined with the natural
characteristics of landscape to create sustainable,
low-maintenance, and productive agricultures for both city and
country using the smallest practical area." Permaculture
empowers us to recreate living systems out of the devastation of
modern life.
How do we do it?
By observing patterns in nature and in traditional farming and
building systems we derive the principles which guide
permaculture design. To these principles we add the insights of
modern science, concoct a set of stories which convey these
essential understandings and begin repeating them to our friends.
You do the same. The effect is inspiring and contagious.
Because everything is connected to everything else and everything
must go somewhere, you cannot just do one thing and there is no
free lunch. Remember that everything gardens and "Nature
knows best." With that introduction to ecology, you are now
ready to learn permaculture.
A rough dozen principles can help us to design
sustainable systems:
1. Relative beneficial location. Put elements of the system near
other things with which they can have beneficial relationships.
Link rain barrels to roofs, and kitchens to gardens by bringing
them close together. If carrots love tomatoes, plant them
together; let the beans climb on (and fertilize) the corn.
2. Multi-functional elements. Make sure that everything in the
system has at least three functions. In this way space and cost
is saved while yields are increased.
3. Redundancy. Make sure every important function (like water,
warmth, food, and income) is supported by multiple elements.
4. Energy-efficient planning. Place elements in zones of
decreasing access and intensity of use radiating outward from the
center of activity (the home). Analyze outside influences (sun,
wind, weather, pollution, wildlife, views) on a site by sectors,
and let that guide your placement of elements also. Take account
of gravity by allowing elements to flow through the landscape
from high elevation to low.
5. Biological resources. Choose elements which are
self-propagating, self-healing, and which can be disposed of
without toxic residues. Living systems build real wealth. Prefer
wood to steel, bamboo to aluminum, worms to rototillers, legumes
to chemical fertilizer, trees to air-conditioners, and chickens
to bug spray.
6. Energy cycling and recycling. Energy flows and materials cycle
in ecosystems. Keep nutrients, water, heat, genetic material,
money, and other valuable resources in close circulation. Harvest
your own garden seed and begin to adapt plants for the
microclimate of your back yard. Water coming in as rain can be
collected, rather than drained away. If filtered, drunk or washed
with, it then flows out as greywater and urine from the
household. Instead of dumping it into sewers or septic tanks
where it can pollute, clean it on site with plants, harvest mulch
material from the artifical wetland, use the cleaned water for
fish habitat, and then irrigate crops with the pondwater.
7. Revalue appropriate traditional technology. Plants were our
first medicines; they are still our best health insurance. Grow
herbs in your garden and learn to use them in tinctures, teas,
poultices, and salves. The corn straw broom is still superior to
any plastic whatyamacallit ever made. Masonry stoves are the best
way to use wood for heating. Unglazed clay pots (called ollas in
Spanish) sunk into the ground and filled with water are the most
efficient way to irrigate gardens in drylands. Mud (earth) is a
healthy, low-cost building material available almost everywhere.
8. Stack yields in both time and space. All ecosystems evolve
toward greater complexity over time. Lawnmowers waste energy and
cause pollution trying to prevent this from happening. Go with
the flow instead. Plant perennial crops with different maturities
and different heights all at once. The forest yields at crown,
mid-level, near the ground, and under the ground. The 7-layered,
4-dimensional polyculture garden can do the same. Annual
vegetables succeed to berries to tree fruits and nuts as the
garden matures.
9. Maximize edge in cultivated systems. Use all the in-between
spaces. Edge is