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BELOW READ TOBY"S REPLY ONGOING stuff



Cheers,

Castigating Graham :)

----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:Mark.Fisher@care4free.net>Mark Fisher
To: 
<mailto:gb0063551@cableinet.co.uk>gb0063551@cableinet.co.<mailto:gb0063551@cableinet.co.uk>uk 

Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2002 12:17 PM
Subject: [PermacultureUK] - YIELDS

This is what I sent Toby in response to what Graeme Burnett had circulated. 
Toby's reply is then below that.

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Whole Earth Review (winter issue 2001) apparently published a scathing 
commentary on Permaculture by Greg Williams (an agroforester?). This was 
contained in his review of a book called "Gaia's Garden: A guide to 
homescale Permaculture" by Toby Hemenway. Toby has been given the 
opportunity to reply and clearly feels stung by the criticism.

 From what I understand, the most telling criticism is on the absence of 
data, testing and experiments on yields in Permacultural systems compared 
to say mainstream agriculture or other homegarden production systems.

I think we have been here many, many times before (witness the aggrieved 
diatribe from Bob Flowerdew) but it still does not hold major concerns for 
me even though I have myself been critical in the past. Graeme Burnett once 
castigated me for making a comparison of the relative merits between a 
kitchen garden and a forest garden - a useful construct since at that time, 
there was still a reluctance in neophyte Permaculturists to work from their 
own experience instead of just replacing it wholesale with the then 
southern-hemispheric outlook of Permaculture. My point was that we all 
should have recognised the inherent benefits in each system, be open to 
discussion, and the good designer then comes up with a combination of the two!

In response to Greg William's criticism, we need to recognise that often 
early enthusiasts for Permaculture unfortunately played the game of using 
orthodox scalar attributes to describe Permaculture systems. This was a 
hostage to fortune. Here is the key - I don't think we can start to apply 
orthodox measurement to something  which is still evolving and that often 
has a highly personal and location-specific element to it, and which seeks 
to take yields in many ways. It is not that I fear evaluation, its just 
that we need to define and decide on what basis the evaluation will take 
place - and then explain it carefully to the sceptics..

Secondly, we should have realised by now that there is no such thing as 
Permaculture farming or Permaculture gardening per se, as it would diminish 
Permaculture to the stature of a series of techniques. If taken to that 
conclusion, Permaculture would end up an inflexible, thoughtless but 
regulated and regimented no-brainer system as exemplified by certified 
organic systems in the UK. We have the angels on our side in this since at 
least Permaculture recognises that organised food production of any sort 
doesn't come without ecological consequence.

Patrick Whitefield, in his review of Toby's book for Permaculture Magazine, 
makes a distinction by suggesting that there are two approaches to 
Permaculture. The first aims to copy ecosystems in a literal way (and see 
my last point on ecological consequence). The second places more emphasis 
on creating beneficial relationships between people, plants and structures. 
The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.  Patrick thinks Toby's book 
is an excellent description of the first approach. And it this that gives 
me my third point.

Opportunistic foraging and hunting maintained an early hominid population 
in amongst an un-degrading, self-regulatory natural eco-system. The 
development and dispersal of agriculture in Neolithic times allowed the 
hominids to break free from that self-regulating system and become a 
dominant but destabilising influence. Thousands of years later, it has 
taken the exposition of Permaculture and other land and people-based 
interdisciplinary thought and design systems to start to re-integrate to 
varying degrees the hominid population back into a self-regulating natural 
eco-system. Permaculture just happens to chuck in an ethical framework as 
well, which kind of marks it out a bit from those other interdisciplinary 
systems.

If we are serious about the goals for society which are inherent in 
Permaculture, then we should resist having to fight narrow-topic battles 
that seek to define us more in keeping with other's image. There is a 
wealth of philosophical, conceptual and contextual information out there in 
the world (and from many disciplines and interdisciplines) that shows 
Permaculture to embody rational, connected and eminently realisable 
constructs. We should thank Bill Mollison for getting many of us to the 
point where we can appreciate this, but it is now our task to take it on 
from one man's revelations, and show that it could be mainstream in the 
endeavours of peoples of the world.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Hello Mark: Thanks for sending me the thoughts stimulated by Greg 
Williams's critique of permaculture. I wouldn't describe myself as feeling 
"stung" by his article (though maybe I'm taking the meaning of your words 
too stringently), since I can't take any of his comments personally--they 
weren't directed at me or at my book, which he largely ignored. Rather, I 
was annoyed and frustrated that someone of his obvious intelligence could 
so badly misunderstand permaculture (especially since he took a PDC from 
Mollison!). We've all seen that happen before, but rarely in a fairly 
influential magazine. The only serious point he made, as you mention, was 
the failure of people in permaculture to measure what their gardens or 
farms or buildings are generating or conserving. Privately, I have to agree 
with him, but his tone in the original, heavily-edited-for-publication 
piece was so nasty and accusative (he referred to permaculture as a "Big 
Lie") that I wasn't going to grant him a single point.

The issue, as you state, is not simple. On one hand, since permaculture is 
a design approach and thus organizes various disciplines and techniques 
(much the way architectural design organizes engineering, materials 
science, traditional knowledge etc. to design buildings), we should be able 
to use the data generated by, say, agroforestry, organic farming, solar 
energy, etc. to support it. That's a hard sell because first, critics have 
to understand that permaculture is not agroforestry, etc,--at which point 
they get stuck saying, "So you can't use agroforestry data." and then they 
have to understand that Pc tells us when to use these disciplines, thus it 
is legitimate to use their data. That's going to be a tough one, and I've 
found that a lot of farmers get it, while most academics and aid agencies 
don't.

Then there are all those folks who don't really care about yield as long as 
they get something from their yard and don't have to work forever to get 
it: most gardeners fit this. Show them sheet-mulching and the idea of a 
zone-one salad garden, and they begin to see the light. The difficulty here 
is that many of these people are slow to see permaculture as more than just 
a set of techniques. But they'll see the benefit of this new way of 
thinking about gardening--and maybe homebuilding and other subjects linked 
by permaculture. I'm somewhat in this category: I think I get Pc pretty 
well, but I'm not personally interested in whether I'm getting lots more 
food with it. I see I'm doing less work, the wildlife is more abundant, the 
runoff from my land is clear instead of muddy, and I've got more food than 
I can eat year round. But I'm not going to put my vegetables on a scale 
every day (though I feel guilty about this; I spent 15 years designing 
experiments, trained under some really brilliant people, so if anybody 
could and should be doing it, it's me!)

And then there's the whole idea of that mythical "permaculture farm" that 
could be compared to a "conventional" farm. I've never seen one, and you 
seem to be of the same mind: that one can't just force a bunch of 
techniques from the Design Manual upon a farmer. Most farmers, to be 
competitive, have to use a certain amount of monoculture, fossil fuel, 
tillage and other approaches that would prevent the purist from calling it 
a true permaculture design: it would be a compromise. And there's that 
definition problem again: I know some ranchers whose places use keyline 
principles, and have increased their beef production while decreasing 
topsoil loss, but who's going to say that's permaculture? I'm not sure that 
any two people--especially if one or both are skeptical about 
permaculture--are going to agree that a particular place is "doing 
permaculture." So designing an experiment that many people will accept is 
tricky.

I still would really, really like to see some data that compares, say, the 
yields and inputs from a vegetable garden and a forest garden, but how one 
would design such an experiment, and have it be a valid comparison, strikes 
me as a nightmare, and gets me back to an earlier point: I'd rather be 
working on and enjoying my "permaculture" place than going to the 
incredible trouble of turning it into a carefully controlled experiment. 
But if aid agencies and universities are ever going to fund permaculture 
designers, I'm afraid someone will have to take on that ugly task. And we 
should all be grateful when they do.

I haven't seen Patrick's review of my book, and don't really understand the 
distinction you say he's made between ecosystem-based and 
beneficial-relationship based ways of describing permaculture, but perhaps 
when I see the review, I will. Maddy tells me it's not as positive as she'd 
like. It's funny: reviews in newspapers, gardening, farming, and most 
alternative magazines have been, to speak frankly, raves. But reviews by 
permaculturists have often not been as enthusiastic. Some of that is 
possibly professional jealousy, but some, I think, is that we all have our 
preferences about how to explain permaculture and don't take it well when 
someone does it differently. But I wrote my book much more for gardeners in 
general than for permaculturists, and the gardeners seem to love it.

Thanks again for your comments. Feel free to forward this to the others 
that your original email went to; I don't know most of them so I didn't 
feel like inundating them with my thoughts unannounced.

Toby

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