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permaculture - Re: Bill Mollison copyright statement

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  • From: Paul Osmond <p_osmond@hotmail.com>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Bill Mollison copyright statement
  • Date: Sat, 05 Jun 1999 00:43:53 PDT

Here, in
Sydney, in the city, we have an analogous situation.

First of all, there's a need in permaculture courses for an understanding of urban
environments and landscapes and their modifications by the process of urbanisation,
such as the heat island effect etc, as well as for an understanding of the landscape
the city is situated in, it's climate and landforms.

Second, stuff about zones three and four, while still important to teach, are of less
value in the city because all that people have in their homes is zones one and,
sometimes, zone two. In Sydney, there are a few remnant market gardens which represent
zone three systems.

Sydney is at present undergoing a building boom in apartment construction, many more
people are opting to live in medium density units, so this means that many will have
no zone one, or that their zone one will be a balcony garden, if their balconies face
sunward (north).

What we say in our courses is that zone one may be some kilometres from zone zero, the
home, if it is an apartment or if, as is often the case, the person is renting and is
not permitted to build a garden in their rented premises. In these circumstances, zone
one becomes the nearest community garden. Now, I'm aware that some folk will say that
there is an energy cost in travelling to a community garden to obtain fresh food, but
that's rather small compared to the energy, road congestion and pollution cost of
railing or trucking the food in from the country.

I wonder how this modification to the permaculture zonal orthodoxy is impacted by our
supposedly having to teach permaculture as per the syllabus provided by the
Permaculture Institute Australia and, as explained in his recent mailing, which is the
intellectual property of Bill Mollison?

There is a valid argument, I believe, for developing an adapted permaculture design
course for urban areas. The fact in Australia, as elsewhere, is that more and more
people are living in cities and, if the cities canot be made sustainable, then it is
questionable that the rest of the country can be made sustainable.
An urban permaculture course content would retain all the ethics and principles as, I
believe, they are universally applicable. However, there would be less focus on rural
material and its replacement by material pertinent to the sustainable development of
cities and on how to adopt sustainable lifestyles in urban areas.

A number of PDC students have told me that the existing course is too rural in outlook
and content and, as they have no intention of moving to the country, more content on
urban living would make the course more relevant.

Skye, this gets to the final statement in your email, above, about 'growing and
evolving'. Yes, I agree - permaculture has to take a clue from nature and grow and
evolve in an analogous way. What we need, maybe, are bioregionally adapted
permaculture coursee (we already have some, I believe) - some for different parts of
the country, some adapted to life in the cities.

What I'm talking about is not wholesale change of the design curse curriculum, but
adaption to local circumstances and needs.

....Russ Grayson


Valuable comments, Russ, and they suggest exactly the sort of issues we need to explore in the University of New South Wales Ecoliving Project.

Three areas come to mind straight away (and I am sure others will arise in the course of the Ecoliving Project!)

1. The conventional zonal approach focusses on the individual property, or perhaps the village, as the core. In the city, perhaps we should also pay attention to the pre-existing links, nodes and connections *between* properties and "villages" (or suburbs) - and indeed creating new links. There has been a lot of work done on habitat corridors, greenways, street tree strategies etc. in the urban context as part of a "greener" approach to urban design. To give just one example, reuse of stormwater via detention basins in urban parks is now becoming almost commonplace. Just as Mollison drew on ecology, horticulture, morphology and many other fields of knowledge in developing the permaculture design system, so we can draw on the growing field of sustainable urban design theory as expounded by authors such as Hough, Spirn, Thayer, to help inform urban permaculture.

2. A whole new suite of "sustainability tools" has emerged over the past few years - life cycle analysis (LCA), material flux analysis (MFA), ecological accounting, environmental auditing etc. Again, these need to be adapted and brought into urban permaculture curriculum and practice. For instance, the issue of the energy cost of travelling to a community garden for fresh food vs. obtaining food trucked in from outside is not always necessarily clear cut - if (say) 100 people in 50 cars travel "x" kilometres to their nearest community garden, how does this equate to 2 trucks travelling "y" kilometres from a rural area with the same amount of produce? And what is the impact of those same 100 people driving their cars to the supermarket to buy the produce which has been trucked in? Not to mention the issue of the fertilisers, pesticides etc. etc. used in production? This sort of complex flow of materials and energy is well suited to the LCA/MFA approach, which can provide *real* data - for example to back up the case put to a local council for provision of additional community gardens closer to where people live ;-)

3. At the same time, we should not fall into the trap of the "economic rationalists" that everything has to be measured and quantified before it can have a value. Technical methods have their place, but as the servant (which is why I used the word "tools" above) and not the master. Hence the core principles in the permaculture curriculum remain as valid as ever, and highlight the importance of culture change to achive sustainability (permanent+culture).

Cheers, Paul Osmond


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