permaculture

[Paul Osmond <p_osmond@hotmail.com>]

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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