permaculture

["keller" <ak.and.ak@on-line.de>]

Title: Pc slammed in Whole Earth Review

Generally I agree that controlled, well constructed experiments are necessary to check what really works.

 

However, yield is not the only thing that counts.

 

For one thing, pc is about sustainability. You can increase yield by destroing your resources. So what counts is _sustainable_ yield.

 

Secondly, as long as you build systems not for comercial farming but for subsistency, yield may not be the only thing that counts. A subsistence farmer may want a high diversity of products, he does not want to eat just one thing every day. He might prefer less yield it more yield means more work. The classical permaculture systems are subsistency systems in the first place, even if comercial farming is done on part of the area.

 

If you do comercial farming, you might have to do different things and maybe that is not pc again Actually I don't care if it is pc or not, as long as it would be sustainable. If the "classical methods" developed by Bill & Co turn out not to be that good, I have no problem replacing them by something that is better. I am quite pragmatic about that.

 

For me the main thing is sustainability. In the core of that is fairnes. If you decide not to be egoistic, but fair to everybody (including yourself), and you understand that this has to include future generations, then it follows that anything that gives us an advantage on the expense of future people is unfair. E.g.m, atomic energy is unfair, because it gives one generation energy and the next 1000 generations have the dangerous waste. Likewise, anything that is not sustainable would give us advantages on future people's expense. Therefore, nonsustainable lifestyles are instances of exploitation. If we do not want to be exploiters, we must choose sustainability.

 

The methods by which sustainability is achieved aren't sacred. Whatever works is good. We have to be very pragmatic here. But it would indeed be good to proof and measure what works, not just believe in herb spirals. Some good science, let me propose the term "evidence based pc", is necessary here.

 

Andreas

----- Original Message -----

From: Toby Hemenway

To: permaculture

Sent: Saturday, January 05, 2002 9:06 PM

Subject: Pc slammed in Whole Earth Review

Those of you who can get Whole Earth Review may want to look at the new Winter 2001 issue. WER sent a copy of Gaia's Garden for review to Greg Williams, a one-time agroforestry guy who publishes the HortIdeas newsletter. Turns out Williams absolutely hates permaculture, thinks its mostly bull (he took one of the first American courses from Bill). Williams didn't focus too much on my book, but spent a couple thousand words blasting permaculture, very persuasively. Whole Earth was kind enough to let me reply in print, and I did my best to address his gripes, but he raised a couple of very good points (both Greg's piece and mine were cut about 30% by the editors; the tone of Greg's was originally very nasty and sarcastic, but the editors removed most of that).

He used some pretty strong language: "The fundamentally misguided ideas of some permaculturists . . . show signs of polluting the larger culture." It's unpleasant to see this in a widely respected and influential magazine.

One of Greg's less cogent arguments was that Pc's whole idea of mimicking mature ecosystems was stupid because immature ecosystems are more productive than mature ones. This was easy to dispose of, since he missed the difference between fully mature (senescent, ancient, less productive) forests and maturing forests (5-200 years old, which Pc seeks to mimic), which are 2-10 times more productive than meadows or farms.

But his most damning points were about the absence of data, testing, and experiments with controls to support any of permaculture's claims of being a superior system to conventional agriculture or gardening. He wrote that he has never seen "any convincing evidence that temperate zone forest gardens can do better than meadow gardens at providing useful products." If anyone ever did measure, he says, the yields of conventional gardens should dwarf those of forest gardens.

Permaculturists, he writes, "have neglected the scientific approach to determining the worth of their ideas . . . and instead have argued for and against particular gardening techniques on the basis of (at best) incomplete theoretical notions and (at worst) pure intuition. This is worse than glossing over the details; it is misconstruing the details. . . . It is completely unacceptable when their claims are made to the general public, who stand to waste huge amounts of time and money on a (much) less-than-optimal approach to boosting garden output."

The problem is, it's hard to find data to refute his claims (I did my best, but to an insider, there may be a faint whiff of the barnyard about some of my reply). We just don't collect data. What do we answer when a farmer asks, "How much more money or produce, or less erosion, will your system get me?" That we just know it works better? Does anyone have any numbers? I've looked at a lot of Pc sites in North America, and I haven't seen one where people are measuring yields.

So are we justified in saying that this stuff works? Or is permaculture just for those, as Williams says, "who do not require optimal solutions to pressing agricultural and ecological problems"?

If anyone's got any hard numbers, or other reputable data, please share them. If not, it points to a huge lack in permaculture, and we should get busy setting up trials and getting reliable data instead of just banking on Bill's wild claims. Without data, more folks like Williams will erode permaculture's credibility.

I've also had inquiries from a researcher who wants yield data from permaculture farms for a thesis. If anyone has these, let me know.

Toby
_____________________________________________
For a look at my new book on ecological gardening,
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, visit
http://www.chelseagreen.com/Garden/GaiasGarden.htm



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