permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

Thanks for all the responses to my post; one of the things I enjoy about
this list is that to any question people always bring perspectives and ideas
that I haven't thought about myself. The benefits of a group mind (or as my
friend Tom Atlee would say, co-intelligence; for more on that whole awesome
topic, see http://www.co-intelligence.org/ and try not to drown in all the
great links).

I see that the word "subsistence" has come up often in people's responses.
If you only know permaculture through Mollison's books, you'd expect
permaculture to be mostly about broadscale agricultural design. Yet, with
the exception of some projects like the ones Darren Doherty and some others
are involved in, most Pc is very small scale: individual residences and home
gardens that aren't trying to generate substantial income. The measurable
"yields" of home Pc gardens are more about reducing expenditures and
consumption than generating money or bushels of food to store. In school the
word "subsistence" was always said with contempt: those poor subsistence
farmers in Africa scratching for a bare exisitence. Now I've come to think
of subsistence living as an immensely honorable thing, a way of reconnecting
to cycles that really matter, and to notice quality rather than quantity:
all those unmeasurables that people have mentioned.

It's curious that this came up at the same time the Lomborg thread did: all
those people arguing over data, ignoring basic questions like "does all this
stuff and my work to get it actually make me happy?" Turning my whole yard
into row crops may yield more money and produce than a permaculture garden,
but will I enjoy being in it? One of the points I didn't have space to
address in my reply to Williams was his narrow definition of yield, and the
huge human and environmental cost that this small-mindedness has brought.

At several points in Williams's article he referred to the disappointment so
many gardeners would feel if they implemented Pc, supposedly because of
lower yields. How ironic; the whole reason I wrote my book was because I'd
seen so many gardens that the owners were incredibly excited about, and I
wanted to make that joy available to a larger audience.

I also recognize that it's going to be terribly difficult to get yield data
from Pc. Trying to quantify the yields of 25 different species including the
weird little edible greens that always crop up, the work done by beneficial
insects attracted by all those flowers, the negative effects of root
competition in guilds minus the positive effect of the nitrogen fixers, etc,
etc, is a statistician's nightmare. And then there's the whole idea of
proper controls: To measure the the benefit of the shade cast by my grape
arbor, I suppose I should cut down the grapes and see how much hotter my
house gets; not bloody likely. But I've become aware of some good data from
fairly simple agroforestry experiments: the benefits of hedgerows,
interplants of N-fixing trees, root and shade competition. That's a little
ammunition for the completely number-fixated types.

As Andreas and others have said, a pragmatic approach seems best. If we like
doing it, and want to continue doing it, and people who come visit are
excited about what they see, then something about Pc must be working.

Toby