permaculture

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson <lakinroe@silcom.com>]

Hi Mark- hope you dont mind but I forwarded
your very interesting post to the international Permaculture list where
the debate is unfolding,
 
Cheers, 
 
Castigating Graham :)
 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Mark Fisher
To: gb0063551@cableinet.co.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.
 
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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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