permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

on 1/19/02 12:46 PM, souscayrous at souscayrous@wanadoo.fr wrote:

> Honestly Toby I do not think we are so very far apart.

I don't think so either; I too, generally agree with, and am impressed by,
your posts. I was responding mostly to what sounded to me like urging us to
refuse to quantify yield, ever. I think I misunderstood, and as happens in
this medium, my quickly written words distill and simplify my feelings to
seem more harsh than they are.

One of the things I've learned from this thread is that it is of very
limited use to try to measure the yield of a permaculture design (excuse the
sloppy language) in conventional terms. In a good design, many needs and
yields are being met internal to the system--fertility is augmented by
nitrogen fixers and mulch plants, pigs clean up the dropped fruit, etc. etc.
So to say "we applied 80 kg of nitrogen per hectare and it yielded 35 tonnes
of apples and 3 tonnes of wheat per hectare" gives you some deceptive
numbers. It leads you to believe you know something important about the
system, and might stop you from asking other, more meaningful questions
about all the other things that are happening.

I suppose you could continue to ask more of the same kind of question: how
many pollinators, how much mulch, how many species, etc.,and you might even
get clever and begin asking how much work is performed by elements internal
to the system. Then you'd get a whole bunch of little numbers, and maybe a
clever statistician could do some sort of multifactorial analysis and
combine them in a useful way. (Computers and advances in math have made the
old "only change one variable at a time" methods out of date; I used to run
experiments where we'd change tons of variables, and do matrix analyses, and
get answers that helped us.)

Or you could step back and just ask broad questions like, how much energy
does the system capture, how much is drained to sinks, how much remains
incorporated in the system, what are the incremental accumulations.

But after all that, do you really know anything? That might be what
Souscayrous is asking. In a couple of senses, you know some things. You may
know where some inefficiencies are in your design, what you could tweak to
reduce losses--though a good designer spots these things intuitively. But
I've often gone over wads of data and spotted patterns I haven't seen using
other methods. So the numbers could be useful in that sense.  Plus, you
would have a nice pile of data to show to . . . people with money and power
that you want to recruit.

But one danger of getting all these numbers is that this sort of work is
really exhausting and can consume you. Would you still appreciate your place
as a place? (When I'm using my chainsaw, I tend to see every tree as board
feet and cords; it feels awful.) And most numbers measure things and not
processes, and almost never give you a good feel for relationships and
connections. You can measure some of that, though it looks to me like most
measures of "connectance" and "feedback" are very crude and simplistic. Yet
those are the quantities (or are they qualities?) that define permaculture
systems.

What kind of measurements could truly capture the essential qualities of
permaculture design? That's a big question. That would have been a good tack
to take to answer Greg Williams.

So to wrap up this mass of verbiage, I think we're safe measuring things
like yield if we keep in mind that we're using a very limited tool for very
limited purposes (like persuading the skeptical academic) and are missing
much of what's important. Trying to talk about what is important in a
permaculture design seems like a way to develop an interesting new language.

> every time
> I think I understand and reach out to grasp the solidity of the world, the
> more it flows through my hand like water.

Very well put.

Toby