permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

On April 2, 2003, at 11:13 AM, miekal wrote:

> > There's certainly some overlap between kinship and permaculture 
> > gardens,  but no one that I know of has explored how extensive it is 
> > [snip]
>
> But how could one possibly know unless you embrace a spirit of 
> experimentation & opening yourself as a designer to the possibilities 
> the biological universe has to offer?

I'm puzzled at the argumentative tone of your response, miekal. I was 
writing to agree with you, and to find more overlap by proposing just 
such avenues of exploration. Perhaps it's my training as a scientist: 
The way to improve an idea is to focus on its weak points or 
contradictions, and question them in hopes of making the idea stronger 
or connecting it to what we already agree on. But I think we're all in 
pretty close agreement.

As Scott has pointed out, the main difficulty in reconciling Pc and 
kinship gardens--and I am very interested in combining them--is that 
taxonomic relationship between plants has no correlation with their 
ecological or functional relationship, so plants arranged by kinship 
won't necessarily work together in guilds or any other way. Close 
relatives (at the genus or species level) can be very divergent  in 
their needs, yields, or functions.

We often sing the praises of diversity, but ecologists have shown 
conclusively that simple diversity of species does not give you 
stability or resilience or any ecological benefit, contrary to what 
some Pc people assume (I'm writing an article for the next Activist on 
the subject, and am playing hooky from it right now). It's the 
diversity of functional relationships (not species) that creates 
stability because functional diversity gives both redundancy 
(protection from failure) and makes sure that all the different jobs to 
create a whole system are being done. So selecting only for genetic 
diversity, though it's educational and species-saving, won't help us 
create a functioning ecosystem.  But I still think kinship gardens tie 
into Pc. Here's how:

There are two principal ways of creating a kinship garden: 1) do 
extensive "grow-outs" of closely related species in the same genus or 
subfamily, or move up the taxonomic hierarchy and 2) grow selected 
species from an array of related families. The first method is great 
for generating biodiversity but doesn't create functional 
relationships: 10 solanums don't make a guild. This method might give 
you insurance against crop failure; if one variety dies, others might 
thrive. But closely related species don't always provide the same crop, 
right? Here are 4 sunflowers:  sunchokes, edible seed, oilseed, and a 
pretty flower. No redundancy there, so little failure protection. 
Again, genetic similarity does not predict similarities at functional 
or ecological levels.

The second method seems more directly applicable to Pc: Making careful 
choices from different families based on relationship with known useful 
species, as Rick describes, can help with guild design and functional 
relationship. Or you could find a known guild of tropical plants (there 
are lots more of them than temperate guilds) and use kinship to help 
you find related temperate species to try as a guild. But I think you'd 
need to know something about each species instead of taking genetic pot 
luck.

One of Mushroom's biggest insights, overlooked by mainstream scientists 
(Peace Seeds J. 9:46-50) is that by placing some new plant DNA data 
into his kinship maps, he's confirmed that temperate plants in general 
radiated out of older tropical groups, and those old tropical groups 
are all related to each other. So we can turn to the tropics for 
lessons about temperate plants; the tropical plants did it first.

It's a potentially fruitful field, but we need to start planting.

Toby