permaculture

[Stephen Figgins <fig@monitor.net>]

Sharon Gordon wrote:

> They figure that using
> an acre a person is a person's fair share, and that leaves the other 4-5
> acres for other wildlife and plants.
They figure that, but has it been shown to be true?  Why wouldn't it 
leave the other 4-5 acres for 4-5 other one-acre lifestyle people? I 
suppose it would work if for some reason human population was a 
constant. In Bangladesh, where people have lifestyles requiring about 
one acre, are there 4-5 acres of wilderness for each person?  And is the 
environment in any better condition there?

To me, a more intriguing approach is to look at the effects of how we 
live upon the land.  Is your lifestyle deleterious to the environment, 
or does it increase the environments health?  That's what I want to 
know.  Most footprint proponents seem to assume that humans are always 
harmful to the land, and therefore, we should limit our harm by harming 
less land per person.  I see that humans can be beneficial to the land.  
The permacultural lifestyle can increase diversity,  strengthen the 
health of the land, restore watersheds.  Rather than intensively 
gardening one acre to squeeze as much out of it as you can, I would 
rather see people spread a positive influence over a larger space.  When 
living a beneficial permacultural life, maybe it would be better to have 
a larger footprint - one that requires that beneficial influence to be 
spread across even more land.  That would leave less land for other 
people, but we could probably do with a lowering in population anyway. 

To meet the needs of their lifestyle, foraging cultures required 
hundreds of acres per person.  They shaped those environments through 
their use, and  created rich diverse and healthy ecosystems as a 
result.  Now, that's a large footprint lifestyle to be proud of. 

> At the present though I am looking at things more from a viewpoint of
> integrating permaculture and footprints with people perhaps owning 3 acres
> per person (and the other 2-3 per person used for public places, roads,
> preserves,
> and with chunks of forest kept intact as nationally or group owned forests)
> And then I think the object would be to try and get one's permaculture 1-3
> zones on 1 acre and zones 4-5 on the other 2 acres.
Yeah, that's one approach, but what if they were to make their living by 
using zones 4-5 more - say foraging for more of their food, rather than 
intensifying zone 1?  Or supplying some of their needs through 
sustainable forestry.    Maybe then they would need 40 acres, instead of 
3.  Not everyone could live that way, but those that could would be 
maintaining a huge amount of rich diverse land.  They would be spreading 
their influence wider. 

> I'd be interested in hearing how people would design their acre or a family
> of four's four acre chunk(or whatever your real or ideal family
> configuration might be) to produce 90+% of their needs.  I'd also be
> interested in things you might do differently to make this possible such as
> using cloth napkins rather than growing the fiber for paper ones, etc.  I'd
> also be interested in how feasible you think the one acre strategy is.
I guess I'm not much of a homesteader, my dreams run something more like 
this:
My family, and a dozen others, produce 70%+ of our needs from zones 4-5, 
our 2000+ acre wildlife area.  In my area, I think I would go with 
prairie for much of it, and forage from the prairie and the wooded areas 
along whatever streams I have.  I might use Wes Jackson's approach to 
grow some crops with the prairie.  I would open a microbrewery to use 
some of the grains and brew a special permacultural prairie beer.  We 
could serve up a wide variety of food we grow in the inner zones.   We 
could build the building from straw bales.  We could use some of the 
byproducts of the brewery as compost or fertilizer or feed for other 
animals within the land.  Our goal would be to produce zero waste beyond 
some low grade heat.  I would like a small herd of buffalo or perhaps 
cattle to help with the management of the watershed using some kind of 
holistic range management strategy.   We could set up a small leather 
business as well, producing useful leather goods for sale in town.  A 
small blacksmith/machine shop can help us produce most of the tools that 
we need.  If resources allowed we might have a small mining operation, 
though it would be even better to recycle much of the metal.  Perhaps we 
would run a recycling business on some of our land - a junkyard from 
which we could salvage some materials.   While we probably wouldn't have 
a lot of woods, we could have a wood shop and small mill for using what 
we were able to take sustainably from the woods.    We live close to a 
town, and we do some of our business there.  Many other families around 
us live much the same way that we do, and together we supply a good 
portion of the town's needs, and the town provides the 10-20% of our 
needs that we do not supply for ourselves.

Now that's more how I dream it happening.   Though I don't have the 
dozen other families, and I don't have the huge wildlife area.  Alas, 
the four acre area is probably the more realizable dream.  I don't know 
that I would try to produce 90% of what we need from that.  Maybe 
40-50%.  I would want to take some of that land and use it to provide 
good habitat for other species. I think participating in the economy is 
an important part of changing things.  What we choose to purchase and 
what businesses we support with our money will extend our influence 
wider than sticking to our four acres.

-Stephen