permaculture

[Harold Waldock <haroldw@alternatives.com>]

Permaculturealists! Americans & Canadians! Wake up! energy difficulties are
coming your way!

Alberta is behind the Mackenzie Gas Pipeline and although it is to finish
several years before the Alaska pipeline no gas will flow south of Edmonton
from it!  Why?  The oilsands and tarsands need all that gas to get the more
valuable oil out.

So, what are you, fellow PC Designers, offering by way of energy design
services? What products? What tools?  What culturally appropriate,
acceptable, step wise and transitional programs do you market?

I've been feeling keen hunger for DIY and small business energy solution
offerings because I'm struggling to find out what is reasonable and
available.  I surf lots but I don't find much useable stuff.

Lets look at not well documented practice and opportunities and develop
them. Bill Mollison wrote that designers are to take note that one important
consideration is to find existing tools and through small but intelligent
improvement adapt them to better value.

I'm told that it is a common practice in the North Georgia Gulf area near
Campbell River on Coastal BC to make compost piles of wood chips run poly
pipe through it and heat the house and water with it.  Are there recipes and
how to documents? Can this be developed so it is widespread and culturally
used?

As part of my PDC I learnt of Jean Pain.   He was a forester in the south
central region of France in a highlands area over 300m in elevation called
the Central Massive, developed a unique forest management style with many
benefits.  Starting from the post war period to the mid 1980’s he worked to
revegitate a overlogged and deforested landscape, in a mountainous dry
fire-prone region.  It is not unlike the BC interior except that it does not
get as cold.  The scrub land became forest under his management practices by
reducing the frequency of fire through firebreaks and replanting with trees
which were native but less fire prone than the scrub (Oaks I think).    He
created firebreaks by cutting the trees and shrubs in strips across the
landscape and removed the woody plant material, chipped them with his
specially designed wood chippers.  The fire breaks reduce the risk of fire
spreading across a forest. The chips were brought back and either composted
for their heat for houses and greenhouses or digested for biogas.  Compost
was used for the seedlings he grew and planted. Biogas ran his chippers,
trucks and generators.

Resources and Documents I have heard about but have never read or got my
hands on:
Does anybody know how to get the following?

There is a group working in Belgium, practising Jean Pain’s techniques-
Committe Jean Pain, Hof Ter Winkelen 25, Holle Eikstraat, B1840 Londerzeel,
near Ghent. Tel/Fax +32 52 30 53 65. Email- comite.jean.pain@skynet.be (Are
these people active?)

An outline of Jean Pain’s work on  www.geocities.com/j18hellas/mag2.html -
Scroll down

Pain, I. and J., 1972 "Another Kind of Garden...The Methods of Jean Pain",
Domaine "Les Templiers": Villecroze, France. (If I could get the document my
sister  can translate it but has not somebody done this?)

'Another Kind Of Garden' (5th edition). Published by Negro, Draguignan,
FRANCE. (I could not find them can you?)