permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

It's good to see all the thoughtful posts here.

Will Carey <cure@rtinet.com> wrote:

> But the last time I co-taught a Permaculture course ten years ago... I got a
> lot of blank stares from everyone about incorporating concepts from Richard
> Register, Paolo Soleri, John Todd and John Tillman Lyle into the PC course
> curriculum.  

Courses I've seen lately do cover (and in some cases, build or visit
examples of) Register's, Todd's and Lyle's work. Soleri less so, altho a
course I did a couple of years ago had a participant who'd worked with
Soleri and presented on his work. Reviews were mixed on that one; seemed
more dream than substance.

Stephanie wrote:

> but I would also refrain
> from citing per capita statistics - considering that while per capita costs
> may be small, the overall cost of the system they compose may be enormous.

But it's per capita that allows you to compare apples to apples. Sure, NYC
has an incredibly huge infrastructure. But look at how many people it
serves! The New Yorker article pointed out that if the inhabitants of NYC
were spread out at the same density of the small Connecticut town where the
author now lives, they would occupy all six New England states plus Delaware
and New Jersey. Think of all the roads, wires, pipes, fuel, etc, etc, that
would consume--far more than what NYC uses now. One consumption pattern uses
far less reources than the other, and per capita allows you to measure the
value of choosing which lifestyle is easier on the planet.

In the rural community I just left, there were 12 houses on our 2-mile road.
Each one had several hundred feet of driveway, with an equal amount of phone
and power cable going to it. That's a lot of materials. Each family (except
one retired couple and ourselves) made 2-4 roundtrips on the road every day,
driving 12-50 miles to work, kid's school, soccer practice, etc. They all
worked in small offices or shops that are much less efficient to operate
than those ugly big office buildings in cities. That's a staggering amount
of infrastructure for just 12 families. Here in Portland, the 12 houses on
my block use about 600 feet of road total, and maybe 100 feet of cable
apiece. Many bus to work, and several work at home. That's a fraction of
what a rural place uses to serve the same number.

If we've got 300 million Americans, I'd rather see them consuming at urban
levels and not the more damaging and higher rural and suburban levels. Just
saying "SF consumes more than Davis" might fool you into thinking a Davis
lifestyle is less damaging, when the SF lifestyle clearly is.

> but what about that treatment plant, eh?

Well, our treatment plant, covering about an acre, serves about 40,000
households, with, I'd guess, a hundred or so miles of pipe going to it.
Compare that to 40,000 septic systems (many of which aren't functioning
well, which means pollution). That's 40,000 800-gallon concrete tanks, about
2000 miles of drain pipe, $10,000 per system, a zillion yards of drain rock.
I think the treatment plant uses fewer resources; it sure costs a lot less.
This applies across the board: urban and rural people, living the way we do
now, both have similar demands and require the same services from
infrastructure (my rural neighbors all shopped at Wal-Mart). That
infrastructure can be built and maintained with less embedded and expended
resources per person when people live more densely. To me, that seems just a
simple law of physics: distance times work and materials equal resources
used.


Toby
www.patternliteracy.com