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Subject: permaculture

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  • From: "Bart Anderson" <bart@cwo.com>
  • To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Way of life
  • Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 00:27:27 -0700

Tradingpost (paul) asked:

"Deborah, what I'm trying to clarify is why Permaculture is being redefined
to include almost anything from 10,000 acre cattle ranches to balcony
lettuce pots on the 60th floor of a Manhattan apartment. And the replies
raise the question of why bringing up the original concept of Permaculture
gets such a hostile reaction. And why this list disavows completely the
original concept of Permaculture as envisioned by those who coined the term.
A simple explanation would be nice."

Here are some recent quotes from Mollison on the subject:

Bill Mollison interview by Scott Vlaun (Seeds of Change) July 2001
http://www.seedsofchange.com/cutting_edge/interview.asp?UID=2004021515352440

Vlaun: So do you think your ideas of permaculture can apply to all different
scales, from the industrial agriculturist to the home gardener?

Mollison: Any scale. I had a lot of fun in Sweden sitting in little flats
with architects working at how we were going to eat in this flat and we were
able to do it and also to have fish occasionally. We had worm drawers ( for
composting) in our kitchen where we grew our worms by using our kitchen
scraps and spitting into them occasionally and whatever else . . . and then
we had little boxes on wheels which we put out to small verandas in the
daytime to grow our potatoes in . . We used the fish tank, high on the rear
wall, to condense any moisture out of the air down into the tank so we
weren't rotting away in the wintertime. We had a lot of very good systems
running.
Anyhow, on the big scale, we have farms much bigger than Texas in Australia,
so we go very big, and we do thousands of them a year. Somebody said to me,
"Would you design Greece?" or "Would you design Connecticut?" and I would
say, "Sure, that's an easy job. That's smaller than designing one of these
farms." So, it goes from the tiny one room flat in Stockholm to the
unthinkably large, a 4 million acre cattle station in Northern Territory.

Vlaun: So what would you say are the underlying principles that would be the
same in that room in Sweden . . .

Mollison: . . . they're all the same. The principles have to be all the
same. That's the point.
.....

Mollison interview with Scott Landon, published 2001
http://www.scottlondon.com/insight/scripts/mollison.html

LONDON: Does permaculture apply to those of us who live in cities?

MOLLISON: Yes, there is a whole section in the manual about urban
permaculture. When I first went to New York, I helped start a little
herb-farm in the South Bronx. The land was very cheap there because there
was no power, no water, no police, and there were tons of drugs. This little
farm grew to supply eight percent of New York's herbs. There are now 1,100
city farms in New York.

LONDON: Short of starting a farm, what can we do to make our cities more
sustainable?

MOLLISON: Catch the water off your roof. Grow your own food. Make your own
energy. It's insanely easy to do all that.





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