permaculture

[Keith Johnson <keithdj@mindspring.com>]

Another Kind of Energy
by Peter Bane

Copyright Nov. 2000, Permaculture Activist magazine.

PERMACULTURE HAS ITS GENESIS in the visionary work of J.    Russell 
Smith, J. Sholto Douglas, Robert Hart, and others less well known, who, 
two generations ago and more, realized the urgency of transforming the 
basis of agricul­ture through the use of trees and other perennial 
crops. They saw the progressive devastation of land that followed the 
plow and knew that only by integrating forestry and farming could man's 
impact on the Earth be tempered and hope for humanity's future be 
secured into the next century. Following the revelations of ecologist H. 
T. Odum (I) on the problem of energy, a third leg was added to this 
vital synthesis as David Holmgren so tren­chantly expounds in his essay 
"Energy and Permaculture" (2). It was for Holmgren, a young student of 
design at Hobart. Tasma­nia, and his unlikely mentor, Bill Mollison a 
bushman turned university professor, to set forth a systematic and 
practical approach to implementing these new understandings. 
Permaculture emphasized redesign of the domestic landscape or 
self---reliance, building the genius of the local and the individual 
into this triune and revolutionary shift.
Though widely accepted by both traditional and post-modern peoples 
around the world, permaculture has been largely ignored by governments 
and institutions, to which its essential message is anathema. The vacuum 
of official support has obscured the scope and extent of this revolution 
in man's relation to the land. It is important therefore, for those of 
us promoting permaculture concepts and systems to realize that the 
elaboration of the permaculture design system, though original to 
Holmgren and Mollison, was neither isolated nor unique, but contemporary 
with a range of parallel creative work in other western countries.
Rummaging my bookshelf for inspiration on energy in preparation for this 
issue, I came across evidence for a similar ideation in a slender thesis 
by Ida and Jean Pain, Another Kind of Garden. First published in 1973 
and in a fifth edition by 1979, this little book documents the work and 
methods of M. Pain with brushwood compost.

A Little-Known Visionary

Pain was a citizen scientist in Occitania, that fabled and historic 
region in the south of France, whose political fate has long been 
submerged within the French state, but whose spirit is still restive. 
Contemporary with Bill Mollison. Pain was concerned with the devastation 
of the Mediterranean forest by fire, a terminal process of 
dehumification of soils that began thousands of years ago with the 
introduction of grazing animals and cereal cropping. He experimented 
with the production of compost from brushwood thinnings of the 
/garrigue, /France's sclerophyllic (dry loving) southern forest. By 
progressive applications of this compost and careful mulching to retain 
moisture, Pain demonstrated and recorded in great detail that high 
quality vegetables could be grown without irrigation in these dry soils. 
He further speculated that the forest itself could he regenerated by 
selective use of the same material.

What sets Jean Pain apart from Sir Albert Howard or other advocates of 
compost for gardening are two important elements, First. Pain placed the 
source of humic material in the forest and not in agriculture. In this 
way Pain pointed to a way of making productive the vast scrubland and 
dry forest regions of the sub-temperate and sub-tropic regions, areas of 
the planet blessed by abundant sunshine and long occupied by humans, but 
whose soils were exhausted before the modern age. Second, motivated by a 
profoundly post-modern understanding of global resource limits, he 
concerned himself with the production of industrially useful energy from 
this basic earth resource. In this way he offers a bridge between 
traditional livelihoods based in shifting cultiva­tion or nomadic 
herding, and a more modern, prosperous, and settled way of life. He also 
shows westerners a way out of the dilemma of dependence on fossil fuels.

Why then have we not a better knowledge of this important man and his 
work? The answers are several and should surprise us little. Jean Pain 
worked independently in a rural region. He was affiliated with no 
university or government. Though French is a world language, it is no 
longer the leading tongue of science and has been eclipsed by English as 
the lingua franca of cultural innovation. Pain's small, didactic volume 
was self-published, and its translation into English was awkward, the 
text difficult to read. Though Pain networked with other researchers in 
francophone Europe and in California, the extent of his outreach appears 
to have been limited. He was essentially an agronomic scientist and 
inventor, without the personality which might have enabled him to 
publicize and propagate his ideas. And, more broadly, his creative work, 
like so much innovation in energy technology, was marginalized by the 
worldwide conservative reaction of the l980's which sought to deny the 
implica­tions of the oil shocks of the previous decade.

Let's look at Jean Pain's methods and try to assess what sort of legacy 
he has left us as we enter the 21st century.

The rest of the story:
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/PeterBane/Jean_Pain.html

Merry Christmas from Keith Johnson and Peter Bane

--
Keith Johnson
"Be fruitful and mulch apply."
Permaculture Activist Magazine
PO Box 5516, Bloomington, IN 47408
(812) 335-0383
http://www.permacultureactivist.net
also Patterns for Abundance Design & Consulting
also Association for Regenerative Culture
also APPLE-Bloomington (Alliance for a Post-Petroleum Local Economy) It's a 
small world after oil.
http://www.relocalize.net/groups/applebloomington
also Bloomington Permaculture Guild