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  • From: Lee Flier <leeflier@comcast.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] work - was the gardener's shadow...
  • Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:12:58 -0500

Well Mitch, I suppose this speaks once again to the value of having an actual PDC as opposed to taking a few bits out of contexts where they might be easily misinterpreted. :P Never were the comments I quoted meant to imply that a permaculture site isn't a lot of work. I quoted them simply to address Frances' specific concerns about remembering to slow down and reflect and observe what is happening in the garden. It was meant simply to illustrate how the supposedly hard-nosed Bill Mollison does communicate this point without invoking any specific spiritual doctrine.

As far as your point about attrition - no doubt there are some people who underestimate how much work is involved with a pc site, but I think the same is true of pretty much anything. Anyone can become romantically enamored with the idea of learning to play a musical instrument, or becoming a fireman or an airline pilot or a nurse, and once they find out how much work is involved there's always a high rate of attrition, which weeds out those who are serious. C'est la vie.

But there are a lot of folks who never even develop an interest in gardening in the first place *because* they associate it with backbreaking drudgery, and I think this is just as important a barrier to overcome (if not more so) as the idea that gardening isn't much work. Just to bring up an example that's fresh in my mind, I've been helping my town to establish a community garden, and we proposed to do it on city owned property. We got a lot of pushback from our city attorney who was, we thought, rather overly concerned about personal injury. By talking to him a bit I learned that he had grown up on a farm, and that growing food to him was equated with heavy machinery and hard labor, and most of the folks he'd grown up with had sustained some serious injury at some point. Our Mayor is also an old country boy, and still maintains a garden of his own, but he just lost a nephew this past weekend in a horrific accident involving farm machinery.

So I had to take a lot of pains to explain that growing vegetables does not need to be done this way, that we would be using mostly hand tools and implementing techniques such as no-till that were gentle on the body and soul and could be done by all ages. The point of a "community" garden, I had to stress repeatedly, was not just to grow food but to build community, which all of the participating neighbors have made clear.

In light of the huge barriers we need to overcome in terms of changing people's attitudes toward growing their own food and the way it's conventionally done, I think I'd rather err on the side of laziness. :D

I also think that your post is somewhat biased toward the particular way you practice permaculture - not that I have a problem with that, but of course there are many ways to practice permaculture and they don't *have* to involve livestock, or home schooling, or brush clearing, or some of the other things you do. A project isn't sustainable if you can't sustain it, to state the obvious. :D So part of the design process needs to be deciding what you can reasonably handle, including with advancing age. And of course, many people who practice permaculture don't garden at all - they may be involved with invisible structures such as re-thinking economics or law or manufacturing processes. Permaculture principles can be practiced in any field, and what may look like "attrition" from the outside may actually be deceptive. They may in fact be applying permaculture principles in their daily lives in ways that are not obvious on the surface.

Last but not least, if you design for it properly and put in the work of establishing it, you can in fact have a permaculture garden that doesn't require constant maintenance. My home garden is a very "lazy" garden, and although I probably couldn't disappear for a month, I have disappeared for at least a week to 10 days and come back to find everything doing fine. Of course it took work and careful decision making to design it properly and build up the soil, but just saying. :) Depending how you designed it, too, if you have mostly mature fruit and nut trees and other perennials, you certainly could go away for a month. So the amount of work involved in a site really just depends what you want to do (and of course, if we're talking perennials, at what stage of maturity your site is), and the question of how much work you're prepared to do on an ongoing basis should factor into your design. One also shouldn't be shy about bartering for or hiring help, or swapping resources. Toby Hemenway has an excellent article on his website about the myth of self-sufficiency. Sustainability and self sufficiency are not the same thing, and one needn't provide everything for oneself to have a sustainable system - as mentioned, it's not sustainable if you can't sustain it. :D People working together can create a sustainable system, though. Maybe going away for that month's holiday involves having a neighbor looking after your garden, and that's OK too.

Mitch Triplett wrote:
Phrases like this make my neck hair stand on end. I understand that part of
what many of us are trying to do is create, encourage, etc. self-sustaining
systems, but if we're really going to be integral components of these
systems we're going to have to work. Especially if you're starting with a
clean (or in our case cracked) palate.
I've seen the "intervenor becomes the recliner" sentiment pop up
occasionally on this and other lists and I'm always left wondering a) if
people new to Pc realize what they're getting themselves into when they
start down this path, b) what kind of attrition there is because folks got
into it thinking they'd be able to plant a couple trees then spend their
lives lying in a shaded hammock and c) if the lack of realization and rate
of attrition is avoidable by being more honest about the commitments (time,
labor, money) involved in establishing goals & objectives, then doing the
work to get there.

Clearing brush and planting trees is work. Double-digging is work. Hoeing
dirt mulch in a dryland garden is work. Designing a forest garden is work.
Installing irrigation is work. Caring for livestock is work. Harvesting is
work. Processing and preserving is work. Home-schooling children is work.
Participating in a (good) PDC is probably work.

I'm not at all implying that it's drudgery. I work my tail off and then I
rest and then I go back to work (sadly, the rest periods are longer than
they were 20 years ago, but that's life). And I love what I do because I'm
working toward something I feel is worth working toward. But a month's
holiday?! That's hilarious.

Mitch Triplett
Tri-Pearl Family Forest
Member - CCFFA/OSWA & OTFS
Associate Member - FSC





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