permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

On May 12, 2010, at 10:28 AM, jamesdavid Sneed wrote:

> That seems so disappointing, an elitist attitude that discourages people 
> from growing all their own food . . . . I find that independence impossible 
> in anywhere but the most remote regions, I am returning to those locales, 
> which to me is the REAL WORLD

Reality is often more disappointing than dreaming of something we've never 
tried; yes, my point was indeed to discourage people from the simplistic, 
near-impossible fantasy that when it gets tough they can just grow all their 
own food. I hope that idea dies soon; it's a terrible deterrent to facing a 
real solution. I beg you all: Stop thinking that way!  And, James, when you 
return to the "real world," of the wild, just remember who made your 
equipment for you; that's how self-reliant you'll be. The "I'll harvest the 
wild" dream only insures the destruction of the last wild places.That's 
anti-permaculture: stay out of the bush, says Mollison, and he's right. With 
7 billion people, all wild resources would be depleted in a matter of months. 
I was recently in Alaska, and kept running into people who thought they'd 
just hunt after the oil gets scarce. Not with the size of the population of 
Alaska. That's a horrifying thought: goodbye caribou, elk, deer, bear. 

Growing all your own food is not permaculture. It's subsistence farming. If 
you love being a farmer, then do it. But if I remember Rain's stories of the 
Jeavons associate who grew his food for a year, he was working 40-80 hours a 
week for about 6 months on it, and 20-30 hours in the winter. And he did not 
have a job that year. That leaves little time for anything else, and ignores 
the issue of how to pay for land, housing, etc.. Is that what you want? What 
is the question that "grow your own food" is the answer to? It's probably the 
least secure and most labor-intensive way to obtain your food. Do you really 
trust no one else to grow food as well as you can? Or not trust yourself to 
be able to do something in exchange for it? 

There is nothing in permaculture principles that suggests growing all your 
own food, or even any food at all. Mollison, in the first pages of Intro to 
Pc, says it makes more sense to do what you do well and support other people 
who are good at growing food sustainably. It's not permacultural to limit 
yourself to "I must grow all my own food." It's permacultural to say "I must 
take care of my food needs sustainably" and connect with your local community 
around food in ways that create mutual support and a whole system. The lone 
farmer working to feed him/herself is bad design. That's a critical function 
being supported only one way. An injury, and you and your family starve. And 
the food bandits will hit you first, all alone out there, long before they 
will attack the community where a few members farm and the others can stand 
guard.

The "must grow all my own food" mindset is just more of the rugged 
individualist, go-it-alone attitude that infects our culture. It's grounded 
in a lack of trust. It's where we go first because it seems doable, easier 
than creating a community, easier than participating and trusting in a 
network, but it's not a solution. It's like buying a water filter when your 
tapwater isn't clean. It provides personal safety but ignores the problem. 
Except that in food, it's a fantasy solution: hardly anyone is really going 
to grow all their own food, but I think we're comforted by imagining that we 
can. It's a natural early but simplistic response, and we need to move beyond 
it to more sophisticated and realistic thinking that assesses the 
possibilities and resources instead of running away to our back yard.

I don't see more than a tiny percentage of people returning to growing most 
of their food. It is simply too radical a shift from present systems; there 
is no direct path there unless your scenario is rapid rupture of societal 
fabric followed by utter fear and atomization, while there are many direct 
paths to many other effective food-security scenarios. For one, I think there 
will be a huge increase in the number of market farmers specializing in a 
modest variety of crops, some to eat, but most for income or trade.

BTW, I believe the people on Tikopia, like all Polynesians, got most of their 
protein and a large part of their other food from the sea. So that enlarges 
their footprint from 1.8 square miles to hundreds of square miles. To support 
800 people from a square mile is impossible. Once again, that's running to a 
simple answer--they just grew their own!--that misses the real pattern.

Grow food if you enjoy it and are good at it. If not, design a better way to 
meet your food needs. That would be permaculture.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com