permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

(warning: lengthy post that takes a while to get back to the topic) Thanks 
for the thoughtful words, Ben. And Rain, it's not that I'm trying to 
stimulate discussion, as that's too close to trolling. I'm trying to get 
people to think past cliches into deeper considerations of their assumptions 
and beliefs before they do harm or waste effort. And, as Rain pointed out, I 
can write more clearly than I sometimes do, but the "Myth of Self-Reliance" 
article took about 18 hours to write, whereas I'm not going to make kind of 
time for posts on listservs. I think my posts usually contain ideas worth 
hearing, so I hope people will digest the things I ask them to think about, 
instead of jumping to,"Toby wants to discourage us from growing food." I've 
been pretty careful about how I've phrased this, so if that's where anyone 
went, they have not really read it. If you are driven to think I've been 
hacked by Monsanto, consider first that you may have misunderstood me. I 
think I get permaculture pretty well by now.

I often try out ideas here before moving on to larger forums, so I do 
appreciate constructive feedback. When I get too much knee-jerk projection of 
people's own issues onto me, I tend to post much less. I've been pretty 
inactive here for a while, and that's part of why. I have developed a pretty 
thick skin and am learning, usually, not to get triggered by the real idiots 
here--and I'll never be offended by Lawrence, I know him too well--but if I 
run into too many people who will not think critically and won't read for 
meaning, I'm outta here. Life is too short.

Back to the topic: I'm grateful to Ben for pointing out that we've already 
done the "must grow all my food" thing in the 1970s, and we learned many 
things from it, primarily that food production is best done communally, and 
it's rarely good design to have all your food coming from one source, that 
is, from your own labor. We also know that if we really want to, we can grow 
a lot of food ourselves. So if developing self reliance skills is what you 
personally need to do, great. But in permaculture, we don't begin from dogma: 
I must have an herb spiral, I must grow my own food. That's not design. 
That's top-down, dogmatic thinking. That's what I mean when I ask "how did 
anyone ever think that that was part of the permaculture credo?"  We assess 
first: what are my needs? Food is one. If you immediately go to: "then I must 
grow it all myself," you ignore an infinity of other possible design 
solutions for that problem. Good design never starts with the answer. As 
Larry Santoyo says, we don't impose our solutions, we arrive at them. 
Striving to grow a large percentage of your food is only an intelligent goal 
when a good deal of assessment leads you there. So I can't agree with "we 
should set it as a goal even when we know we can't achieve it." I would never 
say "more of us need to grow our own food." It's focusing too low on the 
hierarchy of places to intervene. It might, sometimes, be the right path, but 
it rules out countless other solutions. It never makes sense to let a cliche 
or dogma set our goals. Our needs and resources set our goals. 

We need a sustainable food system. Is Joe Public working in his yard a sure 
way of making that happen? For my neighbor, that means spraying the crap out 
of his yard, killing the bugs, rototilling 4 times a season, buying chemical 
fertilizer, and so on. Being in touch with his land has not made him Green. 
So there is much else that needs to be in place for "grow your own" to be a 
useful directive, as much as I like the idea. Insisting on better farm 
practices would intervene at a far more effective level, as would "break up 
corporate farms," "encourage big food buyers to buy local" and "create urban 
farms." Think at those levels. Sometimes "grow your own" makes sense. For 
Marjory, food is expensive, she likes gardening, and it sounds like she can't 
support the kind of food system around her that she'd like to, so growing 
makes sense. But we usually want a hierarchy of food sources, like a zone 
system. A one-level solution like "must grow all my food" makes no sense 
unless derived at by careful assessment of your own needs and resources, and 
it never makes sense to prescribe that others should grow all their own food. 
There are too many ways for that not to solve any problems, and to cause many 
more. That's why I want to strike it from the permaculture meme-bank.

One of my criteria for any design is, "how many beneficial connections can be 
created by this element or process?" Growing my food doesn't create very 
many. It's often not even that good at reducing inputs unless you get to a 
developed perennial system, as annuals are very input-intensive unless you 
have land to grow compost crops, and use humanure. A small farmer may be less 
resource intensive than a home gardener. A multi-level solution to food, 
where I connect my own commerce, cash or trade based, to the work of many 
others via CSA, farmers markets, friends, and locally owned stores, will 
create a more resilient system that supports far more connections and people 
than me working alone in my garden. Some people will find otherwise. But it 
never makes sense to set the goal before you assess the resources, 
highest-category needs, and options.

I think it's quite the opposite of elitist to think this way. It seems to me 
more elitist, if I gotta use that word, to assume that everyone has access to 
land to grow food, the time to grow it, or is where developing that skill set 
makes sense to them. Creating a garden from scratch can take more resources 
than most people have; I have worked with a non-profit that set up raised 
beds in low-income areas because it cost too much and took too much time for 
people to grow their own food. McDonald's was cheaper and faster. Gardening 
for them was a subsidized future, and not a real solution, not unless a lot 
of other things changed first.

Okay, broken record starting to happen here. I hope I've encouraged people to 
think about where their own place to intervene most effectively in the food 
system might be. 

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com



On May 13, 2010, at 2:50 PM, Ben Martin Horst wrote:

> On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Rain Tenaqiya 
> <raincascadia@yahoo.com>wrote:
> 
>> 
>> I hate how discussions on this list (and everywhere else, I guess) get
>> polarized,
> 
> 
> Hear, hear. I'm constantly flummoxed by people's knee-jerk responses to
> something that they obviously didn't read carefully but onto which they've
> projected their own insecurities.
> 
> 
>> as I've mentioned before, and I think Toby contributes to this.
> 
> 
> I don't think Toby contributes to this at all. I don't always agree with
> him, but his posts -- whether original or responses to ongoing threads --
> are typically well-reasoned, measured, and insightful. Even -- no,
> particularly -- when I disagree, I find that he forces me to look at issues
> from angles I hadn't previously, and I come away with a better overall
> understanding. Toby has opinions, yes, and sometimes strong ones, but I
> don't think I've ever read anything of his that I would consider polarizing.
> Counterweights to polarizing opinions, perhaps, but not themselves
> polarizing.
> 
> All Toby did in this case was to point out that the myth of self-sufficiency
> is one that has A) inspired countless thousands and B) bankrupted,
> disheartened, and burned-out most of those thousands. All of us know
> back-to-the-landers who gave it up and went back to shilling for the Man
> because it was just too hard. Toby didn't say "You can't be
> self-sufficient." If that's what you really, really want, go for it. But
> expect it to be infinitely harder than you imagined. Toby just realistically
> suggested broadening the question "How can I grow all my own food?" with
> "How can I obtain my food in responsible, satisfying, ecological,
> permacultural ways?" That's likely -- but not necessarily -- to include
> growing a significant chunk of it, and encourages thinking about our
> relationships with the ecosystems and human systems around us.
> 
> With all the flak Toby gets on this list and others, it amazes me that he
> hasn't gotten defensive or dropped off entirely. I think it speaks volumes
> about his moral character that he ignores the personal attacks and sticks
> with the issues at hand.
> 
> 
>>  I know he wants to stimulate discussion, but he doesn't have to make the
>> issues sound so black and white (and I just got done reading all the
>> wonderful essay on your site, so I know you can do better).  On the other
>> hand, I do appreciate Lawrence's restraint in the tone of his responses.
>> 
>> 
> Really? I don't generally think calling someone a Monsanto PR hack --
> particularly in permaculture circles -- represents a "restrained response."
> Perhaps this was an attempt at humor. It sounds to me more like an ad
> hominem attack. It's language I'd expect from a troll, not a list moderator.
> 
> 
>> I feel the question about how much land it takes to grow one person's food
>> has been framed in a way that unnecessarily encourages this debate.  A more
>> interesting question, for me, would be, "How much area in food forest is
>> reasonable per person, given a certain climate and available gardening
>> time?"  Cities can probably typically grow 50% of their food.  If urban
>> areas were planted in food forest, a lot of the heavier food could be 
>> easily
>> obtained just outside your doorstep, reducing transport fuel needs.  New
>> aquaponics techniques also have potential for urban areas.  Growing food
>> doesn't have to be a grueling enterprise for the specialized farmers.  And
>> this leads to questions of social equity and justice:  if you don't grow a
>> substantial portion of your own food, who is going to do it?  This whole
>> debate has taken place with the apparent assumption that we are all equals
>> who can freely choose our work.  Not so.  Most of the people on this
>> list are probably white middle class people who would be buying their food
>> from poor brown immigrants if they didn't grow it themselves.  According to
>> David Holmgren, the peasant class is only going to get bigger as fossil
>> fuels become more scarce.  Growing more of your own food is a slap in the
>> face to class specialization and the stigmatization of doing such "lowly"
>> work.
>> 
> 
> I didn't hear Toby saying anything that would argue with any of the above.
> In fact, the above paragraph seems mostly to follow directly from the sort
> of approaches Toby suggests.
> 
> I know it's too much to expect of email lists -- and, given the history,
> this list in particular -- but I really wish folks would sit down with a
> post, digest it, and mull it over for a while before responding. Give it a
> couple hours before you click "Send." Yes, we'll still have a lot to
> disagree over, but I would hope we can do it in civil ways.
> 
> -Ben
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