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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Future Scenarios
  • Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2013 11:30:31 -0800

(warning: rant ahead!)

I don't want to get back into the debate about whether certain techniques,
such as aquaponics, do or don't fit into permaculture. That's a morass.
There's a much more valuable lesson here. Permaculture is a design process,
not a set of techniques. That means that in some cases, a technique fits into
a permaculture design, and in other cases, what is done with the same
technique isn't permaculture design at all. For example: conventional farming
uses herbicides in horribly destructive ways. But Holmgren has written about
the benefits of a one-time use of herbicides for tree planting compared to
the damage done by repeated hoeing and weeding to achieve the same effect.
Surely, herbicides don't fit into permaculture! Or has David been watering
down permaculture all these years?

In the mid nineties, I watched Mollison and his superb equipment operator, an
Australian named Doug, use a bulldozer for many hours to dig a pond at the
Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. Surely a diesel-powered bulldozer does
not fit into permaculture. And it uses thousands of times more fossil fuel
and embodied energy than an aquaponics system, and in terms of yield of fish
versus resources consumed, this pond is far less productive and took vastly
more embodied energy to make than an aquaponics system. And the work left,
for several months, an ugly bare scar on the earth. That can't be
permaculture. But, wait--it was Mollison who designed it and oversaw it. If a
bulldozer can fit into permaculture, then a lot of other technologies having
a far smaller footprint probably can.

My hori-hori used an enormous foundry, vast amounts of fossil fuels, ore
mined and trucked in, and was shipped to me from Japan. Surely that tool
can't fit into permaculture. If I do the same tasks with a flint knife, does
that make it permaculture? If I walk to the nearest creek, where scarce
salmon are just starting to return, and use my bamboo pole and recycled hook
to catch salmon every day to feed my household, depleting that rare stock
dangerously, does that fit into permaculture? I'm a hunter-gatherer, using a
bamboo pole--what could be more permacultural?

It's not about technique or tools. It's about how we arrive at their use. To
miss that is to miss the most important aspect of permaculture design.

If permaculture principles and methods were used to design a system, and it
is multi-functional, uses edge intelligently, uses less energy than
alternatives, reduces impact on natural ecosystems such as fisheries and
wildland now converted to farms, closes resource loops by recycling, teaches
whole systems thinking, uses biological resources as major components while
the technological resources used are no more complex than those in the
average house (a pump, some plumbing, some tanks), cares for people by
feeding and teaching them, is modeled on how a natural system works (e.g., an
estuary), cares for the planet compared to other systems producing the same
products (a fish farm or trawling, say), recycles surplus, etc. etc,--

Then it fits into permaculture.

For me, a major aspect of permaculture design is using the resources
currently available to do tasks we need done in more ecologically sound ways
than how they are conventionally done. In a perfect world, no one would ever
use herbicides or a bulldozer. In this world, if you arrive at their use via
a permaculture design process, then they fit into permaculture.

Merry Christmas, in the most secular way possible.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com


On Dec 24, 2013, at 1:43 PM, Steve Hart wrote:
>
>
> It is yet another subject very worthy of hard core debate and perhaps light
> hearted discussion also. Having been around the PC scene since 1980...I do
> reflect on many issues events and personalities. Also on the
> generalisations and groupings also the stigma and titles. Also very much on
> leadership, in all its forms. Also on the species man and its character,
> how we are evolving in all its layers. Your list above LL is much longer
> than this and can also fall into many different catergories. Good Bad and
> Ugly to name but one grouping. However we are all part of the one family.
> A very diverse family at that. The greater challenge I see is the need to
> strengthen the core of what Permaculture is so as to avoid the watering
> down of the whole subject but to strengthen it. I recall the debate we had
> on Aquaponics and Hydroponics where I think from memory only Scott and I
> argued that neither fitted into Permaculture. This to me is a classic
> example of the watering down of Permaculture. No puns please. One PC
> Principle I respond to most often is "Working with Nature, not against it".
> Often, the complexity of this statement alone is far too mind boggling. But
> the results are more than obvious in every walk of life.
>





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