permaculture

[Joel Glanzberg <patternmind@gmail.com>]

Great Question Paul,

I'd phrase it a bit differently, give that I don't think about it as an ag
system but a whole systems design for human habitation of which food is a
part. Food production has been a much greater focus in places that see food
as an issue, like Africa, while land reclaimation has been more of a focus
in the West.

For me the question is why have we not made greater changes in all of the
systems we need to? When I see photos of Flowering Tree it is impressive as
a food forest island in a desert...and then I wonder why is it still an
Island? Why did Fukuoka's farm remain an island?
I think that we have not been designing the processes of implementation to
actually influence larger systems, somehow believing that folks will want
to join in to a good thing.

I think that the real potential of PC is designing change efforts if we
would use it in that way. It is ot about designing a farm but designing the
process for the self-creation of farms...or economies, or communities. This
is why observation of the forces is so critical. We are not trying to
decide the best array but the smallest changes that will result in the best
array. This is where we have failed in shifting larger systems: we have not
been thinking about or designing these as essential portions of every
physical design we do.

that's what I think

Joel

On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 11:35 PM, Paul Cross <charybda@newmex.com> wrote:

> I am not sure it matters much whether Lion understood (back in 2000) that
> Permaculture was a design system and not a farming technique. I think he
> was getting at this: if Permaculture is really some great design system for
> creating human habitats that provide for human needs while being
> ecologically regenerative, then show us the results. Show us all the small
> and mid-scale farms that are feeding hundreds or thousands of people, where
> the farms were designed by a permaculture practitioner. Then if you look at
> Andy's response, he says that Permaculture is the basis of Lion's
> microfarm, even though Lion's farm began before the word was even coined.
>
> We've got over 7 billion people to feed and house. Permaculture has been
> around since 1974. Let's call it 40 years. That means there are a lot of
> designers out there now for a reasonably long period of time. Let's take
> just Toby's numbers here and extrapolate. He's trained 2300 people to be
> permaculture designers. They have each had somewhere between 1 and 15 years
> to make and implement designs. Let's say these 2300  people have
> collectively done 50,00 designs. Now let's count how many people are being
> fed by these 50,000 designs. Oh but wait, only 10% actually became
> designers, so let's just add another 10 Tobys into the discussion, so that
> there were 23000 PDC graduates and then 2300 designers.
>
> Let's count how many profitable farms there are out there now that were
> designed through this design system. It would stand to reason that if all
> these designers had all this time to do all these designs, we would have
> hundreds or thousands of permaculturally designed farms collectively
> feeding hundreds of thousands of people by now. But we don't. So either
> Lion's measure is off, or the design system is off, or the implementation
> of the designs are off, or permaculture designer's aren't designing farms.
> Or some other reason. Toby is a super smart and articulate guy who's taught
> the PDC curriculum. It's no reflection on Toby that permaculture designs
> are not feeding all that many people.
>
> Let's say it costs $10 a day to eat. So $3650 a year. Then a permaculture
> farm with $100K annual sales feeds the equivalent of about 27 people. How
> many $100K permaculture farms can we list?
>
> If so many designers have had so much time and produced so many designs,
> why has it had so little impact on farming and on how people really eat?
> That is I think Lion's question from 15 years ago, and it still merits a
> response.
>
> It's pretty easy to debunk the claim of permaculture as pyramid scheme. I
> hope Toby and others will consider tackling these other questions too.
>
> Paul
>
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