PERMACULTURE HAS ITS GENESIS in the visionary work of J. Russell
Smith, J. Sholto Douglas, Robert Hart, and others less well known, who,
two generations ago and more, realized the urgency of transforming the
basis of agriculture through the use of trees and other perennial
crops. They saw the progressive devastation of land that followed the
plow and knew that only by integrating forestry and farming could man's
impact on the Earth be tempered and hope for humanity's future be
secured into the next century. Following the revelations of ecologist H.
T. Odum (I) on the problem of energy, a third leg was added to this
vital synthesis as David Holmgren so trenchantly expounds in his essay
"Energy and Permaculture" (2). It was for Holmgren, a young student of
design at Hobart. Tasmania, and his unlikely mentor, Bill Mollison a
bushman turned university professor, to set forth a systematic and
practical approach to implementing these new understandings.
Permaculture emphasized redesign of the domestic landscape or
self---reliance, building the genius of the local and the individual
into this triune and revolutionary shift.
Though widely accepted by both traditional and post-modern peoples
around the world, permaculture has been largely ignored by governments
and institutions, to which its essential message is anathema. The vacuum
of official support has obscured the scope and extent of this revolution
in man's relation to the land. It is important therefore, for those of
us promoting permaculture concepts and systems to realize that the
elaboration of the permaculture design system, though original to
Holmgren and Mollison, was neither isolated nor unique, but contemporary
with a range of parallel creative work in other western countries.
Rummaging my bookshelf for inspiration on energy in preparation for this
issue, I came across evidence for a similar ideation in a slender thesis
by Ida and Jean Pain, Another Kind of Garden. First published in 1973
and in a fifth edition by 1979, this little book documents the work and
methods of M. Pain with brushwood compost.
A Little-Known Visionary
Pain was a citizen scientist in Occitania, that fabled and historic
region in the south of France, whose political fate has long been
submerged within the French state, but whose spirit is still restive.
Contemporary with Bill Mollison. Pain was concerned with the devastation
of the Mediterranean forest by fire, a terminal process of
dehumification of soils that began thousands of years ago with the
introduction of grazing animals and cereal cropping. He experimented
with the production of compost from brushwood thinnings of the
/garrigue, /France's sclerophyllic (dry loving) southern forest. By
progressive applications of this compost and careful mulching to retain
moisture, Pain demonstrated and recorded in great detail that high
quality vegetables could be grown without irrigation in these dry soils.
He further speculated that the forest itself could he regenerated by
selective use of the same material.
What sets Jean Pain apart from Sir Albert Howard or other advocates of
compost for gardening are two important elements, First. Pain placed the
source of humic material in the forest and not in agriculture. In this
way Pain pointed to a way of making productive the vast scrubland and
dry forest regions of the sub-temperate and sub-tropic regions, areas of
the planet blessed by abundant sunshine and long occupied by humans, but
whose soils were exhausted before the modern age. Second, motivated by a
profoundly post-modern understanding of global resource limits, he
concerned himself with the production of industrially useful energy from
this basic earth resource. In this way he offers a bridge between
traditional livelihoods based in shifting cultivation or nomadic
herding, and a more modern, prosperous, and settled way of life. He also
shows westerners a way out of the dilemma of dependence on fossil fuels.
Why then have we not a better knowledge of this important man and his
work? The answers are several and should surprise us little. Jean Pain
worked independently in a rural region. He was affiliated with no
university or government. Though French is a world language, it is no
longer the leading tongue of science and has been eclipsed by English as
the lingua franca of cultural innovation. Pain's small, didactic volume
was self-published, and its translation into English was awkward, the
text difficult to read. Though Pain networked with other researchers in
francophone Europe and in California, the extent of his outreach appears
to have been limited. He was essentially an agronomic scientist and
inventor, without the personality which might have enabled him to
publicize and propagate his ideas. And, more broadly, his creative work,
like so much innovation in energy technology, was marginalized by the
worldwide conservative reaction of the l980's which sought to deny the
implications of the oil shocks of the previous decade.
Let's look at Jean Pain's methods and try to assess what sort of legacy
he has left us as we enter the 21st century.
--
Keith Johnson
"Be fruitful and mulch apply."
Permaculture Activist Magazine
PO Box 5516, Bloomington, IN 47408
(812) 335-0383 http://www.permacultureactivist.net
also Patterns for Abundance Design & Consulting
also Association for Regenerative Culture
also APPLE-Bloomington (Alliance for a Post-Petroleum Local Economy) It's a
small world after oil. http://www.relocalize.net/groups/applebloomington
also Bloomington Permaculture Guild
[permaculture] Jean Pain and Com-Post-Modernism,
Keith Johnson, 12/24/2006