What is Permaculture?

Since this blog is dedicated to my personal delve into permaculture, I feel that it is first important for me to define just what permaculture is. Since I am a novice to the world of permaculture, I am going to use what I learned from Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway to help me out.

Origins

According to Hemenway, permaculture uses a set of principles and practices to design sustainable human settlements. In fact, it stems from the words "permanent culture" and "permanent agriculture". In the 1950s, man named Bill Mollison (who later became the author of Permaculture: A Designer's Manual) was inspired when observing marsupials in Tasmanian rain forests. He noticed the abundance and how interconnected the ecosystem was and wrote "I believe that we could build systems that would function as well as this one does". In the 1970s, his student David Holmgren, began to identify the principles that made the systems they had observed in nature and in indigenous cultures so rich and sustainable. They wanted to apply these principles to design ecologically sound, productive landscapes. And that's how permaculture began. If you think about it, other animal species, and even indigenous human species have lived in harmony on this earth for a long time. Why is it that we now are faced with serious threats such as global warming, starvation, over-population, lack of resources, etc.? It is because for too long we have reaped the benefits of nature in a very one-sided way. Continuing down this path will lead to our extinction, and possibly the extinction of all life on earth. Now I'm not suggesting that we all need to go back to living off the land, hunting and gathering and not using technology. No, that's not what I'm saying at all. In fact, that would still probably be pretty detrimental to the planet...there is just too many of us now. What I am saying is that we need to find a way to give back to nature in all the things we do; to live in harmony. We need to find ways of producing food that doesn't suck out all the nutrients from the earth and leave huge fields of grass that are essentially deserts since they are so void of nutrients that they need to be pumped with artificial fertilizers to function as anything useful. And there is a way to do this, and it actually takes less work in the long run because nature wants to help...we just have to have the patience to try and to do things on a smaller, more local scale, using nature as a guide. And that is permaculture.

A Few Definitions

Permaculture has been defined as many things since it has originated, and that's probably because it is rather vague and is practiced in so many different ways. Here are a few ways that Hemenway defines permaculture:

A set of tools for designing landscapes that are modeled after nature, yet include humans (Hemenway pg. 5).

If we think of practices like organic gardening, recycling, natural building, renewable energy, and even consensus decison-making and social-justice efforts as tools for sustainablility, then permaculture is the toolbox that helps us organize and decide when and how to use those tools. Permaculture is not a descipline in itself but rather a design approach based on connecting different disciplines, strategies, and techniques. It, like naure, uses and melds the best features of whatever is available to it (Hemenway pg. 5). 

The aim of permaculture is to design ecologically sound, economically prosperous human communities. It is guided by a set of ethics: caring for the Earth, caring for people, and reinvesting the surplus that this care will create (Hemenway pg. 6).

Still confused? To  me, permaculture is a collection of tools and methods to guide us to live in harmony in nature. Whether it be gardening in a sustainable way so that not only humans reap the benefits of the fruit, but so does the soil, the plants and the animals. Or whether it is building a large, vertical building that houses more people without having to destroy as much of the environment because it takes up last of the earth's surface, that harnesses energy from the sun, wind, or water to power it, and that utilizes some of its space to supply for the people within. Permaculture is the way forward to reconnecting with the earth, and it can be done in very small steps with your very own home. Watch me try...perhaps you should too.

Permaculture Principles and Ethics

I know I've already blabbed on quite a bit, and you probably have a pretty good idea of what permaculture entails, but I feel obligated to include these permaculture principles. These principles are not just guides to tell you how to design your garden, or how to power your house. These principles are intended to guide you in how you live; the decisions you make daily. I happen to think they are wonderful principles to live by, and would encourage you to at least read through them once and consider them. These are the principles I will keep in mind as I begin to redesign my home (Hemenway pgs. 6-7):
 
Ethics:

1. Care for the Earth
2. Care for People
3. Return the Surplus

Primary Principles for Functional Design:

1. Observe. Use protracted and thoughtful observation rather than prolonged and thoughtless action. Observe the site and its elements in all seasons. Design for specific sites, clients, and cultures.
2. Connect. Use relative location: Place elements in ways that create useful relationships and time-saving connections among all parts. The number of connections among elements creates a healthy, diverse ecosystem, not the number of elements.
3. Catch and store energy and materials. Identify, collect, and hold useful flows. Every cycle is an opportunity for yield, every gradient (in slope, charge, heat, etc.) can produce energy. Re-investing resources builds capacity to capture yet more resources.
4. Each element performs multiple functions. Choose and place each element in a system to perform as many functions as possible. Beneficial connections between diverse components create a stable whole. Stack elements in both space and time.
5. Each function is supported by multiple elements. Use multiple methods to achieve important functions and to create synergies. Redundancy protects when one or more elements fail.
6. Make the least change for the greatest effect. Find the “leverage points” in the system and intervene there, where the least work accomplishes the most change.
7. Use small scale, intensive systems. Start at your doorstep with the smallest systems that will do the job, and build on your successes, with variations. Grow by chunking.

Principles for Living and Energy Systems:

8. Optimize edge. The edge—the intersection of two environments—is the most diverse place in a system, and is where energy and materials accumulate or are tranformed. Increase or decrease edge as appropriate.
9. Collaborate with succession. Systems will evolve over time, often toward greater diversity and productivity. Work with this tendency, and use design to jump-start succession when needed.
10. Use biological and renewable resources. Renewable resources (usually living beings and their products) reproduce and build up over time, store energy, assist yield, and interact with other elements.

Attitudes:

11. Turn problems into solutions. Constraints can inspire creative design. “We are confronted by insurmountable opportunities.”—Pogo (Walt Kelly)
12. Get a yield. Design for both immediate and long-term returns from your efforts: “You can’t work on an empty stomach.” Set up positive feedback loops to build the system and repay your investment.
13. The biggest limit to abundance is creativity. The designer’s imagination and skill limit productivity and diversity more than any physical limit.
14. Mistakes are tools for learning. Evaluate your trials. Making mistakes is a sign you’re trying to do things better.

Conclusion

If you take nothing else away from this post, at least go away understanding this: that my goal is to find a way to have my family live more in harmony with nature, however tedious and difficult the journey may be. This blog will document my journey, and hopefully inspire you to try the same.

Where to Begin?

As a new homeowner (we just bought our first house this winter), one of the things I am most excited about is having a yard to beautify. After years and years of dreaming about secret gardens, bird sanctuaries and sweet little reading nooks hidden under the fruit trees where I can glance up occasionally to see a friendly, nearby chipmunk nibbling on a chestnut, I can finally start making this dream a reality. Saying I am excited is drastic understatement. I am ecstatic, blissful, rapturous, elated, overjoyed...euphoric even. But I am also overwhelmed. With such big dreams come lots of work and lots of expenses. And then there is the scary question of "where to begin?"

To prepare myself for this spring, the time when I can really dig in...quite literally, I've been reading Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture (second edition) by Toby Hemenway. To many, this book is considered "the Bible" for permaculture, as the book clearly outlines the necessary steps to create a flourishing backyard ecosystem, which is essentially my goal. To me, this book is sort of the instruction manual on how to put together my dream yard, and while it is absolutely informative and amazing in every way, quite frankly it is overwhelming. If I thought I had big dreams before, I'm not sure what I have now. A fantasy perhaps? I'm not saying its a fantasy because I am afraid of the work it will entail, but a fantasy because we really don't have a lot of money, and we especially don't have excess money to put into creating heaven on earth. So while part of me wants to follow the book step by step and do everything just so, another part of me (the part I must listen to) is telling me that I must be creative and find inexpensive ways of eventually reaching the same vision. Which brings me back to the same question...where the heck do I begin??

Well, I've made some progress in that regard. First, I've decided to write this blog. Having a place where I can collect my thoughts, report the findings of my research, and share my accomplishments will be not only a great motivator for me, but also a very satisfying way for me to keep track of how well I am reaching my goal. I also hope to attract like-minded readers who will answer my questions and share their experience with me because certainly a bushel of minds is better than one novice mind.

Second, I am going to continue to read Gaia's Garden, and do my best to follow his advice to the best of my ability, using creativity to help me when suggestions seem too daunting or expensive.

Third, I have started to attract birds to my yard by simply installing a couple bird feeders and putting up a a couple birdhouses that my husband, who I shall henceforth refer to as Hunkcules (both for our family's protection and my personal amusement), built for me. With these small acts, I hope that at least some small birds will make their way over to our home and find a small bit of sanctuary at end of this harsh, cold, New England winter. I promise to tell you more about these bird feeders and bird houses in future blog posts, but for now please be satisfied in knowing that after having our feeders up for a month, yesterday we attracted our very first visitor, and Hunkcules and I are both filled with excitement and hope for the biodiversity utopia we daydream about. It's silly, but it's true.

A chickadee; our very first visitor

So if you are at all interested in permaculture (don't worry, I'll explain all about what that means in another post if you don't already know what I'm talking about), attracting wildlife to your yard, gardening, raising animals in your backyard, do it yourself projects, conservation ecology, creating beautiful spaces, and/or living in harmony with nature, than please follow my blog. As I begin this adventure with a blank slate, I can't wait to share my progress with you and am looking forward to your insight.