(Comments in first transcript by Dan Hemenway (D.H.), in second transcript by Thomas Fischbacher (T.F.))
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I don't think [2] anybody has summarized[3] what is happening on the face of the Earth.
In order to change our ways, we seem to need to terrify ourselves, anticipating tidal waves and catastrophes[4]. Now those things may come off, and the San Andreas fault may shift. But we can't do much about that[5]. What is really happening is something for which we, as human beings, are personally responsible. It is very general. Almost everything we say applies everywhere.
The real systems that are beginning to fail are the soils, forests, the atmosphere, and nutrient cycles. It is we who are responsible for that. We haven't evolved anywhere in the west (and I doubt very much everywhere else except in tribal areas) any sustainable systems in agriculture or forestry. We don't have a system. Let's look at what is happening.
Forests
Forests have been found to be far more important to the oxygen cycle than we ever suspected. We used to think oceans were the most important element. They are not. Not only are they not very important, contributing probably less than 8% of the oxygen in atmospheric recycling, but many are beginning to be oxygen-consuming[6]. If we release much more mercury into the seas, the ocean will be oxygen-consuming. The balance is changing. Therefore, it is mainly the forests that we depend on to preserve us from anarchic condition[7].
Of the forests, some are critically important, like the evergreen forests, of which there are two extensive systems. One is equatorial, multispecies; and the other, cool evergreen forests. Rain forests are critically important in the oxygen cycle, and in atmospheric stability.
The forests also provide a very large amount of our precipitation. When you cut the forest from ridges, you can observe the rainfall itself fall between 10% and 30%, which you could probably tolerate. What you don't see happen is that precipitation may fall over 86%, the rainfall being only a small fraction of the total precipitation[8]. It is quite possible on quiet, clear nights with no cloud, no rainfall recorded anywhere on any gauges, to have a major precipitation in forest systems. It is particularly true of maritime climates. Bit it is also true of all climates. Therefore it is possible to very rapidly produce semi-desert conditions simply by clearing trees from ridge top. This is being done at a great rate.
It is the character of forests to moderate everything[9]. Forests moderate excessive cold and heat, excessive run-off, excessive pollution. As forests are removed, immpderate extremes arrive. And of course, it is the forests that create soils. Forests are one of very few soil-creating systems.
What is happening to forests? We use a great many forest products in a very temporary way - paper and particularly newspaper. The demand has become excessive. At present, we are cutting one million hectares per annum in excess of planting. But in any one month that can rapidly change. Last month, for instance, that doubled because of clearing the Mississippi bottom land forests for soy beans[10].
Of all the forests that we ever had, as little as 2% remain in Europe. I din't think there is a tree in Europe that doesn't exist because of the tolerance of man or that hasn't been planted by man. There is no such thing as a primeval European forest[11]. As little as 8% remain in South America. And 15%, I think, is a general figure in other areas. So we have already destroyed the majority of forests, and we are working on a rather minor remnant. Cutting rates vary, depending on the management practices. But in general, even in the best managed forests, we have a constant loss of 4%, giving 25 more years to go[12]. But in fact, what we observe throughout Southwest Asia and in South America, and throughout the Third World, and wherever multinationals can obtain ownership of forests in the Western world, is about 100% loss. It is a "cut and run" system.
We have long been lulled into a very false sense of security by reassurances that the logging companies are planting eight trees for a tree cut[13]. What we are really interested in is biomass. When you take something out of the forest in excess of 150 tons and put something back which doesn't weigh much more than 10 ounces, you are not in any way preserving biomass.
What are the uses to which we put forests? The major uses are as newsprint and packaging material. Even the few remaining primeval forests are being cut for this. Forests that had never seen the footsteps of man, that had never experienced any human interference, are being cut for newsprint. Those are forests in which the trees may be 200 feet (60 meters) to the first branch, gigantic cathedrals. They are being chipped. There are trees in Tasmania much taller than your redwoods. These are being cut and shipped out as chips. So, for the most part, we are degrading the primeval forests to the lowest possible use[14].
That has effects at the other end of the system. Waste products from forests are killing large areas of the sea. The main reason why the Baltic and Mediterranean and the coast off New York have become oxygen-consuming is that we are carpeting the sea bottom with forest products. There are, broadly speaking, about 12.000 billion tons of carbon dioxide being released annually by the death of forests. We are dependant on the forests to lock up the carbon dioxide. In destroying forests, we are destroying the system which should be helping us. We are working on a remnant of the system. It is the last remnant which is being eroded.
Climate
The effects of this on world climate are becoming apparent both in the composition of the atmosphere and in the inability of the atmosphere to buffer changes. In any month now, we wil break the world weather records in some way. In my home town, we are very isolated and buffered by ocean and forest. But we had in succession the windiest, the driest, and the wettest month in history, in two hundred years of recording. So really what's happening in the world climate is not that it is tending toward the greenhouse effect; it is not that it is tending toward the ice age; it is starting now to fluctuate so wildly that it is totally unpredictable as to which heat barrier you will crack. But when you crack it, you will crack it an an extreme and you will crack it very suddenly. It will be a sudden change. Until then, we will experience immense variability in climate[15].
That is what is happening.
We can just go cutting along, and in maybe twelve more years we won't have any forests.
There is still another factor. It would be bad enough if it were just our cutting that is killing forests. But since the 1920's, and with increasing frequency, we have been loosing species from forest to a whole succession of pathogens. It started with things like chestnut blight. Chestnuts were 80% of the forests that they occupied. So a single species dropping out may represent enormous biomass, enormous biological reserve, and a very important tree. Richard St. Barbe Baker[16]. pointed out that the trees that are going are those with the greatest leaf area per unit. First chestnuts, with maybe sixty acres of leaf area per tree[17]. Then the elms, running at about forty. Now the beeches are going, and the oaks, the eucalypts in Australia and Tasmania. Even the needle leaf trees in Japan are failing. The Japanese coniferous forests are going at a fantastic rate. So are the Canadian shield forests and the Russian forests.
The Phasmid Conspiracy
Now we come to a thing called the phasmid[18] conspiracy. Each forest varies in each country in that its elms, its chestnuts, its poplars, its firs, are subject to attack by specific pathogens. Insects are taking some sort of cauterizing measures. The American reaction would be to spray; the British reaction would be to fell and burn; and in Australia, the reaction is to say: "Aah, what the Hell! It's going to be gone next year; let it go!"
Really, is it these diseases? What are the diseases? Phasmids are responsible for the death of eucalypts. There is the cinnamon fungus. In elms, it's the Dutch elm disease[19]. In the poplars, it's the rust. And in the firs, it's also rust. Do you think that any of these diseases are killing the forest?
What I think we are looking at is a carcass. The forest is a dying system on which the decomposers are beginning to feed. If you know forests very well, you know that you can go out this morning and strike a tree with an axe. That's it. Or touch it with the edge of a bulldozer, or bump it with your car. Then, if you sit patiently by that tree, within three days you will see that maybe twenty insects and other decomposers and "pests" have visited the injury. The tree is already doomed. What attracts them is the smell from the dying tree. We have noticed that in Austra- lia. Just injure trees to see what happens. The phasmids come. The phasmid detects the smell of this. The tree has become its food tree, and it comes to feed.
So insects are not the cause of the death of forests. The cause of the death of forests is multiple insult. We point to some bug and say: "That bug did it." It is much better if you can blame somebody else. You all know that. So we blame the bug. It is a conspiracy, really, to blame the bugs. But the real reason the trees are failing is that there have been profound changes in the amount of light penetrating the forest, in pollutants, and in acid rain fallout. People, not bugs, are killing the forests.
Soils[20]
As far as we can make out, we have lost 50% of the soils we have ever had before 1950. We have been measuring pretty well since 1950. And we have lost another 30% of the soils that remain. Now this is as true of the Third World as it is in the Western World[21].
The rate at which soils are created is at about four tons per annum per acre - much less in dry areas. Soils are created by the fall of rain and the action of plants. The rate varies. In the desert, they are being created at a much lesser rate. But in these humid climates, at about four tons per acre. If you don't loose any more than four tons of soil per acre per annum, you are on a break-even.
But let us look at the usual thing. In Australia, we lose about 27 tons of soil per cultivated acre per annum. You do a lot better than that in America, however. Where you grow corn, you can loose as much as 400 tons per acre per annum[22]. While the average may be twenty, it will go as high as 400 or 500 tons. So we are not doing too well. In Canada, they are measuring the humus loss, and that is about the same. There, they are running out of humus. In the prairies, where they started with good humic soils, they are now down to a mineral soil base. Here is something that should be of interest to each of us. For every head of population - whether you are an American or an East Indian - if you are a grain eater, it now costs about 12 tons of soil per person per year for us to eat grain. All this loss is a result of tillage. As long as you are tilling, you are losing. At the rate at which we are losing soils, we don't see that we will have agricultural soils within a decade.
Apart from the soils that we lose directly by tillage, we are losing enormous quantities of soils to what is called desertifica- tion. In the state of Victoria, in Australia, we lose 800,000 acres this year to salt[23]. That means not only a loss of soils which are tilled, but also a loss of the soils that we don't till.
Deforestation Causes Soil Loss
Now the main reason for disappearance of soils is the cutting of forest. And almost always the cutting of the forest is remote from where the soil is lost. That is, you can do nothing if your soil starts to turn salty here, because the reason lies way up the watershed, maybe a thousand miles away. We are now starting to get soil salting in humid climates in Australia. It is becoming a "factor out of place." It is no longer only occurring in deserts. It occurs in quite humid, winter-wet climates. How did this happen?
It is not a simple process, but it is easily understood. The rain, as it falls on hills and penetrates forests, has a net downward transfer. If we remove forests, we now have a net evaporation loss. Forests transmit clean water downward, and they release clean water into the atmosphere. This net downward transfer carries with it the salts which are an inevitable part of that additional four tons of soil per acre which is produced from breakdown of rocks[24]. These salts normally travel on out in deep leads. They are not surface systems. Fresh water runs from the surface and soaks down. Even in humid climates, we have much saltier water at depth than we have on the surface. This is because the trees act as pumps to keep the leads low.
If we cut the trees down, the deep leads rise at a measurable rate, and they are rising measurably across enormous areas in America, Africa and Australia. When they are up to about three feet below the surface, the trees start to die of "phasmids." And when they are up to about 18 inches below the surface, other crops start to die. When they reach the surface, they evaporate and the soil visibly goes to salt[25]. Then the Australian government starts providing free pumps to farmers and they start pumping out the salt water. Where can they discard the water they pump out? Big problem!
The next step is to have concrete delivered, so now water diverted from the rivers soaks into the soil while they are pumping the salt water off to the sea. And they have to be doing that forever. You now want a thousand thousand pumps. At the same time that the government is supplying pumps to farmers, it is leasing additional wood-chipping licenses to the multinationals, who are doing very well. They are selling pumps on one hand and wood chips on the other. It is a happy circumstance for some people, but a catastrophe for the Earth.
Most people, however, aren't doing very well at all. So we are losing soils and increasing desert at a simply terrifying rate. And that is without any plowing for agriculture. You ask if the analysts of the multinational firms are aware of these problems? No, they have degrees in economics and business management and all sorts of irrelevant areas.
Mining is also a major factor in salting on a local basis, and has accounted on its own for the loss of whole hardwood forests in areas of Western Australia and no doubt elsewhere. Mining brings up a lot of residues which are evaporated on the surface.
Highways, Cities and Wells
The largest single factor in Britain causing loss of soils is the construction of highways. It is also a major factor in America. In Britain, I think that there is a mile of highway for every square mile of surface[26]. And highways are being rapidly extended on the supposition that you will never need the soil and that highways will enable you to increase energy use. Highways account for the permanent loss of soils, as do cities.
Cities are located on the 11% of very good soils of the Earth. Canada is an interesting example, where cities are liable to obliterate the top quality soils, without any other factor, and in this decade, leaving agriculturalists to move on to less sustainable situations[27]. At the same time, we are calling for at least sus- tained production, and in some cases an increase of production, on the soils that remain. As the loss of agricultural soils is largely due to the excess application of energy - mechanical energy and also chemical energy - then the fact that we are attempting to sustain productivity on the remaining soils means that the rate of loss must increase due to the fact that we use more and more energy on less and less surface.
Other factors work for loss of soils. In the arid southwest of this country, there is a sort of cut and run agriculture in which you sink a bore [drill a well] and pump up semi-saline water to annual cultivated crop. You keep this up for four years. By then the surface is heavily mineralized and you must seek another area and sink another bore, which results in a sort of carpeting destruction. You can see it. There are two or three good years, then returns fall below economic level. The soils are usually glued together with carbonates and they give up. pH rises by about two points per annum. You might start at pH 8 and rapidly go to pH 11. It is then that you pull out.
We look now at wind deflection of soils. This has brought about failure of the inland soils in America. There are soils blowing out to Los Angeles and falling as red rain. Soils from Central Australia marginal areas fall on the cities as a sort of finely diluted mud, measurable at 12 tons per acre per day. Wind is a major factor in soil loss. The drier it gets, the more wind becomes the factor that we look to.
We don't have to look any further than the soil, or any further than the forest, to see a finite world. I think we can say with confidence that we don't have a sustainable agriculture anywhere in the world, or a sustainable forestry.
Water
Let us move now to water. Even a decade ago, somebody said that water would become the world's rarest mineral. The water table everywhere is now falling rapidly. These are very ancient systems we are playing with. Many of them are about 40,000 years in evolution. No longer is there any way you can get cheap surface water. If you could, Los Angeles would buy it and use it. A major factor in this is the way we seal everything over in cities and towns. We don't get any recharge of soil water. We seal over huge areas with highways. We don't return water to the water table at all. As soon as water is in a river or creek it is gone. It is on its way to the sea, or it is evaporated on the desert salt pan. The flowing river is not really a very useful thing. It is on the way out.
There are two very critical areas for water. One is within cities[28]. The other is on the edge of deserts. Both are running into real trouble. Encroaching deserts are killing some millions of people now in Africa. It is visible from the air as migrations of herds and people out of the Sahara.
One of the dangers has been the long term disposal of atomic waste in the deep waters. Some of these are beginning to seep through the Sacramento Valley. You had better start counting the radioactivity coming in the water table in Maine, New Jersey and California, and, I have an idea, in lots of other places as well.
Industry has simply used deep bores to put dangerous wastes into the water table with the result that large areas of this water table have become unpotable. I think Boston has ceased to use its ground water. And you'll never be able to use it again. There will be no way you will ever clean that foul water.
In many towns and cities now, water is running at 700 parts per million dissolved salts, which is at about the limit of the tolerance of the human kidney. At 1100 parts per million, you would experience fainting, accumulation of water in the tissues all sorts of problems. Most deaths from that commonly occur in the cities, in Perth and Adelaide in Australia, in Los Angeles. In all these areas, perhaps, we shouldn't be using water for drinking. It's ok to shower in, although in Atlanta, the chlorine alone almost asphyxiates you when you shower. PCB's are a cause of sterility. I think about 20% of American males are now sterile by age 20.
The fact that water is becoming a scarce resource is manifestly ridiculous, because roughly half a million gallons fall on this roof right here annually. But you could be very short of water here soon unless you build tanks or surface storages to catch the water.
Now, of course the loss of trees has a pronounced effect on this increased scarcity of water in cycle. The water is not cycling. We are losing water on the surface of the Earth. I think that 97% of water is locked up at all times and only 3% goes into any cycling at all. We are reducing that very rapidly.
There are yet other factors. There is industrial pollution. There is a desperate scramble for energy sources, whether they are wood, coal, oil or atomic power. These are all really dangerous things to use in terms of the general life system. We are going toward real trouble. The danger is mainly in the end result - what comes out of the process, what goes up the chimneys. But in the case of wood, it is also the fact that you destroy a tree.
Chemicals. What can you say about them? Most every broad-scale release of chemicals has unforeseen and long term results. These chemicals include DDT, PCB's, dioxin and chlorine.
A Desperate Future
At the very least, we have a desperate future. Our children may never believe that we had surplus food. It is mainly because of utterly ridiculous things. The entire output of atomic power in the United States is exactly equivalent to the requirements of the clothes-drying machines.
I literally can't stand being on the American highway. To me it is almost like being in a prison of madness. I can stand the background; but I can't stand the highways in Canada or here. Driving like crazy people. Where are they going? And why are so many of them going in that direction? They are all fleeing something. I would like to inquire what is in those trucks that are tearing down the road. Is it something of no use at all? Or something which is present where it is going? And often I have seen trucks, apparently carrying identical cargo, going in opposite directions, carting it here and there. The drivers tell me that they are carrying widgets.
Now all of this, including the energy problem, is what we have to tackle at once. It can be done. It is possible. It is possible to make restitution. We might as well be trying to do something about it as not. We will never get anywhere if we don't do anything. The great temptation, and one in which the academic takes total refuge, is to gather more evidence. I mean, do we need any more evidence? Or is it time to cease taking evidence and to start remedial action on the evidence already in? In 1950, it was time to stop taking evidence and start remedial action. But the temptation is always to gather more evidence. Too many people waste their lives gathering evidence. Moreover, as we get more evidence, we see that things are worse than they had appeared to be.
Design for remedial action[29]
When we design for permanence, we go generally toward forests, permanent pastures, lakes and ponds, and non-tillage agriculture. That is our business. Until we get more clues as to what will be sustainable[30], that is what we have to play with.
Industrial water can be supplied from roofs. Settlements can use that water. America is simply short of tanks[31]. Now there are different sorts of tanks. One is the kind you put under the down-spout from the roof of your house. Tanks of another sort are the cheap tanks - earth tanks. Absolutely no problem. Always enough water for all our uses - fresh water, which we presently let go into the sea.
We have three ways of water storage. We can store it in the soils; we can store it in surface earth tanks, and we can store it in sealed catchments. For an agricultural situation, we will use the soils. For domestic situations, we will use earth tanks. They are very much cheaper. For every 5,000 gallons we can store in concrete tanks, we can store 250,000 in Earth tanks at the same cost[32].
We have legal and financial strategies. We can convert locally into far more self-reliant bioregions. The people who are doing that are adding greenhouses to their houses and doing their own gardening. There is an immense conversion going on. That's where we start, dealing with an acre.
Now the thing that we have ignored, not only turned our backs on but often fled from, is conversion of high level investment capital to these low energy systems. There are a whole set of strategies to do so that we are assembling as an "Earth banks" service. Some of these strategies will benefit our social happiness as well.
The only way we can do things fast is by making the least number of moves in the fastest possible time, and by very rapid delegation of work to people. There is no hope that we can get this done in the next five years if we keep it to ourselves. Therefore, I have come here to break the monopoly of the elite alternative in America. We have got to let experts loose on the ground. We need hundreds and hundreds of them. We don't want at any time to patent anything or to keep any information to ourselves, not even keep our jobs to ourselves. The time for that is gone. What we are involved in is a cooperative, not a competitive, system. There are a very few of us operating at this end of the system, therefore we have to act in a very efficient way in order to create the greatest amount of change in the shortest period of time.
I think we have an ethic here: to stop admiring the people who have money. There has to be a big ethical change. It is an interesting time to be living in. The big twist we have to make is away from our educational system. All the methodologies and principles we use arose as a result of observation of natural systems, and are stated in a passive way. The mind twist that has to be made to create permaculture is to realize that you can get hold of that and do it. We have to make our knowledge active. We have to move from a passive to an active thought level.
Agriculture is a destructive system.
What are the strategies by which we don't need agriculture? Agriculture is a destructive system. Well, we need a lot more gardeners. Gardeners are the most productive, most hands-on sort of agriculturists. They always have been. There never has been any debate about it. When you make a farm big, you just accept a suddenly lower productivity and yield, but less people get it. That is why it is economically "efficient." When you talk about efficient farming of this order, you are talking about dollars. When you reduce the size of the owned landscape, providing you don't reduce the lots to less than a quarter of an acre, the agricultural productivity goes up. You get a lot of arguments to the effect that breaking up large farms into five acre blocks is uneconomic. Five acre blocks are. One to one-quarter acre blocks are not. They are highly productive.[33]
Now gardeners... How many gardeners are there in the United States? Fifty-three percent of households now garden. They garden only 600 square feet on the average. They make something like $1.50 a square foot. These household gardens are producing 18% of the food in the United States, at a value almost equivalent to total agriculture.[34]
Now let's look at Russia. The peasant farmer, on a half-acre to an acre, is producing some 84% of the food. The state farms, which occupy most of the agricultural land, produce the remainder. But the state farms are not doing their job. They have a 6% deficit, which is shipped in from Canada or the United States. The glamorous agriculture, the large scale, broad scale agriculture, is not the agriculture that is producing the food.
We are now down to about 20 basic foods. The day of soybeans is probably arriving. You can make just about anything out of soybeans.
Control of Seeds
I don't think that there are very many seed companies left in the world that don't belong to a consortium of not more than 10 companies. It is certainly true in Australia. The seed is now being grown for and distributed by the multi-nationals. Can you buy a non-hybrid corn in the United States? Here and there. In Australia, we can't. But we do have one seed company. It is called Self-Reliance Seed Company in Stanley, Tasmania. Maybe we have two. [35]
The next move of the large seed-growing consortiums was to have been seed-patenting legislation. At this point, a lot of people started to get a bit suspicious. The patenting of biological materials was a slightly suspicious move. Then the World Council of Churches looked into the situation and produced Seeds of the Earth. The cat was out of the bag. So there has been a general ground-level revolt against takeover of a basic resource. Kent Whealy's Seed Savers Exchange is just one of these moves.
But one thing this may have taught is that you can't run away from systems. Holing up in two acres out in the New England forests isn't going to get you out of the system unless you are into a seed-growing operation and know exactly what you're doing. Most people do not. If you are training yourself to be a good gardener, there are still certain areas you just haven't got into, and seed growing is one of them. In one valley in Tasmania, among a group of hippies living there, you might find 50 Ph.D.s. Most of them are sitting home knitting or weaving or running around getting blackberries, just leaving it to the really ruthless people to get on with what they are doing. We must involve all our skills to organize life forces, not just a few.
In the permaculture garden, we must deal with the question of ways in which elements are to be placed. Some of these elements are manurial or energy-exchange systems for other elements; others are defensive elements that protect other plants in a whole set of ways; and some act as trellis systems for others or provide shade. So there are physical relationships involved and there are whole sets of rules that govern why certain elements are put together. And we understand some of these rules. A lot of them are quite obvious.
Diversity
Diversity isn't involved so much with the number of elements in a system as it is with the number of functional connections between these elements. Diversity is not the number of things, but the number of ways in which things work.[36] This really is the direction in which permaculture thinking is headed. I was sitting up one evening, studying how many connections are made by putting just two elements together, a greenhouse and a chicken coop. I think I came up with 129 sorts of beneficial connections. So what we are really talking about is not some grandiose complication of 3,000 species on a site.
It would be nice to make 3,000 connections between 30 species or 30 elements, with those connections defined as being beneficial or non-beneficial. You can see hundreds of examples, particularly in social groups, where diverse interests are not necessarily beneficial. Diversity of itself doesn't give you any stability or advantage.
So what we are setting up is a sort of guild of things that work harmoniously together. There are rules to follow on placement within the area. There are rules that have to do with orientation, with zonation, and with the interactions. There are whole sets of principles which govern why we put things together and why things work.
The agriculture departments have defined agricultural land. What they mean is land which can be tilled. But I don't see any landscape as being non-agricultural. There is a whole hierarchy of productivity in landscape, and it all can be used for production. So there are really two strategies for our consideration in agriculture. One is to find out what is the minimum level to which we can reduce agricultural practice, and to go about that. Another is to find the level at which we can increase the use of land termed non-agricultural for agricultural products.[37] There are all sorts of new games to be played. I am literally amazed how little these forests in America are used for sustained productive purposes, as forests.
Principles
Let us look at the sets of principles that govern these systems. These principles, rules and directives are based on the study of natural systems. Axioms are established principles or self-evident truths. A principle is a basic truth, a rule of conduct, a way to proceed. A law is a statement of fact backed up by a set of hypotheses which have proved to be correct or tenable. Theses and hypotheses are ideas offered up for proof or discussion. There are also rules and laws laid down which are neither rules or laws. They do not pay much attention to defining how they got there. Now I have evolved a set of directives which say: "Here is a good way to proceed." It doesn't have anything to do with laws or rules, just principles.
Energy, Source, and Sink
We deal with the Earth, which has a fairly constant energy input from other parts of the universe. We are dealing with energy which has a renewable source, the sun.[38]
Between the source and the sink is where we intervene. The more useful storages to which we can direct energy between the source and the sink, the better we are as designers. So what we are up to is making an efficient set of storages that are useful to man [sic.]. Some of these storages may be useful in the creation of other storages. The amount of complexity we can build into that flow, the amount that we can direct to useable storages in order to hold back energy until we start to use it, that's where the skill of the designer lies. Furthermore, a lot of energies unusable in a mechanical sense are usable in the biological sense. So we need biological as well as mechanical storages.[39]
Energy can be transferred from one form to another, but it cannot disappear or be destroyed or created. So we have a choice in the type of flow that we allow through the system. We can determine whether it is stored or whether we let it leave.
That is the choice we have with water, with rainfall. We can store it or we can let it leave; and if we let it leave, it becomes unavailable to us.
If we would recover it, there is a lot of work to making it available again. Engineers go down to the valley, because everybody can see there is water down in the valley. So they put a block in the valley and the water backs up behind it and you have water, a big lake down in the valley where it is least useful. Where it came from was up on the hills. Had the engineers stored the water where it came from, then they could have run it through all sorts of systems before they let it escape into the valley. The closer to the source that we can intervene, the greater use is the network that we can set up. So we edge up close to the source to start to intervene in the flow. It's not the amount of rainfall that counts, it is the number of duties we induce that water to perform that counts.
Not all energy that goes into the system is efficient. Whenev- er we change the line of energy, we lose a little. No matter how well we design, we must always lose a bit.
A lot depends on the maintenance of the global biological-chemical cycle of essential elements, particularly carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur and phosphorous. We are worried about some of these cycles.[40]
The probability of the extinction of a species is greatest when the density is very high or very low. There is a density dependence. You can see how high density is a dangerous thing for species because of very rapid transmission of plague resulting from the exhaustion of critical elements upon which the species depends. It is more difficult to see how very low densities are also critical situations. The factor of number is a factor ignored by most communes or communities.
I don't think we know of any society of man whose continuance depends on their own genetic health that can exist below 300 in population, and not even at that number without very rigorous genetic control. We are breeding for extinction in several areas. High density populations often also start to include an enormous range of genetic disasters or mutations.
It is possible to make small changes in a general system to bring about a higher chance of survival of the elements of the system, or high yield within the system. There is an horrific statement called the over-run thesis which says: "Our ability to change the face of the Earth increases at a faster rate than our ability to foresee the consequences of that change."
And there is the life-ethic thesis, which says that living organ- isms and living systems are not only means but ends. In addition to their value to man, or their instrumental value to human beings, they have an intrinsic worth which we don't allow them. That a tree is something of value in itself, even if it has no value to us, that notion is a pretty foreign sort of thought to us. That it is alive and functioning is what is important.[41]
Resources
Resources are something you can feed into a system and increase its productivity, or its yield, or the number of useful storages. But if you continue beyond that point of productivity, then the system itself collapses. And that comes down to the statement that any integrated system can only accept that amount of energy that it can productively use. So you can over-manure anything, over-heat anything; you can over-plow anything.[42] Whether we are talking about money or manure, you can put too much of it in. What then happens is first you start to get less and less increase in yield and then more and more increase in a lethal factor. You can't continue to pour in more of the same thing and get a continued increase in yield.
A friend of mine went to Hong Kong. He ran a sort of energy budget on the city, paying a lot of attention to agriculture. He told me that the older Chinese agriculture (weeding by hand) produced, under very intensive conditions, using natural manures, about three times as much energy as it consumed. Then they modernized, utilizing small tractors, artificial fertilizer, and weeded by little hot jet flames. I think he said that they put 800% more energy in and got a 15% increase in yield. And then as they continued to pour in more energy, the yield decreased. By now they are into the same kick that we have. They only get 4% to 6% of that energy out again.
So agriculture went from an energy productive to an energy consuming system, just as the sea has gone from being oxygen producing to oxygen consuming, all because we are putting too much nutrient into it. You can do it to a pond very quickly and to a nation or a continent more slowly.
Then there are categories of resources that are of a totally different sort. There are resources which are unaffected by use. You can look at a beautiful view all day and it really doesn't affect the view. Information is such a resource.[43]
There is another category of things that is interesting in that they increase if you use them. The more you use them, the more that they increase. Some forms of browse fall into that category. Some categories of animals and plants increase each other by interaction, and some other categories of resource also do that. And some resources, particularly quick turnover resources, simply decrease if you don't use them. Annual grass is a good example. If not used, the amount of annual grass in the system decreases. To some extent, so does firewood in a fire-prone situation. It accumulates as a fuel for wildfire when all of it is consumed at once.
But most resources lie in the category of resources that need to be managed to maintain them. They are those which decrease if used. We will call them finite resources.
There is still another category made up of resources that, if you use them, decrease everything else. We have a good example of that in uranium or plutonium. Plutonium in use tends to lay waste to other resources and some of those uses are horrific. Things like dioxins[44], if used as a resource, start to decrease the general resource.
So resources have a sort of hierarchy of management and a hierarchy of being beneficial or not beneficial. Most of the things that make us happy either are very manageable or there are plenty of them. There a few things which we think we need, but which make us miserable.
I think we can pollute with time, and I expect that we can, also, with diversity. Just by putting a lot of things together, we might reach the stage where we pollute the system simply with diversity.
Petrol (gasoline) is a resource which has created disorder in Western society. I can't think when someone last productively used a gallon of gasoline. Nearly all of it is used non-productively. I used a pint or two once to destroy a nest of bull ants to which I am allergic. As far as I was concerned, that was productive. [45] I also do not know of a case in tractor economy where a machine produces more energy than it uses. You have to take the oil out of the ground, you have to refine it, you have to ship it. You argue that petrol fueled the jet upon which I traveled when I came over here. Right. But I came over here just so that you wouldn't have to go over there. It is true that petrol has some present uses - what I call restitutional uses. But generally speaking, the use of gasoline has resulted in terrible disorder. It reaches right into the social structure.
Chaos is really the opposite of harmony. It is conflicting competition and individualism. When everything is in chaos, if there are two or three of you going in one direction, you have to win, hands down, for everything else is really falling to pieces. So maybe we will win; maybe we are seizing an historic opportunity.
When we design, I keep coming back to what we do. We have a two-fold job: to recommend only the energies that are productive, energies that are not harmful, and to attempt to build harmony into functional organization, to pickup the pieces and make harmonious order.
We should not confuse order and tidiness. Tidiness is something that happens when you have frontal brain damage. You get very tidy. Tidiness is symptomatic of brain damage [46]. Creativity, on the other hand, is symptomatic of a fairly whole brain, and is usually a disordered affair. The tolerance for disorder is one of the very few healthy signs in life. If you can tolerate disorder, you are probably healthy. Creativity is seldom tidy.
Tidiness is like the painting of that straight up and down American with his fork and his straight rows. The British garden is a sign of extraordinary tidiness and functional disorder. You can measure it easily, but it doesn't yield much. What we want is creative disorder. I repeat, it is not the number of elements in a system that is important, but the degree of functional organization of those elements - beneficial functions.
Yield is the sum of useful energy stores. It is the sum of energy conserved and generated in systems. It is never just product yield, not the number of pounds of tomatoes, or pounds of fish, or of acorns - which is the normal way people have of measuring yield - but it is the sum of the energy in useful storages. Yield is a function of design, and it is theoretically unlimited. That is, I haven't seen a system where we can't, by better design, increase the yield.[47]
As the design itself is a function of our understanding of the system, so does the yield also depend upon the degree to which we understand things.[48] It is the intellect that decides all these things, rather than any extrinsic factors. I am not quite sure what the intellect is. I have put it as our ability to understand, which may not be intellectual but empathetical.
Between the source and the sink, diversity increases: energy stores may increase and organizational complexity may increase. Our job is to convert those pauses in the flux of some of those categories into beneficial resources. It is the number of niches in a system that will allow a number of species and varieties to co-survive. It is the woodpecker's hole within the forest.[49]
Now, again, the number of niches in a system depends on the design of the system. So now we have come to the active case. In situations which should be saturated with species, and with yield, we can make a vast difference by seeing where we can create more space, often by very small movements.[50] The numbers of pairs of pigeons breeding on a cliff depends on the number of ledges. It is easy to increase the ledges. Often, what is holding down a yield isn't the basic factor of food. In fact, food ceilings are very rare things to bump. It is some other factor totally unrelated to food. There are tons of food [acorns] around this environment [Wilton, New Hampshire], with nothing eating them.
What we must do is to see how things work, how different things work.
Tribal lore prescribes that one should only carry out necessitous acts, that non-necessitous behavior tends to be very destructive. The rest follows. Therefore, one apologizes for whatever one has to do and does it. But you don't see people doing unnecessary acts.[51]
Some time around 1952, I had a house in the bush, and I thought, as a curious thing to do, I wouldn't cut down a tree unless I had to. I never had to. But we could also live in the bush and cut trees down. Unfortunately, if you have money, it is hard not to. You are always doing something because you have to get rid of that money. Like petrol.
As I see it, tribal myth was a way to teach care of the environment. I believe that we are involved in a more complicated game than we had previously thought.
If you put fish and a set of algae in a pond, and one of those algae is particularly delicious, the fish chomp on the delicious algae until there are none of those left. Thus they disfavor them. Then the other algae, not palatable to the fish, increase, thereby controlling the fish, starving the fish out. Fish eats algae; algae destroys fish.
We let cattle go on landscapes, and the landscapes respond. The cattle disfavor plants that they like and thereby produce a system of plants that they don't like. That closes the landscape off to cattle. Some of those plants are poisonous to cattle. Time and time and time again, this is what we observe, that the landscape responds.
There is a response within the landscape against damaging things. I don't know how it works against one of these coal machines that chew up the Earth, but it probably has a long-term response, which may be acid rain. So, you don't push something without it sort of pushes back. We are into all this mechanical physics, which says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But the Chinese say, "No, that's not true." If you kick a living system, it kicks back harder. Its reaction is often unfairly oppressive. You might simply push someone out the door. That person re-enters with a pitch fork, not just pushing back in, but ready to poke holes in you.[52]
Now there are different sorts of acts. There are necessitous acts and harmful acts. But there are also beneficial acts. And that gives us another hypothesis - that you probably will get more good back than you design. And this seems also to be true. What has probably been happening from the beginning of a consciously designed system is that when we put three elements in conjunction so that they are pretty harmonious, other beneficial results come out that we didn't design. Now that has happened almost without exception.
This is something that isn't being taught: that once we have done one thing correctly it goes on and it proceeds to do a lot of other things by itself. This seems to be happening. So it looks like there is something going on there, and it is very hard to analyze. Sometimes, you make a single move, simple and right, which you intend to be beneficial, and you discover, if you stand back and observe it and leave it alone, that it goes on and gives you maybe another 10 benefits which you didn't count on. Then, if you look into it closely, although you put it together for a single reason - you had reasoned it out - you see that once you did that, there were 12 or 15 other reasons why you should have done it. I think we all know examples of this.[53]
When somebody clamped the greenhouse onto the front of the house instead of standing it out there in the sun, he may have done it for a single reason, to heat the house, perhaps, or simply to make it easier to tend it. But then lots of other good things came out of that.
We are not quite sure what they are doing, but the aboriginal groups go around polishing up their country with little ceremonies. They are fairly secretive about what they do, but certainly they are doing a little countryside adjustment. They have to do a little ceremony to keep the springs flowing along certain a mountainside. We laugh at them. We know those springs will flow whether they have a ceremony there or not. But if we take their religions away, the springs will stop flowing. You don't talk to idiots about advanced concepts. Anyway, they won't tell us much about what they know. I suppose they would worry about what we would do with the information.
So here is another whole way of thinking about things which I think we would find very productive, because it is a usable way to summarize a lot of things. We can make principles out of it, if we like. "Everything works both ways,"[54] is one of them. "If you do something right, it will do a lot more right itself," is another.
Now we have arguments as to whether we start from principles and to the real world, or - as I try to proceed - we go to the real world and get to principles. Do we look at what is really happening and sit down under a tree and think: "Well something like that is going on out here."? Or do we start going into nature and try to understand what is happening and then go to the garden? We have this argument about which way you proceed: Philosophy to garden or garden to philosophy. I think that there are people traveling both ways, people coming from the abstract to the garden and people coming from the garden to the abstract. Most of us are coming up out of the garden and heading towards the philosophy. A few have been up to the temple and are coming down to the garden.
I think, again, in our general education, and particularly in our primary education, that we get an awful lot of static phenomena taught to us, and cross sectional phenomena. But we are not taught interactive processes, and we are not taught much about the resonance of things. The real world that we live in is in constant flux. Things are on their way somewhere all the time. There isn't such a thing as a quiet picture of a natural phenomenon. Everything is on its way to other phases. Yet we teach things as sort of rigid truths. We are culturally blocked. It is because it is a scientific culture; we try to measure everywthing. There are different ways of coming at things. I can't handle symbols; some people cannot handle numbers; some cannot handle dimension. This is why it is beneficial to associate in small groups, just to try to bring different lights on the same truths, trying to comprehend the different shadows of reality. This dynamic is lacking in education.
There is something we ought to be sitting on the floor and talking about a lot. There is this harmonic that, if we could get hold of it, would give us a lot of understanding, a lot of control over events. Our job is to put things in the right place and then let them ripe. But to get one in the right place, we have to have a lot of information about it. Anything we are trying to place, whether it is a building or a tree or an animal or a road or a structure or a person, we have to know these things about it. We have to know its intrinsic functions, what is natural for it to do, the things it can't help doing by virtue of just being itself, being alive. Some animals and plants must spawn and they do that in different ways. Then there are things that we can categorize as yield, which we might be interested in. These may be of two or three levels or natures. There are what we might call direct yields. Chickens lay eggs. Then perhaps there are yields which are derived, secondary, or processed yields. Chicken manure will yield methane. And we have to know what the different yields are.
It also pays to know how elements function. They have behaviors, things that they do. They walk around or they sway about. They have properties. They will or will not reflect light. They have properties by reason of what they are. They have a color. They behave. They have a whole set of interactions and stimulus-response behaviors. Behaviors are short-term and long-term, too. Too often we comment on the short-term behavior of things, which isn't how they behave in the long term. Our science, and particularly psychology, suffers a great deal by not looking at the long-term behavior.
Now if we knew enough, if we had enough information, then a lot of these things could be listed for each element in the system, each entity. And then we could make a tremendous amount of design use of it. But they are not the things that are being listed as knowledge about the entities. You can obtain knowledge of almost anything about a tree except these things. Bad luck! Very little is known about the properties of a tree. As to the yield, it may be almost unknowable. I once tried to find out how people have used walnut trees. I found out that there is a people who base their whole culture on the walnut; other people may base their culture on bamboo. Or you can just take the walnuts by themselves. It is up to you.
If you have a fair idea of what is known about something, then you are able to place it so that it can function, so that its intrinsic function is possible to it. Then it will give its yields and its secondary yields can be taken advantage of, and it will behave in a friendly way because we put it near to things that are beneficial to it.
There is an enormous difference between the way we make a design in permaculture and the way an agriculturist would make it. Really, what we are up to is trying to let things function in a natural way.[55]
Comments
[1] A Frightening Introduction
(T.F.) Upon first reading of this chapter, it is very easy to get startled and emotionally involved to such an extent that one overlooks that this actually is not a collection of random bits and pieces selected with the main purpose of frightening the reader, but a very precise description and summary of those problems where action is most urgently needed, and why. It pays to re-read this chapter a few times after the first impression has worn off, and after one has read up on techniques in conjunction with advanced forest management, etc. These days, taking a close look just at fossil fuel depletion and climate change would be more than enough to frighten the hell out of pretty much anybody. Here, what is important is the `mapping overview' Bill gives over those issues Permaculture focuses most attention to, which is the essential resources water, soil, forests, food, biodiversity. While he does not mention it, what also is treated implicitly here -- and what permaculture largely is about -- is sane ways to make a living healing the earth, rather than being forced to live in a way that exploits primary production while at the same time defiling the very basis of civilization.
[2] I don't think...
(T.F.) Throughout these courses, which are a transcript of Bill talking, he uses a very colloquial style. Occasionally, one has to look out for a bit of wry humor that may be difficult to discover unless one tries to get an idea about the mood Bill may have been in when he talked to his students.
[3] summarized
(T.F.) As mentioned, this lesson is quite a precise summary of the structure-as-viewed-from-the-distance of the most pressing problems of the biosphere, certainly from the subjective viewpoint of Bill Mollison in 1981, but nevertheless remarkably accurate. In particular as he talks about many issues (such as erosion) most people are completely unaware of!
A quote from the book the brilliant astrophysicist Carl Sagan embarked upon writing as his legacy once he was diagnosed with cancer fits nicely with this issue:
"It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive waste, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth." (From: "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark")
[4] Terrifying
(T.F.) It is not clear whether Bill means that his intention is to terrify the reader to convince him of the importance to act, or whether this is meant just as a general statement on the collective behaviour of homo sapiens. Personally, I would like to add that fear more often than not is an extremely dangerous motivation for going to action, as it interferes most badly with our judgement. Reading contemporary mail exchange by people such as Feynman, it becomes clear that Fear was what made U.S. physicists develop nuclear weapons: Fear of the Nazis getting them first. (A much more reasonable conclusion to draw presumably would have been to invest more effort into sabotage rather than trying to build such a weapon of their own - and after all, a special allied sabotage unit destroyed Germany's Heavy Water plant in Norway in 1943.)
What we always have to keep in mind is that it is very difficult to judge some process when one is so deeply involved that obtaining an exterior perspective becomes impossible.
[5] Responsibility
(T.F.) Permaculture can be seen as the daring experiment of running a culture according to appropriate principles so that it it is not bound to eventually fail because of self-made problems. Between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D., the Garamantes have been an important regional power in the Sahara Desert, using slaves for extensive mining operations to extract (non-renewable) underground fossil water for irrigation. When these water supplies eventually ran out, the kingdom declined and fragmented. On the other hand, there are indications that the Kogi people in the mountains of Columbia, who call themselves "The Elder Brothers" (in distinction to the rest of mankind, who they call "younger brother"), indeed may have been around for such a long time that in their own terms, the Spanish invasion has been a very recent event. There is a tremendous variation in terms of how well different cultures manage their essential resources, and how long they therefore survive. Quite often, cultures fail due to mis-management of natural resources. Perma-culture is an attempt work out strategies to pay due attention to the management of crucial resources so that a culture need not fail as a result of self-made problems.
[6] Oxygen-consuming oceans
(T.F.) A good refereence that puts this statement into proper perspective and explains more about the details would be helpful here. As this is the transcript of a talk, this certainly is excusable. Unfortunately, this also happens in many places in the "Permaculture Designer's Manual": more references to sources of claims would often be helpful. What Bill presumably means here is that, when temperature increases too much, forest soil starts to release large amounts of CO2, making a forest effectively a source for atmospheric carbon rather than a sink.
[7] Environmental degradation and anarchic conditions
(T.F.) See e.g. background information on Richard St. Barbe Baker
.
[8] Precipitation and Forests
(T.F.) This is a very important statement! The role of forests for the water cycle cannot be understated. By clearing high forest and therefore severely interfering with the balance of the water cycle, the people of Hawaii managed to make the island of Kahoolawe un-inhabitable. (According to B.M.)
[9] Moderation
(T.F.) Weather extremes (such as for example late frosts) are one crucially important limitation to productivity. Lack of water is another. Forests moderate both, and much more. (One has to consider that about half of the mass of a living tree is biologically mobile water, so there is a lot of thermal mass standing around in our woods!)
[10] Soy Beans
(T.F.) To Bill Mollison, the soy bean seems to be an icon of "all that is going wrong in present-day agriculture". He refers to the deeper implications of soybean production quite often in his talks.
[11] Primeval European Forest
(T.F.) One may see subtle difficulties in the definition of what constitutes a primeval forest, but to be precise, there indeed still are some very small patches of primeval European forest, such as the Austrian Rothwald (about 40 km^2, which is about 15 square miles). Also, there is the Bialowieza Primeval Forest in Poland, of a size of about 1400 km^2 (540 mi^2), and presumably a few other tiny patches. In comparison, Forest would be the natural vegetation in our European climate, and taking Great Britan, virtually nothing of the original forest that covered its 260 000 km^2 (100 000 mi^2) remains.
[12] Primeval European Forest
(T.F.) Evidently, now in 2007 that these 25 years have passed, we have not run out of forests, so something profound must have been going on here. Looking back in history, deforestation was quite dramatic in the 70s, especially in Australia, where the export of woodchips was a rapidly growing industry. The Italian Nobel Laureate Dario Fo (1997, Literature) once stated that "geniuses grow out of a particular need for them" (or words to that effect), and so it is presumably not too surprising that, facing this dramatic situation, it was an Australian who came up with an integrated concept where things fall into the right places.
When viewed in this context with the particular historic background of Australia in the 70's, we presumably should forgive Bill these (from our present perspective) inaccuracies - or rather, we should be damn grateful he was not right on that issue!
The F.A.O. (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) provides data on annual deforestation rates at http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/005/Y7581E/y7581e16.htm, which make quite an interesting read (to some, at least). In the years 1990-2000, Haiti lost on average 5.7% of its forest per year, while Uruguay gained 5.0%. India gained 0.1%. However, numbers alone are not very useful without appropriate interpretation.
An interesting background article on Deforestation in Australia in the 70s is http://www.wrm.org.uy/deforestation/Oceania/Australia.html.
One general problem with the destruction of primeval forests is that we are interfering badly with a system that evolved into its present state over tens of thousands, maybe millions of years. So, this means in particular that, even when we grow trees where there once has been primeval forest, a lot of the biodiversity and hence resilience to external influences already has been irreversibly destroyed.
[13] Saplings
(T.F.) Of course, only a fraction of all saplings planted grow into mature trees. (I think Richard St. Barbe Baker mentioned a 1-in-6 ratio somewhere.)
[14] Lowest possible use
(T.F.) Common sense alone of course dictates making the best possible use of a scarce resource, degrading it only if necessary. This is a re-occurring theme in Permaculture.
[15] Climate Chaos
(T.F.) Bill presumably refers to general properties of a class of physical effects here known as "second order phase transitions". These are processes in which some of the general properties of a system change profoundly, but gradually. They differ in many ways from the much more well-known "first order phase transitions", such as the melting of ice and evaporating of water. One example for a second-order phase transition would be the gradual onset of magnetic order when a ferromagnet cools down below the Curie temperature. It is a general property of second-order phase transitions that as one comes close to them, fluctuations start to grow and get ever more violent. So, talking about so-and-so-many degrees of global warming may be seen as a red herring: the increasing frequency and violence of weather extremes is an even far more important problem than increasing temperatures!
[16] Richard St. Barbe Baker
(T.F.) This English forester (1899-1982) with the barely pronounciable name was widely known (for evident reasons) as the "Man of The Trees". It presumably can be safely claimed that so far, no person throughout history made a greater contribution towards the restoration of deserted and degraded land than Richard St. Barbe Baker (through the organizations he founded around the globe) - via tree planting programs.
Of special interest are reports of the Kenyan Mau Mau Uprising, where those regions that experienced considerable improvement of their natural capital through tree planting programs decades earlier remained comparatively peaceful, cf e.g. http://www.fao.org/docrep/91150e/91150e02.htm:
[Back to oceans]
(...)
In appreciation of the many years of devoted service of Chief Josiah
Njonjo I invited him to come to London in 1953 as my guest for the
Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. When his plane had touched down he
was interviewed by the British Broadcasting Corporation for their
daily programme, In Town Tonight:
"You are a Chief from Africa? " inquired the interviewer. "Yes"
said Josiah, "I hold King George's Gold Medal for long service and
now I have come to see his daughter crowned." "And what are the
duties of a Chief?" asked the man from the BBC. "The Chief is the
voice of the government to the people and the voice of the people to
the government." "Tell us about this Mau Mau business," said the
interviewer. "That is a long story," said the Chief, "and I am no
politician but I can tell you this. In my part of Kenya we have had no
trouble at all." "How do you account for that, Chief? " inquired the
interviewer. "Because over 30 years ago a forester taught us how to
plant and protect our native trees. We have kept the promise made to
him and so we have plenty of timber, plenty of fuel, plenty of clear
water and we have plenty of food, so no trouble."
(...)
Of course, this very short excerpt should only be seen as a starting point for further investigations, not a definitive final conclusion on the effectiveness of resource improvement programs to combat terrorism.
[17] Leaf Areas of Trees
(T.F.) Unfortunately I have very little detailed data on issues such as a tree's leaf areas, but from just standing under a few fully mature chestnuts, pacing out the radius of the crown and visually estimating the number of leaf layers in the tree (the "leaf area index"), I only can come to the conclusion that unless I grossly misunderstood something fundamental about the notion of "leaf area", Bill's numbers are way out of contact with reality (i.e. far too high) here. This is actually a somewhat discomforting re-occurring issue in particular with his "Permaculture Designer's Manual" as well: while all the underlying concepts and ideas seem to be quite sound and viable, the overall impression is to some extent marred by numbers and formulas that do not play an important role for the main text (such as the rough values of average leaf areas here), but are badly wrong. For example, the chemical formula for the hydroxy ion OH^- is consistently mis-printed in the P.D.M. (with two negative charges), the formula for Rutil (TiO2) is given as TiFe, a 90-degree slope is called a "100% slope" (100% actually would be 45 degrees), the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is given as "3-4%" in one place, etc. One place in the PDM where a major error has slipped in is in the chapter on "aquaculture" where an "18-fold yield gain" is reported for a specific fish bi-culture. Going back to the original F.A.O. article by Swingle on which much of this chapter is based, one sees that the underlying mistake was the duplication of a "9" digit in one number.
[18] Phasmids
(T.F.) Phasmids (Phasmatodea) are "stick insects", the name coming from the greek "phasma" (phantom). Here, Bill presumably(?) just uses this term in the sense of "some weird bug"/"pathogen".
[19] Tree Pathogens
(T.F.) Cinnamon Fungus (Pytophtora cinnamomi) is a root-rotting fungus belonging to the same genus as the (late) potato blight, Pytophtora infestans, which "caused" the tragic famine in Ireland ~1845. (More appropriately, one perhaps should claim that monoculture and land management politics were major reasons.) "Dutch Elm Disease" is a fungus disease that eradicated virtually all the elm trees in particular in the U.K. and other parts of Europe during the decades ~1970-2000. Bill wants to make the point that these diseases are just symptoms, with the real problem being that we cause so much stress to the trees that their immune systems no longer can cope with problems that otherwise would be minor.
This actually sounds rather plausible, considering that everyone of us knows how stress causes increased susceptibility to colds, etc. I have personally seen that there are still lots of elms around in colder and less polluted Sweden, and they look quite healthy. There are indications for another dramatic elm decline that occurred around ~3000 BC in Northern Europe, where Dutch Elm Disease or a close relative may have played a role.
[20] Soil
(T.F.) One of the most frightening characteristics of our culture is that we pay so extremely little respect to soil, because we are generally only very remotely aware on how important it is to our survival. I know it comes as a shock to many, but our formal education system completely fails to convey even the least bit of relevant knowledge about that which is so absolutely essential for our very existence on planet earth.
Some people even speculate that the story of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis in the Bible may actually refer to the beginning of agriculture, hence civilization. After all, "adam" and "adamah" (soil) are linguistically close relatives, as are as are "human" and "humus". If one starts to look into the issue of soil management, one soon starts to wonder whether "civilization", looking at its most visible lasting long-term impacts (on time scales of tens of thousands of years), is much more than an infectious disease of the topsoil on this planet. As it seems, this does not necessarily have to be the case, but we only have learned about the alternatives somewhat recently. Permaculture is precisely about these alternatives.
(Occasionally, I wonder whether it is just those nations behaving in the most irresponsible way which have been in contact with the soils sustaining them for the shortest amount of time...)
The fundamental theorem of soil management presumably can be stated like this: "You can fuck the soil, but in the end, the soil will then always come back to fuck you" (i.e. loss of agricultural productivity will lead to riot, genocide, rape, cannibalism).
[21] Past soil loss
(T.F.) Is it really this bad? Of course, when Bill Mollison talks about having lost 50% of the productive agricultural soils of the planet so far, this refers to the entire history of human civilization. It is interesting to compare his numbers against data from the F.A.O., as provided e.g. in this article: http://www.fao.org/sd/EPdirect/EPre0045.htm, in particular this statement: "Approximately 30% of the world's arable crop land has been abandoned because of severe soil erosion in the last 40 years". So, order-of-magnitude-wise, Bill is absolutely in agreement with the FAO here, and it also is pretty clear that the eventual result of such a process, unless reverted, can only be hunger on a massive scale. But we indeed have the knowledge and power to revert it. That is what matters here.
An interesting diagram on erosion is provided by the US Natural Resources Conservation Service: http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Technical/land/nri03/images/eros_m9272_large.gif.
[22] Creation and destruction of topsoil
(T.F.) Of course, one should keep in mind here that 2.5 acres equal one hectare. (For those who do not know these units of measurement, 1 ha = 10_000 m^2, hence 1 acre is 4000 m^2. In Bavaria, a conventional traditional unit of measurement is the "Tagwerk", which is 1/3 ha. Literally translated, the term means "can be worked (presumably plowed) with a day's labour", so this human scale may also be visible in the slightly larger "acre".)
All in all, Bill's numbers - both on soil creation and soil loss - are quite high here. There may be soil losses of 500 tons per acre in a year, but this usually refers to catastrophic one-time `mudslide' events. Erosion rates have been as high as 40 tons per hectare per year in the U.S. and have come down somewhat for a variety of reasons, not all of them nice, unfortunately. Also, the given natural soil formation rates of ten tons per hectare(!) per year should be considered as rather high. Rough ballpark figures of soil formation rates usually seem to lie in the range 0.2-3 tons per hectare per year. (Actually, one has to be very careful here what one is talking about! If weathering of rock is the speed-determining factor, soil formation is a very slow geological process, but if it is accumulation of organic matter in already weathered rock, it may be possible to speed up that process quite considerably - with the additional benefit of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.)
[23] Salination
(T.F.) To give a rough idea, 800 000 acres (3200 km^2, 1200 mi^2) is a square 56 km (35 mi) by each side, or, expressed in more familiar terms, a constant salination rate that large would correspond to the loss of agricultural land about the size of the isle of ireland within 25 years' time. One wonders if this number is more accurate than the data on erosion rates, but does the precise value actually matter that much? After all, it certainly is a huge problem in the sense that something got quite badly out of balance, and unfortunately, soil salination is a problem that is very difficult to correct once it has occurred.
[24] Salt from weathering of rocks
(T.F.) It is interesting to note that one can get a surprisingly reasonable estimate for the age of the earth by setting the ocean's salinity (on average about 35 parts per thousand) in relation to the annual transport of salts into the ocean through rivers.
[25] Trees and the water table
Remember the moderating effect of trees? One especially important issue is keeping the water where it belongs, i.e. at the right depth. Surface evaporation leads to visible salination quite fast, but salt stress can start much earlier.
[26] Roads
Useful data on such issues can be found in the (annually updated) "CIA World Factbook" at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/countrylisting.html. In 2007, there indeed are now 2.3 miles of road for every square mile in Britain!
This is an issue for multiple reasons, one of them being that compartementalization of land is very destructive to flora and fauna that cannot cross roads, as it creates genetic islands.
[27] Urban Sprawl
(T.F.) Evidently, cities arouse preferredly in locations with good agricultural soils. As cities grow, they therefore tend to damage those soils first which would have been best suited for agricultural production. Also, erosion will always remove the most fertile bit of soil first.
As bad as this is, one should at least consider making the best out of the present situation that already got quite out of hand: if there still is some good soil around and people live close to it, it can be used much more productively in horticulture than in agriculture. So, growing food on most of our present lawns will be an important strategy.
[28] Water and Cities
(T.F.) Water presumably is the most important limiting factor for big cities. When the allied forces conquered Nazi Germany, some cities had no other choice than to surrender once the allied forces got control over the waterworks.
Generally, the role of water is dramatically under-estimated by virtually everyone in our society. Intelligent water management is perhaps one of the most important issues for any civilization, on any scale from an entire city down to a small garden.
[29] Design for remedial action
The contents of this chapter parallel chapter 2 of the Permaculture Designer's Manual: "Concepts and Themes in Design". The two presentations nicely complement one another, the pamphlets being much more colloquial and occasionally providing some extra background, the book paying more attention to the general structure of the presentation. Unfortunately, the pamphlet text makes a somewhat fragmented, disconnected, and untidy impression, with many abrupt changes of subject, especially at first reading.
[30] Sustainability
T.F.: We have to bear in mind that "conscious design for sustainability" can be regarded as a rather radical concept: so far, man has not really managed to design any sustainable system, as every culture gradually destroyed or destroys its resource base. Some of them did (or do) so very fast, and hence can only be very temporary phenomena, while others are far better in terms of resource management, lasting tens of thousands of years. If mankind is to survive, learning how to properly design a really sustainable system presumably is the most pressing necessity, far more important than e.g. learning how to deflect asteroids that may impact earth (such things happen, but on timescales that are longer than the timescales relevant to the present sustainability crisis).
One of the interesting aspects is that most people in our culture are not really aware what - at a personal level - the key sustainability issues are we have to pay attention to. This issue is much more involved than one might expect, but for the average westerner who never gave such questions much thought before, the "Solar Living Sourcebook" and the work of the "Solar Living Institute" (http://www.solarliving.org) may be a useful first stop. But actually, sustainability is much less an issue of appropriate technology as it is an issue of mental attitude. So, a study of "low impact" cultures such as that of the Jain may turn out even more relevant than knowing about sustainable technology.
Personally, if I had to define the most important topics of sustainability, these would be, roughly in that order: (1) viable resource management and decision making strategies, (2) water, (3) shelter, (4) security, (5) food (and seed), (6) tools, (7) transport, (8) energy.
[31] Water Storage
T.F.: Presumably, many people would disagree on a phrase such as "america is simply short of tanks" when taken out of context. But actually, there is a lot to be known about simple, cheap, durable, efficient water storage techniques. The Permaculture Designer's Manual has quite a bit of information on that. (One notices that water storage is much more an important subject in Australia!)
[32] Gallons
T.F.: Australia seems to use the British imperial system where 1 gallon is about 4.5 liters, so 5000 gallons are roughly 23000 liters, and 250000 gallons are about 1.1 million liters.
[33] Efficiency of Gardening
T.F.: For those who do not garden themselves, there are many interesting reports on the history of efficient small-scale market gardens in the past. Certainly, Franklin Hiram King's description of Chinese agriculture in "Farmers of Forty Centuries" should be mentioned in that context. The book "Gardening for Profit" by Peter Henderson from 1882, which is available for free from Steve Solomon's online library at http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0302hsted/030219marketgarden/marketgarden.pdf may also make an interesting read. There, he describes German market gardeners in New Jersey in the 19th century that produced an income from as little as 1000 square meters.
It is very important to pay close attention to this particular point Bill is making here! There is a world of a difference between `gardening' and `agriculture'/`farming'. In particular, much emphasis is on this one sentence:
When you make a farm big, you just accept a suddenly lower productivity and yield, but less people get it. That is why it is economically "efficient."
Personally, I would like to add that, looking at history, a re-occurring pattern is the replacement of cultural resource management by market-based mechanisms through (usually rather questionable) regulations that were introduced via salami tactics. For example, the British introduced Hut Taxes in Africa which, apart from generating revenue, served the additional purpose of forcing Africans to acquire something which otherwise would have been essentially useless to them: money. Through the artificially created need to earn money, the Colonialist's money, Africans were forced to participate in the colonial economy. The double strategy of providing pointless but attractively styled goods on the one hand as incentives and tricky regulations that require obtaining money on the other hand usually has proven to be very effective, over the years, to modify somewhat stable equilibria of cultural resource management (in which various forms of `money' also played a role, but not a dominant one) towards primarily money-dominated resource management. Can this process of "engineered monetarisation of society" be regarded as a faith-based (i.e. faith in the superiority of market mechanisms) missionisation?
[34] Gardening in the U.S.A.
T.F.: Of course, it would be interesting to have a proper source given for such numbers.
[35] Self-Reliant Seeds
D.H.: Self-Reliant Seeds is now defunct, but it was replaced by Phoenix seeds, also of Tasmania.
[36] Diversity
T.F.: The importance of this statement about diversity cannot be emphasized strongly enough!
A modern University may be a good example: usually there are lots of foreign students on the Campus, but rather than employing their special background to make maximum use of it, most institutions of higher learning are merely culture-agnostic or culture-tolerant, rather than fully aware of the cultural potential. So, bringing together many different elements by itself does not automatically mean to create diversity.
[37] "Creative Agriculture"
T.F. While agriculture in the conventional sense is damaging ecological systems to the extent it has to alter them, we must not forget that while on the one hand, conventional agriculture has ruined a considerable part of the soils that originally were present after the last ice age, there is on the other hand a large number of species that only can thrive in conditions as they are found in damaged or degraded ecosystems. So, these damaged soils offer a huge potential for improvement, and if we are able to restore their fertility in such a way that the plants we use to improve them can give us other yields as well (in the broadest possible sense), that is a good strategy. Anyway, in concentrating on the restoration of destroyed soils as a priority issue, we can learn a lot about ecosystems without playing with valuable fertile soil, possibly ruining that as well with our experiments.
[38] The end of the Sun
D.H.: Not true--the sun is using itself up. However it will expand and consume the Earth before it ceases to be a source of the shorter wavelengths.
T.F. on D.H.'s comment: It is actually not so clear whether the sun will eventually really consume the earth, as it will lose a considerable amount of its mass before it grows to monstrous proportions. Presumably, it will engulf the earth's present orbit, but due to solar mass loss, earth then may have shifted to a more faraway orbit. Anyway, this issue is purely academic for our purposes, as there are more relevant effects. Solar output will increase by about 10% over the next billion of years, which should upset many systems. Also, once earth's core cools off sufficiently for active volcanism to stop, life will be in trouble as well. But as much as we are interested in permanent solutions, who knows? Should we eventually manage to learn how to properly harvest energy from the sun, we might one day really learn to travel to distant stars. Most presumably not in 100 or 1000 years' time, but maybe in 100_000 years?
[39] Catching Energy
T.F.: Basically, intervening in the entropy-driven energy flow and catching that energy is what biological systems evolved to do, and are especially good at in particular with the highly erratic flows of energy (and nutrients as well) found in nature. That contributes a lot to their elegance and beauty. Digging up and burning nature's former abundance in the form of fossil fuels whenever we want to burn them is a rather blunt and simplistic way to obtain energy. Tapping and harvesting the flows present in nature is much more sophisticated and asks for the design of elegant and beautiful systems that pay attention to nature's characteristics. Building huge dams to harvest water power (in contrast so small and beautiful human scale systems) is just again trying to impose inappropriately blunt ideas on nature.
It should be pointed out that energy storage is a very broad concept here: edible calories in the form of grain certainly are one form of highly useful energy. Complex chemical molecules that are synthesized by plants, difficult to obtain otherwise, and can be used as medicine certainly are a very useful form of stored energy.
[40] Nutrient Cycles
T.F.: Unfortunately, our educational system does not pay any attention to the actually very important issue of teaching people about the way the major nutrient cycles work. So, one is particularly well advised to read up on how the major flows of essential nutrients, in particular phosphorous, work in these days. The idea of first mapping and then designing around natural nutrient flows (which furthermore should cycle as much as possible) is a central theme in permaculture design.
[41] On the intrinsic value of life
T.F.: There actually are surprisingly deep and highly important philosophical issues connected with this particular question. This is not at all an easy topic, and certainly not a matter to talk lightly about! Nevertheless, it unfortunately is beyond the scope of these pamphlets.
[42] Too Much Of A Good Thing
T.F.: It may be useful to think of an engine here: it was designed for a certain mode of operation and has an optimal energy throughput around which it will work best. Forcing far more energy through it than it was supposed to handle, we burn and actively damage the machinery.
[43] Information
D.H.: But information is preserved by use.
[44] Dioxin
T.F.: It should be mentioned that dioxin actually is a comparatively harmless molecule, "benzene with two carbon atoms in the ring replaced by oxygen". When that name comes up in environmental issues, what is rather meant instead usually is some particular chlorinated aromatic derivative of dioxine, such as the extremely toxic 2,3,7,8-tetrachlordibenzo-p-dioxine.
[45] Productive uses of Petrol
T.F.: Of course, this is an instance of Bill's somewhat strange humor.
[46] Tidiness as a form of brain damage
T.F.: One may wonder whether Bill thinks of artificially tidy structures such as ornamental gardens here.
[47] Yield measured in terms of energy storage
T.F.: This idea of "yield" very important and central concept, and quite different from the very narrowly used conventional idea of a "yield". The idea of "yield being unlimited in principle" sounds challenging, given that we certainly cannot harvest more energy than what comes in from the sun. There are presumably two aspects to this: the first is that what matters most to us is the amount of energy we have in our stores, ready for use when we want it, and only to a lesser extent some "harvesting quotient". The other issue is that solar energy is so abundant in comparison to the tiny fraction we can make use of that practically all the really important limits are of some other nature. Masanobu Fukuoka explains this in a very concise way: what we do is not to "improve yield", but "remove factors that limit yield".
[48] Yield as a function of our understanding
T.F.: The more we know about the potential uses of some resource, such as a species, the better we can appreciate and use it (alas, also abuse it) in a sensible way. It certainly is a worthwile exercise in that respect to learn to identify edible and otherwise useful plants. To most people, this comes as a major transformation where they start to become aware of actually being surrounded by incredible natural abundance.
[49] Niches
T.F.: Habitat is another central topic in permaculture. Usually, the important limiting factor is not so much food, as one might initially think, but very often, it is habitat. So, consciously providing and designing appropriate niches often is a very easy way of constructively designing ecosystems. Providing appropriate niches can be as easy as putting up a few poles for predatory birds to sit down on. Why would one want to attract certain species? The answer lies in the fundamental principle that "everything gardens". If we can make good use of the way how various species interact with their natural environment, we can make them do a lot of useful work we otherwise would have to do of our own (and might not manage to do as well)!
[50] Niche Design
D.H.: After first seeing where the unfilled niches, the empty spaces, exist, and filling them. Temperate ecosystems, in particular, often are incomplete.
[51] Unnecessary activity
T.F.: One has to note that our present economic system is very busy doing basically unnecessary things, creating unnecessary wants and then trying to satisfy them.
[52] Pitchfork
T.F.: Actually, Bill Mollison refers to a famous quote of the Japanese farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka. (It is attributed to him in the Permaculture Designer's Manual.) "If we throw mother nature out the window, she comes back in the door with a pitchfork."
[53] "Accidental" beneficial effects
T.F.: This certainly is true in software engineering. It often is amazing to see how applying the appropriate principles gives solutions which then automatically show ways how to resolve other problems in an elegant way.
T.F.: Philosophically, this is a very interesting and extremely important issue which our Western culture seems to have failed to understand properly for hundreds of years! As spiritual people from India know very well, and also as Gandhi knew, there is a very immediate reality to the concept of "Truth". How little we understand this can be seen in the Bible when Pontius Pilatus asks Jesus in his trial: "What is truth?". Unfortunately, in our society, the idea is widespread that Truth ultimately and exclusively depends on who is judging. But actually, this is not difficult to recognize as a big fallacy: Truth is what ultimately breaks your neck if you go on a confrontation course with the laws of reality. You may believe as hard as you want in having the power to fly in an extreme emergency, jumping from a high-rise building will teach you otherwise. Truth is what has un-done many a totalitarian regime in manifold ways. Even if the Nazis had managed to evade Truth in that one point that they never had the capability to take on Russia, their society would have been doomed due to other reasons where they were on conflict with reality, maybe only over a hundred years's time through the effects of inbreeding as a result of their ideas concerning eugenics. (One should note the similarity of this idea to the concept of Evil of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of "Christian Science": Evil only has the power to destroy itself.)
While this "Truth is very real and will break your neck if you confront it and stubbornly ignore all warnings you will receive on your path" idea sounds rather brutal, everything has two sides. Unfortunately, as a consequence of the violence-centeredness of Western societies' world of thought, it is much more difficult to establish this point in the West than, for example, in Asian cultures. The other face of Truth is much more subtle, loving and nurturing and basically says: the closer one comes to the path of Truth, the more often it will happen that things start to unexpectedly work together in a harmonious way of their own. There is at least one good reason that can be articulated why this even should be expected: if competition alone were the driving force guiding the evolution of natural systems, then perhaps multi-cellular life never would have evolved on Earth. So, cooperation must play a very important role, and as we are talking about systems that have evolved over millions of years, we should not expect that our very limited knowledge about how nature works could ever be more than fragmentary. Rather, we should expect many mechanisms of cooperation at work in Nature that are unknown to us, but will kick in once we get some aspects of system design right. (Hence, presumably, the old saying: "Good Things Come In Threes": If we do two things right, we get a third one for free.) And why not? The different components of natural systems co-evolved together. So, what we have before us is a big puzzle of complicated pieces. And just as with an ordinary puzzle, once we manage to get a few things right, the puzzle starts to help us discover its own structure. The further we go, the easier it gets!
On the other hand, once we start doing something fundamentally wrong, we will create a host of problems that all have to be addressed individually, and will in turn again create new problems. (Hence the saying, "the main source of problems is solutions".) Take, for example, the Windows operating system. The reason why there nowadays is a big market for antivirus software (which nevertheless only has to offer a weak illusion of security and little real protection) is that the system is messy and full of holes in the first place. To a large extent, bad Windows security design also contributes greatly to the SPAM problem, as most SPAM emails are sent from backdoored Windows machines. There are many more examples where we have gone fundamentally wrong some time ago and keep on adding more complexity in a Sysiphus effort to deal with the effects of earlier problems.
Of course, the environmental crises must be seen in the same light: to many people, the ozone hole, climate chaos, deforestation, soil loss, falling groundwater tables, seem to be quite unrelated effects, and the future prospect of only being able to tackle a few of them but being undone by the others may make them despair. But actually, chances are that all these effects merely are symptoms of a deeper problem, which may be Student Man not paying proper attention to the teachings of Professor Nature, who constantly tries to keep on telling us how things are actually supposed to fit together!
[54] Everything works both ways
T.F.: When confronted with a difficult and seemingly unresolvable problem, it often helps to turn things around and look at the situation in the opposite way: seeing an effect as a cause, seeing the strikingly useful feature of a bad effect, etc. Penicilline was discovered in such a way.
Let us take for example the Energy Crisis. We commonly think that we have to do whatever we can in order to ensure a growing energy supply in order to feed a growing economy. But is this really the case? Energy, after all, is of very special nature: we can regard it as a kind of "universal joker", the Magic Wand that allows us to compensate for all kinds of mismatch between systems. Given enough energy, we can go skiing in the Sahara and grow coconuts on the South Pole. So, how would things look like if we instead took the perspective that whenever we have to use excessive amounts of energy, this may be a strong indication of a fundamental error in system design? Concerning what we said about "accidental beneficial connections" [53], we presumably should pay close attention whenever we need a lot of energy.
[55] Making things "function in a natural way"
T.F.: We must be aware that we are constantly surrounded by countless incredibly old programs, genetic and otherwise, that go on around us, inside us, between us, and that have evolved to play multiple different roles in complex systems that are far older and live much longer than anything in our cultural comprehension. Presumably, even "conscience" is some incredibly old program that in some form is present in many higher vertebrates. So, permaculture is a lot about making all these programs work the way they are supposed to work!
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Transcript of full Permaculture Design Course given by Bill Mollison in 1981:
1. Preface
2. Introduction to Permaculture
3. Permaculture in Humid Landscapes
4. Permaculture in Arid Landscapes
5. Permaculture on Low Islands
6. Permaculture on High Islands
7. Permaculture on Granitic Landscapes
8. Permaculture for Fire Control
9. Designing for Permaculture
10. Permaculture Techniques
11. Forests in Permaculture
12. Water in Permaculture
13. Permaculture for Urban Areas & Urban-Rural Linkages
14. The Permaculture Community
15. The Permaculture Alternative
16. Permaculture for Millionaires
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