field tested

Now I will begin by saying I have no affiliation with Leatherman so don’t go thinking I’m getting any sort of kickback by writing this. I just happen to think they make a very useful tool. Of course if they want to send me some free samples to test I wouldn’t say no.

I was given my current leatherman as a gift and didn’t realize how usefult a gift it was until I was in Jordan working on the Jordan Valley Permaculture Project. Living in the 1st world aka the OD world (over developed) one might not realize how useful a tool like this can be. When you have a myriad of tools at your disposal, or a fully stocked hardware store around the corner it might remain a bit of a novelty. But when you’re on a project or out in the field with little to no resources this little trooper might make the difference in getting the job done at all.

I’d say the most useful tools in my experience are the pliers, saw, knife, and screwdriver, in that order. A screwdriver is easy enough to get in most places, but a decent set of pliers, saw and a knife will cost you some money at the hardware store if there even is one. And in a country like Jordan with virtually no trees around finding a decent saw is not an easy task. The saw is small but very sharp and unless you are cutting some bigger pieces of wood I’ll use it over a regular hand saw. Its also really good at cutting smaller bamboo as it doesn’t bind up.

Now because of the saw and knife if you plan on traveling via airplane you’ll have to be checking a bag. I try to limit myself to my computer bag and one carry on size bag, so having to check my bag for one item is a bit of an annoyance. Depending on where you are going you can always ship the tool to yourself an avoid the hassle of checking luggage.

A word of caution if you wear the leatherman on your belt, in countries like jordan where you will frequently encounter the squat toilet its not a far stretch for the tool to want to slide right off your belt and join your other deposit. Thankfully i was fortunate to avoid this scenario.

So if you find yourself in less than resource rich situations this little trooper might just save your day. The model I have is the blast, offering 16 tools, they have some more deluxe models with a few more specific tools but for everyday use I think this model has everything you really need. Also it has coated edges so when using the pliers you are not squeezing on a metal edge which helps alot.

Bottomline, it’s a very useful tool, keep it clean keep it oiled, basically take care of it and it will take care of you, just don’t drop it in the loo.

cheers.

Then came, what one of my elders have called, the Western Syndrome. For thousands of years there has been a syndrome (We call it a SYNDROME because the definition of the word describes it perfectly; syn•drome n, a group of things or events that form a recognizable pattern, especially of something undesirable) that has moved around the earth consuming intact cultures by replacing our rooted stories with distant tales and a commerce that carries no responsibility for the land that sustains it. And now, the story of broken-hearted people who have no origins place who move continually west to flee their oppressors only to find they have become the oppressor themselves of the intact peoples they encounter in their flight. This story has repeated itself in untold ways for millennia and it runs deep in most of our blood and bone as it plays itself out in our daily lives and worldviews around the world. This syndrome is not just carried or transmitted by one particular grouping of people defined by race, creed, or color but has affected and been purported by us all and continues to do so.

In my Permaculture education and design work in the West African country of Liberia, I have found myself often in a face-off with the Western Syndrome in its quest to cull life from communities to gain a profit, mostly for large western corporations. I soon found that one of my roles as a permaculture educator coming from the so-called “developed” world was to dispel the myth that the “western world” only leads to a glorious future. In Liberia, many of the people, young and old, will adopt nearly anything “western” as a personal sign of status and progressiveness. Where I was first confronted with the reality of this is when I went to visit one of the student’s midwifery clinics, which was close to where I was facilitating a permaculture design course.

When I arrived at the clinic, which was well made of mud bricks and palm thatching, there were women, some pregnant, others with babies and children all about on benches, playing, sitting next to a cooking fire, and others were weaving baskets as they they shared stories, laughed and tended to the little ones. One particular woman was walking about with a spray can pumping away to keep the spray mist constant on all the leaves of the plants that were all about. My curiosity hoped it was a compost tea she was using to fertigate the plants, yet my intuition knew differently, so I went to see what the magic concoction was that was so necessary to spray around this clinic for women and children. It was DDT. I was shocked. As I read the label on the can she was re-supplying her sprayer with, it only had the warning, “fatal if swallowed” and the name of an American Chemical Company. My heart sank in the dark reality of standing face to face with the Western Syndrome.

I asked the woman who was spraying the DDT, what her reasons for spraying were, and if she knew about the repercussions of using this biocide. She replied, “We have to use it to kill the bugger-bug which destroys our crops. They have got so bad since the war that we have no choice but to use most of the few dollars we make to buy this chemical or we lose our food.” She also shared that she knew it would make her sick if she drank the chemical, but nothing else.

Later that day in our Permaculture Design class, consisting of 25 students, some of whom were respected elders in their community, others who were barely adults, and all who are from a wide range of backgrounds in education, traditions, tribes, languages, and beliefs, I asked them, “what is this bugger-bug?” It was as if I had incited the devil itself as the translator shared in the common tribal language my question. Everyone stirred, some even grew fiery red in the face as they explained how the losses of their crops from this little beast could mean the difference between life and death for whole families and communities. They also shared how they were told that they should spray to kill mosquitoes that bring them malaria. When I asked them about the DDT they used, they spoke to it as a type of savior, yet a costly one for people who on average make $2 a day for 8-10 hours of hard labor. None of them knew anything of the long-term travesties that are caused by this chemical and why it is illegal to use in most “western” countries in the world including the country of origin of the spray found at the midwifery clinic – that being the USA.

I spent some time gathering some information about DDT to better inform them and myself of the chronic effects of this toxic substance. I shared the gamut of research that detailed how DDT is an endocrine disruptor and has other chronic effects on the nervous system, kidneys, liver, the reproductive and immune system, it is a carcinogen that contributes to cancer and is one of the nine persistent organic pollutants, which more importantly for the midwifery clinic, accumulates most intensively in mammals in the mother’s milk. Needless to say, they were horrified.

When everyone began to settle down a bit, one elder asked the very important and relevant question, “So what else can we do about the Bugger-Bug if we don’t use DDT?” I certainly did not have the answers, as often I don’t when it comes to regional knowledge of place. So in full Permaculture style, I replied, “Let’s go ask the Bugger-Bug?” So right then and there, with very quizzical looks abounding, we all got up from our makeshift classroom and went out into the adjoining landscape to ask the bugger-bug what can we do to survive together.

We all walked into a recently cleared area of rainforest where the debris had been burned-off and the land was laid bare and exposed except for patches of mono-cropped maize and cassava. The bugger-bug abounded, busily gathering leaf material from the crops and bringing it back to their growing mound in the middle of the clear-cut. We found that their mounds were rich in detritus and bird manures and seedlings of the native forest were sprouting all around it. Their growing mound looked like a miniature forest mountain, rich in diversity and nutrients.

We then left the middle of the clear-cut and went to the edge of this mono-cropped farm where the forest and the maize intermingled and to everyone’s surprise, the bugger-bug was significantly less prevalent and the damage to the crop was minimal. In-fact, anywhere we went that had diversity of plant species with a mulch layer on the ground there was minimal damage by the bugger-bug.

We finally ventured deeper into the forest to observe how the bugger-lived there in a natural setting and found that they were so diminished in numbers within the forest that we had a difficult time finding any damage at all from them on the understory plants. They seemed to only be feasting on the leaf drop from the canopy trees and had significantly less numbers than in the clear-cut areas.

In true detective fashion we then assembled our observations and clues that we gathered and low and behold, a story of true forest stewardship emerged. Our little bugger-bug was a “keystone” pioneer in the forest regeneration process. It seemed that this termite would live peacefully in the forest until the time where a complete devastation of the forest occurred, then it would spring into action to assist the forest in rebuilding its structure. Its numbers would increase and then they would search out plants, especially unhealthy stands of plants, to begin its soil building, mound-raising process. As their mounds grew from their efficient gathering, they would soon be the highest point in the landscape where birds of all sorts would perch. Thanks to the birds, their mounds were seeded with myriad types of plant life and from there, the forest would regenerate outward in concentric ring-like patterns.

The spell of the bugger-bug had been broken. We excitedly went back into class where we applied our new learning into the design of a food growing system that incorporated diversity in both annuals and perennials, layering in both space and time, and deep mulching that is most analogous to the structure of a natural forest. We then began building our demonstration farm using these practices learned from our bugger-bug teacher. One elder shared with me while pointing to their 150-foot high ancestral tree, “I will give thanks to these little bugs for I know without them we would not have our forests.”

At the very root of Permaculture is the knowing that we must live in integrity with the world which sustains us. The Western Syndrome cunningly distorts our ability to take responsibility for our lives through the many faces of globalization and often leaves us barren of integrity whether we are aware of it or not. The bugger-bug story illustrates that with our work as Permaculture teachers and designers, we have a duty to honestly read the pattern languages around us and incorporate them into the conscious design of how we live in support of that which gives life.

~~~~~~~~~

Warren Brush is a certified Permaculture designer and educator as well as a mentor and storyteller. He has worked for over 20 years in inspiring people of all ages to discover, nurture and express their inherent gifts while living in a sustainable manner. He is co-founder of Quail Springs Learning Oasis & Permaculture Farm (a few of their offerings include: Permaculture Design Certification courses for Youth called Sustainable Vocations, PDC for Adults and Sustainable Aid Courses among many other offerings), Wilderness Youth Project, Mentoring for Peace, and Trees for Children. He works extensively in Permaculture education and sustainable systems design in North America and in Africa through his design firm, True Nature Design. He can be reached through email at w (at) quailsprings.org or by calling his office at 805-886-7239.

www.quailsprings.org; www.sustainablevocations.org; www.mentoring4peace.com; www.treesforchildren.org; www.truenaturedesign.net

Further Reading:

• Which Came First – Pests, or Pesticides?
• Pesticides, and You

Those who watched Greening the Desert II will recognise some of my footage from Jordan as well.

Having the mainstream media peek at our work is getting to be a habit. Now we just need to move them from looking at this as a ‘novel idea’ to regarding it as an urgent necessity.

Here’s an idea that should be embraced and championed by all earth repair advocates: The Buffalo Commons.

The Buffalo Commons is a conceptual proposal to create a vast nature preserve by returning 139,000 square miles (360,000 km2) of the drier portion of the Great Plains to native prairie, and by reintroducing the buffalo, or American Bison, that once grazed the short grass prairie.

The proposal originated with Frank J. Popper and Deborah Popper, who argued in a 1987 essay (PDF) that the current use of the drier parts of the plains for agriculture is not sustainable. The authors viewed the historic European-American settlement of the Plains States as hampered by lack of understanding of the ecology and an example of the "Tragedy of the Commons". Many people in potentially affected states resisted the concept during the 1990s:

There once were over 400 million acres of wild prairie grasslands in the central part of North America. The backbone of the Buffalo Commons movement is the work — over a period of decades — to re-establish and re-connect prairie wildland reserves and ecological corridors large enough for bison and all other native prairie wildlife to survive and roam freely, over great, connected distances, while simultaneously restoring the health and sustainability of our communities wherever possible so that both land and people may prosper for a very long time. Future generations may choose to expand these reserves and corridors, as the new culture of caring and belonging we have started today becomes an integral, ingrained part of life in the world of tomorrow, especially as extensive grasslands become needed to help absorb carbon from the atmosphere. (Highly biodiverse native prairies are excellent carbon sequesters.) – Buffalo Commons

It’s fascinating material and an idea worth entertaining, to say the least. The Poppers propose that a significant portion of the region be gradually shifted from farming and ranching use. They envision an area of native grassland, of perhaps 10 or 20 million acres (40,000 or 80,000 km²) in size.

Further Reading:

• From Wikipedia
• The Buffalo Commons as Regional Metaphor and Geographic Method, by Drs. Deborah E. Popper and Frank J. Popper

When studying the human mind, one of the most fascinating – and at times startling – insights is that there is sometimes a serious discrepancy between the tale the human mind spins to itself, and actual reality.

One especially striking demonstration of the extent of the distortions introduced by the brain’s data pre-processing was given by Edward Adelson, MIT professor of vision science, with the "checkershadow illusion":

The squares marked A and B are the same shade of gray
Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This innocent illusion is so extremely appealing because it conveys its profound message in the most direct, most immediate, most rapid way possible: Your eyes lie, and much more than you actually might ever have imagined.

It is, of course, just a simple optical illusion, but it would be a mistake to assume that other major distortions, or "adjustments" do not also take place at higher levels of data processing in the brain. One interesting higher-level optical illusion is the so-called "hollow face illusion": A mask, when viewed from the concave side under the right lighting conditions, will "pop out" and appear convex, as a high-level censorship department of the human mind steps in and tells us that hollow faces are an impossibility.

Neither of these two illusions pose any major problems to us, for they can easily and verifiably be identified as illusions (e.g. by using an image manipulation program in the first case, and a change in lighting, or a shift of perspective in the second), and more importantly, we do not base important life-and-death decisions on our uncorrected intuition about these issues to start with.

Concerning high-level censorship functions of the human mind, there are, however, some phenomena that are far less innocent, which seem to play a major role for a number of important challenges we are presently facing, including, in particular, our environmental ones. Taking the so-called "oil crisis" as an example, it should be patently obvious that this term actually is a misnomer. In what sense could that crisis ever be blamed on the black syrupy liquid? More appropriately, one could speak about an "oil attitude crisis", but precisely speaking, its true nature is that of an "attitude change inertia crisis". So, what high-level illusions of the human mind may be relevant for "attitude change inertia"? Evidence is that there might be something fairly deep at work here – for if it were not, we most likely would have succeeded in getting these issues sorted out a long time ago!

An interesting concept that emerged from research in social psychology is that of "cognitive dissonance". In a nutshell, the theory claims that the conscious human mind can go to great lengths to avoid open conflicts in its beliefs. This is especially relevant with respect to maintaining the most fundamental beliefs that comprise the self-image in which we have invested so much to construct. "Going to great lengths" can in particular include temporarily suspending both memory and the capacity for logical reasoning to shield itself from feedback that seriously questions a "precious belief". It can even go so far as to unconsciously abuse the mind’s reasoning facilities to spin ever more sophisticated logically sounding explanations as earlier lines of reasoning keep on getting debunked. As George Orwell has put it:

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. – George Orwell

While we all are prone to doing this – with various issues and at various times – there is a pathological end of the spectrum of such behaviour that is closely related to the phenomenon of "confabulation". Confabulation has received considerable attention in neurological research, with fascinating recent results [1,2].

With cognitive dissonance, a key issue is that the ego’s censorship departments step in whenever our (usually positive) self-image gets challenged, such as when a belief gets destroyed that we’ve invested a lot of our personal time, money, sweat, energy, or emotions in – because it would be painful to admit to ourselves that this investment was a stupid idea. We like to believe ourselves not to be stupid. A striking example of this was documented by the father of Cognitive Dissonance Theory, Leon Festinger, when he, with a colleague, infiltrated an apocalyptic doomsday sect who believed that the world would end on December 21, 1954. In agreement with the predictions of cognitive dissonance theory, those members of the group who made the biggest investments in their belief of an apocalypse showed quite an interesting change in behaviour when it failed [3].

Evidently, cognitive dissonance is a fairly ubiquitous phenomenon, and can easily interfere quite badly with our capacity to make sound decisions. But as with the "simplistic" optical illusions presented above, it is just a fundamental characteristic of the human mind, and as with these, it is possible to correct the misguidance it causes with a bit of design. As permaculture is to a large degree about paying close attention to the characteristics of species and their co-evolutionary interplay, and as homo sapiens is such a potent system component, it makes perfect sense to invest some time in learning about some of the mechanisms that prevent us from reaching our full capacity for making wise decisions – and devising ways to overcome them.

Let us consider the issue of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The question in which ways cognitive dissonance could negatively influence our decision-making – and how to address that – is a valid one irrespective of any greenhouse effect physics. What certainly plays an important role here is that in some circles there is a deeply held belief that man’s ultimate purpose is to conquer nature using the one tool perceived as setting him apart from beast: fire. One somewhat well-known 20th century protagonist of this concept is the author Ayn Rand, and her philosophy of "Objectivism" that shows alarming traits of being a Promethean cult, worshipping fire in all forms, (including the cigarette) and seeing the role of the engineer as that of the holy priest who supplies mankind with all its needs by taming fire. In this ontology, any effort to reduce our CO2 emissions inevitably must be interpreted as a sinister act of sabotage, and it is equally clear that its proponents are bound to fight tooth and nail against it – fire being regarded as the essence of everything that is good. Examples of this attitude abound [4,5]. This excerpt from a book by Ayn Rand is especially interesting:

Observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists – amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for "harmony with nature" – there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival.

The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire. – aynrand.org

It is bemusing to contemplate the glaringly absurd discrepancy between the belief expressed in those lines written in 1971 and the ethical core of permaculture. But the important point here is to note that the structure of such a belief system (and similar ones) fits the setting of cognitive dissonance like a glove – note in particular how the "positive self-image" is linked to a fundamentalist (i.e. "must not and hence can not be questioned") belief in the ultimate role of fire. However, cognitive dissonance undeniably gets everyone of us at times, and hence its role certainly also has to be assessed on the side of those who take the published and peer-reviewed research literature on climate change as serious.

The important insight is: if we want to make any progress on making sound decisions about our CO2 emissions, and so many other issues, we certainly would be well advised to solve another problem first: working out effective ways to eliminate the negative influence of cognitive dissonance.

How to approach this then? Here, it must be emphasized that everything works in both ways. And, after all, if the human mind has this mechanism, there may well be a good reason for its existence. An interesting observation is: those who go to the greatest lengths to avoid any thought that could challenge their positive self-image mostly do so due to an especially low pain threshold for the inner conflict that would arise otherwise. Gandhi understood this point very well. The idea at the core of Gandhi’s approach to conflict resolution is: Always behave in such a way that those who use force to maintain an illusion cannot do so without getting in serious conflict with their positive self-image. He managed to repeatedly demonstrate the – often surprising – effectiveness of this approach in dozens of conflicts, ranging from collective bargaining between millers and mill-owners to the independence of India and an early termination of an intractable all-out Hindu-Muslim civil war [6]. Gandhi’s conflict resolution protocols hence deserve close study if we want to make progress with the big challenges ahead.[7]

References:

1. "Brain Fiction – Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation", W. Hirstein, http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11086
2. http://blog.ted.com/2007/10/vilayanur_ramac.php
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=When_Prophecy_Fails&oldid=319135040
4. http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7363&news_iv_ctrl=1021
5. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=220
6. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3677437859600027297
7. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, HarperCollins, 1997

A modern take on an ancient farming method is becoming a new movement sweeping the lush pastures of New Zealand.

The art of scything has seen a recent resurgence with permaculturalists and Ecoshow directors Joanna Pearsall and Bryan Innes holding a series of workshops around the country starting at Rainbow Valley Farm under the expert eye of visiting Austrian scything teacher Christoff Schneider.

A scythe can be used for many things: mowing the lawn, cutting long grass, harvesting grain or cutting scrub, tasks normally done using a mower, brushcutter or weedeater. New and lighter ergonomically designed tools with specialist razor-sharp blades are able to be wielded with an almost effortless effectiveness that would put the average weedeater to shame.

“It’s appropriate technology,” Innes explains.

“And what I mean by that is that we have many technologies today which are industrial based, fossil fuel based, which actually have very heavy carbon footprints. And very often they’re not as efficient as the older technologies.”

Scything is much easier on the body than using a weed eater or scrub bar Innes says.

“These scythes are designed ergonomically around the human body rather than around the blade. So they’re very, very efficient. You could scythe all day without wearing yourself out.”

“You’re not putting stress on your back, they’re very sensible tools and available just to get out and go. They don’t need a workshop to maintain the tool, you don’t have to go down to the garage to get the petrol, you don’t have to choke on the fumes. “

People can learn the basics of scything in just a three-hour workshop, ready to practice at home.

The workshops include showing people how to maintain the blades, Pearsall said.

“We’ve been showing people how to whet and how to peen. Whetting is about smoothing the edge of the blade so that it’s becomes a razor edge again, and peening is about creating the edge again, if it gets damaged.”

The blades used and available for purchase come from a factory in Austria that has been producing them for 500 years. If cared for they will last a lifetime.

“They’re probably the best in the world,” said Pearsall.

Scything has health benefits too, Innes said.

“Because the scythe is ergonomically designed you’re using your body really well and you’re keeping a nice upright posture. You are not loading up your back. you’re not doing anything harmful. In actual fact it’s a bit like doing tai chi or yoga, it’s very good exercise and because grass never stops growing it’s a discipline that keeps you healthy.”

For more information please go to www.ecoshow.co.nz or contact jo (at) ecoshow.co.nz

I’d like to introduce you to Sepp Holzer, a man who not only produces food in a very unlikely location, at a high and frigid altitude in Austria, but is also growing very unlikely crops there as well — and all without the use of chemicals, and with minimal input of human labour.

I guess you could call him a European counterpart of people like Bill Mollison and Masanobu Fukuoka — as all three independently discovered ways of working with nature that save money and labour and that don’t degrade the environment, but actually improve it. In Holzer’s case, he was effectively running a permaculture farm for more than two decades before he even realised his unconventional approach could be termed ‘permaculture’.

In the coldest part of Austria, a farmer is turning conventional wisdom on its head by growing a veritable Garden of Eden full of tropical plants in the open on his steep Alpine pastures.

Amid average annual temperatures of a mere 4.2 degrees Celsius (39.5 Fahrenheit), Sepp Holzer grows everything from apricots to eucalyptus, figs to kiwi fruit, peaches to wheat at an altitude of between 1,000 and 1,500 metres (3,300 and 4,900 feet).

… “Once planted, I do absolutely nothing,” Holzer told Reuters. “It really is just nature working for itself – no weeding, no pruning, no watering, no fertiliser, no pesticides.” — permaculture.org.uk

What’s more, the land he cultivates so successfully today had notoriously poor soil when he originally inherited it. Not anymore. Where people were before calling him mad, now farmers are arriving on his doorstep to learn how he does it, and others are flocking to buy his superior produce. His methods are currently being implemented in dozens of countries.

Holzer states his path to success began when he realised he had to discard what he’d learned in agricultural college. He set out on a path of observing and emulating natural systems, rather then attempting to control (and, in the process, undermining and destroying) nature. His knowledge rebellion also put him at odds with the Austrian authorities, who fined him several times — and even threatened him with imprisonment — for ignoring regulations on what plants can and cannot be grown in specific regions.

Holzer uses some simple, low-tech, yet ingenious methods to create a micro climate conducive to growing plants that normally couldn’t grow in the region. Watch the clip to get a glimpse at his work:

Additional clips on Holzer’s farm here and here.

Between the pinetree monocultures of Austria he built a fishpond system with his own water power station, planted 9000 fruit trees of the most various kinds in connection with many other plants to support each other (plant families). Thirty different types of potatoes, many different grains, fruits, vegetables, herbs and wildflowers are growing just about everywhere — in the forest, on extremely steep hills, on rocky soil, on pathways, around ponds, as well as raised beds. All of this he grows without the use of any pesticides, herbicides or fertilizer. Holzer says: “I couldn’t understand that still everybody at the agricultural schools told you these chemicals are useful. They drowned us in brochures of the chemical fertilizers with the latest information on how many kilos of which stuff you should get. But if you follow their instructions you only have trouble, your purse is empty, you have a lot of hard work to do, and you’re destroying all this important life in your ground, and your own health with it. Sorry, but I really don’t want to spoil my own land with this poison!”

Instead of using chemicals, he simply observes nature and finds out which plants support each other. In autumn he collects many seeds and stores them, and whenever he can, he throws this seed mixture on his ground. Along pathways, on new patches of terraces, anywhere. There is no square meter of ground with only one type of plant. All plants grow together and support each other. No plant or insect is unwanted. — rhiosrawenergy.com

Permaculture guru, Bill Mollison, once said:

Today we have more soil scientists than at any other time in history. If you plot the rise of soil scientists against the loss of soil, you see that the more of them you have, the more soil you lose. — Scott London

Why is it that, as a race, we consistently manage to ignore good science and common sense? David Montgomery, author of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, summed it up well in a Celsias interview:

… we know how to take care of soil. It’s just that we’re not doing it. — Dishing Dirt with David Montgomery

To a large degree, our lives, health and future are dependent on our ability to reverse the soil-destroying trend that political policies and industry have apparently locked us into with the last fifty year’s mass implementation of monocrop farming systems. Sepp Holzer is an inspiring example of what can be accomplished if we look upon nature as a teacher, rather than just a resource to be plundered.

Sepp Holzer: “I find it painful to watch all these farmers going broke and selling their land for next to nothing, mostly to rich academic people who know even less what to do with the land. If these farmers only knew what they could do with their land! Nature has so much to offer, so many possibilities!” — rhiosrawenergy.com

PIJ #40, June – Aug 1991

Very often ‘management’ is mistaken for control. And control usually leads to friction and so is inefficient – there is wasted energy. Control also stifles creativity, our best management tool. True management then, is a far more subtle relationship in which trust, communication and control intermingle towards common goals. And the key to it all is trust.

Possibly the only way to lasting peace and harmony, whether between states or within communities or even families is the gradual dissolution of the hierarchical approach and the building up of trust.

And so too with the Earth. We try to control the earth as we do people. We call it management. But true management of the earth and its resources is about understanding and trust. If we do not trust the millions of years of development that has brought the earth to today, if we do not trust the ability of the earth and its ecosystems to provide what we need when we manage it (instead of trying to control it) we are doomed to fail.

The ecosystem is in a constant state of change based on a series of cycles. Take the water cycle, for example. Water falls from the sky in some form or another: rain, dew, fog, hail, snow. With a well covered soil it will enter the ground and can be used by plants and transpired back to the atmosphere. Or it can enter the ground water from where it will often move underground to join small streams, bigger streams, rivers and finally the sea. If we could fully understand this very simple process and trust its existence, trust this cycle as being the most effective way to sustain our water supply, we would design our use of the land to catch all that water. We would ensure complete soil cover all the time instead of desperately going to the end of the streamline and building huge dams, often to silt up. Trust the water cycle, cover the soil, sink the water, then streams and rivers will start running again. Then perhaps build small dams, starting high on the watershed.

As another example, take the soil and its mineral cycle. For millions of years trillions of microscopic organisms in the soil have been breaking down dead organic matter into humus, a part of the soil, to hold the soil together with minerals in a form that can again be used by plants. Suddenly we have ceased to trust this complex process and have stopped trying to manage it. Instead, we are attempting to control it with our own supply of minerals in the form of chemical fertilizers. Like in any management setup, control leads to the need for more control, until the situation slips into chaos. With more and more fertilizer the result is a dead soil, easily eroded and unable to sustain much growth without still more fertiliser. Until we trust those trillions of microorganisms to do the work for us and design our use of the land to allow them to do so we will continue to try to control in ever more desperate ways.

Look at pesticides. In natural systems an equilibrium between predators and prey exists. There is no such thing as a pest plague. But we do not trust the ways of natural systems. Instead we create huge areas of one crop, spray deadly poisons around that do far more than just killing the insect they are aimed at. The pests grow resistant, we use more pesticides and make newer and stronger varieties, again in an evermore desperate attempt for absolute control.

Perhaps we should start intelligently managing the Earth again. The key to such management is trust.

The mother of all long-term problems is that our culture has become an “anti-ecosystem.” Humans lived in symbiosis with all life for three million years before the agricultural revolution. Humanity fixed nitrogen, created carbon dioxide, and compost for plants in exchange for food, shelter, water, and air/oxygen.

10,000 years ago, one tribe in the fertile crescent changed history and started living a new story that “the world belongs to man” instead of “humanity belonging to the earth.” This new story lead to our lifestyle today that has ruptured our evolutionarily-developed mutually-beneficial relationship with our ecosystem.

Over the long run, how humanity lives with its ecosystem is infinitely more important than any other problem we face. Problems we face today such as the financial crisis and peak oil will affect us and the next couple generations, but then they are over. Social justice, poverty, overpopulation, and climate change are more symptoms of how we live within our ecosystem.

Because we are living the story that “the world belongs to man,” we can concentrate wealth, creating injustice and poverty. We can also populate at will regardless of the affect on all other species. Climate change is a reflection of our thirst for energy and an easy life. All of these and most other problems come from our world view. As long as “our life style is not negotiable” we will never change for the better.

I want to make it crystal clear that our biggest long-term problem is our relationship with our life supporting ecosystem. By long-term I don’t mean seven generations, I mean 500 generations—another 10,000 years. In seven generations, they will still be cleaning up our mess. If there is to be a 500th generation, we must admit our problem and find a new way or regain an old way of knowing. This is not a question of how future generations will live, but whether there will be future generations or not.

I will use two simple examples to open your mind: history and your body. Every ancient human civilization has failed. And, unless their people walked way before their ecosystem became too damaged, like the Mayan did, all ancient civilizations left deserts in their footsteps.

Recently I spent some time in Bosnia and Herzegovina with family. It reminded me of other parts of the Mediterranean that I have visited before. But once I remembered my history, what I was seeing really hit home. There was no topsoil left on the hills. Walking up them to the shrines for “Our Lady” in Medjigorie was difficult; it was almost completely rocky.

What was once old growth forest, was now a rocky savanna. The forests are long gone to smelt metals for the bronze and iron ages or just for heating and cooking. What is now left is a rocky over grazed scrub land that won’t even support olives. You can barely scratch any soil between the rocks with a knife there is so little left. Read Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture for detailed examples of civilization-caused ecosystem degradation.

Our culture reverses the growth of soil. Soil is reproduced from its parent material so slowly that once the topsoil is washed off the land it is, from a practical standpoint, permanently impoverished. It takes about 300 to 1,000 years to build one inch (2.5 centimeters) of topsoil under favorable conditions. When seven inches of topsoil is washed away, at least 2,000 to 7,000 years of nature’s work is gone. All of the world’s life depends on the fertility of this thin layer of topsoil covering only one-tenth of the earth’s total surface.

The laws of natural selection force practically all plants and animals to support the soil building process. No species of plant can survive long on sloping hillsides unless it helped check soil erosion. No species of animal developed enough intelligence or versatility to survive for long unless it tended to support the continued growth of plants and soil. Otherwise it destroyed itself by destroying its primary source of food.

For about 350 million years, the growth of land-based soil and life has increased. And the evolution of plants and animals to higher forms and greater biodiversity has continued until now. This is why I call our culture an “anti-ecosystem” – as it reverses what ecosystems build. The “agricultural revolution” should really be called the “symbiosis disruption.” In a blink of a eye, our culture has ripped an enormous hole in our ecosystem’s food web.

If the earth was your body, you may not know it yet, but you would have several severe or terminal illnesses. Your diagnosis would be congestive heart failure, AIDS, metastasized cancer, pulmonary fibrosis, plus a fever.

Your body has congestive heart failure because your rivers are polluted and blocked, AIDS because your natural resilience from biodiversity is crashing, cancer because the problem is spreading uncontrollably, the cancer has metastasized because it is now globalized everywhere, pulmonary fibrosis because your forest lung fibers are being clear cut and the air you breath is polluted, and you are running a fever called global warming. In short, if the earth was your body, you would be very sick.

The 2005 U.N. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reported that, “Approximately 60% (15 out of 24) of the ecosystem services evaluated in this assessment are being degraded or used unsustainably,” and “10–30% of mammal, bird, and amphibian species are currently threatened with extinction.” If 60 percent of your body was beginning to fail and you were losing 10 to 30 percent of your immune system, you would be rushed to the hospital.

You may say, “I don’t think it’s that bad.” Three points: first, looking back people do not experience what the world was like for their grandparents and great great grandparents. If they did, they would be shocked. Peter Kahn called this “generational environmental amnesia.” We live too short a life time to know how the world has changed. We might remember when the field next door was turned into a subdivision. But we do not remember what the old growth forest was like next door before it was turned into a field.

Looking forward, I am not talking about the near future. Although, in a few years from now it will become difficult to walk out your door and go “happy motoring.” I am defining a long-term problem that affects many future generations. Connect the dots much further out than just your next paycheck.

Third, how can we be so selfish? We have been given the gift of not only life which we should cherish, but also of some semblance of intelligence. Yet we have this enormous lack of empathy for any other species other than our own. We sit back, drink beer, watch TV, and many could care less.

For ten millennia now one tribe’s cultural story has grown to dominate all others. The last remaining indigenous cultures are barely hanging on against our cultural onslaught. The onslaught of our technology, our languages, our media, our corporations, our bankers, and our loggers. A few dysfunctional wealthy stand atop the shoulders of the vast majority of people and all other species.

Theologian Leonardo Boff put it this way, “Not only do the poor scream, but also the water, the animals, the forests, the soils: that is, the Earth as a living super organism, called Gaia. They scream because they are continuously attacked. They scream because their autonomy and intrinsic value are not recognized. They scream because they are threatened with extinction. Every day around ten species of living beings disappear as a result of human aggressiveness in the contemporary industrial process.”

Many people are starting to recognize that “something just isn’t right,” and are searching for what to do. The answer is to restore the disruption in our relationship with the ecosystem. If we do this, everything else will eventually fall into place. There is a gray area between our ability to restore the earth and getting out of the way to let mother nature do her work. I myself am a permaculturist trying to restore 140 years of damage to our Ashland farm. With permaculture, we work with nature’s succession instead of against it.

Masanobu Fukuoka developed a system of rice farming and orcharding that involved no cultivation, no chemical fertilizer or prepared compost, no weeding by tillage or herbicides, and no pruning. Once he got “out of the way” of nature his rice and orchard yields matched industrial agricultures. He was doing another vastly important thing, he was building topsoil. Each year Fukuoka’s fields became more fertile.

We cannot expect everyone of us to start living like Masanobu Fukuoka today, but for those who are ready let’s start considering a new story—that “humanity belongs to the earth.” The story we live by is the rudder that steers our culture. Change the story and the culture will follow in time.

An ecosystem is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships and energy flows. Our planet, Gaia, is a self-regulating whole life system. Sunlight is the only input to this closed loop. A life form is what “it does.” The now extinct passenger pigeon was a huge nutrient distribution system. When one of the several mile long flocks of birds that darkened the sky stopped to roost, it left two to three inches of manure nutrients. One flock of millions of passenger pigeons did 300 to 1,000 years of soil building in a few just a few days.

Life is a process—a sacred spirit enlivened process. We know this when a loved one is still alive, yet has become simply a body that can no longer relate or respond to us. We know they are gone even before they are dead.

The earth, Gaia, our ecosystem is a sacred place. We are sacred in a sacred place. If we can remember the original story that air, water, soil, oak trees and even mushrooms are just as sacred as we are—that humanity belongs to the earth, then we will restore our symbiotic bond with our ecosystem. By reforming this bond of love, the earth will be able to heal herself and humanity as well.

Visit www.culturequake.org to learn more about Culturequake the book and the online Magazine. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC

Notes:

Oneida Kincaid: Another Way of Knowing

Chuck Burr: Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture

Tom Dale: Topsoil and Civilization

P.A. Yeomans: Water for Every Farm

Peter H., Jr. Kahn: The Human Relationship with Nature: Development and Culture

The United Nations: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Leonardo Boff: Resurgence magazine, November/December 2002

Masanobu Fukuoka: The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming

Zone planning in permaculture design means placing elements according to how often we need to visit them. Areas that need to be visited every day (e.g. the glasshouse, chicken pen, herb garden) are located nearby, while places visited less frequently (grazing area, orchard, woodlot) are located further away.

In Bill Mollison’s book ‘Introduction to Permaculture’, zone zero is defined as being the centre of activity in a design. This may be the house, or in the case of a large scale design may be a village centre.

However some permaculturists have used the term ‘zone zero’ to describe the human element in permaculture design, claiming that the most important part of a design, the people, often receive little attention during the design process.
So how do we define zone zero in permaculture design?

Four experienced designers gave their opinion…

• Zone 0: the centre of human activity, for example, the house.
• Zone 1: close to the house, is the most controlled and intensively-used area containing the garden, work-shops, greenhouse, small animals, wood-pile, compost, etc.
• Zone 2: has typically larger shrubs, small fruit and mixed orchard, windbreaks, poultry, ponds, terraces, etc.
• Zone 3: contains unpruned and unmulched orchard, larger pastures or ranges for meat animals or flocks, and main crops.
• Zone 4: is semi-managed and semi-wild used for gathering, hardy foods, unpruned trees, and wildlife and forest management.
• Zone 5: is unmanaged wilderness – where we observe and learn; it is our essential place for meditation, where we are visitors, not managers.

David Holmgren…

David developed the concept of permaculture with Bill Mollison in Tasmania in the mid-1970s. He lives and works as a designer and consultant in Central Victoria, Australia.

I consider the human dimension in Permaculture very important. I have often said to clients they are the greatest asset and the greatest liability of their land. They are more important than any of the physical characteristics of the land in terms of its sustainable use and development.

But I am wary of the Permaculture concept becoming a ‘theory of everything’.

Perhaps ‘zone zero’ as encompassing human aspects such as psychology, philosophy, ethics, religion, family, love and conflict is an example of that tendency to take a very simple physical model and try to jam a lot of incredibly complex things into it.

I don’t really use the concept of zone zero much but I take it to mean the house. It provides the framework for the house design.

In my work I will do a lot of design in relation to earthworks and how the house sits on the site, the access in and out, the position of the greenhouse and so on. It’s really the province of architectural design, household management, food processing, eating, sleeping and so on. All the activities within that zone are more human–centred than the other zones.

But the zone refers to the house itself, not people, because the concept of zoning is a spatial concept. Zoning relates to physical design. People themselves are not actually confined in a physical sense. So it is quite a limited concept rather than it being an ‘over-arching idea’ that can encompass what permaculture design is all about. It is just one way of looking at things.

If you get to a point where you are actually seeing the zones as distinct systems that can be dealt with separately then the whole concept has become counter-productive. There is only one system and the boundaries are only there in a conceptual sense, though they may more or less coincide in a lot instances with things like fence lines and building walls, and so on.

I have been quite critical of the zoning concept over the years because it is a ‘single node development model’.

On complex properties such as village developments there are many activity centres, or nodes. Each one of these could have a series of zones around them.

The big issue in design is the interrelationship between those centres and the network that develops, and the links between things such as access and water supply. What I call a ‘network approach’ to design needs to be developed more in Permaculture.

Rosemary Morrow…

Rosemary is a design consultant based in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Australia. She has travelled extensively and taught courses in Central Australia, India and Vietnam.

In every class I’ve held, the need for personal change, both psychological and spiritual, has come up in discussion. We are unanimous that a new society is needed and that we simply must alter ourselves for that to happen. It is common for most people to want others to change. I have been fortunate enough to do courses which are specialised in conflict resolution and non-violent exchange.

The permaculture design course (PDC) as it stands, incorporates many possibilities for social and personal development, with topics on land access, land rights, ethical use of money and right to livelihood. In my own teaching I set down class rules in the first lesson based on humility, maximum cooperation between students and everyone’s right to be heard (and to be wrong) without ridicule. I encourage individuals for their gifts and potentials – trying never to compare one with another. I discourage negative language such as ‘but’ and accusing and adversarial behaviour.

Although I use these ideas in my classes, I take Zone Zero to be the building and its technology. I would not feel comfortable developing a unit of the PDC as ‘Zone Zero – the person and society’. I feel that important links to personal and social change come up at appropriate times during the course. Also I would not feel good about Permaculture jargon such as ‘Zone Zero’ for the person. I am happy to discuss people and societies using terms which already exist.

Robyn Francis…

Robyn is a teacher and designer based in Lismore, Australia.

Coming to terms with the issues central to people and human dynamics is a difficult task for many. The complexity of people as individuals, as communities, and as cultures often presents a challenge that is all too easy to ignore. Yet people are central to permaculture. When individuals can cooperate towards a common goal the results will have a greater impact. From this perspective I see the term ‘Zone Zero’ as being most appropriate – all action commences from within the individual, all design is ultimately subject to the human factor of both designer and user. The practical realisation of permaculture is a result of applied philosophy, thought, information, empowerment and motivation in people.

Personally, I like to think of the home as the heart of ‘Zone One’, the house and garden being an integral and inseparable design unit – our personal living environment. There should be no great fears of coming to terms with the human element in design, it must be acknowledged and worked with in a sensitive and realistic way. Simply by applying basic permaculture design principles to people, on an individual and community level, we can learn so much about life and find a practical human ecology. People permaculture – Zone Zero stuff – doesn’t need personal growth or spiritual dogmas any more than any other element in a permaculture system. The principles of cooperation are a big enough challenge for most of us when it comes to human cooperation – what we need are some good tools to facilitate the process.

We all have our strengths and talents, the things we love to do – we need to find our human place in the system so that we can use and develop our skills and talents to the benefit of the greater community as well as for our personal sense of satisfaction and achievement. The complex webs of interdependence and functional cooperation that give natural systems their sustaining resilience can and need to be applied to the patterning of people and human environments.

Bill Mollison…

Bill has taught and written extensively about permaculture for decades.

Periodically, people remark on the lack of ‘spirituality’ in Permaculture writings and courses, even on the lack of attention to a ‘Zone Zero’ or concerns with human interactions.

Yet all of Permaculture deals with the welfare and interdependence of living things; and it is all directed to right livelihood, beneficial interaction and a conservative lifestyle.

Permaculture is about living system design. It is not pop psychology, co-counseling, anthroposophy, or any particular belief system.

Permaculture has always been about skills and systems that are practised, and verifiable by any individual; it does not, and will not, teach purely individualistic beliefs – such systems are already taught elsewhere, and there are numerous courses on spiritual, therapeutic, or theological subjects available.

The strength and credibility of Permaculture lies in its projects.

In my experience, all cultures recognise Permaculture as a tool to extend their native understanding of what is observable, hence a tool to empower themselves, a way of thought that anyone can own.

We can teach philosophy by teaching gardening but we cannot teach gardening by teaching philosophy.

Fukuoka, Bahaguna and many acknowledged spiritual people would agree and have said much the same thing. We begin with the small and practical, and end up with larger concepts of the whole, including the human and spirited dimensions.

“Duty and work, well performed, are elevated to the level of sacrifice or spirituality in the Gita” (ancient Hindu scriptures).