[Ludi]

It's taken me awhile to get around to watching this and I think folks have posted it before, but I think it's worth posting again as it covers a lot of basic issues we might need to consider (includes discussion of Peak Oil):

http://permaculture.tv/how-permaculture ... -hemenway/

I don't agree with everything he says, and I'm not saying his solution is one we're likely to actually implement (for reasons Pstarr posts about a lot), but I think the ideas are worth looking at.

[americandream]

This is mere tinkering. Were permaculture to take off in the West, all we'ld be creating is another consumer sector for the ships to provision from the Chinese factories. Some clever person would probably set up a sectoral index on factories in the permaculture sector and another excuse to consume more would raise it's greedy head.

What does need changing however is our obsession with owning everything privately. That will not change until we are compelled to do so by forces beyond our control.

[Narz]

I like Toby a lot. I took a permaculture course with him (and Larry Santoyo).

However, I don't see permaculture "saving the Earth" nor do I see civilization collapsing. These are both fantasies.

I think permaculture is really cool as a supplemental agricultural practice & also good for city/town planning & architectural design in general however, I've never heard of anyone ever feeding any significant number of people (even one) on this alone.

So, I think there's a lot to learn from permaculture but to think it's going to save the world (the world = permaculture enacting good guys while the zombie hordes eat each other).

[Ludi]

This is mere tinkering. Were permaculture to take off in the West, all we'ld be creating is another consumer sector for the ships to provision from the Chinese factories. Some clever person would probably set up a sectoral index on factories in the permaculture sector and another excuse to consume more would raise it's greedy head.

What does need changing however is our obsession with owning everything privately. That will not change until we are compelled to do so by forces beyond our control.

That's a profound misunderstanding of permaculture, americandream. Permaculture is about human societies, not about obsession with private ownership. In fact, Pstarr's excellent observation that we're unlikely to transition to permacultural society is that it demands redistribution of land, which the ownership class will object to strenuously. There's no "permaculture sector" in a permacultural society. I urge you to learn more about permaculture so you won't waste your time and other people's time with that kind of strawman.

[Ludi]

I've never heard of anyone ever feeding any significant number of people (even one) on this alone.

That's surprising you hadn't heard of any successes. Sepp Holzer feeds his family and is a successful permacultural "farmer" on his place, as one example. The Bullock brothers on Orcas Island are another example. I'll try to get a list of other examples if you'd like.

[Sixstrings]

I'm not an expert at gardening, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Having said that.. my impression of permaculture is that IT'S A HECK OF A LOT OF WORK. And seems to me the problems are endless when you're trying to go all organic.. constant insect problems. Just overall a lot of work, like what a hobbyist would do who obsesses over the "perfect garden." Problem is life isn't so perfect.. what if some animals come through and tear up a crucial part of your little ecosystem?

I'm also suspicious of the new agey, hippie, feel-good vibe about permaculture.. that's fine for a hobby, but when it comes to making sure folks have something to eat then you don't have time for fluff -- do what works, be flexible, whether it fits within your ideology or not.

EDIT:

Permaculture is about human societies, not about obsession with private ownership.

That's the kind of New Agey feel-good stuff I'm talking about. My point.. if everyone in your town is hungry, transportation has broken down and there are shortages and winter's coming and you MUST grow food or STARVE.. then there is no time for all this ideology. There's no time to plan a perfect garden where everything is perfectly placed and the shade is just right, everything you plant complimenting what it's next to, on and on.

[Ludi]

I'm not an expert at gardening, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Having said that.. my impression of permaculture is that IT'S A HECK OF A LOT OF WORK. And seems to me the problems are endless when you're trying to go all organic.. constant insect problems. Just overall a lot of work, like what a hobbyist would do who obsesses over the "perfect garden." Problem is life isn't so perfect.. what if some animals come through and tear up a crucial part of your little ecosystem?

It's actually a lot less work than other kinds of food-growing, because most of the work comes in the first couple of years when you set up the system. After that it mostly runs itself. I have gardened "organically" for years and never had significant insect problems. Permaculture emulates natural systems, so the predators of pest insects are in the system and take care of the pests for you. Most of the work of of permaculture is in pruning plants, mulching with the prunings, and harvesting. A little planting if you want to grow annuals that don't self-seed easily. Because the little ecosystem is diverse and resilient, if an animal comes through and tears part of it up, it can regenerate from the remainder. Permaculture relies on a perfect world much less than agriculture does.

You might want to learn more about it before making these sorts of criticisms, which are thoroughly covered in all the permaculture texts. For beginners, I like Toby Hemenway's (horribly titled) "Gaia's Garden."

I'm also suspicious of the new agey, hippie, feel-good vibe about permaculture.. that's fine for a hobby, but when it comes to making sure folks have something to eat then you don't have time for fluff -- do what works, be flexible, whether it fits within your ideology or not.

Yeah, I don't like the New-Agey vibe either, but that's not a fault of the system. Maybe I strike you as a New-Agey, unserious sort of person who isn't interested in making sure folks have something to eat. I don't know if you bother to look at my posts in the Planning Forum, but I'm pretty damn pragmatic actually. I don't like woo-woo shit and I don't tend to promote woo-woo shit. So if permaculture is too woo-woo for you, you certainly wouldn't have gotten that impression of it from me.

[Sixstrings]

It's actually a lot less work than other kinds of food-growing, because most of the work comes in the first couple of years when you set up the system.

And what if people starve because you spent too much time, up to two YEARS, planning "the perfect garden." What if bad weather, animals, or marauders tear that perfect garden up -- is it another two years to plan another?

My point is in desperate situations it might be better to just plant a lot of potatoes and corn.

Permaculture just seems very complicated to me, everything too interdependent on too many factors.. complicated isn't good in a survival situation, you want to keep it simple.

[Ludi]

If you want to plant lots of potatoes and corn, that's fine. There's no rule says you can't grow those even in a permacultural garden. If people prefer to grow potatoes and corn in a field, I think they should do that. In fact, I have always said people should do what they feel most comfortable doing. Nobody is going to force people to practice permaculture, because that would be contrary to the principles of permaculture!

How much corn and potatoes are you growing these days? If you want to grow really a lot of those things, I suggest Biointensive, which is a very simple system but one which to my way of thinking is too much work. But boy howdy can it grow a lot of potatoes!

[Sixstrings]

If you want to plant lots of potatoes and corn, that's fine. There's no rule says you can't grow those even in a permacultural garden.

Think about it.. people have been growing food THE SAME WAY for what, 10,000 years? Humanity has learned that there's safety in maximum quantity.. that means big farms with rows of densely pack veggies, not a "garden of eden" outside everyone's house.

Permaculture is a NEW idea (post 1960 I'd guess). It's going against the grain of thousands of years of human experience.

Nobody is going to force people to practice permaculture, because that would be contrary to the principles of permaculture!

See that's why I don't get.. all this "principles" stuff and "community" it's all ideological.. making sure your community has enough food so folks don't starve is serious business. Agriculture is a science, not a philosophy.

How much corn and potatoes are you growing these days?

How much of your food do you grow? I've watched some permaculture vids on Youtube.. it is AMAZING what these people can do with just a suburban yard, and the gardens are gorgeous. But you can tell they spend a massive amount of time on this stuff. And when the rubber meets the road, they still aren't growing a majority of their food needs.. maybe 30%.

My main point here is that if everything breaks down and there's a whole town that has to get fed, you can't screw around with perfect gardens -- history has shown the best way is to plan for MAXIMUM produce and that means max density.

[americandream]

This is mere tinkering. Were permaculture to take off in the West, all we'ld be creating is another consumer sector for the ships to provision from the Chinese factories. Some clever person would probably set up a sectoral index on factories in the permaculture sector and another excuse to consume more would raise it's greedy head.

What does need changing however is our obsession with owning everything privately. That will not change until we are compelled to do so by forces beyond our control.

That's a profound misunderstanding of permaculture, americandream. Permaculture is about human societies, not about obsession with private ownership. In fact, Pstarr's excellent observation that we're unlikely to transition to permacultural society is that it demands redistribution of land, which the ownership class will object to strenuously. There's no "permaculture sector" in a permacultural society. I urge you to learn more about permaculture so you won't waste your time and other people's time with that kind of strawman.

Ludi

Permaculture is less about how we steward the earth in my opinion, and more of a function of how we relate to it as stewards (being the only sentient species). Until we resolve that primary relationship and that will involve revolution borne of the absence of choice (and I actually believe that somewhere in the recesses of his mind, this is essentially what Marx intuited in his objectivist notions of dialectical history), only then will our rational stewardship of the planet and its resources arise. As it is, we are so messed up as a culture that no sooner does some idea for restoring the earth, etc, etc, come along, than someone is onto it for a fast buck and we are no better than we were previously and in many instances worse off.

I speak from hard experience having actualy taken the trouble to drop out of modern society, taking up a crofting lifestyle in a very remote part of the UK (in the Orkney Islands where I was essentially self sufficient for 7 years), pursue permaculturalist living with like minded disillusioned only to find that the entrepreneurial disease soon afflicted some on the island (myself included) and we were back at what we had rejected.

My arrival at Marxist rationalism has been through the filter of sentimental idealism. My objective understanding of history is a much more solid foundation I find, understanding as I do the core issues at stake.

In fact I would argue that it was preciely this wooly headed thinking that undid the French and American Revolutions and will undo any other tinkering until this core issue is resolved. In contrast, the Russian Revolution was a much more resilient affair and it took the Western elites a very lengthy, expensive and bloody conflict to break the spirit of objective awareness (The Soviets emerged from the bloody battlefields of US inspired jihadism in 80's Afghanistan drugged, broken and shellshocked...however they did not relent lightly as they knew and understood the nature of the beast hence the standoff today.)

In a nutshell, sane stewardship of this planet will not come without a struggle

[mos6507]

plan for MAXIMUM produce and that means max density.

Which will mean mining and eroding the topsoil down to the bedrock which will eventually lead to famine anyway. There ain't no free lunch. Permaculture attempts to do things as close to the way nature does it as possible, which is slow and gradual. Try to force too much productivity out of natural systems and you wreck them.

[Ludi]

Here's an example from a permies messageboard of a permie feeding some people:

"We had a 22 member CSA foodbox program this year, and I would consider our farm to be practicing permaculture. Half the boxes were for singles and couples, and the other half were families. I'd estimate that would be about 60 people.

We provided an average of 7 items to our customers for 18 weeks on about an acre of cultivated land, as well as wild edibles.

We also sold extra produce to restaurants and had a weekly table at a nearby farmers market for about 14 weeks. And of course we ate a lot of veggies from the garden ourselves.

We probably could've been able to support more than the 22 members but wanted to start small as it was our first year on this farm."

http://greenshireecofarms.com/

Seems comparable to a "normal" farm.

[SeaGypsy]

From my many years experience living on permaculture oriented communities I have simplified the key questions dow to the following:

1/ Is it ok or even important that edible weeds be encouraged to establish in marginal or even prime farming areas?

2/ When is the obvious immorality of planning codes forbidding the growing of food plants/ animals in suburbia going to end?

3/ When will survival and sustainability take precedence over business interests? ie: public parks become fruit orchards despite the damage to the fruit seller?

4/ When will caloric/ nutritional yeild per hectare take precedence over taste/

[Sixstrings]

Which will mean mining and eroding the topsoil down to the bedrock which will eventually lead to famine anyway. There ain't no free lunch.

That was a problem before oil came on the scene. Answer: crop rotation.

[Ludi]

Those are some important and interesting questions, Sea Gypsy. Especially the planning questions relevant to urban and suburban spaces.

In regard to calories produced versus taste, this is an issue I'm trying to deal with in my own permaculture garden. I've recently change to the "paleo diet" to lose weight http://www.nerdheaven.dk/~jevk/paleo_intro.php#menus and also because it is a diet I'm more likely to be able to grow than the normal civilized diet, as grains don't grow all that well in my climate. The grains folks grow here are oats and sorghum. I like oats ok but I've not eaten sorghum and not many people in our Western society do. I think it's more common in Africa. But both of them take a lot of space. I'm growing a lot of root crops which are the primary calorie crops in the "One Circle" Biointensive diet, but I hope to get most of my calories from meat. We'll see how that works out. Ideally I'd hunt the meat but having mental illness I don't think I should handle firearms and so far my husband isn't into hunting. I will be raising chickens for eggs and meat. But probably not producing all of my meat on my own place - I've contracted with my sister to get rabbit meat from her. I used to be mostly vegetarian but have recently become convinced that's not necessarily the most healthy diet. So far I have lost weight on the paleo diet which is important because I have congenital high blood pressure and anything I can do to keep it down is beneficial.

[mos6507]

The problem with permaculture, which I agree with SixStrings on, is that it does not operate at a human timescale. It has a slow ramp-up speed on its theoretical yields. A multi-level food forest with a canopy species like chestnuts is a multi-decade investment towards maturity. Over the same timescale I'm sure you could grow far more calories in annuals.

If permaculture had swept the world 30 years ago, we'd be in pretty good shape today. But a crash program today will fall short because it won't reach maturity before TSHTF. And with each year that passes, the ability of permaculture to soften the blow of collapse recedes.

That doesn't mean it isn't still useful, but like SixStrings says, when people panic, and they have limited land to work with, they will not be planting chestnut trees. They will plant survival gardens with potatoes and beans into their marginal topsoil and just hope for the best.

There is a lot of dispute over permaculture yields. I have the "A Forest Garden Year" video from Martin Crawford. In that he says point-blank that yields per acre don't match traditional agriculture. This is someone who has put 15 years into his plot. Geoff Lawton, on the other hand, has made some outlandish claims about how many people you can "feed" per acre. So it's hard to know exactly where the truth lies.

A big part of the problem is that perennial systems don't map to the human diet as nicely as annuals do. It's easy to have some fruit trees, and have more fruit on hand than you could possibly eat, but that's not a balanced diet. So simply counting calories is not the way to measure "yield". You have to look at how well a polyculture system can approximate a functional diet, otherwise people will continue to lean on traditional systems for the things they aren't getting from the food forest.

Take someone like Robert Hart. He was a raw food advocate, and a vegetarian. Within his (relatively small) food forest, he pretty much covered his household fruits and vegetables. But he still had to buy grain.

Worst of all, perennial systems require that you stay put, or that you at least pass the torch to new owners who will continue where you left off. Annual agriculture is like pitching a tent and perennial polyculture is like building the pyramids.

Robert Hart's food forest is now in a state of decay thanks to the apathy of the new owners.

And I've put a lot of time and money into edible landscaping here, and odds are when this house is sold, it will all be scrapped. Whatever dividends were earned through several years of grapes, blueberries, gooseberries, currants, raspberries, hazelnuts, etc... will be wiped out in order to put up yet another McMansion. However, as long as you've got good soil and some seeds you can start right up again wherever you go.

This to me is why annual agriculture has become so dominant. Human culture is too transient and destructive for a lot of perennials to make it. Greer mentions something along these lines in The Long Descent. Did annuals make us that way, as Ishmael suggests, or is it merely a reflection of how we wanted to be anyway? Kind of academic to think about the chicken and the egg when you've got 6.9 going on 9 billion people to feed.

This is also the intersection point between permaculture as an alternative form of agriculture, and as more of a social movement. Permaculture systems really call out for people to stay rooted, and to think in terms of ecosystems rather than nice little square fields. People themselves being PART of the ecosystem (zone 0 if you will). For instance, my backyard is a hill. Ecologically, the entire hill is like one system that could be redone in swales and all that stuff. But since I'm in only 1/4 of it, I can only work on my segment. This has a lot of drawbacks. Trees need pollinators, and sun exposure, etc... At a suburban scale, collaboration with neighboring plots would significantly increase the potential of what could be done. So permaculture could help break down borders, if people were to change how they think about land-use.

You've got to decide what your objectives are. Is your objective to kick the can down the road? If so, then why not keep the green revolution going? Use all that shale gas to make nitrogen fertilizer. Then coal. Then nuclear (all you need is electricity for haber-bosch). There are plenty of ways to stack a few more cards on the house of cards. What permaculture does is try to envision a positive end-game, something that could call a truce between mankind and the biosphere without dying back all the way to Georgia Guidestones levels.

And considering that permaculture has the potential to restore degraded ecosystems, it's also important for the few of us who give a damn about biodiversity as well as human carrying capacity. Adding yet another wheat field to the world will only increase the population of rodents and UG99.

So try to think a little deeper about these issues rather than jumping to sound-bite rebuttals.

[mos6507]

Which will mean mining and eroding the topsoil down to the bedrock which will eventually lead to famine anyway. There ain't no free lunch.

That was a problem before oil came on the scene. Answer: crop rotation.

It takes more than crop rotation to make agriculture sustainable.

A couple datapoints for you. The cause of the dustbowl.

And look at what pumped irrigation is doing to the San Joaquin valley. Here we are in the 21st century and we're making the same basic mistakes that the sumerians did thousands of years ago.

So you can say that yields in permaculture are low, but can't you see how our yields are going to go down anyway by virtue of degrading our soils?

[Umber]

Those are some important and interesting questions, Sea Gypsy. Especially the planning questions relevant to urban and suburban spaces.

In regard to calories produced versus taste, this is an issue I'm trying to deal with in my own permaculture garden. I've recently change to the "paleo diet" to lose weight http://www.nerdheaven.dk/~jevk/paleo_intro.php#menus and also because it is a diet I'm more likely to be able to grow than the normal civilized diet, as grains don't grow all that well in my climate. The grains folks grow here are oats and sorghum. I like oats ok but I've not eaten sorghum and not many people in our Western society do. I think it's more common in Africa. But both of them take a lot of space. I'm growing a lot of root crops which are the primary calorie crops in the "One Circle" Biointensive diet, but I hope to get most of my calories from meat. We'll see how that works out. Ideally I'd hunt the meat but having mental illness I don't think I should handle firearms and so far my husband isn't into hunting. I will be raising chickens for eggs and meat. But probably not producing all of my meat on my own place - I've contracted with my sister to get rabbit meat from her. I used to be mostly vegetarian but have recently become convinced that's not necessarily the most healthy diet. So far I have lost weight on the paleo diet which is important because I have congenital high blood pressure and anything I can do to keep it down is beneficial.

Ludi,

You can certainly hunt your meat without resorting to a firearm. Bowhunters do it all the time. A bit of research will show many ways that game was taken before the advent of firearms.

Umber

[Ludi]

I have seriously thought about getting a bow, but they are quite expensive and as I understand take a good deal of strength. I'm kind of a feeble middle-aged lady.