Perma Culture
Perma CultureThe word is actually "permaculture". As in, "agriculture that is permanent, that is sustainable". Permaculture is based on applying patterns to gardening.
Some permaculture principles:
Permaculture is the science and practice of creating semi-permanent ecosystems of nature. Permatech is the techniques employed in order to achieve it. In contrast to traditional agriculture, permaculture bears these behaviors:
The basic idea is to think of it like a terranium that YOU live in.
Permaculture definition of design: "Relating elements beneficially".
There are maybe 20 excellent sound bites in the permaculture literature. Highly recommended. Permaculture in a Nutshell [1856230031] is an excellent short introduction. -- KentBeck
There is a book by BillMollison, "PERMACULTURE: A Designers' Manual" (ISBN 0908228015 ). It is a way of life, a worldview, a theory of design.
The definition from the book is "Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material and strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its forms. It seeks to provide a sustainable and secure place for living things on this earth."
I learned about this book from a review on the DesignPatternsBook on Amazon. (Anybody who knows how to find a permanent URL for that review, please put it here.) RichardHelm pointed it out to me, and said he had the book. It appears that BillMollison is a cult figure in Australia. Anyway, I got the book.
The book started slowly, because the author made a lot of claims that I didn't agree with, and covered a huge number of topics that seemed to me to be unrelated. But the third and fourth chapters were quite interesting from a patterns point of view.
The third chapter is "Methods of Design". It gives an overview of the permaculture method of designing a small farm, and describes a lot of patterns. One is "Develop the nearest area first, get it under control, and then expand the perimeter. A single perimeter will then enclose all your needs." This method of design is based on observing the site, following a few rules, and optimizing. I think the author is oversimplifying; a successful practitioner of permaculture would need to know a lot of details about the plants and animals he was using. However, you would pick this up as you go along. The approach reminds me a bit of that used by ChristopherAlexander.
The fourth chapter is "Pattern Understanding". Like Alexander, Mollison remarks how all patterns in nature are irregular, yet everything fits into patterns. He says "I believe that it is in sophisticated pattern application that the future of design lies, and where many solutions to intractable problems may be found". His approach to patterns centers on shapes, branching, pulsing, and the relationship of scattered phenomena. I expect I will study this chapter for months and still be learning new things.
The remaining chapters are focused on particular topics like climate, trees, water, soils, and particular strategies for areas like the tropics, drylands, and cooler climates. The book is attractive and full of information. It is easy to see that Mollison has been working on this all his life. I enjoy seeing his passion and his expertise, and will keep reading this book for a long time.
I get annoyed by some of his statements. For example, "Monoculture man (a pompous figure I often imagine to exist, sometimes fat and white like a consumer, sometimes stern and straight like a row-crop farmer) cannot abide this complexity in his garden or his life. His is the word of order and simplicity, and therefore chaos."
I agree that monoculture tries to achieve order and simplicity but is inherently unstable and therefore chaotic. I disagree completely that the people who practice monoculture do so because they cannot abide complexity. This is an incredibly prejudiced remark, and completely untrue. The farmers that I know are flexible, love nature, and practice monoculture knowing its problems but believing that they have no other choice.
Page 59 has a figure contrasting permaculture with "most present-day design", which is characterized as stimulated by a desire to make money. If you talk to farmers, you'll learn that they worry about money, and will often explain what they do in terms of the effect on the bottom line. But farmers are definitely NOT in the business to make money! A typical Illinois farmer with 800 acres has a farm worth two to three million dollars, and perhaps another half a million dollars in equipment. He will average maybe fifty thousand dollars a year profit. If farmers cared mostly for money, they would sell the farm and put the money in the bank. A local joke is that a farmer won the lottery and was asked what he would do with the money. "Keep farming until it runs out." Farmers feel trapped by the system, and would love a system like this if it gave them a way out. The fact that they aren't using this system means that they either don't know about it or think it doesn't work.
I'm not a farmer, but I am a designer. I'm expecting to get a lot of design principles from this book as I keep reading it.
-- RalphJohnson
The idea behind permaculture is to set up a stable semi-managed ecology. The ecology should be able to run along by itself for a fair while without human intervention. Because most permaculture environments are set up for human purposes, they do need that intervention, in the form of taking fruit and other edible products out of the environment. For aesthetic reasons, a lot of different elements are used.
This doesn't scale up for large-scale food production, largely because it's relatively manpower intensive to harvest (as the plants are scattered all over the place). I've never heard of someone growing grain in quantities to feed a village in a permaculture environment, for example. Plants like wheat, barley, and cotton just like to grow in fields, and that's how they are often found in the wild, for instance.
However, any long-running farm can be looked upon as a stable semi-managed ecology. The old ThreeField? system is a good example. These are not permacultures, because the ecology is essentially uprooted at harvest time, but they are stable.
Permaculture works well on the individual or community garden level, especially if you want a more natural garden (as opposed to the ordered row of flower beds). Just be prepared to spend a bit of time controlling invaders to your ecology, especially weeds (a good perimeter fence helps, but is not sufficient). As a plus side, you'll never have to mow the lawn.
Worth noting that in Australian alternative ag. circles Mollison is frequently reviled.
See also, or perhaps instead, OneStrawRevolution? - http://www.motherearthnews.com/library/1982_July_August/The_Plowboy_Interview__Masanobu_Fukuoka has a nutshell.
EditText of this page
(last edited February 16, 2014)
or FindPage with title or text search