The Permaculture Promise: What Permaculture Is and How It Can Help Us Reverse Climate Change, Build a More Resilient Future on Earth, and Revitalize Our Communities
160
The Permaculture Promise: What Permaculture Is and How It Can Help Us Reverse Climate Change, Build a More Resilient Future on Earth, and Revitalize Our Communities
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Overview
The Permaculture Promise explains in simple terms why permaculture may be the key to unlocking a livable future on our planet. Author Jono Neiger asserts that humans can thrive while simultaneously making Earth healthier and not destroying it. The book shows 22 ways that permaculture can create a better future for all living things. Profiles of people and communities — including an urban dweller who tore up her driveway to create a vegetable garden and a California housing development that dedicates a third of its land to parks, orchards, and gardens — will inspire you to incorporate permaculture principles into your life today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781612124285 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Storey Publishing, LLC |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 35 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Toby Hemenway has been an adjunct professor at Portland State University and Scholar-in-Residence at Pacific University. He is the author of The Permaculture City and Gaia’s Garden, which won the 2011 Nautilus award and was named one of the ten best gardening books of 2010 by The Washington Post. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Natural Home, Whole Earth Review, and American Gardener. Toby and his wife, Kiel, live in Sebastopol, California.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Turn Deserts into FARMLAND
We often assume that human impact on the environment must necessarily be destructive. At best, we think, we can make an effort to be "sustainable" — something the United Nations has defined as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
But what if we could do better than that? On a planet where humans dominate so much of the land and resource base, what if we could do better than simply not compromising the future? Creating regenerative systems — those that revitalize, restore, and rebuild — moves us beyond sustainability. Regenerative design builds up life; it is expansive, additive, affirmative. It enables us to repair the damage that humans have wrought on the environment.
All living systems are naturally regenerative; they renew and rebuild their materials and energy over time. A forest grows more complex as the years and decades pass, adding species, biomass, and interconnections. Disturbance — brought by a storm that blows down limbs, or loggers who harvest trees, for example — will knock it back, but the regrowth process inevitably begins again. Trees will heal their wounds, and saplings will fill in open land. Soils are another example of regeneration; they grow in depth and fertility over time, given the right conditions.
Some environments are more fragile than others, however. In some parts of the world, human interaction has degraded landscapes to the point that they have lost their ability to regenerate without some assistance. In vast swaths of dryland ecosystems, for example, human interactions have promoted desertification, with almost complete loss of vegetation and animal life. Drought and climate shifts also play a role, of course; it's harder for a natural area to regenerate if there's no water.
REGENERATE, RATHER THAN DESTROY
Although humans have contributed to the degradation of these lands, we can also take part in healing them. By using contour swales to help capture the small amount of water that is available and by planting crops that return nutrients to the soil (such as leguminous trees, which fix nitrogen) and serve as windbreaks to slow erosion, we can reverse the process of desertification.
In some areas of Africa, farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) has been successful not only in preventing and reversing desertification but also in restoring degraded cropland, grazing land, and forests. In many dryland areas, this "underground forest" of resprouting trees had been neglected and even removed for cropping and tree-planting projects. Under the FMNR system, farmers now encourage and manage the natural regrowth of woody plants and support the cycle of healing. The trees and shrubs are managed carefully with traditional coppice and pollarding practices — pruning methods that produce harvestable wood without removing the tree. By supporting the lands' impetus to regenerate, farmers receive benefits such as firewood, fencing, crop shade, soil improvement, and fodder for livestock. Farmer-managed natural regeneration is a low-cost, low-input, large-scale regenerative approach led by locally knowledgeable people.
When we are in sync with life's processes and working with natural systems, we can build up the soil, the health of the land, and the ability of communities to support themselves.
CHAPTER 2
Create SELF-FERTILE SOIL
Many people garden using bags of compost and fertilizer from the garden center. Buying in fertility may be a stopgap measure for getting your home garden or farm up and running, but it's not a long-term solution. It's a bit like being on a treadmill. Every new growing season means another trip to the garden center and another bag of fertility brought in from off-site.
A better strategy for maintaining the fertility of our soil is to use the plants and animals already working there. This is self-renewing fertility, and it happens naturally in wild places. Plants reach deep into the soil layers to access and concentrate nutrients, which then become available to plants and soil microorganisms when the plants die and decompose. Or animals consume the plants, such as pasture grasses, and leave behind (as manure) what they cannot absorb. On marginal land, the rich manure from these grazers is especially important for improving depleted soil.
We can replicate this natural system of self-renewing fertility in human-created landscapes. There are several simple but key factors:
PLANT "DYNAMIC ACCUMULATORS." These plants excel at gathering nutrients and accumulating them in their tissues. Once these dynamic accumulators decay, whether naturally or via composting, those nutrients are released into the soil and become available to other plants. Dynamic accumulators can do much of the work of building soil. We don't know everything about how these plants work and where in the plants most of the nutrients accumulate. Certainly much of it happens in their roots, which are in the topsoil layers. Some scientists also believe that deep-rooted plants can pick up nutrients from deeper soil layers, but this theory is still being researched. Comfrey is an excellent example of a deep-rooting herbaceous plant that accumulates nutrients, including potassium, phosphorus, calcium, copper, iron, and magnesium. Watercress, a floating aquatic perennial, accumulates many nutrients. Some other excellent dynamic accumulators are stinging nettle, black locust, dandelion, sorrel, dock, black walnut, and shagbark hickory.
GROW PLANTS THAT ADD NITROGEN TO THE SOIL. Nitrogen is a limiting nutrient in many soils, meaning that it is often in short supply and may be the first nutrient to limit a plant's growth. And since it is water soluble, nitrogen can easily be leached out of soil if it isn't bound to organic matter and replenished. Nitrogen-fixing plants, primarily those from the bean and pea family, have a symbiotic relationship with a particular kind of bacteria that helps them convert nitrogen from the air into a form that is usable by plants.
Plants such as vetch, clover, and alfalfa can convert as much as 250 pounds of nitrogen per acre. However, the nitrogen is concentrated in nodules on their roots and goes quickly into seeds as they ripen; in fact, as much as 70 percent of the captured nitrogen can be tied up in the seeds. To make this reserve of nitrogen available to surrounding crops, the plants must be cut back before they produce seeds. The stress from being cut back causes the plants to shed roots (and thus nitrogen) into the soil.
CREATE A FERTILITY BANK. This is a cache of woody or herbaceous perennial plants that are grown specifically so their new growth (fertility) can be harvested and cycled back into the garden, orchard, or field. Plants are cut back yearly (or several times per year), and the trimmings are either composted or applied directly to the soil. In this way, the organic matter built up in the trimmings can be incorporated into the soil.
With woody plants, this process is called "coppicing"; with herbaceous perennials, it is called "cut-and-come-again" or "chop-and-drop." Perennial plants that form the base of a fertility bank will regrow from the same root systems, so they do not need to be replanted year after year.
In one fertility bank my design partners and I planted, we used switch-grass, bush clover, creeping comfrey, and Russian comfrey. An autumn olive self-sowed there, and its high-nitrogen branches and leaves are coppiced. Compost bins nearby can be used to process the vegetation into compost, or it can be used as mulch directly in growing beds.
KEEP SOIL MULCHED OR COVERED WITH PLANTS. Bare soil is an invitation for erosion by wind or water, overheating, and evaporation, which can lead to leaching of nutrients and loss of soil fertility. Also, weed seeds that are exposed by tillage quickly establish in bare soil. Soil should be covered, ideally with thick vegetation or mulch, at all times. Even a thin layer of mulch over soil that has just been worked will reduce the damage to soil structure, allow beneficial fungi and microbes to stay active, and protect soil's ability to maintain fertility.
CHAPTER 3
TURN WASTE into FOOD
Everything a natural ecosystem produces is cycled, from soil, air, or water through plants and animals and then back to soil, air, or water again. When soil, water, sun, and seed conspire to produce a tree, it grows and grows, storing organic matter and nutrients in its body, housing animals and insects in its branches, providing shade and shelter for surrounding plants.
When the tree dies, woodpeckers break it up digging for insects, insects burrow through the decaying wood, and as the wood is broken down by fungi, it returns to the earth to become soil. The soil grows another tree. Around and around it goes. There is no waste, only cycles of reuse. Everything is food for the next part of the cycle.
REJOIN THE CYCLE. Somewhere along the timeline of human agriculture, we began breaking the cycles of reuse into linear chains, and seeing the materials at the end of the chains as waste. Manure from farm livestock was no longer cycled back onto farm fields and thus became a waste product to be disposed of. The fields then needed fertilizer, which was made in factories and became an additional expense for the farmer. Excess fertilizer ran off the fields and caused pollution in nearby waterways and groundwater. With cycles of reuse broken and waste products rampant, problems began to multiply.
When we focus on turning "waste" into food, we are resurrecting natural cycles that have been disrupted. Following the tenets of permaculture, we can provide for our own needs while participating in and supporting the great cycles that are so essential to natural ecosystems. We can work with this cycling and do the work of growing soil, and thus the plants and animals we rely on.
COMPOST EVERYTHING. One of the easiest ways to convert waste to food is by composting, which captures the organic matter in food scraps, prunings, lawn clippings, and other plant debris. Organic matter is an essential ingredient for building rich soil, which in turn produces the crops we consume. In almost all circumstances, more organic matter is called for. Is your soil too clayey? Add compost. Too sandy? Add compost. Just plain depleted? Add compost.
Be on the lookout for other sources of organic matter that might be flowing through your community as "waste." Arborists and companies that clear trees away from power lines often have truckloads of wood chips looking for a place to go. Fallen leaves (often bagged up by the side of the road), pine needles, and woody brush are also usually available for the taking. They can be added to your compost or chopped and used as a mulch that will decay in place, providing organic matter over the long term, while at the same time helping to increase soil life, reduce evaporation of water, and cool the ground in summer.
UTILIZE HUMANURE. In most homes, the fertility of our own human waste is taken away, whether to a municipal waste treatment plant or into a backyard septic system. Although it's an uncommon practice in our culture, this "humanure" can be a fertility source instead of a pollution problem. Simple systems to compost and cycle humanure, urine, and graywater (household water, such as that from the laundry or bath, that does not contain serious contaminants) can save large amounts of water and energy and contribute to the self-renewing fertility of our land. Projects to demonstrate and document the benefits of cycling human waste are important. The Rich Earth Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont, demonstrates the use of urine as an agricultural amendment, closing the loop of pollution caused by the high nitrogen in urine. Instead of polluting water resources, it's improving the production on croplands.
CHAPTER 4
SPREAD the WEALTH
There are now more than seven billion people on the planet, and our numbers increase every day. Many of these people are struggling to survive, while a small percentage thrives. What would it look like if we created a society that met everyone's basic needs?
The founding fathers of the United States said (I'm paraphrasing) that all people deserve "life, liberty, and the chance to grow kale." Similarly, permaculture calls for "people care" — in short, that everyone should be able to take care of their needs for food, water, shelter, and personal connection.
However, centuries of land and power consolidation have left many people around the world without access to land, with no way to sustain themselves and no basic skills to help them meet their everyday needs, such as collecting water and growing food. The vast wealth of developed societies is out of reach for most people.
Just as we can reinvigorate frayed ecosystems by layering the soil with organic matter and creating habitat for pollinators, we can regenerate degraded communities by sharing resources — physical, mental, and emotional. We can limit our own consumption and distribute the surplus more evenly.
Economies and other systems are based on exchanges and the flow of "goods," whether they be currency or food. Surplus results when an economy or a community reaches abundance. Too often in human societies, though, the surplus remains with a select few instead of being shared with those in need. This parsimony — keeping for ourselves, rather than sharing with those who need it — goes against the principles of nature, however. After all, earth's systems are designed to create and move surplus, whether it is in grain, tomatoes, labor, or love. When animals reproduce, the offspring often move on to populate new areas. Some plants produce thousands of seeds, which are carried on wind, water, and wing to spread far and wide. Wind, water, heat — all forms of nature's energy concentrate, build, spread, and dissipate. Onward and outward, natural systems distribute surplus to support balance and stability.
CHAPTER 5
BUILD COMMUNITY
The romantic archetype of the lone pioneer making it on his own is embedded in our society. We love to idealize the rugged individual. Think of Thoreau in his cabin on Walden Pond, escaping human society and waxing poetic on the beauty and immeasurable intricacies of nature. In reality, though, Thoreau was just a few miles from the center of Concord, Massachusetts, and regularly went into town to socialize and get supplies.
Just like Thoreau, we are inescapably a part of society, and we need the connections and mutual support that come from living with others. A strong community is a source of resilience in the face of an uncertain future. In even a relatively simple world, the skills you need to live on your own and be truly self-sufficient are vast: growing food (vegetables, fruits, grains), raising animals, preserving food, building shelter, making medicine. Add in the skills of a more modern world — water filtration, energy system management, engine repair, plumbing, wiring, electronics repair, and so on — and most of us will simply throw up our hands in despair. We may be adept in some of these fields, but it is the rare, extraordinary person who can claim to grasp the fundamentals of all of them. And that is why we need each other.
The lone pioneer is really just a myth. We need our neighbors. We need lots of people within the community who can each play a role — to grow vegetables, teach the children, represent us in government, care for elders, build our homes, repair our infrastructure, and on and on. Start by getting to know your neighbors and learning what their skills and passions are. As a community in search of stability and resilience, figure out which pieces of the puzzle are missing — which skills or resources your community lacks — and make a plan for filling in those holes in your community base.
As with other permaculture facets, it's the interconnections between the parts that build the complete picture. In a healthy, whole community that functions with resilience, you can contribute your skills, do what you are passionate about, and know that others will be there doing their part, too.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Permaculture Promise"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Jono Neiger.
Excerpted by permission of Storey Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
ForewordIntroduction
1 Turn Deserts into Farmland
2 Create Self-Fertile Soil
3 Turn Waste into Food
4 Spread the Wealth
5 Build Community
6 Help Individuals & Communities Re-Skill
7 Make Wetlands & River Edges Productive
8 Create More Livable Cities
9 Stabilize Our Food Supply
10 Create Productive Landscapes
11 Help Reverse Climate Change
12 Help You Become a Nicer Person
13 Help You Become a Better Designer (of Landscapes and of Life)
14 Build Smarter Homes
15 Create Gardens That Provide for Themselves
16 Stop Erosion & Make Water Cleaner
17 Ensure That We Have Enough Water
18 Create Financially Resilient Communities
19 Revitalize Natural Areas while Providing for Humans
20 Turn Problems into Solutions
21 Fulfill Our Energy Needs
22 Build a Resilient Future
Basics of Permaculture Systems
Resources
The Shoulders We Stand On
Gratitude
Index