Permaculture roundup (part 1)
Apr. 19th, 2011 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceeloveSo, that permaculture thing. I've been trying to grasp and assimilate it, in class for one or two weekends a month since September, to get the gestalt beyond the concepts.
We spent a lot of time in class, which was formally titled "Permaculture for Social and Ecological Transformation", quietly scrunching up our foreheads around different ideas about doing things. We did exercises and had speakers to shake up our ideas about race and class and spirituality. We visited economic collectives, a backyard nursery full of about 300 kinds of plants you've never heard of, and an off-the-grid B&B. We examined the one-way process of human systems, from cultivating/mining a product's raw materials through disposing of the waste, versus the circular process of nature, where one entity's waste is another's raw material. We wandered snowy woods and fields to speculate on their history since the settlers. We talked of forest gardens which provide a host of human-and-other needs with very little human work for multiple generations. We practiced skills for differently seeing the potential of a place; we learned about reshaping the land to capture and hold the energy of water and sun and beneficial animal life.
I looked up the Wikipedia entry on permaculture, and while it's accurate, it somehow manages to be kind of boring.
What does it mean to me? I'm still figuring that out, and I imagine I will be for a long time to come. But it's gelling enough that I can explain it to others, or at least such that I'm feeling more pulled to try, so here goes:
As you all know, I don't see our Western lifestyles as long-term tenable - there just won't be enough resources to go 'round - and I feel an intense internal pressure to understand and reduce the ecological impacts of my lifestyle choices. But, as was hotly debated within the environmental community in about 2005, enviros are never going to get through to people by lecturing about how we should use less: people need to be inspired, to live in a way that feels rich and full, not threadbare.
Right now, most of us are completely dependent on a huge number of complicated systems for our everyday lives, and unless they are overloaded or broken, we don't notice them going on: food, water, heat, power, transportation, communication, waste management, etc, etc. I feel empowered by every step I take towards self-reliance (which for me goes hand in hand with waste reduction), everything I learn to create or do for myself and my community.
For me, you might have noticed, a lot of that is about growing and processing our food. As I've been learning, the less work required from us people (and our resource-hungry systems), the better. The more compost we can make on our property, the fewer trips we make to bring a vanload in from Saugus: so, I gathered many bags of neighborhood leaves last fall, and also started a thriving kitchen worm bin over the winter. The drought of last summer was hard for plants not hooked up to a municipal water supply, so this year, Carl and I will get rain barrels going.
I love grubbing in the garden, but the annual beds are indeed a lot of work, to maintain their fertility, so I'm trying to put more attention into perennial fruits and veggies. Last year, we started asparagus, blueberries, and more raspberries; this year, wild leeks (ramps), which have the bonus of coming up in early-mid spring, and soon a goumi berry bush (which also fixes nitrogen, thereby supporting plants in its vicinity) and pawpaw trees, with comfrey to help them out. Say what?
Pawpaw is a cold-hardy tree with highly perishable fruit that tastes kind of like custard (yummy but not commercially viable); comfrey improves the soil and provides mulch around the pawpaws, draws beneficial insects (pollinators and predators of pests), and can be used medicinally for people, to aid healing. Using plants to provide for themselves and each other, to draw and support animal species, to recenter and reconnect our lives with what's going on immediately around us: this is the kind of thing that interests me most in what I've been studying.
We spent a lot of time in class, which was formally titled "Permaculture for Social and Ecological Transformation", quietly scrunching up our foreheads around different ideas about doing things. We did exercises and had speakers to shake up our ideas about race and class and spirituality. We visited economic collectives, a backyard nursery full of about 300 kinds of plants you've never heard of, and an off-the-grid B&B. We examined the one-way process of human systems, from cultivating/mining a product's raw materials through disposing of the waste, versus the circular process of nature, where one entity's waste is another's raw material. We wandered snowy woods and fields to speculate on their history since the settlers. We talked of forest gardens which provide a host of human-and-other needs with very little human work for multiple generations. We practiced skills for differently seeing the potential of a place; we learned about reshaping the land to capture and hold the energy of water and sun and beneficial animal life.
I looked up the Wikipedia entry on permaculture, and while it's accurate, it somehow manages to be kind of boring.
Inhabitants’ needs are provided for using proven technologies for food, energy, shelter and infrastructure. Elements in a system are viewed in relationship to other elements, where the outputs of one element become the inputs of another. Within a Permaculture system, work is minimised, "wastes" become resources, productivity and yields increase, and environments are restored.How would I say it concisely? Permaculture is a way of re-seeing the human world by emulating the strength, complexity, and versatility of relationships that have evolved within nature.
What does it mean to me? I'm still figuring that out, and I imagine I will be for a long time to come. But it's gelling enough that I can explain it to others, or at least such that I'm feeling more pulled to try, so here goes:
As you all know, I don't see our Western lifestyles as long-term tenable - there just won't be enough resources to go 'round - and I feel an intense internal pressure to understand and reduce the ecological impacts of my lifestyle choices. But, as was hotly debated within the environmental community in about 2005, enviros are never going to get through to people by lecturing about how we should use less: people need to be inspired, to live in a way that feels rich and full, not threadbare.
Right now, most of us are completely dependent on a huge number of complicated systems for our everyday lives, and unless they are overloaded or broken, we don't notice them going on: food, water, heat, power, transportation, communication, waste management, etc, etc. I feel empowered by every step I take towards self-reliance (which for me goes hand in hand with waste reduction), everything I learn to create or do for myself and my community.
For me, you might have noticed, a lot of that is about growing and processing our food. As I've been learning, the less work required from us people (and our resource-hungry systems), the better. The more compost we can make on our property, the fewer trips we make to bring a vanload in from Saugus: so, I gathered many bags of neighborhood leaves last fall, and also started a thriving kitchen worm bin over the winter. The drought of last summer was hard for plants not hooked up to a municipal water supply, so this year, Carl and I will get rain barrels going.
I love grubbing in the garden, but the annual beds are indeed a lot of work, to maintain their fertility, so I'm trying to put more attention into perennial fruits and veggies. Last year, we started asparagus, blueberries, and more raspberries; this year, wild leeks (ramps), which have the bonus of coming up in early-mid spring, and soon a goumi berry bush (which also fixes nitrogen, thereby supporting plants in its vicinity) and pawpaw trees, with comfrey to help them out. Say what?
Pawpaw is a cold-hardy tree with highly perishable fruit that tastes kind of like custard (yummy but not commercially viable); comfrey improves the soil and provides mulch around the pawpaws, draws beneficial insects (pollinators and predators of pests), and can be used medicinally for people, to aid healing. Using plants to provide for themselves and each other, to draw and support animal species, to recenter and reconnect our lives with what's going on immediately around us: this is the kind of thing that interests me most in what I've been studying.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}