We're overdue for a collective shift toward a more just,               cooperative and ecologically sustainable culture.                                                                                             If not now, when?

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            Step 4

        Permaculture       

                                    DOING MORE WITH LESS           

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INTRO: A REALITY CHECK

Step 1: SLOW DOWN * let's get reacquainted with nature's pace

Step 2: LOOK AROUND           stand where you live and assess the situation

Step 3: GET ROOTED * DIG IN    find your home community and  get active

Step 4: PERMACULTURE                doing more with less

Step 5: BE KIND * PLAY FAIR     the golden rule and its many cultural variations 




        Folks like Bill Mollison have been spreading the Permaculture Principles for a few decades now. 

                      The principles stress the importance of efficiency by:

        * advising us to work with nature

        * finding the positive resource in an apparently negative situation

        * making the least change for the greatest possible effect

                  ( another variation on Einstein's idea - that the simplest solution is the best one.) 

                                

          

                  "Efficiency is rooted in allowing nature to lead in our design solutions."

                                                                    --- from "The Sustainability Revolution" ---


         "Firstly, premaculture is about producing edible landscapes, mirroring                         the natural ecosystems in their diversity and production."

                           It places an emphasis on long-living food crops, like fruit and nut trees.

                          But it's so much more than just sustainable food systems.

It's about designing gardens and homes to harmonize with natural laws,    minimizing consumption of energy and materials, and minimizing waste               and pollution.

It's about developing land use strategies that restore damaged environments,      and maintain genetic biodiversity.

Over time, permaculture concepts have grown to include, "finances, water harvesting,       communities, buildings, and alternative and appropriate technology." In other words, it's a set            of basic principles designed to create more sustainable cultures, by cooperating with nature.

Permaculture explains composting and long term food crops, and also practical ways to      make the best use of home sites - for instance, how to capture and reuse rain & waste      water, or make the best use of a site's solar energy.

           ( gleaned from "The Basics of Permaculture Design" by Ross Mars )

                   

 "Permaculture is about taking back the responsibility for feeding and sheltering ourselves, and for our own individual welfare and physical and mental well-being."

"We can only be of service to others if we first learn how to care for ourselves. If we can use the precepts of permaculture to help us to learn to feed, house, and employ ourselves, then   we can provide for our families with far less strain on the community and our environment."

            from "Chicken Tractor " (The Permaculture Guide to Happy Hens and Healthy Soil)
                                       by Andy Lee and Pat Foreman  
                  
  I must confess, I've got a ways to go to be fully in step with natural, permaculture style living.
No doubt, my carbon footprint on the planet is larger now than it was 25 or 30 years ago,
when I lived more simply, and helped grow more of our own food.

Let's face it, living a sustainable lifestyle in a sprawling metro area can be challenging.
But it's doable.

And I'm sure all of us can find new ways to introduce principles of sustainability into our lives,
                          whether we're living in a twelve story walk-up,
                                          or a suburban ranch home,
                                                    a double-wide along a creek,
                                                               or a development of McMansions.


                    Call it permaculture, or voluntary simplicity, or eco-householding,                                                                                 any way you slice it,
                    
   
                                      it's time to re-embrace nature's way.
                   
In many ways, our home and yard don't look so very different from the rest of the neighborhood.
We've got the usual lawn and trees and ornamental shrubs.
But in addition, we've planted apple and fig trees, and 2 delicious varieties of grapes that drape over
         an ugly chain link fence, and grace it with beautiful leafy vines and fruit.

We even tucked in a few other fruit trees, guerrilla style, in neglected neighboring lots
             - the pies we bake from the cherries down the street just burst with flavor!

And sizable chunks of our front and side yards have been turned into organic vegetable gardens.
We planted them when our youngest daughter was an adolescent. She was, of course, mortally embarrassed by the corn growing in our front yard. But hey, she's come around. Now, as an adult, she and her family have got veggies, fruit trees, herbs and flowers growing most everywhere in their yard.

Over time we've filled in holes in the landscape with native berry bushes that require very little care and water. Even the ornamental plants we introduce have a practical function:

            - like rose varieties with the juiciest, sweetest hips to eat and use as medicine
            - and lavender to attract pollinator bees ..                                                                                 - and echinacea, with its beautiful flowers, and healing roots and seeds.

            
          You should see all the bumble bees on the echinacea when its in bloom.
          Sometimes the bees stay the night on the flowers, a bit drunk on pollen it seems.

 I figure you can never have enough pollinators around - particularly these days, with so many
 honey bee colonies experiencing hive collapse.
 So we maintain a population of easy care, mason bees too.

 We've got way more lawn than any self-respecting permaculturalist would have.
 When spring comes around and you can almost see the grass growing daily, it can be            challenging to keep it mowed with our non-motorized push reel mower.
But if we do it regularly, it's pleasant enough exercise .... part of what keeps us fit.
Really, it feels good - getting a work-out, while taking care of basic home and yard maintenance.
    It's intrinsic exercise - not something you need to hop into the car to find - it's built right into day-to-day life.
Over time we've gotten rid of some of our lawn by turning it into a meadow that we only cut seasonally.
It's great wildlife habitat for a variety of local creatures ... raccoons, possums, birds and the like.
Plus a chunk of lawn in back has become home to our compost and brush piles.
   
                       You get the general idea, right?

           

  I'm thinking the next step for us may be raising a few backyard chickens.
 More and more of our neighbors keep chickens these days.
 Sometimes their roosters end up getting donated to our stew pot ... yum yum.


           We try to use what's right at hand.

For example, we've got a huge maple tree in our back yard,
and come fall, we've got an over abundance of leaves.
None of the leaves get carted away in trucks ... all the recycling happens right here.
Some of the leaves join our food and yard waste in the compost piles.
Others provide mulch for our landscape and gardens.
The remainder rots in place and nourishes the soil under the tree.

We've paved the pathways out to the gardens, the compost pile and the shop, with the most ubiquitous of man made materials - old concrete slabs - aka "urbanite"
It's everywhere. Readily available to recycle.
Some of ours came from just down the street where an old sidewalk was being repaired.
Set into the ground with an eye for patterns, the paths are pleasing and practical, and cost nothing beyond our own sweaty labor.

When the weather permits, we hang our laundry outside to dry.
Clothes dried in the sun have a certain undeniably pleasant smell to them.
Besides I think laundry hanging in the backyard looks friendly - it says, we're here, we're home.
 
 

 And during the chilly, winter months, we dry our laundry on racks over the heat vents.
There's hot air coming out - might as well use it.
Draped over our bed in a gentle yoga stretch, I can even use the heat vent as my hair dryer.

      

All of our yard work is done without chemicals or power tools.
I certainly appreciate rototillers, tractors and chainsaws. They have their place in a sane world.
But in keeping with the idea of minimizing energy consumption and pollution, my husband and I
choose to garden with basic hand tools, like shovels and trowels, hand pruners and bow saws.
There's something quite satisfying about using simple, well made tools.
I'm reminded of this when I rake up the fallen autumn leaves.

There's a rhythm to it.
With each sweep of the rake, the leaves are flung closer to the pile, where they'll sit composting, until they're needed for mulch next year. Some of the tines on the old rake are a bit out of line with the others, giving them a musical tone as they skitter along the ground or scrap on the sidewalk.
Why anyone would use a loud, heavy, stinking leaf blower to do the same job, is beyond me. Leaf blowers turn a seasonal pleasure into a damn chore!

Yeah, there's a real beauty and pleasure to well designed hand tools.
One of husband's favorites is our weed whip.
The broad, easy, back and forth motion, is a good balance to the close-up work he does.


If you look back a hundred years, you'll see that many commonplace tools of the era,
 made use of the principles of mechanical advantage.
          Tools were designed to complement human or animal power
                 with the use of gears and pulleys and levers.
            Some were really quite ingenious.

                    
         
                       Take the bicycle for instance.
It's evolved into a perfect blend of human power and mechanical advantage.

                         Low tech.   No fuel needed.

      


Maybe we should back-up a bit... and revisit/reconsider a road we took in our history.
Round about the turn of the 20th century, lots of innovators saw the advantage of electrical power and the internal combustion engine. And for better or worse, the modern technological world was up and running.

It's time to rethink our dependence on technologies that require large inputs of energy. Perhaps we should start using more efficient, human-powered tools again.

Cause our over-reliance on technology has come back to haunt us, with pollution... obesity ... health threatening toxins and diminishing energy reserves.      
I'm not suggesting we all embrace some sort of Amish lifestyle or become complete Luddites.

Having lived for years without the usual conveniences of modern life, believe me,
hot running water and central heating are some of humankind's best inventions ever !

Of course we want to shelter ourselves from the elements and create a reasonable degree of comfort
in our lives, but we've gone so ridiculously far beyond that.

Some of us hermetically seal ourselves off from the very source of our physical well being, the Earth itself - moving seamlessly from heated car to heated office to heated store to heated home.
     Do you realize how much energy that takes?
     Do you understand the correlation between that much energy use and pollution?
     Do you know that America's blood sucking energy use destabilizes global relationships?

Hey, it's just inevitable to feel some cold in the winter.
It's certainly easy enough to turn down the thermostat, and layer up with sweaters & vests.
To save energy in the cooler months, my husband and I turn off the heat at night while we sleep. We bundle up, all toasty warm in a thick pile of covers.
 Then in the daytime, we keep the heat set in the low to mid 60's. We're reasonably comfortable with a few layers of clothes on. In the evening, when we're slowed down and tired, we turn the thermostat up a few degrees, and luxuriate in the wonderful warmth.
It's no real sacrifice.

And naturally of course, we sometimes feel HOT in the summer.
Like a lot of older homes in our bioregion, ours lacks air-conditioning.
We moderate the heat by darkening the house with blinds and curtains.
We use fans, and open & close windows to catch cooler breezes or block out the heat.
And we simply experience the summer heat. Even enjoy it.
You know something's wrong when our homes, stores and offices are air conditioned to the degree that we need to wear extra clothing indoors in the summer. Let's face it, if you need to wear a long sleeve shirt or sweater inside when it's 95 degrees outside, excessive energy is being used.

Of course, weatherizing our homes -
Adding insulation & energy efficient windows, goes a long way toward moderating our overuse of the planet's diminishing fossil fuels.
   

     
    
          Healing the planet isn't strictly about our individual and household choices.

    We're overdue for massive business and government investments in
green energy. Our economy and infrastructure need to be rooted in sensible,
energy efficient technologies.

UNFORTUNATELY ...
"...our hardest problems usually require big changes in
the existing economic and political order.  But big changes
always run headlong into staunch opposition from powerful
and entrenched interest groups - like companies, unions,   government bureaucracies, and associations of financial
investors - that benefit from the status quo."
                                    ("the Upside of Down" by Thomas Homer-Dixon)

              So, we'll need to keep pushing our leaders, and hopefully soon
                      we'll see a surge in the use of alternative technologies,
         like solar, wave and wind power, throughout all segments of our society,
         - technologies that make use of natural energy flows and patterns.

   
                         

    
       Janine Benyus has coined the term Biomimicry, to describe how...
    "nature with its 3.8 billion years of evolution acts as a guide for humans"
                                                             - from "The Sustainability Revolution" 

She says,  "nature teaches humans to treat ecosystems not as a commodity but as a source of knowledge and inspiration"

"The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone."

 Unfortunately the industrial model of life looks at nature as a resource base,
                 ..."a kind of treasure chest to be plundered by the most cunning or powerful."

         ____ here's Ms. Benyus's _________


  Biomimicry Principles     


                             * Nature uses only the energy it needs.
        * Nature runs on sunlight.     * Nature taps the power of limits.

                    
             * Nature fits form to function.   * Nature recycles everything.

               
        * Nature demands local expertise.    * Nature banks on diversity.

                      
      * Nature rewards cooperation.   * Nature curbs excesses from within.
(Some of nature's basic repeating patterns, from the book "Li - Dynamic Form in Nature" by David Wade)
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         How can we incorporate these natural principles in our lives?                              __________________________________________________________
 

     The basic principles of Deep Ecology, as derived from the work of Arne Naess,
     a Norwegian ecologist and philosopher, continue along in the same vein.
        Deep Ecology stresses ... " that all species have the intrinsic right to exist."

"Appreciation for non-human species counters the Western development model, which seeks to exploit nature to accommodate human needs. For deep ecologists, the rights of other species to exist is independent of human activities."


Camped out in Death Valley, California, during 1984, George Sessions and Arne Naess drew up eight basic principles that describe deep ecology:

  1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves. These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
  2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.
  3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity accept to satisfy vital needs.
  4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life demands such a decrease.
  5. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly rapidly worsening.
  6. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.
  7. The ideological change is mainly in appreciating life quality rather than adhering to to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.
  8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary change.


         
 
     
   Of course, reading & talking about the environment will only get us so far                                                       in our understanding of nature's ways.

                      There's simply no substitute for spending time in nature.
      - hiking, skiing, flying kites, gardening, snorkeling, picnicking -
                                         ... whatever gets us out there.

   Out in the world, on nature's own terms,
   we meet her in all her bounty and glory,
       her fury, and utter indifference.

               Out in nature, we are reminded of our place in the big scheme of things.
                                             We relearn patience.
                                We find that nature communicates with us.


                 

                             "But ask the animals, and they will teach you;
                              the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
                              Ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
                               And the fish of the sea will inform you."  Job 12: 7-8

      Mother Earth is a living and breathing system with her
           own ways and wisdom  -  a beloved friend.

Those who care for the Earth live...."according to the realization that the world is home to billions of living creatures, all of whom have an equal right to a healthy environment and a life in peace".

We understand.... "that human beings - the most powerful creatures on earth - are meant to find happiness not in exploiting or manipulating (our) fellow creatures but in protecting them and enriching their environment."    
                                            ( from "The Compassionate Universe" by Eknath Easwara )


                
                                Let's renew our bonds with nature.



               Highly recommended:

 "Exploring Deep Ecology" from Northwest Earth Institute
  
 "Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture" by Toby Hemenway

   Permaculture Activist  Magazine

  "Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century" edited by George Sessions

   Vandana Shiva  check out her website    http://www.vandanashiva.org/
   "Voluntary Simplicity" by Duane Elgin
        ( ..." a manner of living that is outwardly more simple and inwardly more rich.")


   "The objective is not dogmatically to live with less, but is a more demanding intention                     of living with balance in order to find a life of greater purpose, fulfillment, and satisfaction."

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