Groxie

Lately my brain has been consumed with permaculture principles. After learning just the basics from Larry Santoyo last weekend, I’ve been using the main principles to orient my actions and organize my thoughts.

Like many folks, I knew little about permaculture, and I assumed that it was about growing/raising your own food in a sustainable matter. I wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t have the whole picture. Permaculture is bigger than gardening or raising chickens; it is a whole set of guidelines or principles for creating a system of closed loops. It doesn’t offer concrete solutions, rather, you can use permaculture principles in every aspect of your life to build toward a system that generates less waste, creates an abundance of good things, and makes use of the relationships between resources in a way that is very economical.

The ideas I learned that have been so helpful (and I’m sure this is a very abbreviated version) are:

Elements should have multiple purposes.

Santoyo brought up an example I’ve been seeing a lot lately: the chicken. Chickens can be a backyard farmer’s best friend. They love to dig around, aerating the soil. They eat insects and insect larvae, and they fertilize the soil as they move along. They can warm up your greenhouse and provide you with fresh eggs without any special training. Why do we pay money to introduce machines or harmful chemicals to do so much of the work they’d do naturally?

Many elements should serve the same purpose.

Nature always has a backup plan; in any system there are lots of ways to fix nitrogen, store nutrients, or spread seeds. If any one nitrogen fixer is wiped out by weather, disease, or predators, another will fill in. This backup system allows for an area to adapt more easily, creating the conditions for resilience and longevity.

Diversity of functional relationships is essential.

Santoyo argued that diversity in and of itself isn’t some great, productive, stable solution. His example was priceless: if you were to gather all of the different gangs in L.A. into the coliseum, you would have a group that is racially diverse. Would it be productive, stable, or beneficial to all of the members? Probably not. When we strive for diversity, we need to be thinking about diversity of functional relationships, about what each element has to contribute. A quintessential example of this method is seen in the way Native Americans planted corn, beans, and squash together.

The cornstalks form a trellis for the bean vines to climb. The beans, in turn, draw nitrogen from the air, and via symbiotic bacteria convert the nitrogen to plant-available form. These nitrogen-fixing bacteria, scientists have recently learned, are fed by special sugars that ooze from the corn roots. The rambling squash, with its broad leaves, forms a living parasol that densely covers the ground, inhibiting weeds and keeping the soil cool and moist.
Toby Hemenway, Gaia’s Garden.

Follow natural succession modeling.

This one is common sense, but Santoyo did a good job of making it hit home. Forests of pines do not spring up from nowhere; pioneer species begin the job, making way for successive species that slowly make the way for the climax species that we so often associate with impressive forests. Trying to plant these climax trees in a meadow, skipping the steps that create favorable conditions, leads to trees that are weak, vulnerable to disease, lacking the plant and animal support communities that ensure hardiness.

The problem is the solution.

Instead of directly addressing a problem, create the conditions for a solution to emerge organically. This was by far the most profound idea I took away from the discussions. Santoyo compared circling around a problem to making a beeline from here to there. For example, if you’re having a hard time keeping your grass healthy in the middle of July, you could just pump tons of water and fertilizers onto your lawn. That would temporarily solve your problem, but you’d be a slave to your lawn maintenance. On the other hand, you could decide to create a set of conditions where the heat and dryness no longer posed a problem. Let the grass die; replace it with native plants. Those plants naturally flourish with your region’s regular rainfall. Then you won’t need to waste money or other resources fighting the natural characterisitcs of your environment.

Changing the conditions to make the solution appear organically will take a while. In most cases, it will appear to be harder than going directly towards the end goal. It will however, provide a more stable framework, one that might just resolve some other issues along the way. John and I have found ourselves returning to this method daily since seeing Santoyo. At the beginning of the first discussion, Santoyo explained: “Permaculture isn’t the answer. It’s a way to arrive at the answer.” We’re still working on a lot of questions, but by using a permaculture framework, I know that we’re setting up a system that avoids so many of the problems we’ve encountered in the past.