{{tag>permaculture bookref}}
===== Permaculture =====
"If we throw Mother Nature out the window, she comes back in the door with a pitchfork" --Masanobu Fukuoka
People often tend to hear about Permaculture. It has been my own arduous journey in trying to understand permaculture. I concur, the arduousness was simply because I was stuck to one view of how the world should work. It made complete sense, when I realized, Business As Usual can't go on for too long.
To me, Permaculture is not just a method of food production.
==== How I see it ====
Permaculture is a grass roots movement. Its a way of living in this earth as an earth-dweller. Its about making use of science and making use of nature, even more so. Its about living responsibly and simply.
Permaculture, therefore, is not just 'techniques'. Techniques are merely clever ways to solve problems. Principles guide action. These guiding principles are all firmly based on philosophical grounds.
A 'permaculturist', therefore, needs to first work on the philosophical motivations. If your goal is to build a big multinational corporation out of using permaculture techniques, I'm sorry to say - you're missing the point. :)
The power of community has kept humanity alive for millions of years. Modern day science is a very advanced form of this power. However, one thing humanity never worked on is in understanding their own animal nature. Science only resulted in applications that further fueled the desires that needed these applications. The root-cause, ultimately, is in our animal brains.
People tend to blame Science for the short-sightedness, I beg to differ. Science has been a gift. It has allowed us to see deep into ourselves. Whether we see through the Hubble Space Telescope or an Electron Microscope, what we see is complex and ironically simple ways by which nature works.
Science has also allowed us to see our own stupidity :)
I'm amazed at the short-sightedness and the arrogant over-confidence humanity has exhibited in the past 100 years. Science is a tool. From the time we appeared on this planet, we have used tools to feed our instincts. Our tools helped us make use of the environment to 'get things done'. Science allowed us to understand nature very effectively but there was nothing stopping us from questioning ourselves. So much so that we dug out [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuquicamata|Craters like this]] for extracting copper. Now, why exactly do we need copper? Electricity is zilch without copper. Why do we need electricity? Because "Life is great" with it.
Or is it?
In India, thousands of farmers leave their land to urban slums because farming has become a loss-making affair. In many cases, the river that used to flow has started drying up and increasingly failing monsoons is enough to drive a lot of farmers out into the cities. Why did this happen? Dams, the ingenious way of stopping a river by constructing materials out of the earth using the earth's fossil fuels to control a river's flow. Irrigation is an amazing phenotype.
Today, every urban dweller is earning his basic needs of food and shelter by, in some way or the other, working towards helping people consume more and more 'stuff'. The army wants to protect it's country's territory and The corporations want you to abide by laws that they sure know how to manipulate.
I define the urban man as someone who ultimately helps a corporation or a government, ruled by a set of rich and powerful men, reap paper money out of his little contribution to the exploitation of the environment. And of course, the more paper money you have on your hands, the more you're allowed to use the exploitations of the environment. Note that even food is environment, if you think about it. The Green Revolution did not solve hunger in India. The number of people living in slums and number of farmer suicides increased after the Green Revolution. What the Green Revolution did was to convince farmers that they can get these //green pieces of paper// in return for their obeying the laws of the //green pieces of paper//. This system used a system of using fertilizers and pesticides to wield absolute control over the environment in order to produce a high yield of crops. Sounds alright, doesn't it? Well, the problem is the short-sightedness of that 'project'. It is a system that increased plant nutrition (as against soil nutrition). It is a system that relied on killing the eco-system by using pesticides. It converted large tall forests into flat agricultural lands.
Here's how I joke about the Green revolution: Green revolution is like taking a healthy person into a hospital, keeping him in intensive care because you want him to grow well. We feed him, change his diapers and do everything we think is important to him. All along thinking he is happy... and then we realize that the food we've been feeding him is from a finite fossil fuel.
Its just gotten way too complicated, isn't it?. All one needs is clean air to breath, clean water to drink and healthy food to be alive and experience this universe in this moment of being alive.
To me, it was the realization that even so-called Noble things: from the internet, roadways, etc., to laws - everything is ultimately driven top-down from either a corporation or a government. The more I help them, the more I encourage their system of exploitation to thrive. To me, it just didn't seem right. The only way one can discourage this system and drive it out is to take an alternate approach to living is to start stopping to depend on it... by living a simpler and more joyful life.
Around August 2008, I bought [[Our Farm|a small patch of agricultural land]] in [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanjavur|Thanjavur]]. The land was primarily developed using inorganic methods. Though, in general, south india hasn't caught up to the Green Revolution, thankfully... there is still some eco-system left.
I decided to be goal oriented about my activities at Thanjavur simply for management, bias-free review and scrutiny of process followed. Here be a [[our farm]]!
==== Goals ====
- Learn by fun - Document and build a [[Nature observations]] journal. Little pieces of useful information and thoughts can help create a big idea! (For instance, Here is one: "Plants are highly inefficient about taking incident sunlight. They only consume 5% of the day's light. They would love to take more, but they just don't have enough time due to their inefficiency. Reflecting light from multiple places WILL certainly help plants grow better.")
- [[our farm|design]] the land progressively with each step yielding more of my basic needs than what the 'rest' of the land is doing in the 'known' way (//known way// includes being in the //paper money// system. All one needs is to show people that it is indeed possible to lead a simple life and enjoy it. In simple words, //Lead by example//.
- [[Short term goals]].
=== Community Building ===
I believe, there is real happiness in simple things. I'd any day prefer great time with family or friends: eating, talking and doing the usual things... than spending over 50 hours of my week in doing complex things like program a computer to earn a salary that ultimately gives one very little time for these simple things. And whom do we feed in the process? The //green pieces of paper// system - where the more //paper// you have, the more you can own earth. It has no long term goals - it doesn't care for the the environment or the future of it. The //green pieces of paper// have become a virus that only wants to keep growing year over year, driving the planet mad!
There are several permaculture communities around the world claiming to be living happily. They just have fun throwing dinner parties while nature does its job. I know that sounds a little funny, but its as simple as it gets. They do have biogas, they tend to avoid solar panels. They are people like you and me, but they live locally. They don't travel 20 KMs to spend most of their day away from home. They don't pretty much own anything but their houses and gardens. There are also permaculture followers in the cities.
Ultimately, they realize the value of the environment and base their actions on long term environmental wealth building while sustaining their needs. Such principles naturally lead you to also making changes in your lifestyle.
It is probably a drastic change, but it is probably not difficult to make when we approach it. Whether we like it or not, and whether peak oil is 10 years down the line or has already happened... some day or the other, our current careless way of life will result in lesser resources left for the future generations.
And if you really want to make a transition to simple living, you're going to need people!
I'm talking to some relatives and some known friends. Relatives, especially the 'previous generation' do show keen interest. I've also met a bunch of like minded people, but due to the virtue of using the Internet to finding these people, they're all distributed across the globe ;)
==== How I was enlightened under a tree ====
I was in J.P.Nagar, probably 3 years ago... where there are still a few places with trees. It started raining and I was no where near shelter. The only available shelter was a very large tree. It rained for 1 hour straight. Yet, I wasn't wet through out the period. I went away, finished my job, returned to the same tree to drink something. And there it was, dripping - not at the intensity with which it rained, but a much slower rate.
A wild forest doesn't need irrigation. Yet, there is abundance of water available for a lot of purposes, including well water. The method by which a forest 'holds' water is mind bogglingly simple - a lot of simple things working together can result in very interesting outcomes. A tree is like a giant sponge. I have made the same observation from a reasonably large medicinal (for my pet) 'bush' in my garden. Its wide at the top and so there is a lot of shade below it. When I water the plant (all over the leaves), water keeps dripping for upto 45 minutes. Its like a hacky, lazy drip irrigation system that
- prevents water evaporation merely due to the virtue of its leaves covering sunlight. I have my nursery right below this bush.
- needs very little effort. ie., Permaculture needs you to be absolutely lazy when trying to solve the problem... like, a very smart monkey living in a forest ;)
==== The Koan that enlightened my friend ====
Someone that I recently befriended, who had his own reasons (spiritual simpler living) to live a simpler life, narrated this story to me:
He had been to Pondicherry where he met this Yogi.
The Yogi held a 5 rupee coin on one hand. Threw it on the soil and asked "What happens?"
He replied "It would probably rust away."
He opened his other hand. There was a seed. Need say no more. I was enlightened once again.
Everybody has their reasons. Some folks I know cite health reasons and I have nothing to disagree with them.
==== So how do we 'build' a permaculture forest/garden/farm? ====
First off all, you need some land. You can have an eco-system that can sustain you only where you have enough soil to grow enough of your needs. While some folks have managed to meet 70% of their needs from 0.1 acres of land, you're probably going to have to look for a practical place where you can either take care of it yourself or have someone like-minded taking care of it for you. Needless to mention, if someone is doing it for you, you need to start taking efforts to directly take care of it. Afterall, that is what is a community.
The long term goal is to work towards living completely off of your land. Build a community and go about living your life. It needs observation and interaction. It certainly needs a lot of spikes of efforts in adapting and growing your 2D land into a 3D forest.
Permaculture is essentially a mindset to solving problems using nature. Plant whatever you want, but apply your existing knowledge about the plant and upgrade your knowledge as you continue to observe. There are books that document such learnings... but permaculture is essentially a way to apply that knowledge in, simply put, very lazy ways.
As I learn and explore India, I'm amazed at the inherently simple and sustainable ways by which people have lived for centuries. India offers me a sense of hope in that sense.
For instance, farmers tend to grow ducks. They rare the ducks to their already irrigated land. The ducks swim. Irrigated river water contains fish which would anyway die and these become feed to the ducks. Besides this, the pest inflow is high as fresh water enters a given region. The ducks keep the pests population in control. Ultimately, the ducks turn the problems (pests) into food (meat, eggs) and distributed manure (droppings).
Compare this in contrast to a Monsanto Inc.,'s "solution" that uses heavily mechanised farms, a person working round the clock, constantly spraying pesticides, etc., life indeed has become unnecessarily complicated.
And when I say "Permaculture is a Lazy way of thinking", you really do have to see how villagers live a very lazy and relaxed life :)
It takes a while to learn to live the permaculture way, I guess. I just began the journey.
=== Related Favourite Books ===
{{amazon>0646418440}}
{{amazon>0393065898}}