Suburban Renewal - One backyard at a time

Earlier this week we learned from Bill Mollison of the Permaculture Research Institute that permaculture is a design system which incorporates Nature's principles to support human life without degrading habitat and ecosystems for all other life forms.

In this vid by Peak Moment TV: Community responses for a changing energy future, host Janaia Donaldson visits Jan Spencer in his Eugene, Oregon, permaculture home and garden.



What did you think of Spencer's use of urbanite? We're seeing this term more and more for concrete, steel and wood mined from urban lots, buildings and highways as the old is torn out and replaced. Keep this in mind when we get to the discussion, way down the road, about whether the world of Ordinary has always existed as we find it now, or whether villagers learned from a past much like our present. If their society evolved from one something like ours, what did they do with the cities and highways? Where did all those buildings and the stuff inside them go?

We're in the garden of Eden

The only job we have left on earth that can express our humanity, is to return other species to their place, and take our place, which is a small place in the total system.

Bill Mollison

In parts 5 and 6 of In danger of falling food, Bill Mollison takes us from a rain forest to an African desert plateau nearly completely denuded of vegetation, then to Crystal Waters Permaculture Village, and finally to a 67 year old garden he calls the garden of Eden.

Note: This is a continuation of the hour-long film In grave danger of falling food by 220 Productions. The segments stop and start mid-sentence. See May 19 and 20 posts for parts 1 and 2, 3 and 4, respectively.

[Permaculture] has to be the mainstream agriculture of any future society.

Bill Mollison

People say to me, will permaculture work? I say, will plants grow?

Bill Mollison

I give gratitude to 220 Productions for making this film available on YouTube and to Bill Mollison and the others of the Permaculture Research Institute for teaching us all how to recognize our place in the natural system. I give gratitude as well for their showing us how to build a world much like the Village of Ordinary.

Next: We'll take a break from the world as garden and I'll introduce you to two amazing men who sat across the table from one another, made eye contact, and shook hands. One of them spent 25 years in jail for shooting to kill the other. He nearly succeeded.

Bringing the chickens home

Modern agriculture is not a system for producing food, but for producing money.

Bill Mollison

In parts 3 and 4 of In danger of falling food, permaculture co-originator Bill Mollison takes us on a tour of his newest garden, where plump, healthy chickens strut their stuff, then samples the delectables in one of his first gardens, now fully mature. This garden has something blooming and growing year round, and none of it is weeds.

Digging causes work. Work causes digging. Weeds cause work. Digging causes weeds. Cause and effect. Vicious cycle.

Bill Mollison

You may have noticed in parts 1 and 2 that each part begins where the other left off, usually mid-sentence. That's because In danger of falling food is a one-hour piece, chopped into parts for YouTube viewing.




How many eggs does it take to produce one egg? If you live in the city, how much of your food dollar is for food and how much for transportation, fuel and waste? (Try 95 percent.)

Society is caught up in this system of destruction. Instead of all that, you can grow a garden in a few weeks that will provide you with vegetables and timber all your life, and it seems to me to be much more sane and responsible that people should be trained to put in those few weeks of work.

Bill Mollison

How realistic is it to grow food where we live? Find out in part 4.



My favorite line from this segment: "All plants are carnivores. They eat you in the end." Now that's Ordinary.

In danger of falling food

Bill Mollison is a living legend. He's known as the genius of permaculture.

Alan AtKisson introducing his interview with Bill Mollison

If you have a few extra minutes, you'll be glad you spent them reading the interview. Mollison's a natural teacher who entertains so effortlessly you forget you're learning. Here's a sampling of what he has to say.

On designing community: Why is it that we don't build human settlements that will feed themselves, and fuel themselves, and catch their own water, when any human settlement could do that easily? When it's a trivial thing to do?

On designing homes: A house should look after itself - as the weather heats up the house cools down, as the weather cools down the house heats up. It's simple stuff, you know? We've known how to do it for a long time.

On agriculture: That we don't design agriculture to be sustainable is totally eerie. We design it to be a disaster, and of course, we get a disaster.

Mollison is featured in In grave danger of falling food, an hour-long documentary about the permaculture concept presented by 220 Productions in their series Visionaries: Small solutions to enormously large problems. The program is available free on YouTube, in easy-to-watch ten-minute segments.

In these first two segments, Mollison builds a balcony garden and takes us into a rare Antarctic beech forest remnant billions of years old."If we lose our forests," he says, "we lose our greatest instructors."



The elegance of permaculture design is that you start where you are. Everyone can do it. In Part 2, Mollison shows us how to grow an edible garden, complete with an aquatic system and frogs, if we like, on a narrow city balcony, but don't count on eating the frogs, because they'll become your friends and "you can't eat your friends."

Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.

As quoted in the Alan AtKisson interview

That's what the Village of Ordinary is about, and that's why permaculture is so important to the vision.

Tomorrow: Parts three and four of In grave danger of falling food.

Greening the desert

Geoff Lawton taught a group of agronomists in Jordan how to turn ten acres of salty desert into a fruit-bearing garden. What's more, they sprinkled only one-fifth the irrigation water other folks were using in the region. They were so successful that months later Lawton received an e-mail from the Jordanians telling him there was fungus growing in the soil. The fungus was mushrooms, and the Jordanians were astonished because they had never seen mushrooms.

Take five minutes and twenty seconds to see how Lawton's team grew fruiting figs in just four months. More find out just how important those surprising mushrooms were to the success of the project. (I'm tempted to say, like the nightly pre-news blurb: "You won't believe the significance of those seemingly insignificant mushrooms ...")

Edit 5/19/08: My apologies, friends and readers. I embedded the wrong video last night. I've moved it to its rightful place in today's post. This is Greening the Desert. Watch it and be amazed.

You can solve all the world's problems with a garden.
Geoff Lawton

Think of denuded jungles and clear-cut forests, now desert wastelands all over the earth. Think of reclaiming them with these techniques. Think of using such techniques to grow food worldwide.

Tomorrow, we'll delve deeper into permaculture, with the first of six ten-minute videos with Bill Mollison, one of the founders of permaculture. You'll be filled with hope, and just possibly inspired to start your own permaculture garden on your urban balcony, and maybe to plant a few seeds. Now that's Ordinary.

What is permaculture and why should you care?

Permaculture is

• Care of the Earth
• Care of People
• Setting limits to population and consumption
• Reinvesting surplus back into the system

Those are Penny Livingston-Stark's words, not mine. She's talking about the basic tenets of permaculture, and in this video by globaloneness she shows how agriculture is perhaps the easiest way for us to begin to adapt the concepts of permaculture into our lives. Take a look.



David Holmgren and Bill Mollison developed the concept of permaculture in Australia in the Seventies. Mollison says the term permaculture is a marriage of two words: permanent culture. By observing and imitating natural systems, say Mollison and Holmgren, we can better establish a working partnership with nature that ensures the longevity of our species. Rather than the slash and burn, pillage and exploit, tear down and rebuild strategy of the past three centuries, permaculture shows us how to live in abundance without destroying our world.

Want to see how it works? Check out Crystal Waters Permaculture Village and Earthaven Ecovillage. These people have been living in an Ordinary village for decades. They show the rest of us how.