revealing article<\/a> in the HM newsletter In Practice<\/i>, permaculturist Aspen Edge describes her evolution from thinking of permaculture as a set of practices to seeing it as a way to design solutions. Aspen and her husband, David, with four years of permaculture experience in a temperate region, bought a farm in the hot, arid Mediterranean climate of southern Spain, and decided to create a food forest. Aspen writes, \u201cOur permaculture mind applied those techniques which, if applied in a temperate or tropical environment, would build soil and conserve water. . . . Four years on, far from a complex, multi-stacking sward of \u2028vegetation, we had even less biodiversity and increased bare\u2028 ground. . . . Nothing was performing in the way that we had expected.\u201d They shifted gears, and tried the specific methods of Holistic Management for brittle (hot, dry, and fragile) landscapes, which involve rotational grazing and building soil via animal manures, and provide specific steps for ranch financial planning. The land, animals, and their finances rebounded beautifully.<\/p>\n Their initial conclusion was that HM was simply better for drylands than permaculture was. But they soon realized that HM offers\u00a0a recipe tailored for managing brittle landscapes like theirs, and nothing in HM was out of keeping with the strategies that a good permaculture design would arrive at. It was their perception of permaculture as a set of practices\u2014that sheet mulching should be done everywhere, that all land wants to be a food forest\u2014that was the problem. Holistic Management originator Alan Savory did not use permaculture as such to create HM, but he arrived at it by using the same observation skills and understanding of ecological processes that any good permaculture designer would. It provides\u00a0a recipe specifically for operating ranches, with brittle landscapes as its particular focus. Just like Transition, it wisely tells the user exactly when and where to use it, how to monitor progress, and what outcomes and milestones to be watching for.<\/p>\n
This last\u2014context\u2014is what is often missing when we first hear of the iconic permaculture practices that embody permaculture\u2019s principles so aptly. Techniques like herb spirals and keyhole beds are teaching tools that richly apply multiple principles and patterning, but they are often taught as general panaceas without giving clear guidelines. You need to really love herbs to keep up with the many species that stack into an herb spiral. Keyhole beds, in turn, can be difficult to irrigate, tend to be so intricately planted that newbies often lose veggies in them, and are hard to navigate on slopes. And food forests, often touted as the goal of every permaculture land design (and Gaia\u2019s Garden<\/i> is partly responsible for this misconception), can be, in hot, dry climates, failure prone resource-gobblers, and in most places are usually so densely planted that fungi, bugs, and rodents romp happily in their moist thickets, and harvesting in the dense growth is difficult. Permaculturists, being recipe-lovers like everyone else, can forget to apply criteria for choosing, monitoring, and evaluating our hallmark methods, and we often ignore the fact that there are situations when we shouldn\u2019t<\/i> use them.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re drawn to recipes like herb spirals, sheet mulch, and even process recipes such as consensus and non-violent communication because they are elegant solutions to specific problems. But they work because they are instantiations of good design that embody organic principles and pattern literacy, not because they are cure-all techniques to be plugged in everywhere. Sometimes a coin-toss decides just as well as hours of consensus process.<\/p>\n
When designing a strategy or selecting a technique, it’s useful to ask, \u201cWhat problem am I trying to solve with this?\u201d rather than being drawn to a sexy method for its own sake. Transition and HM, by clearly laying out where and when they are to be used, and by being focused on specific problems, are excellent models of how permaculture-like memes can be propagated successfully to solve widespread challenges like oil depletion and range degradation. Another promising Trojan horse for permaculture is disaster relief. Recipes for solving disaster and refugee crises are being designed by first-responding permaculturists in places like Haiti and hurricane- and drought-struck communities. These are opportunities for permaculture to become part of policy for large NGOs and even nations.<\/p>\n
To enrich our ability to use recipes and put them into context, without engaging in a full-blown design analysis from scratch, we can use pattern languages. The term was coined by architect Christopher Alexander to mean a structured grammar of good design examples and practices in a given field\u2014architecture, software design, urban planning, and so forth\u2014 that allow people with only modest training to solve complex problems in design. A pattern language is like having a box full of wide-ranging recipes from large to small scales, from \u201chow to cook a week of meals for 40 people\u201d down through recipes for single dishes, to instructions for tasks like sharpening a knife, organized and notated so that we can understand the context and application of each recipe, or pattern. Like recipes, pattern languages are plug-and-play rather than original designs, but they allow plenty of improvisation and flexibility in implementation, and can result in rich, detailed solutions that fit. A handbook of pattern languages for the basic human needs and societal functions, structured along permaculture principles, would be a worthy project for a generation of designers.<\/p>\n
We love recipes, and they are useful. But permaculture is not a collection of recipes or practices, or even patterns. It is a way of developing strategies to design or choose the recipes to solve virtually any problem. Those recipes, however, need to come with guidelines for when to use them, what to expect, and how to evaluate progress. Through those criteria, and an understanding of the limitations of recipes, we can avoid imposing recipes wrongly, and instead can arrive at them as useful solutions. Plus, a well-designed, properly specific recipe doesn\u2019t need to have the stamp of permaculture branded onto it, but rather can be a benevolent Trojan horse to introduce the new paradigm of whole-systems thinking to those who need it. Which, if you think about it, is most everyone.<\/p>\n
Sept 1, 2013<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Transition movement seemed to catch fire right from the beginning, and I confess that its success made me, as a permaculturist, a bit envious. Here was a program for converting to a post-oil society, created by a permaculture teacher using permaculture principles, and it seemed to be becoming better known and more highly regarded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Trojan Horses, Recipes, and Permaculture - Toby Hemenway<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n