Permaculture: an interlude

[Repost of an article I wrote in Nov., 2008]
Bill Mollison, 80 years old, toddled up to the blackboard and wrote "You are so lucky. Three teachers!". Then swinging around, he stood, cuddly as a lad, cocking an eyebrow up and smiling the friendliest conspiratorial smile you ever saw.
That kick started the Permaculture Design Course [PDC] in Melbourne, Australia on September 22, 2008.
In the two following weeks, over 60 participants from around the world were to be seduced and informed by Bill's integrity, wit and wisdom. For close to thirty years he has been spreading a way of thinking about our sojourn on this planet, calling it Permaculture. Now he was at it again- a man grown heavy with age and recently recovered from an illness, but with his passion undiminished, fire raging within, thoughts sparkling with clarity, stories unending and his impish humour intact.
Permaculture advocates the deliberate marshalling of natural elements to create a living system that sustains everything in it, including -incidentally- humans. The essence of it is obvious to those who are prepared by life to receive it; but it'd seem a folly of fools, to those who bliss through life without a single doubt. For example, Bill in his autobiography "Travels in Dreams" quotes Ronald Reagan: "See one tree, you seen them all; trees pollute the air more than cars". The good man could not have been taught Permaculture by anyone, let alone Bill.
But the group that descended on Melbourne for the Course seemed to confirm the adage that the meek shall inherit the earth. They were open, trusting and sincere in search of a meaning for their lives. They were mostly stragglers discontent with the Ronald Reagan Road. They came from all over the world: Switzerland, USA, Portugal, Japan, Finland, Holland, India, Brazil, New Zealand and of course, Australia. Among them were architects, gardeners, a horticulturist and a farmer; but there were also artists, engineers, teachers, a nurse, housewives and a make-up artist. Significantly there were several from the chair-borne army of the computer world. At 66, I was the oldest in the class.
Permaculture appeals instantly to those agonising over the fact our planet is in peril. Of its three ethical principles, the first two are somewhat vague and almost clichéd : care of the earth and care of people. But the third is Bill's greatest heresy in a modern world geared for grabbing all you can. Permaculture's third ethic, when paraphrased, urges you to 'return all surpluses' .
Obviously surpluses will have to be created before they can be returned. Established forests as models of permanent agriculture are what inspired Bill to evolve Permaculture. Such forests are forever producing surpluses and support countless life forms. The mission of a Permaculturist is to design such systems with conscientiousness and skill.
Bill Mollison's life has been dedicated to discovering and putting together a way to teach Permaculture to everyone. His magnum opus 'Permaculture: A Designer's Manual' is a compendium of best practices drawn from around the world. Bill has travelled the world and worked everywhere, he has read widely and implemented many projects. He has been a fisherman, hunter, gardener, researcher, professor, manager, cost accountant and in between these, a poet, a writer, a celebrity, a ladies man and even a night club bouncer. Consistently, he has been irreverent of authority and closed minds.
The PDC was run at Trinity College in the University of Melbourne. Most of us out of towners were billeted in the college hostel. Next to it is the classic Trinity College Chapel. Across the paddock, rolling out a thousand steps from my room window, is the dining hall which might in fact belong to Hogwarts. That is not an inappropriate setting to feed oneself in preparation for the magical lectures starting 9am everyday at the Buzzard Hall, next door.
The weather was balmy. We would lounge in the grass, cups of coffee in hands. What variety we were and yet shared a passion for making a difference to the world with our lives. We shared our plans, delighted in others' stories and promised to be friends forever. Shortly before 9am, Bill would be steadily making his way across the quadrangle , invariably accompanied by the quiet and efficient Tony Watkins who held the programme together. Soon as Bill arrived, the atmosphere was charged with expectation of great truths to be revealed.
And Bill seldom failed. He would be seated comfortably and begin rather formally on a topic, say the nature of design ["The goal of design is to create energy storages"]. He would be a few steps into formal teaching but soon he was up and away, flying, taking the class with him, cruising the thermals set up by
his stories. One day it was about how to ring a bull's nose, and on another about a pig that lived inseparably with a cow. Then there was the adventure in Bronx growing vegetables on newspapers spread on sidewalks or how 600 women with little hand hoes built miles of swales in India. How is life with a Kachel oven? My personal favourite was the gripping story of how trees make rain. [Sections 6.5 and 6.6 of the Manual. See box]

From the Designer Manual - Sec.6.6
"The upward spirals of humid air coming up from the forest carry insects, pollen and bacteria aloft. This is best seen as flights of gulls, swifts and ibis spiralling up with the warm air and actively catching insects lifted from the forest; their gastric pellets consist of insect remains. It is these organic aerial particles [pollen, leaf dust and bacteria mainly] that create the nucleii for rain...

..."To doubt the connection between forests and the water cycle is to doubt that milk flows from the breast of the mother, which is just the analogy given to water by tribal peoples. Trees were the 'the hair of the earth' which caught the mists and made the rivers flow."
Stories were heard in intent silence broken by frequent titters and every now and then a guffaw. A story often  ran  for the better part of an hour. Bill always signed off with a long drawled 'yeeaah' followed by an explosive laugh.
The Course's formalism came from Geoff Lawton, the second teacher. Geoff has been a Permaculturist since 1983 when he attended Bill's first fully developed PDC. His training as an engineer fits him out for structured presentation of curriculum. He is an engrossing teacher, good at detailed instructions on how-to actually do things. If Bill explored the idea of design, Geoff followed that up with how-to of design.
Gregg Knibbs, the third teacher's strength was his sensitivity to human nature. His work in Philippines and Ghana have shocked him deeply. Gregg gave lectures on the importance of empathy when Permaculturists travelled overseas as aid workers.
The actual design process was rolled out by Geoff. He was addressing us as future Permaculture designers and teachers. Each design is location specific and begins with observation of local geography. Although each design is unique, all designs have these in common: harvest free natural resources mainly, wind, rain, sun shine, gravitational potential due to diferring heights; take into account opportunities from animals, weeds and state of the soil. An ideal design exploits these to the fullest. Design for zero or minimal waste. "Waste is pollution". Consider every 'problem' situation as a gateway for an opportunity, which it is the duty of the designer to discover. Finally the designer lists nearby consumers, markets, businesses, skills and specialists and factors them in into her design.
The designer marks out the project area into five zones, ranging from the most frequented [home, cattle shed, Zone1], infrequently visited [orchard, Zone 3] to rarely visted [wild growth, Zone 5]. Zone-1 is then identified with great deliberation to maximise benefits from natural resources earlier listed.  In Zone-1 is located the residence which is oriented for best comfort in winter, summer and monsoons. Food growing is a central feature of a Permaculture site; at a minimum vegetable and fruit trees are planted. Vegetable beds, compost making and chicken if kept, are all placed within easy reach of the house because they need daily access. These too would be in Zone-1.
Another mandate of Permaculture design is to build redundancy into a system. What this means is every component must serve more than one function and every function must be served by more than one component. For example chicken produce eggs and meat but they also scratch, deweed, eat pests and scratch. In the designer's eye chicken is more than food.
Geoff's detailed how-to instructions in the context of Bill's overall philosophy began to come together as the course progressed. His instructions on how to make good compost in 14 days was alone enough to make a person with only marginal interest to jump in and try her hand. There were other temptations as well like integrating ducks, ponds and cropping area, building with cob and straw bale and using Permaculture communities for political activism. There were stories of his successes in the countries he worked in. And they are a few.
Did we go around with serious miens, return to our rooms for further research and study? Naaw! We had fun. The two coffee breaks in the morning and afternoon sessions and the hour long lunch breaks would see us swarm out and begin animated discussions full of laughter. There were sumptuous snacks and endless coffee. In the evenings we would watch videos or more likely, step out to a pub or a cafe.
About five days before the end of the course the class was divided into 7 groups and each was given an assignment to design a Permaculture space for customers whose profiles and requirements differed. The Bull Paddock of Trinity College was our common canvas. We had to survey it, study it  and meet our client's needs. This exercise brought out our understanding of Permaculture principles. Simultaneously, we were preparing for the Big Party to bring down the curtains on the Course. The object was to have fun, as though we had not enough of it thus far. There were conclaves everywhere working on project assignment and rehearsing for the party.
On the last Friday, Oct 3, 08 we presented our projects and explained the logic involved. Bill, Geoff, Gregg and Tony gazed on. Enthusiasm, creativity and diligence were on display. We felt very included as Permaculturists. In the Party that evening it was Bill who carried away the honours. When the songs and dances had been presented, close to 100 people sat on the parquet floor, listening to Bill. He sat on a chair switched around, his elbows on the chair's back.
Bill began slowly and spoke softly. He was narrating the story of how a whale washed ashore on the beach at Stanley when he was a small boy. A little dog had wandered into the whale's jaws and disappeared. And three boys -Bill among them- ventured to fish out the dog. It was of course more than just this tale. Bill filled in exquisite details of the time when innocence, hard work and frugality reigned.
We heard with tightening breath, in love with this man who by his life and advocacy had been battling the way of our fully monetized world where everything had a monetary cost but not an environmental one. In the two weeks with him we had not so much been educated as transformed in ways we were not fully aware, except that we knew it was significant. There was sadness now, that we must return to the world out there.
In the fortnight of the Course, we had seldom discussed the world outside, certainly not its ills. Permaculture had completely displaced it. Call us innocents or Bill's flock. We throve on news deprivation. Now we must re-enter the world. It was not even the bad world we had left two weeks ago. It was worse.

From WikiPedia:
"The filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection by financial services firm Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, remains the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history, with Lehman holding over US$600,000,000,000 in assets.
...
"The bankruptcy triggered a drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average of more than 500 points, the largest decline since the September 11, 2001,(Twin Tower) attacks."
Click here

I had flown out of India  on Sep 17, two days after the iconic Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy. It's fall had rumbled around the world in the fortnight we were at the PDC; stock markets had plunged, corporations failed, jobs were being lost and countries were slipping into recession. Ideologues of Total-Capitalism were either wringing their hands or running for cover.
The world that Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher had conjured up was falling apart. It was a world where 'wealth' was created out of thin air with nary a need for hard work nor care for natural resources. All you needed was the wizardry that Wall Street had invented and taught wizards around the world. You dealt in strange products -neither grown nor manufactured; they were mysterious packages going by the names of collateralized assets , currency swaps, hedge funds, derivatives and futures. All you needed to know was how to bet which way the investing herd would turn. The world had been seduced by the ease with which 'wealth' can be had for all. Even the dour Chinese suspended their centuries of wisdom and believed the colour of the cat did not matter as long as it caught the mice. [Everyone tittered taking it for a witticism while in fact it dripped with the cynicism that means don't matter as long as the end was met]. A whole big Ponzi scheme was set in motion. Endless consumption resulted in demand for oil, oil wars and climate change.
Eerily, Bill Mollison was beginning his counter-revolution almost exactly when Reagan became President in 1981. Bill was urging a sustainable way to permanent wealth, by caring for nature and working within its rules. He was not against technology but against greed and sloth.
In one of the classes a puzzled Geoff Lawton had mused: "When I did my PDC, taught by Bill in 1983, I was certain that his idea's worth being so obvious, the world would be Permaculturised by 1990". Alas, the aha-moment arrives by individual appointment and seldom collectively.
Despite a 30 year romance with trees, it was not until I chanced upon this factoid, I realised what was worthwhile in life; it is to me, creating or conserving soil fertility. The purpose of man is to be but a part of all living  forms -not apart from them- and to cooperatively serve the sustenance of the planet. For me, the Melbourne PDC was a revalidation of that conviction. Over 60 of us fanning out to various parts of the world after our rendezvous with Bill, had either had our aha-moment or were readied for it.
I flew back to pointReturn with a calm confidence about its relevance.