Transition Culture

Permaculture - a vision for the future, rooted in the past (2001)

Permaculture - a vision for the future, rooted in the past. (I think this was originally published in Organic Matters Magazine).

Last year I was selling books at a garden festival, and met a man in his 70s whose eye was drawn to a book I sell called “Ireland’s Earthen Houses�. “I used to live in one of those� he said. He had grown up, he went on to explain, in a 200 year old earth wall house in Co. Limerick. Two foot thick walls and a thatched roof. “Warmest house I ever lived in� he said, “the driest too�.

The house had a large inglenook fireplace which had been designed and built in such a way that on only one day of the year, the sunlight came down the chimney and lit up the whole room, like it does at Newgrange. The beauty and the artistry of the house had affected him deeply and had stayed with him during the 30 years since he left it. “I sold it in 1973�, he said, “the fella who bought it knocked it and built a bungalow on the spot�.

A building such as that contained skills and insights almost completely lost today. He was interested to learn that earth wall building, for so long seen as a poor man’s building material and infinitely inferior to its modern replacement, concrete, is now making a comeback. Many cutting edge green architects, attempting to reduce the embodied energy in the materials with which they are designing, are coming to see earth as the ideal material - locally sourced, very low in embodied energy, structurally sound, breathable, non-toxic and historically proven. When combined with modern green design, energy efficiency, high performance insulated windows and renewables such as solar water heating, it finds a new lease of life. The best of the old meets the best of the new in a form guided by the limits of sustainability and the possibilities opened to us by new technology.

It is this bringing together of the best in cutting edge sustainable design and the best of traditional practices that underpins Permaculture Design. It is sometimes said that permaculture, with its vision of bringing food production home to where people live, of naturally built affordable homes and of sensible design based on the observation of natural systems, is somehow trying to ‘take us back’ to some impoverished past. The reality is, however, that in order for us as a society, to be able to move forward with any kind of certainty, we have to address the challenges of sustainability and begin to live within the limits set for us by Nature.

A recent Dutch study stated that if each Dutch citizen were to use their fair share of resources (based on global averages) then by 2010 each person would need to cut consumption of energy by 60%, water by 38%, wood by 65% and agricultural land by 45%. That’s quite a challenge. The alternative though is far more daunting - increased global conflicts as the worlds largest nations square up for the dwindling reserves of oil, the ravages of an unpredictable climate and a disastrous fast ‘cold turkey’ for a society addicted to oil.

Permaculture is about abundance and stability. The way our society and our food supply system function is institutionalised insanity; how can it be sensible for the UK, for example, to export 88,000 tons of butter to Holland, and then import 55,000 tons of butter from the same place? It is only subsidised cheap fuels that allow this madness to continue. Author of ‘Small is Beautiful’, E.F.Schumacher once remarked that it would be impossible to design a more inefficient system for producing food than the one we have at present even if we tried. Permaculture, with its aim of creating a ‘culture of permanence’ sets out to articulate a new design ethic based on the observation of natural systems and energy efficient site planning. Like the house in Limerick it is full of the distilled wisdom of traditional practices. At the same time it also integrates the best of new thinking in the areas of intensive organic gardening, local currencies, renewable energy, green building and settlement design. Permaculture is, in essence, a tool kit for practical sustainability, which can be understood and implemented by anyone anywhere. It is empowering and practical, and it can be applied on any scale, from an apartment balcony to large scale farms.

It is my very strong wish, as more and more people learn and practice the principles and applications of permaculture design, that the remains of my friend’s earthen home, deep beneath the grass of Limerick, will act as seeds of a more sustainable and human scale future, one in which the limits set for us by Nature are embraced as a challenge to our ingenuity and in which we can live in abundance and peace.