Permacultuur

Permacultuur

Wat is permacultuur ?

Inleiding.

Permacultuur is een vertaling van het Australische woord ‘permaculture’. Permaculture is

een samengesteld begrip van Permanent Agriculture en Permanent Culture. Het doel van

permacultuur is een samenwerking tussen de mens en haar omliggende natuur, gericht op een

lange termijn overleving van beide. Met permacultuur ontwerp je een functioneel systeem om

de mens heen met de sterkte en veerkracht van een natuurlijk ecosysteem. Permacultuur is

ontwerpen met de natuur.

Wat is permacultuur?

Permacultuur is een bundeling kennis om een functioneel ecosysteem om mensen heen te

ontwerpen. Permacultuur beschouwt de mens hierbij als onderdeel van het ecosysteem en niet

als iets wat ernaast of erboven staat. Deze ontwerpen kunnen gericht zijn op

voedselvoorziening, waterzuivering, bosbrandwering, etc. Een permacultuursysteem kan zich

ook op meerdere functies tegelijk richten. De mens dient een keuze te maken wat het

ecosysteem wat hij of zij wil ontwerpen voor functie dient te hebben. Aan de hand van dat

doel kan begonnen worden met het ontwerpen van een goed systeem.

De achtergrond van permacultuur.

Permacultuur is in de jaren 1970 omschreven door Bill Mollison en David Holmgren aan de

universiteit van Tasmanië. Deze Australische biologen hebben onderzoek gedaan naar de

werking van ecosystemen in de bossen van Tasmanië. Aan de hand van deze principes

wilden ze kijken of mensen zelf in staat zijn een ecosysteem te ontwerpen met een functie

voor de mens, maar waar ook de natuur zo veel mogelijk voordeel bij heeft.

Hun onderzoek was een reactie op een aantal grote problemen die de monocultuurlandbouw met zich meebracht en brengt. De belangrijkste problemen hiervan zijn;

1) grote verdroging (Australië is het droogste continent op aarde) van het land, hierdoor gaat

er door winderosie veel vruchtbare grond verloren.

2) grootschalige vervuiling van de koraalriffen en andere ecosystemen door een groot gebruik

van chemische kunstmest, herbiciden en pesticiden.

3) grote uitbraken van ziektes onder monocultuur gewassen waardoor direct hele oogsten

verloren gaan.

Permacultuur zocht met succes oplossingen voor deze problemen. Met de technieken van

permacultuur zijn inmiddels over de hele wereld ecosystemen opnieuw opgebouwd. Er zijn

oplossingen gekomen voor oerwoudverbranding wat veel voorkomt bij landbouw in de

derde wereld. Daarnaast zijn stukken woestijn teruggevormd tot bruikbare productieve

stukken grond door slim de ecologische principes die aan permacultuur ten grondslag liggen

toe te passen.

Permaculture: A Quiet Revolution

By Scott London

Bill Mollison

Bill Mollison calls himself a field biologist and itinerant teacher. But it would be more accurate to describe him as an instigator. When he published Permaculture One in 1978, he launched an international land-use movement many regard as subversive, even revolutionary.

Permaculture - from permanent and agriculture - is an integrated design philosophy that encompasses gardening, architecture, horticulture, ecology, even money management and community design. The basic approach is to create sustainable systems that provide for their own needs and recycle their waste.

Mollison developed permaculture after spending decades in the rainforests and deserts of Australia studying ecosystems. He observed that plants naturally group themselves in mutually beneficial communities. He used this idea to develop a different approach to agriculture and community design, one that seeks to place the right elements together so they sustain and support each other.

Today his ideas have spread and taken root in almost every country on the globe. Permaculture is now being practiced in the rainforests of South America, in the Kalahari desert, in the arctic north of Scandinavia, and in communities all over North America. In New Mexico, for example, farmers have used permaculture to transform hard-packed dirt lots into lush gardens and tree orchards without using any heavy machinery. In Davis, California, one community uses bath and laundry water to flush toilets and irrigate gardens. In Toronto, a team of architects has created a design for an urban infill house that doesn't tap into city water or sewage infrastructure and that costs only a few hundred dollars a year to operate.

While Mollison is still unknown to most Americans, he is a national icon down under. He has been named Australia's "Man of the Year" and in 1981 he received the prestigious Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, for his work developing and promoting permaculture.

I sat down with him to discuss his innovative design philosophy. We met over the course of two afternoons in Santa Barbara in conjunction with an intensive two-week course he teaches each year in Ojai. A short, round man with a white beard and a big smile, he is one of the most affable and good-natured people I've met. An inveterate raconteur, he seems to have a story - or a bad joke - for every occasion. His comments are often rounded out by a hearty and infectious laugh.

*

Scott London: A reviewer once described your teachings as "seditious."

Bill Mollison: Yes, it was very perceptive. I teach self-reliance, the world's most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it's seditious. But it's peaceful sedition.

London: When did you begin teaching permaculture?

Mollison: In the early 1970s, it dawned on me that no one had ever applied design to agriculture. When I realized it, the hairs went up on the back of my neck. It was so strange. We'd had agriculture for 7,000 years, and we'd been losing for 7,000 years - everything was turning into desert. So I wondered, can we build systems that obey ecological principles? We know what they are, we just never apply them. Ecologists never apply good ecology to their gardens. Architects never understand the transmission of heat in buildings. And physicists live in houses with demented energy systems. It's curious that we never apply what we know to how we actually live.

London: It tells us something about our current environmental problems.

Mollison: It does. I remember the Club of Rome report in 1967 which said that the deterioration of the environment was inevitable due to population growth and overconsumption of resources. After reading that, I thought, "People are so stupid and so destructive - we can do nothing for them." So I withdrew from society. I thought I would leave and just sit on a hill and watch it collapse.

It took me about three weeks before I realized that I had to get back and fight. [Laughs] You know, you have to get out in order to want to get back in.

London: Is that when the idea of permaculture was born?

Mollison: It actually goes back to 1959. I was in the Tasmanian rain forest studying the interaction between browsing marsupials and forest regeneration. We weren't having a lot of success regenerating forests with a big marsupial population. So I created a simple system with 23 woody plant species, of which only four were dominant, and only two real browsing marsupials. It was a very flexible system based on the interactions of components, not types of species. It occurred to me one evening that we could build systems that worked better than that one.

That was a remarkable revelation. Ever so often in your life - perhaps once a decade - you have a revelation. If you are an aborigine, that defines your age. You only have a revelation once every age, no matter what your chronological age. If you're lucky, you have three good revelations in a lifetime.

Because I was an educator, I realized that if I didn't teach it, it wouldn't go anywhere. So I started to develop design instructions based on passive knowledge and I wrote a book about it called Permaculture One. To my horror, everybody was interested in it. [Laughs] I got thousands of letters saying, "You've articulated something that I've had in my mind for years," and "You've put something into my hands which I can use."

London: Permaculture is based on scientific principles and research. But it seems to me that it also draws on traditional and indigenous folk wisdom.

Mollison: Well, if I go to an old Greek lady sitting in a vineyard and ask, "Why have you planted roses among your grapes?" she will say to me, "Because the rose is the doctor of the grape. If you don't plant roses, the grapes get ill." That doesn't do me a lot of good. But if I can find out that the rose exudes a certain root chemical that is taken up by the grape root which in turn repels the white fly (which is the scientific way of saying the same thing), then I have something very useful.

Traditional knowledge is always of that nature. I know a Filipino man who always plants a chili and four beans in the same hole as the banana root. I asked him, "Why do you plant a chili with the banana?" And he said, "Don't you know that you must always plant these things together." Well, I worked out that the beans fix the nitrogen and the chili prevents beetles from attacking the banana root. And that works very well.

London: You have introduced permaculture in places that still rely on traditional farming practices. Have they been receptive to your ideas?

Mollison: I have a terribly tricky way of approaching indigenous tribal people. For example, I'll go to the Central Desert, where everyone is half-starved, and say, "I wonder if I can help you." And I'll lie and say, "I don't know how to do this?" And they say, "Oh, come on, we'll make it work." By the time it's done, they have done it themselves.

I remember going back to a school we started in Zimbabwe. It's green and surrounded by food. The temperature in the classroom is controlled. I asked them, "Who did this?" They said, "We did!" When people do it for themselves, they are proud of it.

London: For some people - particularly indigenous tribes - the notion that you can grow your own food is revolutionary.

Mollison: When you grow up in a world where you have a very minor effect on the land, you don't think of creating resources for yourself. What falls on the ground you eat. And your numbers are governed by what falls on the ground. Permaculture allows you to think differently because you can grow everything that you need very easily.

For example, the bushmen of the Kalahari have a native bean called the morama bean. It is a perennial that grows underground and spreads out when it rains. They used to go out and collect it. But after they were pushed off their lands to make room for game and natural parks the morama bean was hard to find. I asked them, "Why don't you plant them here?" They said, "Do you think we could?" So we planted the bean in their gardens. Up to that point, they never actually thought of planting something. It stunned them that they could actually do that.

The same thing happened with the mongongo tree which grows on the top of sand dunes. They had never actually moved the tree from one dune to another. But I went and cut a branch off the mother tree and stuck it in the sand. The thing started to sprout leaves and produce mongongo nuts. Now they grow the trees wherever they want.

London: You once described modern technological agriculture as a form of "witchcraft."

Mollison: Well, it is a sort of witchcraft. Today we have more soil scientists than at any other time in history. If you plot the rise of soil scientists against the loss of soil, you see that the more of them you have, the more soil you lose.

I remember seeing soldiers returning from the War in 1947. They had these little steel canisters with a snap-off top. When they snapped the tops off, they sprayed DDT all over the room so you never saw any more flies or mosquitoes - or cats. [Laughs] After the war, they started to use those chemicals in agriculture. The gases used by the Nazis were now developed for agriculture. Tanks were made into plows. Part of the reason for the huge surge in artificial fertilizer was that the industry was geared up to produce nitrates for explosives. Then they suddenly discovered you could put it on your crops and get great results.

London: So the green revolution was a kind of war against the land, in a manner of speaking.

Mollison: That's right. Governments still support this kind of agriculture to the tune of about $40 billion each year. None of that goes to supporting alternative systems like organic or soil-creating agriculture. Even China is adopting modern chemical agriculture now.

London: I remember the late economist Robert Theobald saying to me that if China decides to go the way of the West, the environmental ballgame is over.

Mollison: I overheard two "Eurocrats" in Vienna talking about the environment. One said, "How long do you think we've got?" The other said, "Ten years." And the first one said, "You're an optimist." So I said to them, "If China begins to develop motor vehicles, we've got two years."

London: What kind of overconsumption bothers you the most?

Mollison: I hate lawns. Subconsciously I think we all hate them because we're their slaves. Imagine the millions of people who get on their lawn-mowers and ride around in circles every Saturday and Sunday.

They have all these new subdivisions in Australia which are between one and five acres. You see people coming home from work on Friday, getting on their little ride-on mowers, and mowing all weekend. On Monday morning you can drive through these areas and see all these mowers halfway across the five acres, waiting for the next Friday. Like idiots, we spend all our spare time driving these crazy machines, cutting grass which is only going to grow back again next week.

London: Permaculture teaches us how to use the minimum amount of energy needed to get a job done.

Mollison: That's right. Every house should be over-producing its energy and selling to the grid. We have built entire villages that do that - where one or two buildings hold the solar panels for all sixty homes and sell the surplus to the grid. In seven years, you can pay off all your expenses and run free. They use this same idea in Denmark. Every village there has a windmill that can fuel up to 800 homes.

London: The same principle probably applies to human energy as well. I noticed that you discourage digging in gardens because it requires energy that can be better used for other things.

Mollison: Well, some people like digging. It's a bit like having an exercise bike in your bedroom. But I prefer to leave it to the worms. They do a great job. I've created fantastic soil just from mulching.

London: Does permaculture apply to those of us who live in cities?

Mollison: Yes, there is a whole section in the manual about urban permaculture. When I first went to New York, I helped start a little herb-farm in the South Bronx. The land was very cheap there because there was no power, no water, no police, and there were tons of drugs. This little farm grew to supply eight percent of New York's herbs. There are now 1,100 city farms in New York.

London: Short of starting a farm, what can we do to make our cities more sustainable?

Mollison: Catch the water off your roof. Grow your own food. Make your own energy. It's insanely easy to do all that. It takes you less time to grow your food than to walk down to the supermarket to buy it. Ask any good organic gardener who mulches how much time he spends on his garden and he'll say, "Oh, a few minutes every week." By the time you have taken your car and driven to the supermarket, taken your foraging-trolley and collected your wild greens, and driven back home again, you've spent a good hour or two - plus you've spent a lot of money.

London: Even though permaculture is based on scientific principles, it seems to have a very strong philosophical or ethical dimension.

Mollison: There is an ethical dimension because I think science without ethics is sociopathology. To say, "I'll apply what I know regardless of the outcome" is to take absolutely no responsibility for your actions. I don't want to be associated with that sort of science.

London: What do you think you've started?

Mollison: Well, it's a revolution. But it's the sort of revolution that no one will notice. It might get a little shadier. Buildings might function better. You might have less money to earn because your food is all around you and you don't have any energy costs. Giant amounts of money might be freed up in society so that we can provide for ourselves better.

So it's a revolution. But permaculture is anti-political. There is no room for politicians or administrators or priests. And there are no laws either. The only ethics we obey are: care of the earth, care of people, and reinvestment in those ends.

This interview was adapted from the radio series Insight & Outlook, hosted by Scott London. It appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of Green Living magazine.

Retrofitting the suburbs for sustainability

Published Mar 30 2005 by CSIRO Sustainability Network, Archived Apr 5 2005

Retrofitting the suburbs for sustainability

by David Holmgren

David Holmgren, co-originator with Bill Mollison of the Permaculture concept, is an innovative environmental design consultant based at Hepburn Springs in central Victoria, where he maintains one of Australia’s best-known permaculture demonstration sites. David has written several books, conducted numerous workshops and courses on sustainable living, and developed several properties himself using permaculture principles. The following feature is adapted from a public lecture given at the Aldinga Arts EcoVillage in Adelaide in January 2005. You can check David’s website at: www.holmgren.com.au and contact him at: Dit e-mailadres is beschermd tegen spambots. U heeft Javascript nodig om het te kunnen zien. .

‘Permaculture’ is a system of “consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs. It is a vision of permanent (sustainable) human culture based on permanent (sustainable agriculture). See: David Holmgren (2002) Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability, Holmgren Design Services – www.holmgren.com.au – ISBN: 0646418440

The "Suburban Dream"

The suburbs of our Australian cities have, in the main, become sterile wastelands, lacking in any true spirit of community, impoverished of local resources, and filled with fearful people whose daily efforts are focussed elsewhere. What has happened to the Australian "suburban dream"?

To find the foundation of the so-called 'suburban dream' and the reasons why it has proved illusory, we need to look back to the post World War II economic boom of the 1950s. At that time, Australia was riding high on the sheep's back, with wool prices around $2.40 [Australian dollars] per kg, and there was also cheap and abundant fossil fuel and timber.

Furthermore, the government of the period provided widespread war-service housing, low-interest loans, and substantial public infrastructure such as roads and utilities to facilitate suburban growth.

The typical 'baby-boom' family of the 1950s lived on a single income of around $50-$100 per week, with a housewife and three children at home. These home owners, who had grown up through the "Great Depression" and wartime hardships, had an ethos of proud self-reliance and domestic frugality, reinforced by their wartime experiences.

Many suburban 'back yards' had an actively worked vegetable garden and one to a few productive fruit trees. Produce swapping and home preserving of seasonal surpluses were common. And this was also the heyday of several great consumer icons - the FJ Holden car, the Victa lawnmower, and the Hills Hoist clothesline.

But there were problems with the suburban dream and the resulting rush of young families to "nappy valleys" on the city fringes, notably "urban sprawl". As the suburbs spread, they displaced important agricultural activities such as the market gardening and dairy farming that formerly provided fresh foods with minimal need for transport.

Not only did public infrastructure become increasingly poorly used, but the disproportionate rush to build roads and sell more Australian cars led to a general decline in the use of public transport - leading eventually to the phenomenon we see today, that our suburbs are designed for cars not people.

Along with "sprawl" has developed an increasingly dysfunctional economic situation. We see speculative inflation of land values, capital invested unproductively, declining household (non-monetary) production of food and "backyard industry", and a massive rise of consumer addiction based on rising household debt.

Large areas of our cities have become "dormitory suburbs". The average household size is declining while ever-larger homes are increasingly empty during the working day. Their blind windows look out onto streets empty of people (but all too often filled with cars). There is an alienating lack of community resulting, ultimately, in increased crime and fear.

Trying to Adjust

The conventional responses to this situation are familiar to us all. The first is a change of planning regulations to encourage increasing density, promoting smaller housing blocks in new developments, dual occupancy infill development, and medium-density redevelopment of older areas.

Residents themselves have responded independently in various ways through their lifestyles. The renovation obsession is frequently directed at producing more high-value house space at the expense of the 'back yard'. Then there is a mobile lifestyle and semi-abandonment of home, when eating out and leisure activities elsewhere compound the daily absence during work hours.

There is also the move to get rid of garden maintenance and commuting by moving to inner-city apartment living; and, at the other end of the scale is the "super-suburb" response of moving to a rural-residential or hobby-farm property beyond the new suburban fringe.

In recent years, as we have become more aware of the negative effects of our high-impact lifestyles, a number of environmental responses have also been introduced - such as building insulation, energy-efficiency requirements, improvements to public transport, conservation of urban green space, and more water-sensitive urban design.

Permaculture Principles

We have barely scratched the surface, however, of the profound improvements that the application of permaculture principles and strategies could deliver for the sustainability and livability of today's suburbs - for example:

Food security based on gardening: Food security through retention of horticultural production within and close to cities, has barely been on the agenda, while home gardening is largely ignored as irrelevant to the sustainability debate.

For many of today's urban residents, where food comes from beyond the supermarket is barely on their radar. We are still fixated on the high-density European-style city that gets its food from somewhere else. Most are unaware of different patterns of urban living such as those of Japan, China and other Asian countries where cities have traditionally contained interspersed gardens and rice paddies.

If food is produced in distant places, its supply is more vulnerable to risks (such as increased transport costs) that we cannot control. For urban residents aware of the fragility of the food supply system, home gardening is a practical activity that can provide much of the fresh food of a family, and also bias the diet away from over-consumption of animal protein and towards vegetables and fruit.

Even when the level of production is small, the seasonal garden maintains the skills necessary to produce food and passes those skills on to the next generation.

Better health through a culture of home food consumption: Consumption of genuinely fresh fruits and vegetables from a local garden can underpin good health and combat the current obesity epidemic. In the same way that wood warms you twice - once when you split it and once when you burn it - garden produce keeps you healthy when you grow it and also when you consume it.

Local Gardening

Economy through home food production and food preservation: Growing food at home and preserving seasonal surpluses bypasses the so-called "value-adding" processes of the commercial food chains, and means food is much less expensive - a principle readily understood by families of the Great Depression and WWII years.

Firewood for sustainable and ethical energy: The permaculture strategy of burning waste wood from landscaping and building for space heating, water heating and cooking allows urban residents to be more energy self reliant, while keeping a valuable resource from going to landfill (to generate greenhouse-intensive methane) or into inefficient, noisy, fossil-fuel-driven chippers and mulchers.

How many of us realise that our cities are actually big forests? The expanding areas of new plantations and natural regeneration within or near cities all need continuous thinning to reduce fire hazard and improve timber and ecological values.

With careful management and better education, there is much valuable wood that could be saved for fuel. Wood has a high energy density, is greenhouse-gas neutral, and can readily be made available as smokeless charcoal for city use. With maximum pollution occurring through smoke emission right at the point of use (cf. distant coal-fired power stations), there is a useful negative feedback that controls user behaviour.

Passive solar design combined with thermally efficient natural materials: Building with rammed earth, mud brick, recycled timber and salvaged joinery, for example, greatly reduces the embodied energy of a dwelling while providing 'character' to designs and thermal mass to control temperature fluctualtions. This is in contrast to the conventional regulatory emphasis on energy efficiency through insulation alone. Unfortunately, this emphasis often leads to suppression of real innovation even while it "raises the floor" for lowest performance.

Retrofitting attached greenhouses to existing homes: An attached greenhouse can help capture warmth from the sun while extending the garden growing season.

Gravel Reed Bed

Water harvesting and natural wastewater treatment: In many coastal areas of Australia (where the greatest proportion of us live), the rain that falls on the roof should, if used innovatively, be sufficient for at least the majority of home uses, including gardening. Rainwater harvesting can be supplemented by treatment of greywater (from the bathroom, laundry, and kitchen) e.g., through, gravel reed beds, for subsequent use in the garden.

Even blackwater (from the toilet) can be treated and re-used on site in some circumstances, or a waterless composting toilet can be installed to ensure water goes to more productive uses. Closing the nutrient cycle, from human waste to fertile, food-producing soil is, in the longer term, one of the most critical factors in the sustainability of urban populations.

Animals in productive garden ecosystems: Hens and ducks are excellent components of a sustainable suburban garden system and can significantly expand the range and value of foods produced at home. They deal with various types of food waste and pests such as insects and slugs, while their manure adds natural fertiliser to the soil.

Reclaim the Streets

Reclaiming the streets: Making greater use of our public space - most notably our streets for walking and cycling - reduces the costs of transport, enhances knowledge of the local area, and contributes to better community.

The more we expand these uses, the more the destructive uses of public space (such as excessive car traffic and vandalism) are gradually displaced. It is high time residents reclaimed their suburban streets for people. They should again be available for children to play and safely learn their cycling skills.

Recumbent Bicycle

Creative recycling: Making creative use of discarded goods and wastes is a classic permaculture strategy that is far more innovative and productive than most industrial recycling systems, such as smashing and melting down bottles.

My own 16-year-old son, for example, built himself a fully functional recumbent bicycle from "rubbish". We have a shortage of innovative skills, not materials. Creative re-use and re-manufacture could greatly extend the lifecycle of many consumer goods.

City farms and community gardens: Cooperative gardening and farming of city open spaces allows these productive activities to move beyond backyard scale, opening up a further range of possibilities for food production and community engagement.

Community Garden

New ways of trading: Locally based trading systems retain the energy of participants within the local community, rather than draining it away to some different location. LETS systems are a good example, some of which may also have associated local currency or tokens for ease of exchange. Local exchange systems allow citizens to wrest back some control of their economic wellbeing from the increasingly unstable, national and global monetary systems.

LETS is an acronym for Local Energy Transfer System, or Local Employment Trading System. It provides a simple mechanism for a group of people to exchange goods and services without needing conventional money to do so. LETS does not require a two-way barter-type trade. It records each one-way transaction, and leaves both participants to spend or earn enough to balance that trade another time.

New ways of sharing land: Traditionally, Australia has acknowledged only two forms of land ownership - fully private and fully public. Recently, however, there has emerged a new option - that of commonly owned land - providing new opportunities for community formation and cultural innovation.

Eco-villages and co-housing schemes are beginning to appear which combine 'ecological' building with common infrastructure and community governance. The actual housing lots and dwellings in the scheme can be part of the 'commons', or privately owned within a broader common title.

As we in Australia take the first hesitant steps beyond "rugged individualism" and begin to re-learn the skills needed to govern ourselves in community, the private-within-commons system tends to sit more comfortably with many.

Sharing Land

Creative Descent

The importance of the above options becomes clear when we ask the question "What if energy availability declines?" Beyond the abundant availability of fossil fuels is an uncertain energy future that has been pictured in various scenarios that range from "techno-fantasy" (e.g., unlimited nuclear cold fusion with no unforseen negative impacts) - an absurdly optimistic scenario but frightening in its implications for humanity and the planet - to an "Atlantis-like" fate in which our culture "goes under".

Energy Futures: Sustainability lies between techno-fantasy and Atlantis

Most of the sustainability debate is focused within the "green-tech stability" scenario in which we essentially maintain a steady (albeit somewhat reduced) level of energy usage by progressively moving to renewable sources such as wind, solar, tidal power, etc., as fossil fuel reserves are used up.

While permaculture strategies mesh nicely with many of those directed towards this generally accepted desirable future, permaculture in fact defines a creative response to a fourth scenario that I call "Earth Stewardship" - a "creative descent" in which we progressively reduce our energy demands to return eventually to living within the natural energy and production budget of the land we occupy. Elements of all these scenarios can be found in the wide-ranging viewpoints and arguments of today's "sustainability" debates.

In the Earth Stewardship "creative descent" scenario, which I consider to represent the only truly sustainable future, human society creatively descends the energy demand slope essentially as a 'mirror image' of the creative energy ascent that occurred between the onset of the industrial revolution and the present day.

The actual sustainable plateau is a long way down from current energy demands, but also a long way ahead in time. If we begin our journey now, there is time to use our familiarity with continuous change and creative innovation to avoid bringing on "Atlantis".

So, in an energy-descent future, what are the prospects close to home - here where we live in suburbia? Will it be the end of suburbia? What if we can no longer afford to commute to work by car? What if we are dependent on food and energy supplies that are transported long distances at increasing expense? What if the services and functionality of our communities decline further so that there is ever-diminishing support from local councils and police, for example?

There is a real and viable alternative to this seemingly alarming scenario - a retrofit of suburbia - a remodelling of local neighbourhoods and communities for the energy-descent future. The "refit manual" will bring together and integrate features such as:

Home-based work, telecommuting, and cottage industries serving a local clientele;
Extended families, lodgers and shared households;
Recycling of storm water, waste water, and human waste;
Soils of improved fertility, and the water supply and infrastructure for urban agriculture;
City farms, cooperative gardening, Farmers' Markets, and Community Supported Agriculture schemes (CSAs). Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a scheme in which customers undertake to buy a regular box of in-season fruits, vegetables, eggs, etc. from one or more local producers, thus providing the latter with a secure income and the ability to diversify the types of produce they provide.

Late 1950s: the Golden Era of the Suburban Dream

Let's paint a specific picture of how this might work. If we return briefly to the golden age of the suburban dream in the late 1950s, a birds-eye view of our suburban neighbourhood might have looked something like the image above, which shows four standard suburban blocks with productive backyards, including one supporting a small service enterprise.

If we move on in time and look at the same small neighbourhood in the 1990s, the image below shows the typical effects of affluence, aging and infill. The backyards are now all unproductive as aging original householders are no longer gardening or working at home.

Late 1990s: Affluence, Aging, and Infill

The cottage industry workshop has been renovated as an addition to the house space, and one property has been sold for speculative investment and the backyard filled with a second dwelling. How can this decline in productivity be turned around?

Let's leap a few years ahead into the late 2000s and imagine what might now have been done with the same four properties. The catalyst has been the sale of the house second from left to an energetic young couple determined to "future-proof" themselves for the energy descent expected in their lifetime. Using permaculture principles, they have restructured their entire block, including its front garden, as an integrated food production system.

Late 2000s: Permaculture Refit

Seeing this exciting new development on the other side of the fence, the empty-nest baby boomers in the property third from left have aborted their migration to Queensland and restructured their home and lifestyles along lines compatible with the initiatives of their neighbours.

They have extended their home with an eco-addition and increased its occupancy with an additional family member plus a young boarder. The 1970s games room has been fitted with a solar PV array and returned to its original 'backyard-industry' purpose to house their son's small metal-working business.

The fence between the two properties has been removed to allow the land of both blocks to be farmed cooperatively for the benefit of all the occupants. Shared water management facilities, including rainwater collection and greywater treatment, have been implemented, and productive fruit trees have been planted on the nature strip in front of both houses.

The complementary design relationship between the two households is characterised by horticultural skill and youthful energy but not much capital on the left, and more capital and more interest in the built environment and social strategies of permaculture on the right.

Seeing all these successful communal activities going on next door, the property owners on the left- and right-hand ends of the row are now looking for ways to contribute. The elderly couple on the left need home help (an opportunity for one of the young mothers) in exchange for use of their extensive backyard to expand the cooperative CSA vegetable-box garden.

While the development and neighbours in the right may be slower and more difficult to connect, they have offered their unused back and front gardens to extend the farming system in return for a share of the produce, one of their teenagers is training to help in the metal-working enterprise, and their stormwater detention tank will shortly be refitted as part of the communal water management system. And so it grows...!

The bottom line here is that we do not need to wait for policies to change. We can choose today to do this - to create our own small neighbourhoods.

The Suburban Sprawl Advantage

'Suburban sprawl' in fact give us an advantage. Detached houses are easy to retrofit, and the space around them allows for solar access and space for food production. A water supply is already in place, our pampered, unproductive ornamental gardens have fertile soils and ready access to nutrients, and we live in ideal areas with mild climates, access to the sea, the city and inland country.

So what do we have to do to make it work? Basically, the answer is "Just do it!" Use whatever space is available and get producing. Involve the kids - and their friends. Make contact with neighbours and start to barter. Review your material needs and reduce consumption. Share your home - by bringing a family member back or taking in a lodger, for example.

Creatively and positively work around regulatory impediments, aiming to help change them in the longer term. Pay off your debts. Work from home. And above all, retrofit your home for your own sustainable future, not for speculative monetary gain.

In an energy-descent world, self-reliance represents real opportunities for early adopters of a permaculture life style:

Rises in oil prices will flow through to all natural products (food, timber, etc);
Higher commodity prices will be a stimulus for self-reliance and organic farming;
Local products will be more competitive than imports;
Repair, retrofitting, and recycling will all be more competitive than new replacement;
There will be rising demand for permaculture as life-skills education; and
There will be a resurgence of community life, ethics and values.

There are, however, some real hazards for the greater community in the energy-descent scenario. For example, perverse subsidies and "head-in-the-sand" policies could distort necessary market adjustments (e.g. the end of fuel tax combined with production subsidies to agribusiness).

There is a real danger that fascist-style politics could see minorities and those providing for themselves as being to blame for declining social conditions. Sudden economic and environmental shocks could conceivably lead to social collapse, removing even the security necessary for local food production.

We need to understand the energy-descent pathway ahead, act to ensure our own longer-term resource security, and keep ourselves informed about the viewpoints and approaches of the greater national and global communities around us.

Additional Resources

Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas - http://www.peakoil.net
The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg. New Society Publishers 2003. ISBN: 0865714827 [Read the RTH review]
Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability by David Holmgren. Holmgren Design Services 2002. ISBN: 0646418440
Video Interview of David Holmgren by Adam Fenderson - http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/106
Documentary Film: "The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream." http://www.endofsuburbia.com [Read the RTH review]

David Holmgren, co-originator with Bill Mollison of the Permaculture concept, is an innovative environmental design consultant based at Hepburn Springs in central Victoria, where he maintains one of Australia's best-known permaculture demonstration sites. David has written several books, conducted numerous workshops and courses on sustainable living, and developed several properties himself using permaculture principles. The following feature is adapted from a public lecture given at the Aldinga Arts EcoVillage in Adelaide in January 2005. You can check David's website: http://www.holmgren.com.au.

How we can implement Permaculture and Earthcare ethics in our own lives:

• Think about the long-term consequences of your actions. Plan for sustainability.

• Where possible use species native to the area, or those naturalised species that provide food or are known to be beneficial. Thoughtless introduction of potentially invasive species may upset the natural balances in your home area.
• Cultivate the smallest possible land area. Plan for small-scale, energy efficient, intensive systems rather than large-scale, energy-consuming extensive, systems.
• Be as diverse and polycultural as possible. This provides stability and will help insure against change, whether environmental or social.
• Increase the sum of yields: look at the total yield of the system provided by annuals, perennials, crops, trees, and animals. Also regard energy saved as a yield.
• Use low-energy environmental (solar, wind and water) and biological (plant and animal) systems to conserve and generate energy.
• Bring food-growing back into the cities and towns, where it has always traditionally been in more sustainable societies.
• Assist people to become self-reliant, and promote community responsibility.
• Reafforest the earth and restore fertility to the soil.
• Use everything at its optimum (not maximum) level, and recycle all wastes.
• See solutions to work on, not problems.
• Work where it counts (plant a tree where it will survive; assist people who want to learn).