Permaculture Reflections

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Introduction to Fungi in Soils

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 2

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Fungi are a vital component of soil life constituting 70% of the biomass in healthy soils. Within a gram of healthy soil, there are between 10 and 20 million fungi and between 3 and 300 metres of fungal hyphae (roots)!

There are three categories of fungi: saprophytes, mycorrhizal fungi and pathogens.

Pathogens, as the name suggests, are the harmful fungi that do damage to plants and are the source of many plant diseases.

Saprophytes (often called saprotrophs today), are decomposers. Though they make up less than 1% of soil fungi, they are important in recycling carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. When you pile on the sheet mulch or do chop-and-drop mulching, saprophytes go to work breaking down that material and turning it into soil.

Mycorrhizal fungi are a plant’s best friend. What is really important for us in permaculture are connections. The hyphae of mycorrhizal fungi connect not only fungus to one plant but multiple plants. Furthermore, these mycorrhizae are the conduit for photosynthates (sugars and other carbohydrates that are the product of photosynthesis) and nutrients between plants of different species. Some fungi can even help certain species of tree better survive acid rain by assisting in the uptake of calcium.

Additionally, fungal hyphae also encourage beneficial bacteria. This soil life creates the vital crumb-like structure of healthy soil. Such soils are more easily penetrated by air, water and plant roots. Additionally, because soil with a crumb structure holds water better, it is more drought proof and less prone to water-logging.

Among the mycorrhizae are endomycorrhizae, which enters right into the cell wall of plants’ roots to exchange nutrients, and ectomycorrhizae, which pass between root cells but do not enter the cell wall.

One of the limiting factors to plant growth is the uptake of phosphorous. This is where mutualist mycorrhizae become vital. They scoop up the phosphorous in the soil and supply it to plants. The plants in turn supply the fungi with sugars.

Not every plant responds to mutualist fungi, however. Among plants that don’t are members of the amaranthaceae (think amaranth and Chinese spinach) including its subfamily chenopodiaceae (think beets and chards), many brassicaceae (the mustard family which includes broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, brussels sprouts, turnip and others), theaizoaceae family (iceplant) and the cyperaceae family (bulrushes, sedge, papyrus, etc.). Knowing this, one might see a pattern of degraded lands with poor mycorrhizae having many of these plants in them. Such lands can be repaired by deep mulching and innoculating the soils with samples of healthy soils.

Also, soils that are high in sodium, chlorine, boron, cadmium, zinc or manganese can be detrimental to fungi. Highly acidic soils damaged by acid rain may lead to the formation of aluminum sulfate or aluminum nitrate which is toxic not only to plants but to fungi as well.

To promote fungal life which leads to healthy soils, plant cover crops that will provide a permanent host for mycorrhizal fungi, avoid disturbing the land (ie. no-till agriculture), avoid the use of artificial fertilizers and do not use herbicides or pesticides.

Geoff Lawton Interview, 2005

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On October 1st this year, I grabbed Geoff Lawton on the last day of a Permaculture Design Certificate Course he was teaching with Permaculture founder Bill Mollison. Geoff had some alarming things to say regarding the state of the world’s environment.
Image of Geoff Lawton and Douglas Barnes
Douglas Barnes: The last time I saw you, 2004, you mentioned two events – one was a possible event, but the first one you mentioned was the tsunami that you did work on in ’98; and we of course had the big one in December. And the other event was New Orleans, which you mentioned to us and told us what could possibly happen and it wasn’t a conspiracy theory or anything like that. It happened. What are your thoughts on those two events?

Geoff Lawton: Well, the tsunami was one that took everyone by surprise. And the size of the event obviously shocked everybody, you know, how vulnerable people are at a distance to a natural event like that.

One of the great results from the recovery, sort of the design side of the tsunami, was that some of the government agencies listened to our research that we had from the New Guinea tsunami. And the fact that we had researched the fact that tree belts buffered the impact and particularly filtered out the destructive debris in the waves and were a lot less fatal to people when there was a tree belt on the foreshores. And that was very easy to reference in the December Indonesian tsunami because there was so much footage. And it was easy to see if you scanned through the footage that where there were dense tree belts on the foreshore, there was hardly any damage behind and a very significant drop if any loss of life at all behind large tree belts. Although those shots weren’t shown on the news very much because the media, as usual, concentrated on the sensationalism of the catastrophe and the biggest damage. But particularly the Indian government surveyed the aerial footage and they could see very easily that where there were tree belts, there was less damage. And they initiated a planting of 8 million trees in the first wave of repair along foreshores. And they also looked at using trees that would grow on the foreshore and be functional and productive. So, they choose some productive species that would also handle those situations. And they put in a theme of honoring all the people who were lost in that there were trees that were donated to victims, and their families were given permission to plant trees at ceremonies, so they [the trees] are kept alive. So that was good.

One of our directors, Andrew Jones, actually got the job of heading up the post-tsunami rehabilitation assessment consultancy team in Indonesia, based in Jakarta. And we’ve got permaculture education systems going up in the repair of Aceh on the people-scale to start with and the initial reconstruction. And there’s still talk of total redesign in a more sustainable way – but there’s been a large problem with the bureaucracy throughout the Indonesian government on the spending of the money and how it will actually be processed. But we tried our hardest to get those sorts of permaculture initiatives in. And permaculture is written as the main part of the rehabilitation assessment consultancy for the UNEP. So that work goes on.

There’s a gentleman called Steve Cran working for the Bali… well, the Indonesian permaculture group IDEP who are based in Bali. Steve Cran is teaching courses there in Aceh. And there are people working on the ground with reconstruction. So hopefully that goes on as research that will go further into helping any future tidal wave, tsunami-type disasters. It’s obvious that tree belts, appropriately dense tree belts on the foreshore mitigate the power of the tsunamis and definitely filter out destructive debris.

Then we have New Orleans. It was only a year ago when we were there in August the year before Katrina and we were teaching a course there and we were evacuated when Hurricane Ivan nearly hit New Orleans. A million people were evacuated, and we were part of that. And we were half way through a Permaculture Design Course which we had to shift up country a few hundred miles. And now the scenario that’s been painted for a long time, the drowning of New Orleans – there was even a book, The Drowning of New Orleans that described exactly the scenario that’s happened. And the reality is there.

What has become really obvious is the knock-on scenario that when you have a disaster in a first world country, you have this enormous amount of ongoing residual damage because of the amount of possessions and property and equipment ownership of first world people. And the knock-on event that happened with the oil refineries and the oil rigs where 12% of America’s oil got knocked out of production and out of circulation. And that doesn’t sound like much, but because America consumes so much oil, that’s a very large amount of oil out of the world circulation. And it’s had world repercussions, and that’s just one little storm, really. It’s knocked out one city, really, or one area with one major city. So I think what’s happened from that and is still happening is there’s a real serious look now at the global situation of global warming, weather patterns, what’s causing it, why the northern hemisphere is hotter than the southern hemisphere – which is obviously because there are more industrialised human settlements in the northern hemisphere and the separation of the weather systems around the Hadley cell at the equator. And I think it’s crunch time and Bill Mollison’s been saying this for over 20 years; and he’s actually been naming the time frame – “within 50 years,” he said in 1983 when I took my course [Permaculture Design Certificate Course] “you’re going to see major changes.” And here we are just 25 years later, we’re only half way into it and you’ve got it, you’ve got it happening fast.

DB: The other day you mentioned the first south Atlantic hurricane in history.

Geoff Lawton: Yeah. Well it hasn’t really been much spoken about in the general press because it didn’t cause a lot of damage. But Catarina was the name of the hurricane in the southern Atlantic below the equator and there they’ve never been recorded. That’s the first ever and meteorologists are really worried about that because that indicates something that’s a first and a new phenomenon. In quite cool water with quite cool weather patterns we got a very large hurricane forming in the south Atlantic for the first time. So that’s a spillover, I think, of the northern hemisphere weather that’s now pushing over into the southern hemisphere. That’s a spill out really. I think that’s how it’s being seen.

And a scenario that’s happening right now is the release of CO2, particularly the release of CO2 in the ocean, which is speeding up with the arctic meltdown. There’s always a knock on scenario. The lack of reflected light from the polar icecap now is speeding up the warming of the northern oceans, and you’re getting a release of CO2 in the oceans at a much faster rate than was expected. And that is becoming carbonic acid, and the pH of the ocean is dropping dramatically. So, you’re acidifying the oceans. And they’re now talking about a possible doubling of the acidity in the oceans in the next year. And that’s dramatic change. That’s whole life systems getting knocked out. There are lots of sea creatures – sea life – that just won’t take that. And that’s more release of CO2 when that death rate comes on.

So, the inquiry for solution-based systems now is, I think, going to exponentially increase. And when you’re sitting in the position that we are as designers and consultants, it’s actually a bit of a worry that you’re going to just get overloaded with inquiry and if it’s possible to get the resources to get the job done – which is really training people up as quick as possible.

DB: You have classes coming up, of course. Any aid work coming up for you?

Geoff Lawton: Well, I have aid work coming up in Vietnam and in Thailand next year, and I’m on consultancy, at a distance, with a lot of different aid work scenarios. And right now, there’s a group of us seriously looking at the possibility of formulating a permaculture aid organisation which can establish NGOs in many places. All of that has to be speeded up, I think.

Geoff Lawton Interview, 2004

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In this 2004 interview, Geoff describes in his own words what Permaculture is, his work and experiences in Iraq, and his agenda for 2005.
Image of Geoff Lawton and Douglas Barnes
Geoff Lawton is a Permaculture educator, designer and consultant who has taught and implemented Permaculture in 17 different countries. Geoff has been involved in Permaculture since 1982. Having just completed Geoff’s latest Permaculture Design Certificate course, I put down my beer bottle to interview him in Brisbane, Australia.

Douglas Barnes: You are famous for Permaculture. What is that?

Geoff Lawton: Permaculture is a design system for sustainable human habitats that supply human needs in an environmentally sustainable way – an environment enhancing way. That’s a brief way of defining it.

DB: You were in Iraq a year ago. What were you doing there?

GL: I was working on an aid project for Counterpart International to redesign and reconstruct a Kurdish village where the people had been displaced by the Saddam Hussein Regime.

DB: What was it like in Iraq? What was the experience?

GL: Well, it was different. I first went in August 2003 and it was just after the occupation. It was extremely hot apart from anything else. But it was very, very tense and there was a lot of misunderstanding by a lot of people, but there was no organisation of any sort. There was no government, there was no customs and there was no department of any government left in place whatsoever. There was no law, really. We were in the hands of the local people who were organising and running the NGO we were working with and were consulting for. So, I had to trust the local people, Kurdish people mostly, to work with and set up this program and design this village and get it rebuilt.

DB: So there was no infrastructure. No police? No banks up and running? How did the society function?

GL: Surprisingly, the society was functioning fine. It wasn’t until we were arriving almost on the United Nation Humanitarian Air Service flight that I realized that, of course, there’s no customs and there’s no local police. And the American military weren’t really policing the situation – they were occupying the country very cautiously. So, there were no traffic rules – everybody was setting the rules themselves. There was no department of water, no department of sewerage, no department of electricity. All of that was being taken care of by the local people. And there were no banks open either. So, you could only change money on the street. The money that was there was obviously just going around. And everything was functioning fine. There was fresh food everywhere, there was plenty of food. Most services were working. Water and electricity and telephones went off at times, but most of the time were up and running.

DB: How could they be running without government help?

GL: Well, I asked that. The local electricians got the energy systems running, the power stations running and the electricity grid up and running to the best of their ability. The plumbers had the water running and the sewage working. And everybody just worked together in the local community. Everybody just cooperated. And most things looked quite normal on the street and there didn’t seem to be many major problems at all.

DB: So the community, perhaps, was tight enough that these sorts of systems could work out on their own? People could rebuild themselves, as it were?

GL: Yeah, I asked those questions as to how it was organised and how people cooperated and how they knew what needed doing. The local population were well over 90% Muslim and the mosque was the main centre of communication. And when there’s five prayers a day, there’s plenty of time and opportunity to meet. So, the mosques were used as a communication system for coordinating what needed to be done for the local community. It was very much a sort of cooperative society with no particular problems – people policing their own community really. And setting their own boundaries within their religious convictions actually.

DB: How successful was the project you were sent there to do? Did you achieve what you hoped to?

GL: Well, we got the job done and we got the village reoccupied. Fifty-three houses were built and a community centre. And fifty-three families reoccupied a village that had been first evacuated in 1995 or displaced by the regime in 1995. But it was actually a village that was originally at least 500 years old. Some extra houses were built, but we got 53 built with all the infrastructure.

DB: Well, you’ve recently come back from Jordan and Mexico.

GL: Mexico, New Orleans, Egypt and Jordan.

DB: What’s next?

GL: Well, next it’s back to the farm in New South Wales. But possibly in March, we’re over to the eco-show in New Zealand and a small educational tour talking to dairy farmers in New Zealand for about 10 days. After that a national conference in Melbourne and then a [Permaculture Design Certificate] course in New York in a catchment of New York in the Catskills. And in September, a course in Melbourne with [Permaculture founder] Bill Mollison co-teaching, which will be filmed as an educational video. And then in October, a course in Northern New South Wales. That’s all that we’ve got on the potential horizon.

Earth

Permaculture Ethics

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What is it that guides permaculture? The question is one of ethics. The answer is really contained within the definition of ethics itself. In the words of philosopher Slavoj Žižek, “Ethics is ultimately the ethics of moderation. Ethics tells you ultimately how to avoid this extreme…”

Permaculture is positivistic. It does not give a decree or series of commandments against wrong deeds. Nor is it a system of critique. In fact, part of Bill Mollison’s motivation behind the creation of sustainable systems (ie. permaculture) was disillusionment with the environmental movement at the time, which was merely a system of critique. There is nothing wrong with pointing out a problem, but a lot of critique is really a plea to authority to enforce a top down change.

To seek “moderation” or “avoid extreme” is to seek sustainability. Unfortunately, the word “sustainability” has been all but reduced to yet another marketing term. It’s meaning is, in the words of Herman Daly, “dangerously vague.” (Daly, Herman E., Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, Boston: Beacon Press. 1996. p.1)

To be of any use to anyone other than advertisers, a sustainable system needs to be defined as one in which the energy made available by the products of the system is greater over the system’s lifetime than the inputs needed to create and maintain the system.

All this leads us back to permaculture ethics, or, using Žižek’s approach, Permaculture’s guidelines for avoiding excess.

  1. The first tenet is to care for the Earth. We are all dependent on a healthy planet to sustain us. To endanger life on this planet is to endanger ourselves. This is clear enough. All life has an inherent value. Once this is recognised, thoughtless environmental destruction can be avoided. The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development is a step in the right direction: “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied…”
  2. The second tenet, contained within the first, is to care for people. People need access to clean air and clean water. To borrow from Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, [sensible, sustainable] housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
  3. The final tenet is to return surplus to the Earth and to the people. Energy has to flow, as nutrients have to cycle. Stagnation leads to unfit systems. The products of a system have to go back into that system to maintain its health and future viability.

These are not only the guiding principles we use in permaculture design, they also separate permaculture design from other design work.

blueprints

What is Permaculture?

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What is permaculture? This is the sort of question that those who have known about permaculture for years can have a hard time nailing down. The problem is that permaculture is a multidisciplinary practice combining elements from fields such as ecology, geology, agriculture, anthropology, architecture, botany, landscaping, chaos theory, soil science, marketing, international aid, and community building.

See the problem? What is this thing called permaculture that combines the elements of all these disciplines and more?

A lot of people have an image in their head that permaculture is gardening. But gardening is one narrow element, not all of permaculture. Permaculture is used to design not only food production systems, but water-harvesting systems, appropriate building design, waste and nutrient-cycling systems, and non-tangible systems like community associations, trusts, and other organizations.

Well, what is it then? Permaculture was given its name by Bill Mollison who, together with his student David Holmgren, developed a system of sustainable agriculture. In order to express its sustainability, Bill Mollison christened it perma, as in permanent or sustainable ,and culture, meaning not only agriculture, but broader culture as well.

This, however, does not really give an idea as to what permaculture actually is. Simply put, permaculture is a system for designing sustainable human environments.

Permaculture is more than just gardening, more than just agriculture. One could be designing all of the human environment using permaculture principles. The potential is limited to the imagination of designers.

For more on what permaculture is, see our free Getting Started course.

Guidelines for Semi-arid Sira, India

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You can tell the season a permaculturist is in by the frequency of blog posts they produce. Because it has been a while, I’ll post a response to some questions sent in to my by a reader near Sira, India.

 I plan to build rainwater harvesting & groundwater recharge structures, and leave the land undisturbed for few years. I will start serious work once I have more time. On a long term basis, I plan to build a small home and settle down in the farm. 

This sounds like a really solid plan, in that it addresses the concern of water right away. Rainfall in most of India can be quite variable from year to year. It might be over 600 mm one year and as low as 250 mm on a bad year. Sira also has a dry period of around 5 months each year.

 Are there any special considerations (Shape of land, amount of gradient, groundwater level, Soil quality) which I need to keep in mind while selecting a suitable piece of land for permaculture?

If Sira were a little farther north, I would recommend a north-facing slope to offer more shade (and thus more protection against evaporation). Because it is at 13°N, it won’t make a huge difference. A north-facing slope is slightly better, but not by much.

You will want to avoid slopes that are too steep to work, and keep in mind that any slope more than 20° is dangerous for machinery to work, and you will want to use machinery for earthworks. Labour is cheap in India, but manpower is still more expensive than a backhoe. Safe the human labour for grooming the earthworks. Slopes of greater than 20° can be terraced, though the cost is much greater for terracing than for dams. The most cost-effective, and beneficial approach for steeper slopes is to plant trees on them. Look towards something dual-purpose like Sesbania sesban, which provides, shade, fixes nitrogen in the soil, and can be used as a pole lumber. You could alley crop with S. sesban, provided there is easy enough access to the land.

Sesbania sesbans
Sesbania sesban alley cropping

As for soil quality, the more fertile, the better, of course. The problem is, most of the soils will be rather nutrient-poor, lateritic soils. Looking at satellite images suggests that the soil is iron-rich, which would bode well for mango production.

To boost soil life, fertility, and thus water-retention, add powdered charcoal to the site (AKA bio-char or ag-char). This will greatly assist in building soils. Application of mulch on its own, or even compost on its own will not contribute much to long-term increases in soil fertility. The charcoal dust allows biological processes to take hold.

That said, you would do well to build a shaded cement trough that you put compost worms in to produce vermicompost. If the trough is 60 cm by 3 metres, you will be able to produce a fair amount of very high-quality compost. This would be something for the long term, not something you implement immediately.

For ground water levels, the higher the better, unless the water has a high salt content that would damage crops. It does not look like this is the case, however.

 I don’t want to dig a bore-well. Average rainfall in Sira area is around 600mm. Will Permaculture techniques allow me to store sufficient rainwater to achieve water security? I would need water for both irrigation, and for domestic use (once I settle down). 

You might or might not get away without a bore. The majority of the wells I saw in Anantapur District were dug with an excavator. The town of Talupula, however, drew its water from a bore hole that was something like 1000 feet deep.

What will help you for household use is to make sure you catch the water that falls on the roof of the house you will build. You would also be wise to divert greywater from your kitchen into a heavily-mulched garden. Wasting water should not be done, particularly in such a  dry place.

In terms of earthworks, ripping will not work in your situation. The nature of the soil is such that any ripping you do will be erased with the first rainfall. What will work are large swales, gabions, and rock wall dams (unless you have a lot of good quality clay on site). Dams are the most expensive option and require engineering. Gabions, however, are relatively cheap and can make a large difference when placed across a temporary seasonal stream.

Pattern Language: Sheltering Roof

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Have you dreamed of building an energy efficient home? When it comes to home design, building an efficient home is only half the battle. A building that sacrifices everything to efficiency will not be one that people will want to spend time in. In short, beauty matters.

When it comes to roof styles, there are a lot of options to choose from. The focus here is not styles, however. Rather, I’d like to look at a few details that I think really help to make your roof design stunning.

Have a look at our short video that shows the points:

To recap, the key takeaways from the video are:

  • Design your building into to the roof, not the roof on the building
  • Have a point where you can touch the roof, if possible
  • Do not cut off your sunlight in cold climates
  • Make your eaves large

For this tip and other excellent advice on building design, pick up A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander.

Sheltering roofs

6 Tips for Water-Harvesting Earthworks

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If you’re reading this, you probably love water-harvesting earthworks. When done right, they can start repairing damaged land right from the first rainfall after they are installed. When done wrong, they can waste a lot of money, or even put lives and property at risk.

Here are six things to keep in mind when planning earthworks for a site.

1. Slow it down

The point of harvesting water is grabbing it and holding it as long as you can before it escapes you by going off your site. The longer that water stays on site, the longer it is available to you. Whether you are choosing open storage, or directing it into the ground, your aim is to make it stay around longer.

It’s worth mentioning a curious misconception that some people have. Some folks have the idea that if you slow water on your site, you are taking it away from anyone downhill, leaving them with less water. This is not at all the case at all.

Allowing runoff rather than capturing it is generally a no-win situation. To regreen a water-starved place, would you encourage water to rush down off the hills as quickly as possible so that all the downhill people could have it? This, in essence, would be designing the land to make water travel out to the ocean as quickly as possible. Not only is this a recipe for erosion, it is a recipe for turning permanent rivers and streams into ephemeral ones that only flow during heavy rains.

image of swale in landscapeWith earthworks, you are rehydrating the landscape. Rehydrating the landscape means more water available more often for the people downstream. While they might see a temporary reduction in surface runoff in the short term, in the medium and long term they will have more groundwater available.

2. Safety

Nature will throw enough adversity at you without adding to the list by creating your own disaster. A good risk assessment will help you to make wise decisions. Here are some questions to keep in mind before bringing in the machines.

  • How might this kill somebody?
  • How might this damage property?
  • What happens if there is a catastrophic failure?

Though you may be eager to install a particular feature on a site, safety might dictate that you walk away and leave the site untouched.

3. What does the land want to do?

You might have some exciting ideas about what you would like to see installed on a piece of land, but it is not going to work out very well if the earthworks do not suit the site you are working on.

A great perspective to take when deciding what to do is taking the land’s perspective. What does the land want to do? To answer that, consider what the environment was like before human intervention. That will give you some insight into the most optimal techniques to use on your site.

What the land will do depends on:

  • Climate
  • Topography
  • Soil type and depth
  • Local flora and fauna

Consider what the site would look like if it were just left alone for 40 years. How would it change over time?

Once you know the direction the land will naturally head, you can choose an approach that will steer it in that direction, rather than fight against what the land naturally wants to do. Nature rewards partners and punishes dictators.

4. Think like water

Bruce Lee wanted you to have a mind like water. I want you to think like water.

If you are water there are a few things you will do such as evaporate, or freeze, but the most important one with respect to earthworks is that you travel at 90° to contour. To put it another way, you flow downhill. (It’s true that if you are flowing through something, you will favour easily traversed mediums like sand over something denser like clay. In this case when travelling through soil, you might go at an angle less than 90o to contour. For planning purposes, however, 90° to contour is the rule.)

With this in mind, how will you, water, travel across the land? What path will you take? Check the land. There might be clues as to where you have travelled before – evidence of erosion, or of sediment building up. This can help you to make decisions of what to place where.

How much water will there be at one time? Not only do you need to know where the water does and doesn’t go, you also have to know how much there is at one time. How big do the water-harvesting systems need to be? What happens if you get more water than expected?

5. Know what earthworks do what jobs

There are a lot of choices when it comes to earthworks, choosing the right one for a site means that your efforts will go further

If you read your site correctly, it will go a long way towards determining what you can or should do on a site. Soil type, for instance, will determine what will be effective and what will not. As an example, ripping with a subsoiler such as a Yeoman’s plow can be very beneficial. It would be pointless to run one on sand or on lateritic soil, however. In the former case, the sand will just fall back in on itself. In the latter case, the land will flow and “heal” the ripping with the first rainfall (assuming you had the horsepower to get the power to break through the soil in the first case).

Next, you need to know what each type of earthwork does. For example, swales intercept water, sending it into the ground. They are great for sending runoff into the ground and helping trees to establish, but they won’t do much of anything at all for garden beds.

Do you want to get more water in the ground, or do you want open water storage? The answer will depend on your climate and what you are trying to do. If you were in an arid environment, you wouldn’t want a lot of open water storage, which would just be subject to evaporation. If you were in a humid temperate or tropical climate, open water could provide backup irrigation as well as opening space for aquaculture.

6. How much money do you have?

You can make a grand plan, but do you have the money to pay for it? You might have to implement things in stages. Hiring a tractor to pull a subsoiler is very affordable. Digging swales is affordable and has a high return on investment, if you are using them for the right thing in the right place. Installing a dam is a higher investment that will take considerable machine time, and thus more money.

You also have a choice of machines to work with. The hourly rate of a backhoe is cheaper than that of a bulldozer. If you are in a humid temperate environment, you can cut in a swale with a bulldozer in a small fraction of the time a backhoe could. If you were in a semi-arid environment with hard, lateritic soils, even if you could cut through with the dozer blade, the swale you made would be far too small and would just be erased with the first big rain event.

Over to you…

What approaches do you take when designing water-harvesting earthworks? What snags and solutions have you encountered with your projects?

The Blessing of Constraint

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“It’s so fine yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas” – Paul Cezanne
Surveying for water-harvesting earthworks.

Surveying our project site in India.

Many people might imagine their dream design scenario to be one in which they are completely free to express their creativity. But like a solution needs a seed crystal for crystals to form, so too does a designer need something with which to get the design started. If we view constraints as seed crystals, the more there are, the faster and easier the design process is likely to be.

Constraints narrow down the possible to the doable. They simplify the process. Limitations are focal points around which you can design.

You might consider a site with a lack of an essential resource such as water. Your focus will then be around the capture and conservation of water.

As another example, it can make the style of element you add to a design clear. If you face the constraint of freezing temperatures, then you are not going to look at thatched huts as a viable option for housing. In fact, just by having freezing temperatures, your building shape and orientation are largely predetermined for you.

Constraints can also bring you down to Earth, focusing you on what you need rather than what you happen to want at the moment. Financial restrictions, for instance, weed out “what would be great” from what you or your clients actually need.

If you find yourself faced with a big, empty site, look for fixed points you can work around. These serve as a starting point. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. You find a piece that stands out from the others, and then fit it together with its neighbours bit by bit, forming a foundation.

Empathy in Design

Douglas Barnes’s Articles at Permaculture Reflections, Page 2

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Empathy?!

If touchy-feely stuff really turns you off, relax, that’s not what I’m going to be talking about here. I’ll be talking about a way of viewing systems that opens useful perspectives for assessing and designing them.

Image of man sitting and reflecting on environment.

Cognitive empathy is for reading more than just people.

The type of empathy we will be looking at is cognitive empathy. Normally, cognitive empathy is assessing the thoughts and feelings of others – getting into their heads, as it were. In applying it to permaculture design, I am using the term cognitive empathy to mean understanding a system’s situation and needs.

For example, when I designed my house, there were a lot of appealing design elements and approaches that I really loved. Would I have tried to fit them all in my blueprint, I would have made a disaster. To make the house functional and pleasant to be in, I had to ‘get into the head’ of the house I was planning. What would the house require given the physical and legal restrictions of location I was to build on? How many of my desires could it accommodate before it started to perform badly? What would the environment throw at it in the future, and how could I design for that?

Use in Design

Empathy is a useful design tool. I’d go so far as to say it is essential for good design. It allows us to design systems that will be more in harmony with natural processes, making them perform better with fewer external inputs.

The water-harvesting designs I have done, for instance, have greatly benefitted from observation of the land in an effort to figure out what the land needs, how it currently behaves, and how water behaves on it. Allowing space for each of these facets allows me to see what I otherwise would have overlooked.

How-to

Get a feel for your site. A great way to do this is through passive observation using mindful walking. Mindful walking is a technique of clearing the mind of thought. The approach is quite simple. Walk slowly. For each step forward with your left foot, breathe in and focus on your breath. With each step forward with your right foot, breathe out and focus on your breath. Keep alert with your head up, looking around, but don’t think. Don’t grasp at ideas or think thoughts like “What am I seeing about water availability?” You are walking the land without an agenda. Let the observations come to you. Don’t force them out. When they do come, note them in your mind, but let them pass. Don’t fixate on them.

After you do that, write down any insights you gained about the site. Next, walk the land applying thought and questioning. Actively observe. Take notes. Think. Think like the land. Think like water. Think like the system you are going to put in place. What is it like for you on a regular day? What is it for you on an extreme day? What is going to happen to you over time?

This approach of ‘getting into the head’ of the system you are trying to design will always help you in designing better systems.