[The following is a writeup of a presentation given at the spring PermaCon in Toronto.]

My focus today is to look at a framework for design and the need for compromise within design. Projects that get abandoned due to inflexibility or unrealistic expectations are all too common.

To understand compromise in design we should be clear about the design process. The first step is creating a goal to work from. This goal should be put in as simple and as broad of terms as possible to get at the core of what you are trying to do. Think of this as the Twitter version of what it is you are going to do. Fleshing out comes later.

When dealing with permaculture, we are looking at creating some sort of sustainable system. A sustainable system is one that captures and stores more energy over its lifetime than is used in its creation and maintenance.

Consider an example that we will examine later in more detail: building a house. Faced with the need for housing and the desire to set up a permaculture research farm, I needed to design a home. Since it is in Ontario, I knew that it had to be a passive solar home. (Incidentally, this knowledge also led to my choice in property and location on that property for the home.) So my goal then became “Design a passive solar home for my wife and me with room for guests.” The goal was not “Design a passive solar tirewall home,” or “Design a passive solar straw bale home,” as those to provide specifics that are not important to achieving the primary goal of sustainability.

Putting on the guise of a 4-year-old and repeatedly asking why can help in this instance. Take, for example, the desire for a straw bale home. Why straw bale? If the answer is “sustainability,” then why are other types of sustainable building unacceptable? Is it aesthetics? Why? These questions can help to get at the kernel of what it is you really want.

This step is the core of any planning and subsequent action you will take, so it is vital to get it right. Without this clear statement of intent, you are leaving more room for misunderstanding and potential for the disappointment of not getting what you really want, or something that simply does not work.

A hint to finding if you have articulated your goal is to ask yourself if it actually sounds like a plan. Saying “My goal is to build a 2000 ft² straw bale home with a root cellar and 3 bedrooms” is too specific and has already moved into the planning stage.

With your goal in place, you are still not ready for planning. You are ready for the observation stage. Your task now is to gather data. You’ll need to find out all you can about the proposed site: temperature trends, maximum rainfall, length of drought periods, soil type, site aspect and slope, drainage, local vegetation, notable elements of neighbouring properties, etc. Ideally, you would want to observe a property for a long time, perhaps a year of more. But this is one stage where compromise creeps in. It might be that you don’t have a long time to observe a property before you need to act. In fact, it’s not uncommon. In such instances, even more careful observation is necessary.

To give an example, I was asked to do a water-harvesting project on semi-arid land in India. I was on site for 3 weeks, so long term observation was not possible. I made up for this and carried out a successful project through careful examination of the site, an understanding of the native plants, lateritic soils, and interviews with locals familiar with the property and climate conditions there.

The next stage is research. With the data you need, what sort of action could you take? Check to see if someone has done something similar and can advise you – even if you spend some money on this, you may wind up saving a bundle by not setting yourself up for further problems later. Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to.

This period of observation takes a considerable amount of time to do correctly. One of my teachers, Geoff Lawton, is fond of saying that you need one hundred hours of thinking to one hour of labour. This is a nice saying that gets you thinking the right way, but with about 3000 work hours invested in my house so far, I promise you that I did not spend 300,000 hours or 34 years worth of thinking time designing house.

Now you are ready to move onto the planning stage. It is likely that during planning, you will find yourself needing to jump back into observation and research. With your goal in mind, you’ll look at the dictates of the local conditions to see what fits the site. You will identify and available resources you have to work with (A native tree stand might be translated into lumber, but in Canada, that means you will need to mill it yourself, when have an engineer inspect and stamp each piece of wood. Buying lumber and leaving your trees in place is going to be cheaper. It will also save that existing stand of trees, though at the expense of another.) Available funding will also determine what it is you are going to do. Local regulations may put a halt to certain plans as well.

Such constraints may seem like a hindrance, but working with constraints within a design actually makes design easier. Being presented with a blank canvas with which to work is more daunting than being faced with limitations on a site – which is something that always occurs in the real world.

As your plan takes shape, you will need to keep in mind Rule 1 in planning: Assume the plan is wrong.

Assume that the plan is flawed and requires observation of feedback and redesign. More problems are caused by neglecting this rule than anything else. The single greatest flaw you can make is falling in love with your idea.

I’ll give you a few examples to scare you off of falling in love with your own ideas.

There is a retired couple I heard of in Eastern Ontario who spent their savings setting up an apple orchard. Right at this point, they might have been saved from financial ruin had the question “Why?” been rigorously asked. Why set up a pest-prone monoculture for a product that has had its market thoroughly eroded by imports? But the story doesn’t end there. They established the orchard on land prone to flooding in heavy rain events. Flooding and fruit trees don’t mix. The end result was unfortunately financial ruin.

Does this mean the couple were stupid? Not at all. Or at least, considering the number of times I have fallen in love with my own bad ideas, I hope it doesn’t. They got stuck on an idea that they were sure they could pull off. Entire civilisations have done worse. More research and more observation might have pulled them out of their disaster before they were in neck deep. It at least would have stopped them from planning a monoculture and putting all their eggs in one basket.

Another example, roundly reviled, is the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal haphazardly scribbled on a napkin, then transferred to make poorly designed, grand old building into an even more poorly designed nightmare.

First, glass on the north side of a building – bad. Then sloped glass – bad. Then sloped glass that can result in snow and ice accumulation sloughing off and striking pedestrians – bad. I could go on in terms of functionality and lack of aesthetic quality, but we are here for permaculture and only here for one day, so I’ll stop at that.

The Sharp Centre for Design foolishly plopped onto the Ontario College of Art and Design is another example. First, it’s oriented north-south in a cold climate – foolish. Second, it is suspended on stilts, minimising thermal mass heat storage and maximising heat loss on a cold and windy location – foolish. Third, it has very little natural light inside and is reportedly unpleasant to work in – foolish. Fourth, it’s butt-ugly – unacceptable. Hardly surprising then that it won architectural awards for its design.

The phenomenon is not limited to people with too much cash on their hands. I’ve encountered a disturbing number of people who want to build “eco-homes” in cold climates that are round or have a rounded south-facing wall. I suspect it is because artist renditions of buildings of the future are very often round, but I’m not sure. Rounded on the shade-side of the building, where the shape doesn’t interfere with the building’s solar gain and where it minimises the surface area on the cold side, is fine. Round facing the sun just wastes potential solar gain and increases the need for additional heating.

Working with constraints within a design actually makes design easier. Being presented with a blank canvas with which to work is more daunting than being faced with limitations on a site – which is something that always occurs in the real world.

Working with compromise can allow you to complete beneficial action that would otherwise be abandoned in attempts to be a purist. Again, the metric is more energy captured and stored than used in the creation and maintenance of a system.

I have had to contend with compromise within my own site design. The target date to start construction was July, 2008, but technicalities interfered with the close of the sale of our old property, delaying the purchase of the new one. I did set to work designing a tirewall structure for the site, however. My aim was to make something very conventional looking but using tires as a building material. This was not to be an earthship. I paid a visit to the permitting office and was told “Not a chance.” The inspector then changed his mind and said I could do it if I had an engineer on site every day of construction. In other words, “Not a chance.” I could have fought this, but I was interested in building a home, not moving into a new community and getting embroiled in a legal battle. Someone else in nearby Prince Edward County felt differently and did get in a legal battle, winning and clearing the way for similar projects. Perhaps when it comes time to building a barn…

A friend who turned to straw bale consulting told me that the building code in Ontario had changed, requiring vapour barriers on straw bale homes, which is not only a bad idea, it could lead to the collapse of load-bearing straw bale structures. Then straw has the issues of extra footprint to accommodate the thick walls, the problem of acquiring quality straw, and that straw in an area that is naturally forested necessarily means that it comes at the expense of forest. Timber production is certainly open to criticism for its clear cutting and replacement of forest with tree plantations, however.

In the end, I chose Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs). They have the benefit of ease of construction and an excellent R-value. In the final equation of more energy captured and stored than consumed in creation and maintenance, I knew that SIPs could be put to use sustainably.

My first choice of locations for the home was about 500 feet back from the road. This site, however, would have meant that I would need to run primary cable from the road to the house for electricity. It would also increase the cost of driveway construction and the amount of work to plough the driveway. This would have added perhaps $10,000 to the cost of the home. Instead, I chose a spot just on the limit before primary cable is needed.

I will soon be insulating the roof of the building. Wet-blown cellulose was my first choice. But I was informed by a local insulator that he no longer does wet-blown because he can’t stand being so cruel to his customers. It turns out that it uses an adhesive which has a foul smell that lingers for several years. No thank you. Dry cellulose is not acceptable to me as it settles over time leaving uninsulated blank spots at the peaks of the roof where it is most needed. Blown in fibreglass looks to be the better option and more sustainable in the long run.

I designed the home myself to be passive solar – to heat itself as much as possible with the heat of the sun. My real-world backup heat source is a thermal mass stove, which doubles as a thermal mass for the passive solar aspect of the building. Code, however, requires a mechanical heat source – a provision put into the building code by the banks. The cheapest to install is electric baseboard. I’m never going to use it, but its benefits are that it’s cheap and code requires more insulation, meaning that I won’t skimp on that end. The drawback is that I have to listen to everyone tell me how inefficient the heat source I’m never going to use is.

The building is not yet complete, but I am sure there are other areas that I will be forced to compromise with before I am done.

In summary, the key steps are to create a brief but coherent goal that states what it is you are trying to achieve. From there, one can begin observation and research to be able to move onto the planning stage. In planning, remember not to fall in love with your ideas. If reality interferes, yield to it. That will give you a happier outcome, even if you don’t realise it. And remember to assume that your plan is flawed and in need of feedback.

Special thanks to Steve Cran

The earthquake and devastating tsunami of March 11, 2011 shocked the world with images of widespread destruction. All during my 13 years in Japan, I lived under the constant threat of “The Big One.” It never came while I was there, but when it finally did, its damage directly affected many of my family and friends living in Japan.

While no structure can be completely earthquake or tsunami proof, there are design elements that can be included that may reduce the damage caused by these events. I’ve already written on a simple design tweak to increase the strength of a building in an earthquake, now I’d like to look at strategies for dealing with tsunami.

After the 1998 tsunami that hit Papua New Guinea, permaculture aid worker Steve Cran toured the devastated areas to find out what strategies might be employed to deal with tsunami prone regions. One pattern that emerged was that areas with dense tree belts along the coast suffered less damage from the wave. Inland tree belts also assist in reducing the power of the wave and filtering our abrasive debris picked up by the wave that can lead to further damage of structures. Again, tree belts help, but as Steve Cran pointed out to me in a recent correspondence, “You can’t stop a tsunami but you can reduce its impact inland.”

Structures themselves can be designed to be more likely to survive tsunami. A boat-shaped wall at least 2 metres high with the “bow” and “stern” perpendicular to contour can help to deflect the wave. Additionally, buildings can be boat shaped and built on piers to better allow the wave to pass as it both comes in and goes out (both directions being destructive). Such a building shape could easily be achieved using concrete – a building material that is commonly used in Japan already. While concrete is an energy intensive material, it is durable and can be used sustainably. Existing earthquake dampening systems could be used in such a design as well.

For community design, Steve recommends compounds “laid out like bricks, offset, two over one so when the wave comes, the front compounds break the force of the wave as it moves inland.” In the case of Kessenuma and other ravaged communities in Japan, property is already marked out, making the brick-like pattern inapplicable. However, houses could still be built as described above to lessen the impact of the wave. Whether such a home would survive the over 10-metre waves that hit the coast is uncertain. They would, however, increase the likelihood of buildings surviving.

Personal Note:

Many kind readers have asked about the safety of my family. My mother and father-in-law live in the mountains of northern Ibaraki and had to endure many quakes over magnitude 6. Despite this, their 150 plus year-old farmhouse survived just fine – a testament to the traditional home design and construction in Japan. Some earthen plaster did fall off one of the out buildings on the farm, but a little sand, some clay and straw and it will be good as new. They are about 70 or 80 km from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, but so far the radiation has not presented a problem.

This blog’s coauthor Scott Meister also safely but nervously road out many magnitude 6 quakes at his home 16 km from the summit of the slumbering Mt. Fuji.

The following is a transcript of a speech given to the Belleville chapter of the Canadian Federation of University Women in Belleville, Ontario on February 17th, 2011.

Tonight, we’ll be looking at the state of the world through the lens of sustainability. Then we will examine what are claimed to be our societal goals to try to unravel how we got where we are today. Finally, we will look at a methodology to put ourselves on a sustainable path along with a few examples of this methodology put into action.

Well, to talk about sustainability, we really are going to have to understand what it is. Otherwise ongoing attempts to reduce it to a meaningless marketing term will succeed. For instance, one infamous agrichemical company has marketed its glyphosate herbicide as a means of “creating sustainable pastures.”

The surfactant in their product is highly toxic to amphibians.

Glyphosate kills Rhizobium bacteria, which are the bacteria that live symbiotically with legumes and fix atmospheric nitrogen, nourishing the soil.

It kills mycorrhizal fungi which help plants attain calcium, phosphorus, magnesium and other minerals. They also help supply plants with water in times of drought. They allow plants to communicate to fight off pest attacks and serve as a network to allow plants to share nutrients. They also help sequester carbon and build up soil humus. Killing them off is an exceedingly bad idea.

Glyphosate is toxic to fish.

While not directly toxic to birds, it has been observed to reduce local bird populations due to its overall detrimental effect on ecosystems.

In humans, it has been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as well as being linked to liver tumours and thyroid cancer in rats.

If the word “sustainable” is to hold any meaning, it must not be left up to the world of marketing to define it.

Here’s the definition: A system is sustainable if, over its lifetime, it captures and stores more energy than it consumes in its creation, operation and maintenance.

In traditional peasant agriculture systems, the energy required to plant and tend a squash plant is paid back many times over by the harvest. Think of a bank account as an analogy. If you continually spend more than you earn, sooner or later you will reach a point in which you are out of capital.

There have been societies that spent more natural capital than they produced. Sumer, Rapa Nui, Rome and the Anasazi are all examples of societies that did this and collapsed.

But that can’t happen to us, right? We’re exceptional! We have technology.

Consider our industrial agricultural system. It now costs 10 calories of energy on average to deliver one calorie of food energy and that is only counting exosomatic energy, not energy from human labour. This is really bad news considering that we are about half way through our global oil supply, discounting the difficult to extract oil sands. Natural gas production, important for synthesizing nitrogen, peaked in North America a decade ago.

And industrial agriculture has destroyed more soil more quickly than at any other time in human history. We lose 75 billion tons of topsoil globally every year. The Great Plains of North America have lost 6 to 10 feet of top soil since the arrival of farming there; and 38% of Canadian prairie farmland has become significantly salinated. It is worth noting that no civilisation has ever collapsed that did not have loss of soil fertility as a major contributing factor. Soil may not be a sexy topic, but it is premier in importance.

Directly connected to soil loss is deforestation. We lose an area of the Amazon the size of Kuwait every year to soy and cattle farming, which are wholly inappropriate to the climate. Globally, we lose the size of Lebanon in forests every year.

To this I will add that global fisheries are predicted to collapse by 2048; and that global climate change threatens the climate stability that makes agriculture possible while acidifying the oceans, threatening the base of marine food chains.

In this context, we can see that sustainability is another word for survivability.

How Did We Get Here?

A key point in finding our way out of this mess is to figure out how it is we got into it in the first place. To find that out, it’s helpful to examine what it is one has been trying to do.

So, what are we trying to do? What are we trying to achieve? Let’s look at the common answers offered up.

Is the goal to maximise individual and societal happiness?

Happiness is tracked by economists as “Subjective Well Being.” (They call it this because it’s more impressive than saying “happiness.”) In 1974, economist Richard Easterlin asked a novel question in the field of neo-classical economics: “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?” The answer was yes… to a point.

More recently, Lord Turner, former head of the Confederation of British Industry (that noted group of left wing radicals) admitted that “All the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness”

He was on the right track, but the material standard of living today in the West is much higher than the point at which is required to maximise happiness. A recent meta-analysis by Oxford economic historian Avner Offer confirms this, concluding that,

Since the Second World War, and especially since the 1970s, self-reported ‘happiness’ has languished at the same levels, or has even declined…. On any measure used, the rise of aggregate money incomes has done little or nothing to improve the sense of well being.

Indeed, it can be argued that the influence of monetary wealth on societal happiness has become detrimental. A 2009 study from the London and Harvard Schools of Business has shown that exposure to luxury goods increases self interested thought and decision making. This is counter-productive to a species that is social by nature.

Is the goal of our global society to maximise human potential?

Were this the case, we would expect to see literacy rates at 99%. We’d also expect the average reading grade level in adults to be higher.

The cost of a post-secondary education in the U.S. would not be outpacing the rate of inflation by over 4.5 times, were this true. (The case is similar for Canada with tuitions skyrocketing.)

We would have no national debate about the need to combat mental illness; we would be combating mental illness.

We would not be creating people incapable of relating to other people. The University of Michigan has been recording self-reported empathy among college students and has found it dropping since 1980 when the study started. Seventy-five percent of today’s students assess themselves less empathetic than their average counterpart from thirty years ago. Self-reported narcissism is at an all time high.

A study published in the February, 2007 Quarterly of Economics found that landless squatters randomly given title over land showed increased materialistic and individualistic beliefs, including – and I wish I were making this up – the belief that you can succeed on your own. It also made the newly entitled less trusting of the landless. Apparently, money creates a new paradigm that blinds one to irony.

Is the goal to meet the need for healthy food, clean air and water, and sensible housing?

In addition to costing more energy than it provides (not to mention costing more dollars than it charges – one investigation from the January 12, 1994 edition of the Financial Times found the cost of a hamburger in real dollars was $290 USD, not counting corporate subsidies), industrially produced food is lower in nutrition than traditionally grown produce.

For instance, pasture-raised hens produce eggs that are 7 times higher in beta carotene, 3 times higher in vitamin E, 2 times higher in omega 3 fatty acids, 2/3 higher in vitamin A, 1/3 lower in cholesterol, and ¼ lower in saturated fat than eggs from prison chickens. Sticking with chickens, dark meat has decreased 52% in vitamin A content and increase 54.4% in fat since 1963. Chemist Donald R. Davis has compared data spanning the past 70 years and found median declines of 5 to 40% or more in vitamins, minerals and protein in fruits and vegetables. There is less food in industrially produced food.

Deaths from air pollution worldwide are estimated at 2 million per year by the WHO. Were clean air a serious goal, the only air quality warnings would come during forest fires and volcanic eruptions.

Clean water? You can convince me this is a serious goal when you can safely and confidently brew a cup of coffee with water from every single major river on earth. Deaths from unsafe water are estimated at 3 million per year.

Sensible shelter? Well, shelter, at least, though not too sensible. It is available to most, but the misfits, the mentally ill and those hit by financial disaster fall through the cracks.

Is the goal long term survivability?

We know we are destroying the soil that human health is dependent upon, we know that we use far more energy to produce food than we get from the food and we know that energy is running out. Furthermore, we know that using that energy is threatening the climatic stability that agriculture is dependent upon.

And even if we discover some wondrous new source of energy, it is clear from what we have done with cheap, abundant energy that we would most likely destroy the ecology that makes our lives possible. While survival as a species is likely, if likely hellish, survival as a global civilisation is not in the cards.

No, if these were our goals then we as a species are either grossly incompetent or incredibly stupid.

Looking empirically at outcomes, it appears to me as though the goal of our current system is to accrue and secure financial power for those clever enough, educated enough, lucky enough and/or devious enough to get it and hold on to it. As the saying goes, “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

How Do We Get There?

If the global society is to survive, it needs to have a coherent and overt goal that encompasses sustainability. The good news is that there are precedents of societies that have successfully pulled themselves back from the brink and are surviving to this day. One example is Japan, which faced a serious crisis from deforestation. This was turned around by imperial decree during the Tokugawa era. More fascinating for me as an environmental designer is the example of the tiny Pacific island nation of Tikopia. At 4.7 km2, Tikopia has long been at risk of overpopulation. Environmental destruction has always been a risk, threatening starvation. Yet they have been able to overcome serious challenges that have arisen over the millennia and are still going strong 2900 years after first founding the nation.

To achieve what those nations did, we first need to establish a holistic goal that answers the question, “What are we trying to do?” Perhaps that goal will be the pursuit of happiness, or perhaps it will be to maximise human potential, but it must be clear and it must address human needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a pretty good model for determining human needs, and the diagram here is patterned in large part, though not exclusively, from it. I’ve put together some of the needs that I’ve seen have empirical evidence to back them and avoided the influence of spiritual, political or economic ideology as best as I could. For simplicity’s sake, this is not an exhaustive list of human needs, just a sampling of important needs.

The importance of a holistic goal is summed up in the following analogy. It is near impossible to arrive in Burbank, California from Belleville, Ontario if all you know is that you need to drive 33 hours to reach the destination. You have to know where you are going if you want to get there.

Once a goal is in place, the next step is to draft a plan to achieve that goal. A vital step that most planners fail to do is to assume that the plan you create is flawed. It is too easy to fall in love with one’s plan and near impossible to create a plan that will not need adjustment over time to achieve its goals.

At this point, it is vital to know the eight most important words in sustainable design: Design action around energy, not energy around action. In other words, don’t plan what it is you are trying to do then scramble at the end to get the required energy. Determine your actions based on locally available sustainable energy. It is typical for a single property design to place elements relative to their distance from the house and the frequency with which you must visit them.

With the plan based on the holistic goal, it can now be implemented. Then observe the feedback and make adjustments to the plan accordingly.

I’d be remiss if I did not caution against looking to technology as a panacea for our problems. In the words of 2004 Massey lecturer Ronald Wright,

Our technological culture measures human progress by technology: the club is better than the fist, the arrow better than the club, the bullet better than the arrow. We came to this belief for empirical reasons.

He points out, however, that “[o]ur practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology – a secular religion which… is blind to certain flaws in its credentials.”

Technology may solve a given problem, but it opens up new problems requiring ever more technology to solve. We’ve had all the technology we’ve needed to make global civilisation sustainable for decades.

Now I’ll give the promised examples of this approach in action.

In May of 2009, I visited the small farming village of Talupula in Andhra Pradesh, India and the invite of a local organisation, the Green Tree Foundation, which provides trees to the region at low or no cost. Historically a dry tropical region, biotic pressure and climate change has turned the region into a semi arid zone, with the threat of desertification very seriously looming (desert has sprung up 100 km to the west). The goal in my case was to design and implement a water harvesting system to revitalise a section of land to serve as a demonstration site.

My initial plan had been to establish a system involving a small earthen dam fed by swales (swales are water harvesting ditches dug on contour) along with patterned ripping with a subsoiler to assist in allowing easier infiltration of water and even irrigation of the land.

Well, remember that it is important to assume one’s plan is wrong. While building a dam was an exciting prospect for me, the lateritic soils there made it an unrealistic option. The soil, hard as concrete in the dry season and as squishy as a mattress in the wet season did not lend itself to the kind of dam I had in mind, nor the patterned ripping with the subsoiler. The plan changed.

We settled on a 7-acre patch of hillside that a local organic farmer had abandoned to pigeon pea farming and nothing else. I knew that swales were a good option for the site and could assist in establishing a more water-hungry and more valuable crop of mango trees.

Inspecting the site, I calculated the size and spacing of the water harvesting swales needed and had the site mapped out by a survey crew. With three levels of contour mapped out and with the aid of a backhoe and a labour crew, we dug out 4 swales spanning over 400 metres. These swales capture rainfall that would otherwise wash down the hillside, eroding it, and store the water in the ground, making it available to plants and recharging the water table. When completely filled, the swales hold over one million litres of water. The total cost of the work to make this happen was $650 CND.

The staff at the Green Tree Foundation includes ethnobotanists who grew up in the region, so I left tree and ground cover selection in their very capable hands. This image just six months after I left shows the top swale with nitrogen-fixing Cassia siamea, which helps stabilise the soil along with enriching it. C. siamea leaves and pods can also be cooked and eaten, and helps fight colorectal cancer. It can also be used as a good fuel source. [Correction: C. siamea is not a nitrogen-fixing plant.]

Here we see mango trees that have been established without the use of irrigation. I knew the swales would have a marked effect, but I never imagined mango trees without irrigation.

Directly below the second and largest swale, there was a large tamarind tree that I would frequently seek shelter under (and it no doubt saved my life on the 45oC+ days we had). The tamarind fruits during the monsoon season and typical crops are like this one on a tamarind very close to the site but on the opposite slope.

Here is an image of the crop from the tamarind directly beneath the swales. The difference is night and day. Considering the tree saved my live several times over, this is the least I could do for it.

I had predicted to the team that within 3 years, springs would appear at the bottom of the hill below the swales, if only during the rainy season. Well, slightly to the side below the site, the farmer had dug a well for irrigation. When I was there, the water level was 3 metres down and inaccessible without a hose. Here, six months later, the same well was full, they say as a direct result of the swales.

My confidence in the effectiveness of this technique came from learning of the experiences of one of my teachers, Geoff Lawton. In 2000, he was invited to Jordan by NICCOD, a Japanese NGO and the Hashemite Fund for Human Development.

On a ten acre site in the Jordan River valley, 10 km from the Dead Sea, he led a project to establish a demonstration site for sustainable design. Rainfall at the site comes in 2 or 3 large events and amounts to only 100 to 150 mm per year. Regular hot, desiccating winds contribute to severe evaporation on the site. The soil is very infertile with little organic matter and extremely high salinity. Soil to a depth of 30 cm was found to have 98.1 dS/m, and soil from 30 to 60 cm deep registered 101.7 dS/m, making it extremely salty. [A dS/m, or decisiemens per metre, is a measure of electrical conductivity which can be used to measure soil salinity. The United States Department of Agriculture considers soil over 4 dS/m to be “saline soil.” The soils at the Kafrin site are above this level by more than an order of magnitude!]

To capture every drop of rainfall possible, the site was surveyed to provide a detailed map of the site contours. Once the contour lines were identified, swales were planned for the site to capture as much of the runoff rain to allow it to sink into the ground where it is most easily stored for the benefit of soil life and vegetation. Nitrogen-fixing trees were planted and drip irrigation was used to help establish them, although the site used 1/5th the irrigation of the surrounding farms in the area.

Eighteen months later, the site looked like this.

Geoff’s wife Nadia Lawton used similar permaculture techniques to design her family’s garden in Jordan. At the start, the site was very dry. They dug in a swale to capture rainwater and shunted greywater from the sinks into the swale. Before the trees were planted, the site looked like this.

The next year, the site was unrecognisable.

It’s not just applicable to arid regions, either. Before I left for India, I designed a passive solar home for my wife and I and have been building it myself since the end of 2009. As opposed to active solar, which is used to generate an electrical current, passive solar is a means of utilizing heat from the sun.

At 45° latitude (north or south) there are 957 Watt hours per square metre available for heating on a winter day. We can use this energy to assist in heating rather than relying totally on external sources of heat.

Taking advantage of free solar heat will not only save money, it will also help in making a building sustainable over its lifetime.

South facing fenestration allows us to capture solar energy where it is stored in the concrete pad and the thermal mass of the masonry stove that also serves as a backup heat source.

Though I was busy during the summer with construction of the house, I did take some time to establish 160 square feet worth of garden to supply us with fresh vegetables. In just that little area, I was able to grow about $400 worth of produce. Finding people to give the surplus away to was the main challenge. I will admit that we did need to water the garden a few times during the summer, but when it came to weeding, I report in all honesty that I spent less than 30 seconds weeding the entire summer. Similarly, we had no problems with pests whatsoever, so my recipes for drinkable insecticides were unnecessary.

Design is not limited to individual properties, either. I have recently worked with Transition Toronto, which is part of the Transition Movement. The Transition Movement seeks to assist communities in dealing with the challenges faced by declining energy levels. This includes creating action plans to provide food and energy for people as well as developing commerce strategies for a world that will surely see cast economic changes.

A colleague and fellow student of mine who is from Colombia has taught an entire village design and assisted them in designing a sustainable village for themselves in the mountains of Colombia.

And another piece of good news before I wrap up. It has taken us a tremendous amount of effort and energy to do the damage we have to the Earth. As we can see, if we pattern our actions in harmony with nature and make nature a partner rather than an opponent, positive response is instantaneous.

Once we can establish a sensible goal for ourselves and create a sustainable plan that involves working with nature, we can turn our planet on a dime. So, don’t panic.

Note: While this piece is rather hard on the practices of conventional agricultural science, it is not to be taken as an indictment of science or the scientific method. Indeed, I greatly encourage more science. What motivated me to write this is the alarming positions and attitudes of followers of the unscientific religion of scientism, which I feel is one of the more harmful fundamentalisms in the world today. Also note that this was written at a time pre-CRISPR-Cas9.

Imagine two different people of two different mindsets want to grow corn: one a permaculturist, the other a conventional agricultural scientist. Imagine both have unlimited resources. One sees corn as being a part of an interconnected system that interacts with everything around it. The other sees corn as a combination of inputs. One view looks at corn as an organism that affects and is affected by its environment. The other view looks at corn as a machine.

The Conventional Approach

The agricultural scientist knows that corn is a demanding crop, so after plowing the land and applying glyphosate herbicide on upstart weeds, he or she fertilizes the soil with a commercial synthetic fertiliser. After all, plants grow better when they have a good nutrient supply. Unfortunately for the scientist, plowing kills beneficial worms and fungi and damages soil structure, increasing erosion. Plowing also oxidizes some of the carbon in the soil, releasing it to the atmosphere as CO2. Apart from being a significant contributor to green house gas emissions, this also reduces the carbon content. Reducing the carbon content reduces the cation exchange capacity of the soil, which is the ability of the soil to transfer essential minerals to plants. In other words, it makes the soil less fertile.

The glyphosate applied might be a brand that has a surfactant which is highly toxic to amphibians. In any event, glyphosate increases the risk of fusarium, a toxic fungus. Glyphosate is also linked to acute health risks including but not limited to headaches, skin and eye irritation, nausea, numbness, increased blood pressure, and heart palpitations and longer term health risks including lesions in salivary glands, inflamed stomach linings, genetic damage in human blood cells, reduced sperm counts (in testing on rats) and abnormal sperm (in testing on rabbits), and cancer (non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in humans and liver tumors and thyroid cancer in rats). So, let’s hope the scientist is careful and has good health coverage.

Hopefully, the fertiliser is not one that holds the nutrients in a cadmium salt as cadmium will further kill off fungi. On its own, the synthetic fertiliser will shift the soil in a bacteria-dominant direction and reduce fungal content with or without cadmium. The synthetic fertiliser also reduces the carbon content of the soil making it less hospitable to life and less fertile, reducing its capacity to retain water, and degrading soil structure thus increasing erosion.

As the corn starts coming up, weeds start popping up again, so a second run with glyphosate is made. This time, the agricultural scientist experienced some tingling skin and burning sensation in the throat.

The corn came up, but the field was full solely of corn, proving to be a smorgasbord for corn borers. Even spraying could not control them all. Clearly there is a problem.

Being clever, the scientist goes into the genetics lab and isolates the cry 1Ab gene from Bacillus thuringiensis ssp. kurstaki, the nptII gene, an intron (a non-coding section of a gene) from the heat shock protein hsp 70, the CaMV 35S promoter gene from the cauliflower mosaic virus and the NOS terminator sequence from Agrobacterium tumefaciens and sets them on the plasmid vector pV-ZMBK07. Plasmid vector pV-ZMGT10 carries the CP4 EPSPS gene from Agrobacterium tumefaciens and the gox gene from Achromobacter strain LBAA and the nptII gene. These are coated on microscopic BBs and fired into corn cells to transfer the DNA. Simple enough, right?

Wow. Millions of dollars later, the copy of the gene cry 1Ab gene was incomplete. If you don’t know what this means, don’t feel bad. No one does. No one knows exactly how this affects the functioning of the genetically modified corn. There was another problem, unfortunately. The terminator sequence to turn off the promoter gene was absent but made it to market anyway. Promoters can affect the DNA 40,000 base pairs down from them. So what is the CaMV 35S promoter promoting besides the inserted transgenes? What are the health implications, if any, of this? What are the environmental effects? Is the incomplete cry 1Ab gene coding for something slightly unique rather than the predicted insecticidal toxin? If so, is this unique attribute helpful or harmful to human health? Independent research has suggested that there were some deletions or rearrangements in the host corn DNA. What affect, if any, is this having on the corn’s nutritional content, human health and environmental safety? Is glycosylation (an enzymatic process attaching carbohydrates to other molecules in cells) causing unpredicted effects when this GMO is ingested? This has been seen with other GMOs. Has the disruption in gene order (something known to be important) had any harmful side effects? And if the only changes made are those that theory designed and predicted, why does this corn have higher lignin content than conventional corn? What about the recent finding of decreased fertility in rats fed the corn?

And it turns out that the pollen and detritus from the plant are toxic to caddisflies. Further research is not done, however, as industry-lead science is not interested in funding a project that might show that one of its controversial cash cows may be dangerous.

With millions spent, the agricultural scientist has increased greenhouse gas emissions, decreased soil fertility, increased erosion, increased pest losses, decreased yield, killed off local amphibians, decreased biodiversity, consumed more energy than the crop yielded, and compromised human and environmental health in a number of different ways. If that were not enough, 10 calories of energy were consumed to produce one calorie of corn.

The Permaculture Approach

It must first be noted that the permaculturist uses sustainability as a measuring stick. That means the energy created by his or her system to grow corn must capture and store more energy than goes into creating and maintaining that system. In other words, the net energy balance must be positive without fudging the accounting.

The permaculturist knows that corn is a demanding crop and will require healthy soils. As such, he or she has set aside a patch and has allowed it to overgrow with weeds and has chopped and mulched those weeds in place to build up soil fertility. Perhaps the permaculturist has added some kelp meal for trace elements. He or she has seeded the site with mycorrhizal fungi spores and/or transplants (probably Glomus species) to increase plant health. King stropharia mushroom spawn (Stropharia rugoso annulata) is added to the mulch to benefit the corn and provide an extra yield as is done in Eastern Europe.

Climate permitting, the permaculturist might adopt the Central American technique called frijol tapado. This method involves allowing the land to fallow for 2 or 3 years until woody weeds are dominant. Grasses will be competitive with the crop, but the woodier weeds will not be. Beans and corn are scattered directly into the weeds. Then the weeds are chopped and dropped to create mulch for the crop. (This system works well enough to produce 60 to 70% of the beans grown in Costa Rica.)

If this technique is not possible, the site needs to be cleared for planting. But the idea of tearing up the soil is unthinkable as it destroys fungal life in the soil, decreases fertility, and breaks down soil structure, contributing to erosion. Furthermore, the act of plowing creates an ideal niche for a raft of weeds that thrive in disturbed soils. The clearing could be done by hand, but doing the work yourself when it could be done by another and could benefit another is foolish. So, the permaculturist sends in the chickens. Penned in the desired area and kept on the hungry side, they tear through the weeds and contribute phosphorus-rich, natural fertiliser at the same time. Their droppings will also increase the number of worms on site, further benefitting the soil.

The corn is planted, but to help meet nitrogen needs, it is intercropped with clover and beans to fix nitrogen. Beans have also been shown to decrease outbreaks of leafhoppers and fall armyworm when intercropped with corn. Clover and soybeans have been found to decrease losses from the European cornborer. Weeds want to be avoided, so to back up clover as a ground cover, squash is planted. The added benefit to this groundcover is the food it yields. Squash also reduces losses in corn to spider mites and aphids. Bee balm is thrown in as a beneficial attractor, encouraging predatory insects and attracting pollinators. Over-concentrating corn is avoided as this would be too attractive to pests. Dr. Jane Mt. Pleasant of Cornell University has run trials of 3-sisters plots (3 sisters being a corn, bean and squash mix) against conventionally grown monocultural corn plots and found the calories produced in the 3-sisters system were 17% higher per unit area.

Wildflower strips along the perimeter of the patch are intentionally grown. These provide a haven for predatory insects, allowing them to overwinter and providing summer habitat for them. The flowers act as attractors for beneficial parasitoids, which help control pests such as cornborers. These parasitoids seek out caterpillars like the cornborer and lay eggs on them. The eggs hatch and burrow into the caterpillar, eating it from the inside out. The sugars from the flowers increase the adult parasitoids’ fertility, lifespan, and host-searching activities. The permaculturist is confident in this approach because field studies have shown this technique to be effective in controlling pest insects.

The permaculturist also plants silverleaf desmodium (Desmodium uncinatum) and molasses grass (Melinis minutiflora) in patches amongst the corn, which has been shown to repel stem-borers. Sudan grass (Sorghum vulgare) and napier grass (Pennisetum purpureum) are planted on the margins as this has been shown to lure away stem borers. Furthermore, all four of these grasses are useful as animal fodder. In Kenya where this method was developed, stem borers were shown to be cut by 80% over control plots.

As the soil has been built up, it grows healthier food. Recent research by chemist Dr. Donald R. Davis of the University of Texas shows significant declines in nutrition in conventional agricultural produce over the past 90 years. And this falls in line with other studies as well.

So, the soil in the permaculturist’s plot has been fed and the use of plowing and biocides avoided, increasing soil life. In other words, the soil is in a healthier condition than it previously had been. So compared to the agricultural scientist’s approach, the soil is healthier, the food is healthier, biodiversity is greater, the watershed has not been contaminated, pest losses are lower, more calories have been produced, less money has been spent, and human health has benefited from the practice rather than been compromised.

What are the goals of permaculture design? What are we trying to do? The goal of any design is to provide a solution to a problem. The problem permaculture addresses is the maximization of human welfare achieved in a sustainable way. To put it another way, we are trying to ensure long-term survival in a way that does not make us all miserable.

When the term “sustainable” is used, we are really talking about energy budgeting. In a closed system like the Earth (or even in our finite galaxy) there is a maximum amount of energy available. To be able to survive long term means not spending more than you save. A designed human environment is sustainable if, over its lifetime, it captures more energy than was required for its manufacture, implementation and maintenance and provides a surplus for human use. Considering the current industrial model for food production, in which one calorie of food energy is created at the expense of 10 calories of input energy, this definition shows us that our food systems are not sustainable. Similar accounting for other human activities shows that sustainable activity is actually the exception these days.

Solution?

With the problem defined, we can work out a solution. Keeping sustainability in mind, we can set a guideline for design: Design action around energy, not the other way around. A given bioregion has a limit to how much energy it can capture and store for our activities. To go beyond this limit is to push the costs of those activities off onto others and future generations. We are not interested in a sociopathic approach to design, so we want to avoid doing this outcome.

One way to design around energy is through the permaculture technique of setting up zones for activities. Activities that require regular, daily attention should be located in a place close to where the people are. While I am always pleased to see people producing their own food in gardens, those gardens are unfortunately usually located at the farthest point in the backyard from the backdoor. Incentive to trudge all the way out there is reduced by its relative distance and it requires more human energy to get out there. How likely are you to go out to the garden to pick fresh herbs for your breakfast if it’s raining and the garden is 10 metres or more from the door? Not very likely. As the attention required by the elements in the design decreases, their distance from the most trafficked areas increases. Animals, if they are incorporated into the design, are a little farther out, perhaps with fruiting perennials. Nut and timber trees are farther out still. With elements placed geographically according to frequency of use, the energy required to tend to them is minimized.

To maximize energy efficiency, we can also mimic nature. Living and nonliving elements in ecosystems are interconnected, so should the elements in our design be. While the approach of compartmentalizing each element makes for simplicity in the minds of men, it is unnatural and creates more work than is necessary. One could set up an area for one set of crops, then another set of crops, another for trees, another for poultry, and so on. It looks simple – everything in its place. But to do this is to simultaneously ignore beneficial interactions between elements and to create more work for ourselves. If crops such as onions and others from the lily family are planted with apple trees, for example, they would provide a non-competing groundcover (unlike grasses) and flowers to attract pollinators and a host of other beneficial insects that show up with them. Compartmentalized, however, this mutually beneficial arrangement is lost. Poultry let into the garden in a controlled manner provide pest control, weeding and fertilization with minimal losses of garden vegetables. Poultry under perennial fruits clean up fallen fruit, breaking pest cycles. Separated and compartmentalized, these elements cannot mutually interact and start to generate waste. This means more work is left up to the people on site. We can match up these elements by noting their characteristics and matching them with other needs. Chickens love scratching, for example. Pigs love rooting. If you have either animal, why damage soil life by cultivating the ground with an expensive and unsustainable machine in preparation for a garden when you can pen these animals in to the future garden site to do a better job without hurting the soil life and fertilize the soil at the same time?

We can also make note of harmful interactions as well. For example, some plants, like sunflowers, are allelopathic, meaning they put out a chemical that suppresses the growth of most other plants. While they might not make a beneficial companion for your other plants, they could be used as living barriers to prevent the spread of plants you are growing but don’t want to invade other parts of the garden. Ignoring this use of the characteristics of allelopathic plants means that the gardener must now expend energy to put in some sort of artificial barrier – one that has its own embodied energy cost.

Inorganic elements on site are also a consideration. A sun-facing rock will store heat, for instance, making it sometimes possible to grow plants in the microclimate around it that would otherwise not survive or thrive in that climate.

Returning to the goal of permaculture design – creating sustainable environments to meet human needs – we need to look at just what human needs are. Fortunately, we are the most studied species on the planet. There is plenty of information available on the physiological, social and psychological needs of the species to make a very detailed set of species characteristics. Furthermore, the area of happiness has also been studied showing us what makes us genuinely happy and what does not.

Our physiological needs include clean food, clean water, clean air, warmth, and shelter. The physiological does not stand alone, however. The social and psychological are also a part of the requirements for physical health, though they themselves are intangible.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a pretty good model for determining human needs, and the diagram below is patterned in large part, though not exclusively, from it. I’ve put together some of the needs that I’ve seen have empirical evidence to back them and avoided the influence of spiritual, political or economic ideology as best as I could. For simplicity’s sake, the needs here are not meant to be an exhaustive list of human needs, just a sampling of important needs.

Next, we can ask what the aim of the current status quo system is.

Is the aim of our society long term sustainability/survivability? Not by any stretch of the imagination. We are living well beyond our needs with the dream that some wondrous technology will come and solve this problem for us. There is no better recipe for collapse of civilization than that.

Is the aim of our society personal or community happiness? Again, no. We have data consistently showing that while personal wealth has, on the whole, increased, happiness has decreased. Communities, too, are becoming less integrated and interdependent than they once were. This is not a good outcome for a tribal species.

Is the aim to maximize human potential? No. The concern of our society is not to get as many people as possible to experience the maximum personal growth possible. National funding on mental health is enough to indicate that this is not a serious aim.

Is the aim simply to meet material needs for clean, healthy food, clean water, clean air, shelter and energy for warmth and cooking? The food we eat holds less nutritional value now that we’ve industrialized food production. Furthermore, biocide use contaminates not only the food, but more importantly and more severely the farmers and environment that produced it. There is no clean air unpolluted by man-made chemicals anywhere on Earth. There is no clean, uncontaminated water left, save for what is available in glaciers. Shelter is available, to some at least. Looking at homeless populations, it appears that over-priced shelter is available, provided you are both mentally fit and gainfully employed or with sufficient financial reserves to provide you with a roof over your head. And energy to stay warm and cook food? The same conditions seem to apply as for shelter. So, no, this is not the aim of the current system. If it were a serious concern, it would meet these needs better, assuming we are not all outlandishly incompetent.

Looking at the outcomes, it appears as though the aim of the current system is to accrue and secure financial power to those clever enough, educated enough, lucky enough and/or devious enough to get it and hold on to it. Again, I base this on observation, not ideology. I am not making an argument for or against markets here, I am only looking at outcomes. I know of situations where markets work brilliantly and others where they fail miserably. I am only interested in reality, not ideology, because reality always gets the last punch.

Knowing this, we can ask how well the current system works at delivering our identified human needs. Well, some are met, others are not; and those that are met are almost never done in a sustainable way. Our physical needs are not fully met and to the extent they are, the process of meeting them is eroding our capacity for survival in the long term. Our social needs are not met. The consumption of ever more gadgets is not strengthening families or communities, nor is it cementing real friendships. Too many home buyers are looking to move into a good marketplace as opposed to a good community – one with real bonds between people. Connection to a geological site is not an important factor anymore with many or perhaps most people. Our needs for connection and spiritual and personal growth are not met.

In fact, you can go through the needs in the diagram point by point and find that the current system does a poor job of delivering them and completely overlooks some needs altogether. So there exists a gap between what the system can deliver and what humans need. Filling in this gap is the task of design: identifying the needs and meeting them sustainably in the most efficient way.

Interestingly, the people who are doing this now and living in these designed systems are usually reporting increased happiness as well (happiness that can’t all be solely attributed to Mycobacterium vaccae, the soil bacteria that has been found to boost mood when in contact with human skin). And why wouldn’t they be happy? Their physical needs are getting met. They require less time to acquire food when compared with the need to work for money to then walk or drive to a market to pick out food to then carry home and unpack and load into the refrigerator. They require less energy and money to stay warm or cool in their homes. Their homes are designed around function and not architectural fashion. They are usually folks who are involved with establishing connections in their community. So, many of their intangible human needs are addressed by their systems.

That said, the work we are doing is not reweaving the threads of the tapestry of society. We are just tying up the first lengthwise wrap threads of the tapestry to be woven in the future. We have yet to find all the answers, and the real work is ahead of us. But the choice is sustainability/survival or adherence to a system that we know doesn’t meet our needs. Which path to take seems clear enough.

The recent devastating earthquakes in China point to the need for a simple and inexpensive means of dealing with earthquakes. In my region of Canada, earthquakes are few and far between. Yet when I lived in Tokyo, the threat of serious earthquakes was always lingering in the back of my mind – especially after the Kobe earthquake of 1995.

Japan has developed different systems for dealing with earthquakes: shock absorber-like rubber pads to allow the ground to shift under the building, or a ball in an over-sized socket that can slide when an earthquake hits. These systems work fine for those who can afford the significant extra expense they incur for the homeowner. But what of those who cannot afford this high-tech approach? Fortunately, there is a proven, centuries-old technique for building earthquake-resistant structures.

In the Himalayans along the Chinese border, there are stone towers up to 60 metres tall that have been standing for nearly 1000 years.It is amazing for any stone structure, particularly ones so tall, to survive so long – but these ones have done it in a region plagued with earthquakes! The key seems to be a heuristic approach as all of the early models of the towers collapsed in temblors. After repeated tries, success was found by adding triangular ridges running up the middle of each wall. These ridges were able to lend extra support to the walls in the event of an earthquake.

A regular wall like the one pictured is stable when the earth shakes in the direction of the length of the wall. When the earth moves more perpendicular to the wall, however, it is prone to collapse.

When the wall includes a ridge as pictured below, it becomes more stable when the earth shakes perpendicular to the wall. The ridge feature acts like a tripod leg to give extra strength.

Seen from the foundation up, the centre of each wall has a ridge running up its length.

With minor adjustments, this feature can be built into the design of a standard home, providing a more earthquake resistance than a regular building would.

Having allowed huge stone structures to remain standing for a millennium, this method has proven itself to be very effective. By incorporating this feature into new structures, designers can add an excellent level of protection and peace of mind to the inhabitants.