Megan Quinn: This is Patricia Allison, who has taught permaculture design courses and consensus decision making for over 10 years. She lives at the Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina, whose mission is to create a replicable model of sustainable human culture. Permaculture is a design system which emulates natural patterns, combining ancient wisdoms with scientific knowledge, to form a set of ethics and principles for creating sustainable culture. Topics include maximizing food production with small-scale intensive growing, integrating animals, catching and conserving water, conserving and building soil, natural building, appropriate technology and alternative energy, local trade systems, and designing self-maintaining landscapes. Please welcome Patricia Allison.

Yes, thank you! So I've been asked to talk about permaculture. I have a non-hidden, open agenda. My agenda is I want the planet to take a permaculture fundamentals course. So there is no secret about my aim and why I'm standing up here. I've got about 45 minutes or so to convince you of that. So let me start with some of the basics, a brief history of permaculture. Permaculture came out of the 70's and it was born in Australia. Two ecologists, David Holmgren and Bill Mollison - David was Bill's student – were looking at a definition of sustainable agriculture. They looked at peoples all over the planet who had been feeding themselves sustainably for sometimes millennia. How did they do it? To make a long story short, what they discovered is they fed themselves with perennial plants, generally tree crops. Trees, tree crops. Nuts and fruits and seeds. And in the tropics and to some degree elsewhere, root crops, perennials. Now you all know how we feed ourselves – it ain't perennials. So we generally live on annuals. So they said, aha! So we see what permanent agriculture is. So they coined the term, "perma-culture", and almost immediately they had to step back and say, "this means people have to have access to land in order to grow trees." And usually, although we would like to create a culture otherwise, usually when we're renting, we don't plant fruit trees or pecan trees. And so permaculture then immediately began looking at why people either have access or do not have access to land. So pretty much immediately when the term was coined, the permaculturists got that we need to look at all the factors involved in sustainable lifestyle. We need to look at political factors, economic factors, educational factors, gender and racial equality factors, all of the factors that influence whether or not we can have that sense of connection and long-term connection with the land.

So permaculture became, the definition of permaculture became, something like a design system for creating sustainable human culture. So it's about permanent culture. Many of you, I'm imagining, who had heard of permaculture, have believed it to be mostly about growing food. Well, it's a heck of a lot about growing food, but it is not just another sort of avenue of organic gardening. This is about lifestyle. Permaculture is about looking at every aspect of our lives, from the way I clothe myself, to what I eat, to where my water comes from, what my economic system is. As we talked about last night, what my spiritual practices are. How I educate my children. How I birth my children. How I take care of my healing. That's all permaculture. I often define permaculture as an umbrella over all my isms. Because I was doing a bunch of that stuff, I was an organic gardener, and I was home-birthing, and nursing, and home education, and home schooling, and homegrown spirituality, and local economics and all that stuff, but when I got permaculture, it was like, wow! They're all connected. It's all one.

That's the quick history of permaculture. In the thirtyish years of its existence … where's David when you need him? I think it was like '74 or so was the first permaculture design course. So we teach a two-week permaculture design course. Now the way I teach it, the design is divided into two one-week sessions. I always try to fudge and make it eight or nine days, but the first section is the fundamentals of permaculture, where you can begin to understand the philosophy, the principles, just the world view of permaculture. And then the second half of that course is very practical practice of, which is called a "practicum", and you actually practice designing a physical landscape using permaculture principles. And in that time in the thirtyish years since we've been teaching this, there have been, we estimate – because permaculture is a bit anarchistic about record-keeping – we estimate at least 100,000 people throughout the world. And frankly, Peter Bain and I, who is the publisher of this magazine, Permaculture Activist, we sort of came up with that number 100,000, probably about three or four years ago. So it's all exponential, because when we get the virus we go out and replicate. We've probably doubled it since then. Who knows? My point is a bunch of people all over the world have been trained in permaculture design.

What we look at is that permaculture is an umbrella, it's a toolkit, in fact, I think David actually – a sidebar here, it has amazed me hearing these speakers using the exact same phrases that I use to describe our work here on this planet – and so permaculture is a toolkit for cultural change. Cultural change from the outside in. And the inside out. So the outside in is pretty obvious. That's the stuff about the gardening, and the orcharding, and the chickens in the front yard, and the tilapia pond, and the strawbale houses, and the solar panels, that's all that physical, sustainable stuff that we all need to learn how to do. But the inside out is just as important. I don't believe that we will make those external changes unless we are convinced from the inside that we need to create a culture which will sustain all of those physical changes that we want to make. We have to find and create, re-create, remember, the culture of sustainability, the values that will keep us doing the work of healing the planet.

Permaculture: Megan did me the great service of reading off the whole list of this is the kind of stuff we talk about in permaculture. And throughout the time that we learn permaculture together, we're also learning new cultural practices and giving ourselves permission to remember the kinds of cultural practices that will lead us into and support a culture of sustainability.

What I'm hoping to do is – I want to go through a few of the definitions and the ethics, and the aims of permaculture, and then I'm hoping that we'll have time to do some real practical stuff of looking at these permaculture principles and give some examples of them. Let me get a show of hands. How many of you out there are permies? How many of you all have had a permaculture design course? Wow! Get your thinking caps on. We'll be asking for examples to illustrate the permaculture principles, if you come up with some. Let's go. The prime directive of permaculture. Simplicity itself. In fact, you're going to discover, as I speak and as you learn more about permaculture, that permaculture is common sense. There is nothing difficult about understanding permaculture. It's the common sense that we've forgotten. It's the common sense that we need – in fact, I often say you don't learn permaculture, you remember permaculture. So we as a part of the human species – I think that's an important point – I'm sure a bunch of you read the book Ishmael, I really like the point that Daniel Quinn makes in that. If I was an artist I'd have a nice little diagram, so I'll just do this – he talks about there being this thread of life, life evolved, we co-evolved with all of the other living creatures on this planet. We knew from the time of our beginning as beings that we were connected to plants, the animals, the rocks, the water, the wind. We knew that. And indigenous people didn't forget. So there's this great strand of interconnected, woven-together life, and about 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 years ago, some folks decided that they would leap up off that strand and disconnect themselves from all the rest of nature. Those were our ancestors, of course. I think it's so important – we often say, humans this, and humans that, and humans are just so screwed up, and humans … no, it's not all the humans. It's just us. It's just our ancestors that jumped off the boat. And I feel like our job is to steer the boat back and reconnect with nature and with all of those pieces that we forgot that we were connected with. Let's watch ourselves when we start talking as if all the humans on the planet have made this big oops. Luckily, we still have some models, barely, from indigenous people, to help us remember our way back home.

Permaculture is an ethical design system for creating sustainable culture. We will talk about those three words. Ethical – design – system. I'm going to come to ethics in a moment. Design – now, I've got to confess. The word design intimidated me when I first heard it. Because design is something that those highly skilled professionals do. But then, it's like, I finally got it – design is thinking ahead. Design means plan ahead. When I make out the list of all the places I'm going to go when I rent my neighbor's car to go to town, I'm designing my day in the most efficient way possible. So we don't have to be intimidated by the word design. We all know how to do it. We do it every day. So, design means – someone said, "make a lot of mistakes", hopefully on paper. Design means making your mistakes on paper. Design means planning ahead. Design means looking at all the components I want in a system like, I want a greenhouse and some chickens and an orchard, and a driveway and a house and a clothesline – looking at all those pieces and figuring out how to put them in my landscape so that they will work together, so that the end product, or waste, of one of my systems, like chicken manure, is immediately given to another one of my systems.

A permaculture principle is observe and replicate natural patterns. What we see as a natural pattern in nature is the giveaway. Nature gives away. Nature does not have an exchange economy. The tree doesn't say, "okay, I'll give you my leaves, so what are you gonna give me for it?" The tree simply gives away its leaves and the earthworms take the leaves, and the earthworms give away their castings, that's these miserable earthworms, that they do that to the forest – they give away the fertility to the other plants around them. So we give away. Give away, give away, give away. That's what nature does. So we learn to give away. I have no idea where I got started on that point. But observing and replicating natural systems. That was about design.

Oh, yeah – hooking it up so that the waste of one system gives its nutrients to the next one. So you have an orchard and you are going to have to go out and buy a bunch of fertilizer and a bunch of pesticides, and you're going to have to maybe kill all around that orchard to keep the grass out. Is that what we're going to do, as good permaculturists? No. No, you get chickens. So you run your chickens in the orchard. And the chickens do their chicken thing and they kill and they eat, they do your herbicide thing, of eating all the bugs around. They eat up all the fallen fruit, including the larvae of the orchard-destroying insects, and they leave their lovely little deposits. So you have by integrating your chickens with your orchard, you have now done at least those three functions and more for your orchard plants. So that's the design part of ethical design systems.

The system part is – we've been hearing all weekend about the problems, the problems that we're facing, and they are multitudinous, and in fact, what they indicate is not a single illness or disturbance of Planet Earth, but a whole systemic illness. We are looking at a systemic illness of this earth. I challenge you to think of any individual or ecosystem that has not been wounded by our industrial consumerist materialist lifestyle that we have been pushing onto the entire planet. So the planet has a systemic illness. We need to look at systemic healing. We need to look at the whole system. For me to try to design my orchard without integrating my chickens and integrating my compost, and integrating my garden, and integrating my people, humans wandering through that orchard so they can both enjoy the fruit and be there to notice anything going on that we don't want to have going on – we see that there needs to be a redesign of all of the systems, the infrastructure, that is supporting us.

Taking care of the earth; I want to mention a word that troubles me sometimes and troubles one of my blessed teachers, David Holmgren. Many of you who know of permaculture know the name Bill Mollison. Bill Mollison is sort of a charismatic curmudgeon who's gone off into the world and promoted permaculture. This fellow, David Holmgren, who is his student, went home and worked it for twenty-five years and finally wrote this book a couple of years back. And it is magnificent. And as I think Richard has referred to, he refers to peak oil, and he's the one who uses the description of the energy descent culture. And so he's the one who talks about, that we can elegantly, as elegantly as possible, make an elegant descent if we choose to do so. The word I was going to talk about is the word "stewardship". Certainly the concept of earth stewardship is a beautiful concept. And for people who are awakening and realizing that they have a relationship with Earth and a duty to do the healing work, the word "stewardship", I think, is valuable. I want to caution us that to be a steward of something indicates that you have both the wisdom and the power to properly steward that thing. I don't know that humans have the wisdom or the power to steward Earth. I think I have enough wisdom and power and open to learning, humility – I almost said "hubris", a little Freudian there – to take stewardship of my little quarter-acre homesite, my actually huge quarter-acre homesite. That's about as much as I would advocate anybody saying they're going to be steward over. Even that word "over" is kind of a giveaway. So let's watch out for that concept. Let's embrace it and not be knocking people down if they use that word. Let's just sort of watch out for the implications of the concept of stewardship.

Care of earth, that's the first ethic. And the best way we care for earth is care of humans. So our job is to take care of the humans. Our job is not to take care of the whales, or the redwoods, or the spotted owls, or the salamanders, or any of those other critters. That is not our job. How arrogant of us, that we think that we should go and take care of other creatures who know perfectly well how to take care of themselves. They have that knowledge. Our only job when it comes to all those other creatures is to get out of the way and let them take care of themselves. To do the healing work for the habitat that we have destroyed, absolutely, we need to make amends. But our job is to take care of the humans. Does that mean take care of humans at the expense of anything that gets in our way? I don't think so. Recognizing that humans are an inextricably linked part of the magnificent web of life, recognizing that I am connected to every single other living entity on this earth, and so the only way I can take care of myself and my people, is to recognize those sometimes very fragile threads that connect me and my people with everything else on earth. So that's our job, take care of the humans. Sometimes people have had a quick introduction to permaculture and they come away saying, well, most people are kind of anthropocentric. Those people are really human-centered. And they are right, we are. We use the term "cultivated ecologies" to talk about the landscapes that we create for human habitat. Our job, in fact, is to create human habitat in as small a place as possible so that we can leave the rest of the land for the nonhuman family. That's our work.

The third one: Share the surplus. Share the surplus is sort of a shorthand. It means live in such a way, limiting your population and your consumption, that there's a surplus left to share. Live in such a way, limiting your population and your consumption, that there is a surplus to share. I used to have a nice chart but I don't. I'm telling this to people who already know all this, but I'd better say it; there's a habit that some of us have of pointing over there to those people, having all those babies over there, those people overpopulating the earth. What are we going to do about those people? Those people in Africa, China, and Central America, and Mexico, etc.? Those people's babies only use a very small fraction of the earth's resources. So every North American baby that is born right now is going to use about a hundred times the resources of an African baby that is born right now, about twenty times the resources of a Central American or a Chinese baby that is born right now. So before we get into pointing fingers about all those babies, we need to look at that other concept of consumption. It's not just population. Carrying capacity is measured by population and consumption. We want to share the surplus. That's Nature's way, that's replicating natural patterns, that's sharing. We want to create our lives of such abundance that we have surplus to share. What kind of surplus do I have to share? I have a little bit of surplus of knowledge, I've been learning this stuff for a long time, so I can share it. I had tomatoes and basil that I had to share this year. My friends have cars and they share them with me. My friend, in fact, Peggy, has a car and drove me here! So we share the surplus. I would love to go off on a rant about the gift economy, but I'm not going to.

The fourth one isn't written in the permaculture books as One, Two, Three, Four, but it is inferred all through the permaculture work. And that is recognizing the intrinsic worth of all beings. I think this is the hardest one, because we have such training that says we're on the top of the heap. We are the masters of all we survey. We are the ones who dictate. We are the dominators. In fact, let me just point to one of the folks who I think is responsible for a whole lot of this revolution, a woman named Riane Eisler. How many of you have read The Chalice and The Blade? This is on the top of my list for recommended reading for permaculture. Top of my list, because Riane Eisler with this book helped me get it, that it isn't the natural human condition to be warlike and competitive and violent. It isn't the natural human condition. It hasn't been going on "since the cavemen," which is, you hear that all the time. You know, it's just human nature, it's been happening since the dawn of time. No, it hasn't! It hasn't. It's been happening for about 4, 5, 6, 7,000 years. This book is amazing. Please read it. And then after you read that one, I'll just have to say read the second one, called Sacred Pleasure.

We live in a dominator culture. We live in that topdown, hierarchical culture. It's taught by the Big Daddy in the Sky that punishes us when we're bad. So we want to turn this culture into this culture, into the circle of equals, into the partnership culture, which is a lot of what this book is about. And the term "sacred pleasure" comes because she defines that the key aspect of the dominator culture is pain and suffering. No pain, no gain. You gotta suffer to get what you want. Life is hard. Yeah. In the partnership paradigm, it's pleasure which is the key aspect. Pleasure. We're born to celebrate and experience pleasure. We have bodies with senses. We are embodied pieces of spirit. So we're looking at pleasure as the defining aspect of our culture. Not pain, not suffering, but pleasure. Every form of pleasure. You get to choose whether it's going to be destructive or not.

So the intrinsic worth of all beings is to recognize that every being on this planet has as much right to life as I do. And we have these terms, "weed," "pest," "criminal," "juvenile delinquent," "terrorist." These are these beings that we don't think have intrinsic worth and we want to destroy them because they get in our way of our progress. So here's the biggest mind-switch, paradigm-switch, that I think everyone of us will be wrestling with for the rest of our lives. Because we weren't raised right, we weren't told the truth, we weren't told that we were connected to it all. We were told that we are the master of it all.

Breathing is important. Everyone breathe. I'll tell a quick story on that. I'm always teaching the importance of breathing. And so in my classes we do a lot of breathing. I was teaching in Austin, Texas, and the location was very near an airport. We didn't discover that until the first day of the class. So maybe every twenty minutes or so, and sometimes, twenty times a day, an airplane came over. And we couldn't hear each other. And so we decided that that was our signal to breathe. Those students now will tell me, "every time I hear an airplane, deep cleansing breaths, deep cleansing breath." You can choose. Every time you hear an airplane.

Restoring soil fertility and water quality. I don't think we need to say a whole lot about that, except yesterday we talked about how we do know how to make soil, good, fertile, strong soil. And of course they go hand in hand, because we know about erosion. You probably know the statistics, like for every bushel of produce from conventional agriculture, you lose seven bushels of soil. There are a lot of people though who still think that big time erosion was only happening back in the '30s, the Dust Bowls, but thank goodness that's over. No, we're still eroding, eroding, eroding, continuously losing our topsoil every day. And where did it go? Away, and specifically to the ocean. And is it serving the critters in the ocean? No. So it's doing lots of damage there. We know that. And so we not only, by restoring soil fertility, which to a great degree means holding the soil on our land and not letting it escape, we are also improving water quality.

The third one: we had a bit of conversation on this already. Growing food where the people are. So we know of the 1500 mile carrots that we eat. What's your expression? The 3,000 mile Caesar salad. I went to my local coop, food coop, organic, etc. They get carrots from Israel. I thought, "what!" So we want to grow food where the people are. Where are more than half of the people now on the planet? In the cities. So can we grow the food in the cities? Good, good, yeah! One little statistic is the city of Hong Kong, which is dense in population, grows, they say, 45 percent of its vegetables within the city limits. Hong Kong. Within the city limits, 45 percent of its vegetables. Within the greenbelt around the city, 85% of its food, total food. So I figure it must be the rice paddies around the edges of the city. So we can do it, if Hong Kong can do it, anyone can do it. And luckily there is a huge movement of urban farms and community gardens. So people are beginning to get this and this is where a huge amount of the work needs to be done.

And then finally and indeed embracing it all. We need to create a regenerative culture. I've referred to this already, we talk about creating a sustainable culture and living sustainability, but do we want to sustain the culture we've got? Most of it not. So what we need to do, our job, and definitely our children, and probably our grandchildren, our work is to create that regenerative culture, regenerative, re-growing, re-membering, becoming a culture that we want to sustain.

How we do that, really simply, healing wounded individuals, healing wounded communities, healing wounded families, healing wounded ecosystems. That's our work. We refer to permaculture as a healing art. Through education. That's what we're doing here, that's those permaculture design courses I'm trying to talk you all into taking. And that's of course all the education that all of us are doing here and elsewhere in our lives. We can't help but be teachers. It's not really a choice that you're going to say, "I'm going to be a teacher." You're going to be a teacher. And through peace and justice work. So if you've been doing peace and justice work in your life, you've been doing permaculture work. Because permaculture is not about me in my isolated little kingdom, living there with my barriers around me. It's about community and connection.

Certainly people can take permaculture concepts, and they can take them into their own little five-acre kingdom, they can do that, it's not against the permaculture law, but we advocate strongly that permaculture is about making connections. It's not about isolation. So those are the aims of permaculture.

In a permaculture design course, our work is to help you make the connection between the global and local. And to make the connections between politics and your bioregion. To make the connections between despair and action. There are many of you, probably all of you, know of Joanna Macy, an incredible teacher, who teaches about despair and empowerment work. Her message is anyone who isn't admitting to feeling despair, sadness, fear, rage, is not being honest. We are all feeling it. We're feeling despair. We're feeling fear most probably, and probably rage. She says very clearly, that's a heavy burden to carry. And when we're carrying that despair and it's all closed up in us, we can't get our work done. We can't allow energy to flow through us. So we need to do the despair work. John Seed is engaged in doing Council of All Beings, Truth Mandala, despair and empowerment workshops. I strongly urge you to do the emotional work that you need to do to empower yourself to get on with the work in the world, because it just drags us down. And when we're so carefully keeping our emotions closed up, we really can't let any more information in. So that's a piece, and it's a piece that we do in permaculture classes. We allow time for crying. We allow time for singing. We allow time for hugging. We allow time for touching. Back on the healing front, another one of my teachers, Andrew Weil – people know of Andrew Weil, a physician, and a rather holistic physician. He says that a whole lot of our societal challenges are rooted in addictions. Not just substance abuse, but addictions to television, war, violence, oil, romance, spending, shopping, competing. We have a lot of addictions. And he says the root of those addictions is touch deprivation. We weren't touched enough. We haven't had enough touch. So in a permaculture class, we always advocate that you've got to have at least 13 hugs a day for good emotional stability. So I advocate to you, please start chalking them up. Well, we've only had seven today.

This is the one piece I mentioned. Your bioregion. I believe if there is a solution and people will really probably beat up on me for this – people may have differing ideas about this, but if there is a solution to the challenges that we are facing, it is the bioregional movement, in my opinion. The bioregional movement – let me just read this little description. What's a bioregion? It's a geographical area whose boundaries are determined by nature, not politics. So often they'd say, the boundaries are determined by the plants, the animals, the landforms, and the human culture that has arisen in relationship to those natural parts of Earth. And the bioregional movement is about 25 years old or so. We will be holding, next July, the ninth continental bioregional congress. What the bioregional groups are doing is that we are creating those parallel structures, that parallel governance, those parallel economic systems. We're basically saying we can disengage. We are disengaging. Now I know we can't all disengage 100 percent. You can't jump out of this culture that we all live in. But we can at least take one foot out.

I have flyers about this. They're sitting out there at the Earthaven display, and I urge you to look at it. I don't urge you to pick up this piece of paper if you're going to throw it away. I urge you to take a piece of paper if you're going to go post it someplace or hand it out to somebody else. Website is not on here, but go to the Earthaven website and there'll definitely be a big link. And that's www.earthaven.org