It Could Happen Here - Permaculture with Andrew
Episode Date: September 6, 2022Andrew explains the principles of permaculture to Mia and JamesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
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Welcome to the Ikedap and Hare's Practical Guide
to making permaculture happen wherever you are.
I am your host for this episode, Andrew of the YouTube channel Andrewism, and I'm joined here with
Chris and James. Say hello. Hello. Hi. Thanks for having us.
Hello.
Hi.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for having me.
Technically, I'm the guest.
Yeah, true.
Well, you're going to walk us through this.
I'm very excited to learn more about it.
Yes.
So I really see it as a key component in our restoration of the earth.
And so I find it necessary that regardless of what direction your individual praxis is going in,
where you're looking to specialize or whatever,
quote-unquote specialize,
I think it's still important to think about where your food comes from
and think about ways that we can enhance and enlarge our food autonomy,
especially considering the multi-layering crises that uh
you know compounding these days
permaculture was first coined as a tomb by permaculturist bill mollison it's a portmanteau of permanent agriculture and permanent culture
and it's the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which
have the diversity stability and resilience of natural ecosystems it's a way of integrating
landscape and people providing their food energy shelter and other material and other non-material
needs in a sustainable way and just to be clear the concepts the ideas the principles that make
up permaculture have existed long before bill mollison was born have existed in cultures all over the world bill mullison is just someone who has i guess
given it a spin for a modern audience but these principles these ideas are things that have been
in practice for thousands of years tens of thousands even From the approach to land management and settlement design
To the whole systems thinking approach to nature
Which can be seen in a lot of animist practices
It has a long history
And it's one that people who practice fumiculture today
Research fumiculture
Will inevitably uncover in their learning process.
However, Bill Morrison first coined it in the 1970s
as a response to the oil embargoes that were taking place at the time.
By bringing together the traditional knowledge
of a vast array of indigenous cultures and combining them with
certain modern design and layouts it created a movement that is now
spreading across the world from every on every continent honestly The way that permaculture views the world,
views systems,
it comes with an outlook that recognizes
that all biological material is a potential energy source.
The aim is to try to trap energy on your land
and to use that energy in the most efficient way before it degrades,
to create circular economies and cycles of energy that allow for actual sustainable agricultural practice,
which unfortunately has not been the aim of agriculture, especially industrial agriculture.
And supemiculture represents a challenge to that status quo.
The ethics of permaculture are primarily focused on care for the earth, that being all living
and non-living things, care for all people, thereby promoting self-reliance and community
responsibility, so that we all have access
to the resources necessary for existence and care for community and specifically community
that allows us to be to think of and approach our society in a way that benefits all people in our life. Recognizing the community is not just our neighbors.
It's not just the people who live in our city or town.
It is all the living things that incorporate our surroundings and beyond.
The way that permaculture approaches design it's a lot of his emphasis in mimicking how the natural world would
attempt to stabilize of course these systems take thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands
even millions of years to fully develop and age and reach some kind of stable state.
But public culture seeks to learn from these old growth forests
and these elderly ecosystems and accelerate that process
to establish things that will last generations,
to establish spaces that will provide for the needs of people
hundreds of years down the line when it comes to approaching permaculture design practically
first things first to recognize is that anybody can take part in permaculture design anybody can
take part in constructing these sorts of systems.
And it can be established, the basic principles can be established
regardless of your circumstances, your individual climate or biosphere.
Because the principles are based on following what nature was doing anyway.
are based on following what nature was doing anyway.
One of the first principles involves the recognition of the connections in a location.
Seeing that a web is stronger than a single string,
meaning that all of these different parts,
these different moving parts coming together,
create something stronger than if each individual person, each individual creature is trying to move by itself.
It also looks at the connection between waste and resources.
We all know the old adage that says, you know, one man's trash is another man's treasure but when it comes to
ecosystems we should really be taking it quite literally because the waste of one part of the
system directly feeds into the resource of another part decomposing plants and animals directly feed into the fungal networks and flourishing of the next generation
of plants and animals. And in that web, in that network, in those connections, we can also
recognize, for principle two, that each element performs multiple functions. If are for example keeping chickens they can be a source of
eggs and feathers and protein of course but they also produce mania and their daily activity
helps to aerate the soil and they also provide insect control allowing your plants to further flourish
banana trees they provide bananas of course they provide fruit they also provide starch and mulch
and protection and shade and they hold water quite well actually when i had taken a permaculture
design course a couple months ago and one of the things that i had learned from the guy who was
running it was that he had told the story and he had done this this project in barbados and in
barbados he was called to uh restore a sort of like an old sand mine um because it had run out
of sand well it's close to running out of sand.
And so the community that was reliant on that sand mine
didn't really have any direction
because their economy, their local economy
had been so reliant on those jobs.
When he came in, it's just like,
and he showed the pictures,
it's just this very, very barren landscape,
very dry, very dusty.
And I was honestly in disbelief that something so dead
so destroyed something so devolved could be as radically transformed as he had transformed it
unfortunately this is a podcast not a video otherwise i would show you the pictures
This is a podcast, not a video, or otherwise I would show you the pictures.
But the transformation was stunning. And one of the elements that he had used to transform that dry landscape into a lush food forest was banana trees.
Unsurprisingly, banana trees are very effective at growing quickly and providing shade to other plants.
And so as these other plants are growing up, they have the shaded banana tree to protect them from the harsh sun.
And so the banana trees, while they may not be the top dogs of the forest in the end,
by the time the forest is fully established, plant trees don't get that tall they still are vital in that early stage in providing that
function of shade that allows the rest of the forest to establish itself that's really cool
it's very very very cool i would show you all the pictures after. Is there like a place people could see them online?
Like Instagram, they could look up or something?
Yes.
So if you go on wasamakipumaculture.org,
I believe he has the pictures up there.
That'll be W-A-S-A-M-A-K-I-P-U-M-A-C-U-L-T-U-R-E.org.
And if I remember correctly, he has the pictures on there.
Yeah.
Was it like a sand mine before or something?
Yeah, it was a sand mine.
Yeah.
Geez.
Wow.
It looks like there's no goodness in the soil in the first one.
And then.
Yeah.
Yeah.
At the end, it's thriving. To the soil in the first one and then yeah yeah and so arriving
to go back into the recording aspect when it came to that project a large part of it was
just getting that life in the soil so they were taking they were getting mulch and mania from
wherever they could get it just to give some life to that soil.
They would grow certain hardy, fast-growing plants
and then chop them down after they'd grown sufficiently
so they would die right where they lay
and provide nutrients to the soil.
And that process was what helped to build up that soil
even before you started planting the bananas and other stuff.
And were they able, like you were saying,
they were getting some of that stuff wherever they could get it.
Like, were they able to get that?
Was it like considered a waste product, I guess,
by the people they got it from?
So like, I know I have chickens
and they obviously produce like manure
and I'll put some of it in my like vegetables that I grow, but I'll just give it to anyone else who wants it.
Is that a thing that they were able to do there?
Yeah, I think people are donated.
least in Trinidad I don't know what the case is in Barbados but in Trinidad there are bush trucks which pass every once in a while to collect whatever you know branches and cut grass and
whatever people have put out from their yard work or whatever so I would assume that they would have
asked the bush truck people to you know bring some of that stuff to the site to help out
because a lot of people you know they just put that in front of the yard waiting for the bush
truck to pass and so a lot of very good potential sources of like um ecosystem building that sort of
that so-called waste, that really resources gets wasted
when it can really serve a lot of these kinds of projects.
Yeah, that's very cool.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's something that like, I don't know,
if you ever read UN documents about stopping climate change,
they always have a giant section about circular economy stuff
and about sort of, I i mean basically doing this stuff and then nothing ever happens and no one ever does it
and so yeah it's it's really cool that like this is a place where those ideas which like
are if there's if we are going to survive as a species with like most of us alive and doing well we're going to have to do
exactly getting implemented yeah i'm uh i'm kind of reminded just on this sort of topic of uh
i was in rwanda uh in like february of 2020 and one of the things that really struck me with this
system of agriculture that they've devised where um they have paddies uh that they grow rice right like submerged
and then in there there are living fish uh and then above them there are like little hutches
with rabbits and i'm so like uh the rabbit manure helps to fertilize what's growing beneath and then
like it's this kind of circular thing where i think they can feed some of the things
that they cut off the the plants to the rabbits and it's sort of like and the fish will help keep
the water clean i think they're like filter fish i can't quite yeah plants keep it clean for the
fish it was fascinating i was like this is amazing like they're not as opposed to i grew up on a farm
and like i'm very familiar with some of the larger arable grains in the UK
and how you're relying on a ton of exogenous inputs,
which I was just so impressed with the fact that they devised a system that didn't require those.
Exactly, exactly.
You really want to, of course, you will have to get external sources,
especially in the beginning as you're trying to establish the system.
But the aim is really to have the system continuously establishing itself
and expanding itself and maintaining itself.
Yeah.
Would it be a system that works mostly with plant-basedbased food stuff, I guess.
That seems generally to be more sustainable.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, mania is a really powerful source of fertilizer.
And I think you can keep animals without, you know, eating them.
Yes.
Or using them anyway.
If you just want to, you know.
Because they make good companions and stuff as well.
Yeah, that's totally fair.
But yeah, I would say a plant-focused system could definitely.
And to sort of rhyme or align with principle two,
which said that each element performs multiple functions
it's also important to have each function supported by multiple elements
right so you don't want to get all your food from one source you want to have a mix of trees and
roots and short crops and cultivars i mean having all your food coming from one source is basically
what we do now with you with these monocultures,
with this industrial farming that has these fields and fields and fields that are so susceptible to pests and disease
that we have to basically drench them with chemicals just to allow them to survive.
And the same guy who did the course
He explained to me like this
He said that
When there's a system
In nature
And it's not
In balance
They basically send out a signal
Saying hey
This is not in balance
Come and fix it
And so
These so called pests
These bugs and stuff They come to these aberrations
these freaks of nature these massive fields of crops and recognizing that this is not a
sustainable um establishment in the landscape They try to Try to optimize
Right, he calls them
He doesn't call them pests, he calls them optimizers
So if you have, for example
Excessive amount of a certain pest
In your system
Something's wrong with that system
Because
Those so-called pests
Those optimizers are only able to flood your
system because they don't have the mechanism your system doesn't have the mechanisms in place
to keep them in check so you don't have the fauna the larger insects and stuff in your system that
will keep those pests in check there's an imbalance in place and that's something that needs to be
rectified and there are different ways to rectify depending on the situation another example and this isn't
um from the permaculture guy permaculture course another example was the um this i believe someone
was talking about the presence of wolves in some of the parks in uh in the u the US and how reintroducing those wolves did so much to
regulate the rest of the ecosystem, the ripple effects that had on the rest of the ecosystem,
stabilizing the deer populations and stabilizing the beaver populations and stabilizing all these
other different plants and animal species that you would think are not even connected to the wolves,
but still their presence played a significant role in maintaining that
balance.
Yeah.
Go,
go watch how wolves change rivers.
It's literally five minutes and it rules.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
I just like the concept of rewilding.
Is that what, would that be a similar thing?
Yeah, yeah.
Rewilding is basically,
permaculture tends to be more focused
on sustaining human communities
in a balance with the rest of the natural world.
Whereas rewilding is more focused on
helping to rebuild ecosystems
outside of the human sphere.
He says I understand it.
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me.
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wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. so with principle three which was to reiterate was that each function should be supported by
multiple elements you wouldn't want to get all your food from one source you wouldn't just want
to grow like rows and rows of trees or rows and rows of corn you want to grow
a mix of trees and roots and short crops and cultivars and all these different species and
variations that would make up like an actual forest the food forest is a approach that a lot of permaculturists would advocate.
And within a food forest, you would have, I believe, seven major groups.
There's sort of seven levels that create a sort of a beneficial system.
On the top layer, you have the canopy, which consists of the large fruits and nut trees.
you have the canopy which consists of the large fruits and nut trees they provide the most shade
and they keep the whole area the climate of the area stable on that second layer you're going to have the low tree layer which has the dwarf fruit trees the smaller fruit trees would fall under
the canopy on the third layer you would have the shrub layer where you'd grow you know your berries and other
small you know plants and below that you have the herbaceous layer where you would grow different
herbs and spices and things like that and then below that you have your root vegetables and
below that you have well can't really go below the root vegetables but next to those
root vegetables you would want to grow your soil surface crops your ground cover um like there's
certain running beans and stuff that help to create a ground cover which protects the soil
and prevents the establishment of undesirable plants which we call weeds and then finally the
seventh layer is the vertical layer
which consists of the climbers and vines that would establish themselves on the low tree layer
and the canopy so if you have that sort of food forest system in place with all those seven layers
you're not getting each function supported by one element you're getting it supported by one element to getting it supported by many elements. The same goes for water. You don't want to get all your water source coming from
just like the pipes and whatever water the government sends you. You want to
have water coming from the rain, if possible you might want to tap into the
water table or you might want to, depending on your situation, you might
have a stream or you might be on a on your situation you might have a stream or you
might be on a hill in which case you'd have water flowing down and you want to find ways to trap
that water and to conserve that water so that it's distributed throughout your system unlike a regular
home garden part of the aim of a permaculture system is that it, just like in nature,
it waters itself.
It takes care of itself.
And so you're going to have to want,
you're going to want to have all sorts of different
sources of water, elements in place
to provide that water.
Same goes for energy.
You would want to get all the energy from one source.
You want to combine, you know, human power, animal power, hydroelectricity, if possible, solar power, if possible. Basically, redundancy is very important. Redundancy is very important. And I'll say it again for emphasis. Redundancy is very important and i'll say it again for emphasis redundancy is very important the next principle principle number four is that you want to approach permaculture with energy efficiency in mind
particularly your own energy so on the more practical side of things, you might want to do what my mentor, my guide had done, which was a zone and sector analysis.
So basically, you draw a map of your space, you outline your daily patterns and the energies that come from outside your site, like wind and rain and flood and fire and pollution and noise and smells and all those
different things you want to look at how you move through your space you want to look how the
sunshine passes over your space you want to look at the view and you want to try to harness those
good energies whether it be the rain or wind or whatever it may be the sun and plant accordingly you don't want to have sun sensitive
plants on like the south side of your property of your space wherever the space is and you wouldn't
want to have plants that need a lot of sun in the shade you also want to divvy up your space once
you've you know done that map of your space you want to divvy up your space once you've done that map of your space,
you want to divvy it up into zones. So the first zone might be your immediate living space.
The second zone would have an intensive kitchen garden. So that first zone would be a place of
consumption and processing of whatever it is that your system is producing. It doesn't necessarily have to be a house. It could be a community kitchen or it can be a campus clubhouse. I don't know. It could be
any space that you're using for consumption and processing. The next zone is going to be
an intensive kitchen garden. It's a place where you'd want to grow the plants that cycle through more quickly
um the spices and the herbs and the different things that you would use on a regular basis
the next zone would want to have its focus on local support community support and surplus
so this zone um the first zone is actually technically zone zero the second
zone is zone one and so zone two which is that sort of local support space that orchard is we
want to grow um your fruit trees your ornamentals um we want to raise your raise animals there and
you basically want it to be a space where you can provide for the local
community separate and apart from your own produce zone three would also have the emphasis on
production zone three would be the space where of investment in establishing a sustainable sort of
life cycle for more long-term plants and zone five would be a space of wilderness of of wildlife corridors that allow spaces of free wilding even within your more constructed site.
Having your systems split into zones helps you to reduce the amount of work that you put in,
the amount of resources used, the amount of work that you put in, the amount of resources you use, the amount of
maintenance you'll need, and it also helps you to boost your yields and to recycle resources
most effectively. The fifth principle is the use of biological resources. Natural insecticides,
timber, nitrogen fixers, whatever the case may be, you want to be using the systems
that have evolved to fulfill those roles, to fulfill those roles. You may or may not be afraid
of certain creatures. I myself personally, I don't like frogs or toads or really, I don't like most animals.
Personally, I just don't vibe with them.
However common, I recognize their importance, right?
So frogs and bats and snakes, all of these creatures help to provide like a stable system,
whether it be snakes dealing with rats or bats dealing with insects or frogs also dealing with
insects you might also want to use companion planting as well like the three sisters method
which is a combination of beans corn and what was the third one again it's squashes right and squash
and that would help to establish you know itself and maintain itself it's sort of
like a microcosm of the broader permaculture concept and one that has been in practice
for hundreds of years the sixth principle is the practice of energy cycling trapping sunlight
through greenhouses making the most use basically out of the
energy that flows through your system before it leaves your system recycling
the organic matter that passes through your system so it produces no real waste
when I was at this site at the permaculture forest, I witnessed a compost toilet for the first time and was immediately grossed out by the concept.
However, upon being blown away by the product of those compost toilets, I changed my tune very quickly and although i would not i probably
would not use a compost toilet on a regular basis i think it has some benefit um because
we're flushing away some some real power some real nutritious stuff um of course there are
risks associated with using human mania um but the process that he had put in place involved using
human waste and then for every certain amount of human waste you would dump sawdust on top of it
and that sawdust helps to deal with the smell so much so that I actually didn't smell anything when
I opened up those those compost toilets but it also helps to create that balance between
the carbon and the nitrogen that is required for compost. And so after a tub has been filled,
a compost toilet tub has been filled, he seals it up, leaves it for a year to break down. And
by the time it comes out, it's just like regular soil however of course safety
precautions i believe he only uses it for his orchards so only like fruit trees and other kinds
of trees i spent a lot of time so far discussing these sort of larger systems where you know i'm
basically assuming you have several acres of land like this guy does i don't have several acres of land i don't have an
inch of land um and i feel like a lot of people listening don't so there are elements that you can
incorporate on the small scale such as grow boxes you can have deep litter beds you can have
You can have deep litter beds.
You can have aquaculture systems.
And that's actually one of the things that he first established,
which was like a series of aquaculture systems.
And it's actually one of the main focuses of his project to this day.
But I was quite surprised as to the yield that could be produced from something as simple as a couple pipes put together with some tomato plants grown out of it so i mean don't underestimate yourself
or the space available to you because you might not be able to plant a whole forest but you can
do a little something.
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to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.
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Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging
into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.
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Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, Check out betteroffline.com. This is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators,
sharing their stories, struggles, and successes.
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actual y viral.
Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcasts. coming back to the food forest concept the eighth principle is the use of natural plant succession
and stacking you want to group plants together that would give a continual production over time
in both the short term and the long term. And like I established, you want to have those layers
in place, the roots, the vines, the trees, etc. The ninth principle encourages diversity,
encourages polyculture, which is something that I'm sure you would have picked up on by now
the 10th principle is increasing the edge within a system by creating unique niches
that allow for the more rare the more vulnerable corners of life to sustain themselves and i think that's something
that a lot of permaculturists do in terms of establishing their own systems they have like
a special focus or certain passion projects certain species that they just love and want
to see flourish and so they create these niches within their systems that allow allow for those creatures
to flourish principle 11 implores that you observe natural patterns nature rarely goes in a straight
line and you may want to make that pattern whether it be spirals or waves or branches, whether it be patterns over time from,
you know, the week to the month, the year to repeating patterns in the weather or the seasons.
You want to be observing these patterns and adjusting your system continually.
The early parts of establishing a permaculture system is certainly the most difficult part.
But even five to ten years down the line when the system is more established, more self-sustaining, you still want to be playing that role of tweaking it as you go along.
And I think that's something that more people need to recognize about humanity we didn't just spring on to hear like some sort of alien parasite leeching off of
the earth right we just like every other animal like every other creature on this planet have a
role to play in the ecosystems we inhabit unfortunately a lot of that activity has
been destructive because of how our socioeconomic
system has been structured. But that's something we have a role in changing. And part of that
is recognizing that we are stewards. We can be good stewards. We can help to facilitate
the flourishing of life. We don't have to be
grim reapers upon the systems that we are a part of. And so even as you're late, quote unquote, in these long-term projects, 20 years, 30 years, you're still going to be
tweaking and cultivating and hopefully expanding these systems over time. Principle 12 reminds us
we got to pay attention to the scale of these systems, to the long term of these systems,
recognizing that this is something we want to establish over generations. And finally,
principle number 13 is be positive. Experiment, from your mistakes scale up bring in more people
get involved get more of your community of your social circle of your family of your affinity
group of whatever the case may be get more people involved um in imagining this complex, beautiful, revolutionary project.
We have a long way to go, but a lot of progress can be made in a short space of time.
And there are a lot of projects already going on with this end in mind.
I would suggest just going online really and just searching for the different permaculture projects
happening around the world.
Whether it be the food forests that Jeff Lawton
is working to establish in Morocco,
or the permaculture, permablit systems
that people are putting in place in Australia,
or the greening the Sahara projects
in the Sahel region across Africa
or the many small-scale projects taking place
and large-scale projects taking place across the Americas.
There are a lot of people putting in this work
and there's a large community
willing and able to support
as you hopefully embark upon this journey that's about it for me
yeah that's that's fascinating um i'm really interested in this stuff i think yeah it's
massively missing in our discussion about like i don't know how to phrase this rightly, but, uh, like making a better world just to give
it a really broad sort of phrasing. Uh, and when we often think about like political discourse and
when we think about political systems, um, but without food systems, we, we really like the
hierarchy of needs is not satisfied. Right. i think that folks listening uh can make a really
positive change really really quickly and in their own lives and spaces if they sort of spend some
time with this stuff yeah absolutely and it's cool i think um and important too to reference it like
so much of this like like the person you named at the start whose name i'm sorry i've
forgotten but like um i think yeah it's important to reference that like these are indigenous ways
of of knowing and doing and being and living and like you said they've existed for millennia and
like going back to that is good as part of the larger sort of way of respecting indigenous
cultures and land rights and all the other things we need to do.
100%.
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