Perennial Ideas

Cultivating abundance within ecological limits.

The Growing Fabrication of Anarchie

Computer Controlled Machine IsotypeIn 1899, Peter Kropotkin, anarchist geographer, detailed a vision of ‘the factory amidst the fields’ in which the ‘two sister arts of agriculture and industry’ are joined to meet the needs of all and to give each worker an opportunity for ‘brain work and manual work’. Never have more supportive material conditions prevailed for the realisation of Kropotkin’s vision. The advent of ‘personal fabrication’, presently most fully realised in the fab lab (fabrication lab), provides “widespread access to [the] modern means for invention” which have historically been limited to large capital. Peter Kropotkin - Mutual Aid Additionally, Kropotkin’s vision is being made more achievable with the unprecedented developments in regenerative strategies for the production of food, fuel and fibre. The significance of this is, of course, not in the realisation of the ideas of a nineteenth century anarchist but in the present viability of a life within ecological limits. A life not of mere toil but for whole human beings. In this post, I hope to be able to share some of my excitement about combing fab labs with the farm and hackerspaces with horticulture.

What are Fabrication Labs?

Fab Lab LogoFab labs consist of a set of machines and tools for making things. The number of things which can now be economically made in a small workshop is steadily increasing. As a character in Cory Doctorow’s 2009 novel Makers says:

“… any moderately skilled practitioner can build anything these days, for practically nothing … Every industry that required a factory yesterday only needs a garage today.” —- Tjan in Cory Doctorow’s Makers, p. 115
Each fab lab has a set of core machines: CNC Cutting Table at Nairobi Fab Lab
  • A computer-controlled lasercutter, for press-fit assembly of 3D structures from 2D parts
  • A larger (4’x8’) numerically-controlled milling machine, for making furniture- (and house-) sized parts
  • A signcutter, to produce printing masks, flexible circuits, and antennas
  • A precision (micron resolution) milling machine to make three-dimensional molds and surface-mount circuit boards
  • Programming tools for low-cost high-speed embedded processors
The frequently asked questions page at the “Fab Central” website based at MIT contains an estimate of the set-up costs for basic machines and materials of around 60,000 USD. However, Kevin Carson, author of The Homebrew Industrial Revolution writes that:
“Open-source versions of the machines in the Fab Lab have brought the cost down to around $2-5,000.” —- Kevin A. Carson, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, p. 221
Garage or farm-workshop (or desktop!) fabrication is still in a seminal stage, as this difference in cost indicates. The direction for fab labs is from machines which can be purchased by a well funded research institution like MIT to open source specifications and self-replicatability. That is, a minimal set of machines which can make another minimal set of self-replicating machines from open source specifications. Self-replication and open source specifications puts set up costs at little more than the cost of materials.

Fabs Labs for Farming, Gardening and Cottage Industry

The machines listed above may seem like they are only for making electronic gadgets or plastic playthings but in fact these machines provide the basic technology from which most other tools and machines can be produced. For example, the roller crimper developed by the Rodale Institute for no-till mechanical weed control, the plans for which are freely available, could be cut out on the CNC machine ready for welding. This is, of course already possible in many farm workshops. The fab lab becomes most useful where precision is critical. The ability to print circuits and to machine precision parts makes possible the manufacture of efficient, small scale equipment, sensitive instruments for monitoring or custom machines for new or niche crops. These possibilities are game changing for the production of food, fuel and fibre. As Carson writes:
“The higher the fixed costs of an enterprise, the larger the income stream required to service them. That’s as true for the household microenterprise, and for the “enterprise” of the household itself, as for more conventional businesses … innovation in the technologies of small‐scale production and of daily living reduce the worker’s need for a continuing income stream. It enables the microenterprise to function intermittently and to enter the market incrementally, with no overhead to be serviced when business is slow. The result is enterprises that are lean and agile, and can survive long periods of slow business, at virtually no cost; likewise, such increased efficiencies, by minimizing the ongoing income stream required for comfortable subsistence, have the same liberating effect on ordinary people that access to land on the common did for their ancestors three hundred years ago.” —- Kevin A. Carson, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, pp. 1-2

Blair Evans of Incite Focus, whom I met at IPC10 in Jordan, introduced me to the sloganistic phrase “move bit not atoms”. This phrase captures another energy (and cost) saving. Where we’re talking about atoms, distance is energy. Bits, however, are trivial to move in comparison.

To summarise, this kind of networked fabrication capacity

  • drops financial barriers to entering production
  • facilitates no / low dept production
  • increases the resilience and flexibility of production businesses by reducing overheads and facilitation rapid retooling / adaptation to new market opportunities
  • facilitates producers becoming processors
  • facilitates local or crop specific design solutions while gaining access to the designs and inventiveness of others
  • the human and environmental cost of transporting goods is rendered unnecessary

In the three day regenerative agriculture workshop I attended in November, Darren Doherty presented an adapted Keyline Scale of Permanence which included two additional items:

  • 9. polymarketing
  • 10. energy
Under the heading of polymarketing Darren includes farm succession, processing, distribution, marketing and everything which puts producers in control of all the things which makes a farm profitable. Networked fabrication will become an essential element of producer control and as such must be considered an essential part of polymarketing. It may even deserve its very own place on the Scale because of the dramatic implications it has for other elements.

Permafacture in Practice

Lifetrac II from OSEFactor-e-Farm is one place in which some of these implications are being worked out. This farm is the site of Open Source Ecology’s project called the Global Village Construction Set. The project aims to produce 50 machines for village scale development. Several prototype machines, all with open source specifications, have been built already including a compressed earth brick press and tractor. Like the fab lab, OSE aims for their machines to be able to be produced from a minimal set of self-replicating machines. Listening to Frank Aragona’s interview with Marcin Jakubowski in 2008 was what first interested me in the possibility of low energy, high tech fabrication within regenerative design. I liked the notion of permafacture, which Marcin spoke of and which Vinay Gupta is supposed to have coined. Since that time, OSE has proved that this idea has legs and the project is steadily gaining momentum.

The Necessity of Sharing

There are conditions for a kind of networked fabrication which is consistent with permaculture and with Kropotkin’s vision. The necessity of sharing perhaps encompasses the major conditions:

  • sharing knowledge, and;
  • sharing profits

Sharing Knowledge

The sharing of knowledge, as represented by the philosophy of ‘open source’, ‘free culture’ and appropriate licensing such as the GNU GPL, creative commons or copy left is what allows the rapid spread and innovation of technologies for a life within ecological limits. This way of holding culture in common is also what allows for the fabrication of useful machines and tools at very low cost. Kropotkin writes:

“In proportion as technical knowledge becomes everybody’s virtual domain, in proportion as it becomes international, and can be concealed no longer, each nation acquires the possibility of applying the whole variety of her energies to the whole variety of industrial and agricultural pursuits. Knowledge ignores artificial political boundaries.” —- Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops, p. 25
He goes on (in 1899!):
“Those who dream of monopolising technical genius are 50 years behind the times. The world —- the wide, wide world —- is now the true domain of knowledge.” —- Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops, p. 48
It is almost as though he could foresee the significance of strings of the letter ‘w’ for the sharing of information. Sharing technical information is essential to low cost networked fabrication. Neil Gershenfeld of the Centre for Bits and Atoms at MIT recognised this in rural India where he was assisting with fab lab development:
“The proviso of personal fabrication for those billion users is in “open source” hardware, meaning that they can collaborate on problem solving by sharing files for a project such as the development of an improved agricultural instrument or a healthcare sensor.” —- Neil Gershenfeld, Fab, p. 49
As we develop vital solutions we must be willing to share what we are able of the associated vital information. This is not charity, it is a practice ultimately beneficial to our own capacity to make use of other people’s improvements on our work and the obligation implicit in our making use of the knowledge of all who have come before us.

Sharing Profits

Fields, Factories and Workshops TomorrowColin Ward first re-issued an edited edition of Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops in 1979 under the title Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow because Ward saw that this vision was becoming ever more realisable even if Kropotkin’s thesis of its inevitability was wrong. More than ever we know that decentralised, human, ecologically regenerative work and life is not inevitable. That there are powerful forces working against just these things for the profit of a few also becomes ever clearer. Kropotkin recognised this even if he could not see that he wrote during the beginning stages of the concentration of capital in trans-national corporations. He wrote:

“Of course, as long as society remains organised so as to permit the owners of the land and capital to appropriate for themselves, under the protection of the state and historical rights, the yearly surplus of human production, no such change [the integration of industrial and agricultural, manual and brain work] can be thoroughly accomplised.” —- Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow, p. 26
This element of Kropotkin’s vision cannot be forgotten and calls for communal, cooperative approaches to the business of production and consumption and for just the kinds of resilient and agile farm businesses which networked fabrication facilitates. These qualities will assist producers in weathering the storm against larger corporate interests and support the vital experimentation required to move towards regenerative production systems.

Fields, Factories and Workshops Today

The development of post-industrial fabrication, the hacker movement and movement for free culture are well under way. So also, developments in regenerative modes for producing food, fuel and fibre are proceeding rapidly. There is a tremendously productive space in which geeks and gardeners, fab folk and farmers might meet for mutual benefit and for the benefit of humanity. Kropotkin saw the potential for ‘the factory amidst the field’ in 1899. Today, the fabricator’s and the biohacker’s lab in garage and garden and on the farm will enable the always inventive gardener and farmer to gain access to the means of invention which have hitherto been out of reach and so also limited the capacity for a truly harmonious relationship with the land and for cooperative and communal production.

Below are some starting points so you can get collaborating:

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Regenerative Agriculture: Three Days with Darren Doherty

Darren Inspects a Cow PooRecently, I had the privilege of attending a course in regenerative agriculture strategies with Darren Doherty. The course was structured by an interpretation of the Keyline Scale of Permanance with a couple of additional items:

  1. Climate
  2. Geography
  3. Water
  4. Access
  5. Forestry
  6. Buildings
  7. Fencing
  8. Soils
  9. PolyMarketing
  10. Energy
The Keyline framework was used to introduce a suite of regenerative strategies, including:

A Keyline PloughAs well as all this, we saw a Keyline plough in action in a West Sussex pasture.

Why is all this so exciting? To my mind, an approach to agriculture that creates systems which build biological capacity in the form of soil, biomass, biodiversity and balanced natural and human managed ecosystems (agroecosystems) is the foundation of the possibility of our flourishing in the earth. And it is interesting and fun. What more exciting thing is there to do in the world than to join with those natural forces which would produce abundance with ecological health; to foster productive systems which teem with life and invite others to join in this creative work.

A Wormy FurrowDarren presented people throughout the world who have been involved in this work with beautiful and profitable results. Profit, in these cases, is gained while ecological health is improved. There is still the issue of to whom those profits might rightfully accumulate or with whom they are most properly shared, but that will be a subject for another day. While I am working the most part of every day to build a barn to store some cereals, I have to hold back on exploring all that I am learning and thinking about. I have written a little bit about some of these people and strategies here before (holistic management, pasture cropping, keyline design, agroforestry). Some of the others strategies in the above list will be the subject of future posts. Some of Darren’s own ideas were also very provocative and will doubtless find their way here in the near future. For now, I have to get off to bed so that many years of work in gathering and multipying diverse cereals are not exposed to rain and sun and lost before we get a barn built.

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Keyline: More Than Water Harvesting

Keylines

“We are discovering a new Australia! As yet, few Australians have seen it.” - P. A. Yeomans

Percival Alfred Yeomans is a greatly underappreciated figure in Australia’s history. This is the conclusion to which I have come while reading “The Challenge of Landscape” in preparation for a course in regenerative agriculture in West Sussex this week. Yeomans developed a system of landscape development which dramatically and quickly improves even very poor agricultural land by considering and working with landscape pattern. Within permaculture, the keyline system is often misunderstood or treated vaguely as simply a water harvesting technique, amongst other things. Like permaculture, however, keyline is principally about design —- “… from pattern to detail.”

As a mining engineer, Yeomans came to farming with a unique outlook. He poured over maps, particularly contour maps, with the idea that there must be some pattern which would allow him to work cooperatively with nature’s forces. Allan Yeomans, his son, writes in the introduction to “The Challenge of Landscape”:

“He discovered that a contour line, that ran through that point of a valley, where the steepness of the valley floor suddenly increased, had unique properties. Starting from this line, and cultivating parallel to it, both, above the line, and below the line, produced off contour furrows, which selectively drifted water out of the erosion vulnerable valley. He named this contour “The Keyline”. The entire system became “The Keyline System”.”

Water is primary within the Keyline System but only because it is the first thing over which we may exercise some significant influence in what Yeomans calls “The Keyline scale of relative permanence of things agricultural.” What is more succinctly known as “The Keyline Scale of Permanence” includes:

  1. Climate
  2. Land shape
  3. Water supply
  4. Farm roads
  5. Trees
  6. Permanent buildings
  7. Subdivision fences
  8. Soil

One of Yeomans’ most important insights in comparison to his agricultural contemporaries was the recognition that soil can be built quickly. With something of a prophetic ring, he announces:

“Soil will improve until Australian soil everywhere is richer and deeper than nature has ever provided.”

Nevertheless, soil is last on the Keyline scale because, though most important, it is the least permanent. Yeomans sees soil improvement and fertility in general as a function of other more permanent factors with which we must first work:

“If the effect of climate on soil is fully understood, I believe we have a basic knowledge that will enable us to increase the fertility and productivity of any natural soil … While there are many ways of worsening the soil climate to reduce fertility of soil, and we have no doubt employed them all, there are, in my opinion, as many ways of improving the soil climate and increasing fertility … The fertility of good soil can be destroyed before a line of fenceposts will rot. A poor soil can be changed into a highly fertile soil in about a tenth of this time.”

This rapid improvement is achieved through adressing the items on the scale over which we have control in turn, beginning with the foundation of water:

“With full water control from Keyline planning, the farm environment improves, the soil improves; the pasture, crops and stock improve in health and their numbers may increase many fold with the growing capacity of the property.”

Keyline, then, while emplyoying amazing techniques for slowing, speading and sinking water into the landscape, is not just a technique. It is a system of planning or design for increasing fertility through harvesting sunlight while facilitating sensible placement of agricultural elements in accordance with their relative permanence. We’ll get into the geometry and detail of keyline in future posts —- for now, here are some links with great information about Keyline design:

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A Few Keyline Resources

I have been lax in my posts. My intention has been to post each week on a Tuesday but I have been working very long days on the farm and getting little time for writing.

So, excuses aside, I have decided to make a less-than-substantial post which points to some resources I have recently created on the back of other people’s generosity.

Next week, I am going to be attending to course on regenerative agriculture with Darren Doherty. As far as I can tell, the course follows essentially the Keyline Scale of Permanance. Some of the key texts in the ‘recommended reading’ list are three which Steve Soloman of the fantastic Soil and Health Library has made available with the permission of Alan Yeomans —- one of the sons of the indomitable Percival Alfred Yeomans, the author of these three works.

I wanted to be able to read these books on my e-reader, so using ‘wget’, a GNU / Linux command line tool, I downloaded the full illustrated HTML and, using Calibre, an open source e-book manager, I converted the texts to .epub format, a free and open standard for e-books.

Just in case anyone else finds illustrated HTML as frustrating as I do, I am making the .epub versions of the books available here:

Thanks again to Alan Yeomans for giving permission for the Soil and Health Library to host these important works. If you appreciate them, why not buy a hardcopy of Yeomans’ classic work “Water for Every Farm” to show your gratitude.

If you’re interested in the idea that free e-books could improve sales of hardcopy books, check out Cory Doctorow’s book ‘Content’, available as a free e-book or audio book on his site craphound.com.

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What is Permaculture? An Historic Response

When introducing myself, I inevitably mention permaculture. I then conduct a careful scan of my conversation partner, looking for signs of recognition or bafflement. Very often, this situation is followed by the question ‘Permaculture? What is that?’ and more often than not I find myself answering historically.

Permaculture is about design. However, permaculture is a design system with a particular historical analysis. This analysis involves three very broad swathes of history centred on the current period of high energy — pre-industrial, industrial and a hoped-for future time characterised by design.

Pre-industrial life, excepting some energy excess of imperial powers, is largely characterised by a low-energy, labour intensive life and limited exploitation of natural resources.

Industrial life is characterised by a high energy, low labour and resource intensive life.

Permaculture envisions the possibility of and looks forward to a life which is characterised by relatively less labour and dramatically lower resource use than industrial life — a knowledge-intensive or design-intensive life.

This design-intensive future is made possible by the purview afforded by the present energy peak. The degree to which we can come to know about other people and places in time and space is an unprecedented product of the high energy age. Permaculture seeks to use a knowledge low energy systems of the past and present to design low-energy systems for the present and future which possess the advantages of both the pre-industrial and industrial periods of the past without destroying the ecological foundations of human society.

The reason I have come to use this explanation most often is because of how exciting and expansive this vision is. It encompasses all the strategies of low energy life from holistic management to bio-intensive gardens; eco-building to fab-labs; cooperatives and communities to creative commons and free culture. Permaculture is a meta-framework and foundation for the development of a satisfying life exploitative of neither person nor place — a life within ecological limits.

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DIY Biological Innocuant: Using Indigenous Micro-Organisms (IMOs)

Itai's Notes on EM RecipeI had heard of effective microorganisms (EM) before and I had the impression that I would be paying a lot for something quite simple. I am always suspicious of things which require money rather than knowledge and effort. Thanks to Itai Dolev Hauben from Costa Rica and Rico Zook from New Mexico, I discovered that my suspicion of EM was unfounded.

According to Itai, the man who developed the powerful cocktail of organisms which came to be known as effective microorganisms, Teruo Higa, wanted the information about how to cultivate this melange to be spread far and wide. Itai gave a great workshop on the first day of the International Permaculture Convergence in which he outlined a recipe for EM. Rico coined a name for the cocktail which I really like —-indigenous microorganisms, or IMOs. Rico’s name captures some of the significance of this process —- it can be done by anyone with locally available materials to cultivate a tremendously useful set of microorganisms which are indigenous to a particular place. It is to the great credit of Teruo Higa that he recognised that such a powerful process ought not be kept from anyone.

Why are IMOs Useful?

IMOs cultivated according to this process are extremely versatile. It seems that there are few things which are not benefited by their presence. They can be

  • … used as a foliar or soil spray to promote plant health,
  • … added to animal feeds for healthier animals,
  • … added to a a composting toilet or kitchen food waste bin to stop bad smells and aid decomposition, and
  • … added to pond water to maintain living, healthy water.

How to Cultivate IMOs

Now for the recipe. This one is for a 55 gallon drum batch. The same proportions can be used for a batch of any size:

Ingredients:

  • 25 L of mulch, manure, soil, leaf litter and healthy (white / off white) fungal strands from healthy ecosystems
  • 25 L of rice semolina (or equivalent)
  • 25 L wheat bran
  • 25 L powdered charcoal
  • 50 L rice husk / wheat husk OR softwood sawdust
  • 200 g bakers’ / brewers’ yeast
  • 2 L raw milk
  • 3 - 5 L molasses / cane sugar / brown sugar / silan (or equivalent)
  1. Combine ingredients and check that the moisture level is that of a squeezed out sponge (like an ideal compost moisture level).
  2. Put in drum / container with an airlock (simple plans for this soon).
  3. Allow to ferment for approximately one week or until bubbling stops (time will vary with climatic conditions).
  4. Open drum. The mix should have a pleasant smell.
  5. Dry the mix slowly in the shade for later use; use directly on soil, in animal feed, kitchen waste or composting toilet; or make up a liquid mix (1 kg dry mix, 1/2 litre molasses, 20 L water) for foliar or soil application.
Thanks again to Itai for sharing your knowledge. read more

The Underground Forest: Using Biodiversity to Help People

A Tree from the Underground ForestOne of the highlights of the tenth International Permaculture Convergence was meeting Tony Rinaudo of World Vision Australia. Tony is a living example of the posture required for the development of truly regenerative systems. Tony has come to see patterns of people, plants and landscape which allow deserts to grow trees again. He does this by opening himself to the voice of the land.

While working in Niger, Tony noticed that what appeared to be small shrubs were in fact trees which had been coppiced by continuous grazing pressure, firewood harvesting and the impulse of farmers to keep crop land free of trees. Tony calls these trees ‘the underground forest.’

‘Do you speak tree?’

Selecting StemsRather than continue to plant trees as great expense only to have them die, Tony began to work with the natural processes which would allow this underground forest to grow. He says that it is necessary to learn to speak a new language —- ‘Tree’. Not knowing whether it would work but trusting the natural fecundity the land, Tony worked with some farmers to select particular healthy stems, remove all but one to five of the remainder, cull to the required number of trees per hectrare and prune to promote healthy growth. This simple approach Tony calls Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR). FMNR is based on

“… the systematic regeneration of living tree stumps, roots and seeds.”
In Niger, 5 million hectares have been reafforested in the last 20 years using FMNR. This change can be seen from space as a spread of green where once there was a growing desert. Niger, as a result of FMNR, is the only African country with net afforestation.

‘It’s not a bad thing to be ignorant.’

PruningI listened to and spoke with Tony several times over the course of the convergence and what became clear was that Tony is not just peddling a technique. At the beginning I mentioned Tony’s ‘posture’. Tony’s posture is one of enquiry, not expertise; listening, not just advising. This same posture comes to characterise the farmers with whom Tony works. Each community or farmer does things slightly differently according to their circumstances. Where Tony recommended keeping a maximum of 20 - 40 stems per hectare, some farmers have begun to leave 100 - 150 stems per hectare with an increase in their crop yield. They have found out what works through their own observations of natural regenerative processes.

Using Biodiversity to Help People

Tony in Niger with 5 Year Old Trees in BackgroundThe trees and shrubs which grow up from the underground forest are the native species which have sometimes not been seen for decades. As a result, the community comes to have not only double or triple the crop yield between the trees but also tree fruits and nuts, medicines, firewood, fodder and shade for livestock and habitat and food for birds and insects which bring fertility and other ecosystem services. FMNR allows for the regeneration of biodiversity and so also the regeneration and maintenance of ethnobotanical knowledge which might have dried up with the desert.

FMNR is almost scandalous in its simplicity. Working with nature, Tony has been able to be a co-creator with that force which lies at the heart of nature and would produce abundance. It was a great privilege to meet Tony and to learn about his work. FMNR is one of the best examples of permaculture in practice and gives me great hope for the future.

Tony also has a lot to share about edible Acacias but that is another story altogether and a post for another day.

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Brad Lancaster on Rainwater Harvesting - Day 1 of IPC10: Slow, Spread, Sink.

Degenerative LandscapeBeginning with the questions

“What is the story of your place?” and “What is the story of its water?”
Brad Lancaster began to tell two tales of water —- a degenerative story and a regenerative story.

A Degenerative Story: “The Hydrophobic Society”

Showing images of urban landscapes designed to hasten the movement of water from those landscapes, Brad suggested that these landscapes were indicators of a “hydrophobic society.”

Not only is water wasted by this hydrophobia but the risk of flooding is increased 10 fold when paved, concreted and otherwise sealed areas feed the ‘dehydration infrastructure’ designed to solved the ‘problem’ of water inundation in drylands.

“Distance is energy”

The result of seeing rainwater as a problem which must be drained is waste and, therefore, expense. More rain falls on Brad’s home, Tucson, Arizona, than is necessary for drinking, washing, food production and industry —- all of Tucson’s water needs. Yet the pumping and transportation of water from the Colorado river is the largest consumer of electricity and the largest single source producer of carbon. Waste creates expense —- “distance is energy.”

A Regenerative Story: “Run off” to “run on” which is “right on.”

Regenerative LandscapeIn Tucson 3,000,000 l of water falls on each kilometer of sealed road each year. Outside of their house, Brad and his brother began to use some of this water to irrigate native mesquite trees on their verge. The kerb was cut to allow the water from the road to ‘run on’ into the mulched basins in which the trees were then able to grow. Sufficient water falls on the roads of Tucson to passively irrigate a mesquite tree in a mulched basin every 8m. Recently, these mulched basins have been found to host a soil ecology approaching that of an established forest in comparison to the surrounding, relatively dead and degraded soils. Where mesquites have been grown in this way, local people have been able to earch $25 an hour picking mesquite pods to be processing into a naturally sweet flour and made into many kinds of food for sale. Here is one example of the creation of a regenerative system which turns ‘run off’ into ‘run on’ while increasing biodiversity, growing shade, food, community and livelihood. These basins are examples of ‘infiltration infrastructure’ —- ‘rehydration infrastructure.’

“Show the flow”

Show the FlowMulched basins and other water harvesting earthworks which are a part of rehydration infrastructure not only catch rainwater where it falls but are also able to receive greywater. Brad prefers to keep the greywater outlet pipe above the mulch level to prevent it being blocked up by roots and to ‘show the flow.’ I know that washing day is an exciting time at my house. There is something special about seeing this productive use of water which would otherwise go to waste.

“Plant the rain and the plants will plant themselves.”

Brad emphasised that we must:

“Slow. Spread. Sink!” rather than “Pave. Pipe. Pollute.”
By slowing water and allowing it to spead out and infiltrate, the earth responds with growth. Native and productive trees planted with an awareness of the the rainwater harvesting budget of a site can provide shade, food, biodiversity and many other benefits. Water is the beginning of the creation of regenerateive landscapes which provide many yields while improving ecological health.

Brad closed an inspiring talk with the suggestion that we all have a role to play in the story of water in our landscapes. We can choose the story and we can choose the role. Degenerative or regenerative? Not a hard choice, really.

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Water for Life: Towards Jordan and IPC10

Water is the condition of life. Without it organisms from bacteria to birds of prey can neither flourish nor survive. For Sepp Holzer

“wasser ist leben.” (water is life.)

For Brad Lancaster

“Rain is the embodiment of life.” —- Rainwater Harvesting For Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1, p. 1 

Water can be a limiting factor in plant growth and ecosystem function where it is scarce or irregular and water can be a powerful destructive force in the form of flooding, soil erosion and waterlogging where it occurs in great quantity or in disturbed ecosystems.

For P. A. Yeomans

“There can be no satisfactory or permanent agriculture without permanent water supply.”

Yeomans developed a system of design called Keyline which conserves and utilses water where it has hitherto been scarce and, where it is in relative superfluity, directs and distributes its otherwise destructive flow. These possibilities open up from an understanding of pattern in landscape. Increasing moisture or improving drainage improves the biological capacity of a place and its potential to produce yields for human use without ecosystem degredation.

The tremendous value of water combined with the perception of its scarcity derived from its waste makes it a contested resource. The potential for conflict over water will only icrease in the near future with continued misuse and pollution of water and with the desire for big solutions to the problems of climate change, peak oil and the collapse of biological systems. For Vandana Shiva

“Water is a commons because it is the ecological basis of all life.” —- quoted in Lancaster, Rainwater Harvesting For Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1, p. 16

Water is the theme of this year’s International Permaculture Conference and Convergence in Jordan. There are few better place to consider the human relationship with low energy water harvesting than the home of the Nabateans —- an ancient people who created a desert civilization founded on rain water harvesting and conservation.

Only the propagation of methods like those outlined by Yeomans in his works on Keyline or those made eminently accessible by Brad Lancaster in his works on water harvesting earthworks for dryands hold the possibility of avoiding the commodification of and conflict over water which will ensue if all people are not empowered to catch rain where it falls, improve the land of which they are stewards and, on that foundation, develop secure livelihoods.

I hope to learn more about these vital strategies over the coming weeks in Jordan and in Palestine. I will be sharing here what I can of the things I learn during the conference and convergence and in the ensuing time. There is also the possibility of seeing and hearing some of what is going on at IPC10 by having a look at the live streaming.

Water will be a bit of a theme and there may be a bit more action that usual at Perennial Ideas from now up to and after the keyline and regenerative agriculture workshop I will be doing with Darren Doherty of RegenAg and Australia Felix Permaculture in November so check back soon or subscribe to keep up with news from IPC10 and the upcoming regenerative agriculture course.

Mycorrhizal Associations: The Web Resource

I have been researching mycorrhizal associations with cereal crops as a part of my work with John Letts at the Heritage Cereals Institute and I stumbled upon this amazing resource:

What is really cool is that it is a Western Australian initiative and funded by the Lotteries Commission of WA.  read more