Permaculture Design

I had wanted to keep this blog updated daily and have been SEARCHING for a new topic the past few days. I wanted to have one day be a blog update on the garden project, the next day an informative blog on sustainable agriculture, Guatemala or any food security related topic. But I didn't do much this week other than planting to test all the seeds I have to make sure they will all grow (some I have been carrying around for a year!). I DID however, buy 4 shovels and gather up a crew of volunteers (THANKS, ANDREW BERG, FOR THE SHOVELS--WE WILL SOON BE BUYING GLOVES..AND YOU ALSO HELPED WITH PRINTING FLYERS!! and THANKS TO SANDRA, YAYELLE AND NINA FOR GIVING ME YOUR TIME!)

Anyway, yesterday at the school board meeting when I was trying to explain the design of the garden, I found my topic for today. I was saying that I would like to model the garden after permaculture theory and every single one of them looked at me with questioning but shy eyes, "Que es permacultura?" Well! I wanted to say, permaculture is the way of the future! As its founder, Bill Mollison says, "It's REVOLUTION disguised as gardening!" But...I thought, really... how do I explain permaculture to people who have used permaculture methods WAY before the word permaculture was coined in the 1970s.

Permaculture at its very core is a word mixture of permanence and culture In practice includes holistic techniques in agriculture, building and civil engineering, waste management and all aspects of our daily life. Permaculture attempts to create sustainability from the smallest, most local systems and build outwards, rather than a top to bottom or big to little application of development. Sustainability (as I've had to say ten thousand times during studying for my degree in Sustainable Development) is primarily defined as the ability to meet the needs of people today without compromising that of the needs of the future. Our current system of nearly everything is NOT sustainable-depletion and selling of raw materials like timber causing deforestation, monocultured lands which deplete biodiversity and important links in our ecosystem which we may not recognize immediately but has irreparable damage, oil-reliant (for transport and petrochemicals such as fertilizers and pesticides) agriculture that contaminates water and depletes carbon sinks, forceful evacuation of people when their culture and land doesn't conform to global supply/demand economics.

I'm using Mollison's guide to Permaculture to design the school garden because, well, it just makes sense. The idea is to use the LEAST amount of energy possible and that applies to the energy your body exerts to grow and to harvest, the electric energy used to pump water from the lake, the energy that it takes to produce the feed that the animals who will produce the manure for fertilization. All of it is one big interconnected web of flowing energy and the goal is to keep it balanced and giving, to keep the soil fertile and producing through natural mechanisms that don't require alot of work (my fave permaculture quote is that "hard work" is really just a sign of a poorly designed system). Using native species, like the squash, corn, beans, tomatoes, and chipilin helps alot: these plants don't require hardly any work since they are accustomed to this climate, the seasons, and the soil.

The idea, economically, is to minimize the amount of materials the school has to purchase from the outside/global market and also that it can possibly sell remaining vegetables and fodder to the community (which live very close-cause if you can't grow your own food, you can at least know who does and where, under what conditions). The school currently buys food from small local tiendas, most of it LOADED with sugar (sugar replaces corn down here as a food processing component). Kids lose their teeth at age 10 because there is so much sugar in the cheapest foods, not to mention lack of dairy because dairy producing animals are too expensive for them . Its not fair and they deserve better.


So...to attack the global economic system through gardening really is revolutionary (hence why I named my project, "A CALL TO FARMS" instead of A Call to Arms...get it?!). If you read Micheal Pollan's letter to the incoming President last week in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) calling for a Farmer-in Chief, new agriculture policy and for the White House lawn to be a giant garden...you understand the enormous implications of a simple act such as gardening. Reducing your consumption does and says ALOT, despite what the lazy pessimists say!