I went to a small Montessori school on the Rio Grande while I was growing up, and among the other "new age"-y things going on at the school, we would spend half a day every week in permaculture class. We spent that class doing things like gardening, constructing adobe stuff like ovens and a gathering space shaped like a turtle (the head formed a pizza oven too - it was really cool), collecting eggs from a chicken coop, recycling fibers and scrap paper into (very brittle) paper, and making tea out of the herbs we grew - mint, chamomile, lavender, etc.
One of the most profound memories I have from that school is of Ms. Susan teaching us to say "thank you" to the plants when we took a few of their leaves for the tea. We'd look at the plant, find some good leaves, pluck 'em off, and then say "thank you" and move to the next one. It was kind of an intimate moment to share with a mint plant haha. It was probably also very cute for the teachers to watch a flock of kids roam around a garden and stare intently at some herbs for an hour.
It was the kind of thing that really sinks in when you're a kid. I didn't know it wasn't a "normal" kind of education, and I just figured, "we take our time and say thank you to the plants when take something from them" was a general rule of life that the adults follow too. I really cherish those memories now! Sometimes I thought they were boring af at the time - learning about compositing toilets isn't really priority #1 for a 9 year-old - but I hope other kids growing up are taught a similar connection to nature today. We've gotta say thank you to the plants!
This reminds me of the lessons from the book "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn. One of the main characters is teaching another lessons throughout the book using a Montessori approach. One of the big lessons is to only take what you need, and to appreciate these things we take for granted. I highly recommend it if you haven't read it already.
I am surprised and not surprised to see this here. I often see themes of burnout, wanting to get back to nature, existential questions surrounding tech and similar here on HN.
I took a permaculture class earlier this year, after having researched it on the sidelines for a few years. It started from looking at sustainability, agriculture, homesteading (wanting to "leave it all behind") and blossomed into a wonderful learning experience about a philosophy where I felt a little more at home. It was great. It introduced me to a few really cool friends whose values largely aligned with mine. Anyone interested in this, please feel free to reach out.
I don't think it has necessarily to do with burnout, or even with the more general notion "city-dwellers feel detached from nature so they romanticize it". Apart from that, there is also the entrepreneurial spirit (as well as the hacker spirit) of wanting to do things yourself, either because you think you can do better or because you want to decrease your reliance on others. And those are very well represented here.
What course did you take, and where, if I may be so intrusive… you did mention to “reach out” if interested! I also arrived at being fascinated by the concept by ideas of sustainability and “getting away from it all”.
Most fun thing about permaculture is the fact that no one is making money from actually applying it but rather just selling courses, books and other media. It’s funny since the first thing you learn about it, is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money doing it.
Beside that, permaculture is nothing more than a framework for systems design. Can be applied to much more than your garden.
A few people are making money from it, but they're content to make money. The majority of people doing homesteading are:
1. At-home farmers who are eating healthier, but paying for the privilege.
2. People who are quiet because they're actually making very good money doing what they're doing.
3. People who haven't quite grasped that permaculture and/or homesteading are still farming, and farming is still hard work despite how blog-friendly you make it.
4. People trying to sell their "next best thing" marketing to hopeful mommmy bloggers.
I am currently a #1 hoping to become a #2 eventually. Online, I predominantly follow #2s and they never try and sell me classes, PDFs, etc, because they're busy making money farming.
I just discovered composting using Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus Ostreatus). It can handle food waste and also human/animal waste too. It colonizes the waste really fast when it's warm. No need for a septic tank.
Yes I have a small hut in the woods, with electricity and Internet via fiber optic cable from a house nearby. There's a waterproof WiFi access point mounted outside the hut on a pole, with a surprisingly long range.
I've been dreaming of a way to compost my dog's waste. It's against city ordinance, and widely discouraged for standard compost bins. Mushrooms could be an interesting approach. But the city ordinance stands. And handling it in the deep Midwest USA winters would be difficult.
For permaculture I first need land, and its expensive where I live (I can't go too far as I'm on 2 wheels without engine), so I'm still saving for a few more years before planting fig, persimmon, medlar, citrus, orange native trees, peppers, and all easy to grow things, and sleeping around that in a small box!
I took a permaculture course a while back and the instructor addressed that specific issue. He said (paraphrasing): you can buy really good tools and learn to use them, you can learn to identify and grow annuals and smaller plants, you can keep worms, you can observe and build invisible structures, all without land.
Sure, keep saving to buy land, but don't forget it is something you can practice in the middle of the city too.
Permaculture is fascinating. I'm interested in how it behaves on a macro scale, though; what would happen to the wider ecosystem if you had a town full of permaculture lots instead of grass yards?
Every estimate I've seen points to a minimum requirement of ~1 hectare of arable land to feed one human for one year (on a minimal vegetarian diet) and that estimate assumes highly productive soils and minimal crop loss due to insects, drought, or flood.
The idea with permaculture is that you minimize (ideally eliminate) the need for fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide imports using effective composting and crop rotation (biological nitrogen fixation) and integrated pest management (raising insects that eat crop pests etc.) and water recycling systems and so on.
Scaling this approach to tens of thousands of acres for reliably feeding even a medium-sized city seems challenging, but there appear to be some 1000-acre permaculture farms out there. However, yields are likely to be lower per acre with this approach as practices like using high fertilizer imports to allow double-cropping don't fit the permaculture model.
a whole town, depending on how things are done would look a bit different, but would handle different too.
First, assuming that people are growing all sorts of things, and not trying to monoculture, you will get an explosion in different kinds of insects and their predators.
Second, you should get an explosion of colour
thirdly, assuming the growth of trees, creepers and other vines, coolers daytime temperatures, and reduced winds
fourthly, and possibly more importantly, much higher water retention.
I've always been wary of the permaculture community. Firstly, a lot of the things advanced by them are simply not scalable to the entire human race. They will say stuff like "it's practically free to have all this free food I grew on my lawn", while ignoring the massive amount of labor they put in, the waste product that they managed to scavenge, and the infrastructure they pay little to no taxes for. It's not even clear to me that "Big Age" is even a bad thing, seeing that their massive economies of scale allow them to produce more for less(money, environmental impact) than smaller farmers. Failure to realize this lead to the dumb memes about how global supply chains are supposedly bad, without realizing that having many small factories around the world would actually be more environmentally harmful than shipping products to where they can best be processed. I'm sympathetic to fears about long term sustainability and skepticism about globalism, but I generally don't like the type of stuff they advocate for. I generally agree with calls for increased regulation and a reduction in waste though.
>It's not even clear to me that "Big Age" is even a bad thing, seeing that their massive economies of scale allow them to produce more for less(money, environmental impact)
Big Ag is extremely destructive to the environment, because it doesn't respect existing environments & ecosystems, instead seeing them as a blank canvas for terraforming and imposing industrial processes.
Where are you getting the idea that Big Ag has less environmental impact than a backyard garden???
>They will say stuff like "it's practically free to have all this free food I grew on my lawn", while ignoring the massive amount of labor they put in,
It doesn't require much labor. That's one of the main points — permaculture is about working with nature rather than against it. Instead of tilling and pumping soil full of mined fertilizer, you use the natural processes appropriate for your local environment to support your crops. When properly applied, permaculture is about minimal effort.
>the waste product that they managed to scavenge,
Yes, that's also the point of permaculture: diverting waste streams and closing loops. For example, composting is a great way to make high-quality soil while diverting food waste from the landfill where it would anaerobically rot and generate methane. Permaculture can (and should) be low effort.
>and the infrastructure they pay little to no taxes for.
Huh? Where are you getting the idea that permaculture encourages resource theft and tax avoidance?
there are many things that absolutely are scalable to the entire human race, at least outside of the city. Permaculture asks nothing of you but your effort. The "massive amount of labor put in is what's needed to produce that amount of food. It's only in rich countries where people can produce food for much less labor (by working a high paying job and buying the food at the market). there are many countries where people are much better off growing their own food, rather than working at a minimum wage job and buying the same food.
You should watch John Jai on Youtube. He's in thailand a country where the GDP per capita is a fraction of the US and yet he has more land, 3 small paid off huts and enough food to raise 4 kids all with plenty of time left over to read books. "Life is easy" he says, not bragging about his riches but rather to let people know about an alternative way of living.
I have long been interested in permaculture, but I have recently been coming around to your point of view.
People give modern farmers a lot of crap, but overall they are very interested in taking care of their land, and using as few fertilizers and pesticides as possible, if for no other motive than the profit one. As universities discover new best practices for regenerative ag, crop rotation and the like, farmers are overall very quick to adopt them, and the ones who don't go out of business. For instance, a lot of farmers have already adopted practices like no-till farming, cover cropping, and double cropping.
Another example, a soil scientist YouTuber named GardeningInCanada explained how the 'tilling' that farmers do with their giant machines is actually just slicing a cut a few mm deep in the soil with a disk, dropping in new seeds, then pushing the soil back over the cuts with another implement.
I think growing your own food is certainly more valuable than just having a giant turf lawn, but if you really wish to provide the most positive ecological impact, I think you should look into things like rain gardens or bioswales that filter rainwater runoff (helping fix the 'dead zones' that high nitrogen creates in our waterways and oceans), and growing a large diversity of plants native to your region that support the greatest number of specialist pollinators, which in turn will feed other life forms. The way I see it now, there is already an overabundance of food for humans in the world, but there is too little food for insects, birds, reptiles, other mammals, etc. In other words, there are plenty of grocery stores for people around but I want my yard to be a giant grocery store full of food for pollinators.
If you are in North America, you can grow some native food plants like American persimmon, paw paw, American blueberries, and wild strawberries. But most high-calorie crops are not native (even corn, beans, and squash came from Mexico iirc) and even the ones that were here before European colonization are genetically very different than the native plants that they came from and do not really support any wildlife.
>Firstly, a lot of the things advanced by them are simply not scalable to the entire human race.
It's scalable to a large proportion of it especially in the west and other such areas with a fitting climate and should probably be incentivized tbh.
One could say the same about lawns. Which were initially thing of the ultra few who could signal they could both afford to leave land unproductive and employ people to maintain it. Now there's a stupid amount of it.
And yes this type of agriculture requires a lot of extra labour which is often understated that I'll agree on.
>It's not even clear to me that "Big Age" is even a bad thing, seeing that their massive economies of scale allow them to produce more for less(money, environmental impact) than smaller farmers.
It's environmental impact is ridiculous I don't see how this is even debatable.
Insect populations in many places have plummeted, topsoil is being eroded, etc.
It does indeed make more sense financially and by a good amount but a large part of that is due to cheap plentiful fertilizers a big share of which comes from fossil fuels and deposits in Morocco and the like that will at some point run out and/or get a lot more expensive to get. We could stretch these resources so so much if we were more efficient about using them by dropping/adopting some practices but we do not because it does not make financial sense to do so right now.
Similar for irrigation issues in many areas.
The moment this inflow of fertilizer starts to end food becomes a lot more expensive, large scale tillage agriculture becomes more difficult and more labour intensive practices common in the permaculture community start making more sense imo. You can't keep going without such fertilizer inputs on soils that are ecologically near dead due to tillage, pest/herbicicides, etc
We can reduce our land use, amount of packaging materials and impact on the environment.
We don't need to be dogmatic about it either since there's a wide open middle ground between what we do now and some kind of 0 impact, 0 pesticides, etc vision.
Permaculture has a much higher yeild, per unit of land compared to traditional western arible. The reasons are not really well understood. Possibly attention to pest levels, mixed crops, and much healthier soils (with a fucktonne of mushroom webs)
but permaculture isn't much different to subsistence farming.
But, the flip side is that industrial movement of food has stopped, limited or reduced the effect of localised famines.
> ignoring the massive amount of labor they put in
I thought the whole point of permaculture was exploring tradeoffs between labour and space (i.e, that "yield per acre" of a small intensively managed gardening plot is surprisingly good, and conversely you can trade effort for yield with "forest garden" type stuff that requires less maintenance).
I'm suspicious of permaculture because I had a friend back in the early 2000s that got into it with a local group and it seemed almost like a cult and they didn't produce enough food to feed a couple of hamsters that I saw.
He did buy all the Mollison books and talked about how he was going to get land and hire people to do the work. I never figured out how he was intending to pay the people with the 20 gallons of persimmons he was optimistically going to get.
I'm an agronomist by training so it was especially irritating arguing with him having been around at-scale food production, and this went on for months as he was totally obsessed.
There are some interesting theories in it. Like catching water on a hill with terraces. Which people did in earlier times and maybe still do in certain parts of the world. A lot of things that people living a simpler life found out a long time ago presented as a "system".
My takeaway though is that (as practiced anyway) it's a bit of an culty scam, but there are worse ones and people being outside and around nature and growing things is in sum a good thing in my opinion so maybe I'm being a bit harsh.
Anyway, I don't know everything, but it just doesn't seem practical at any scale to provide calories. I'd probably feel better about it had I not heard this guy's impractical cultish preaching for months. I hope he is doing fine wherever he is and got his land in the end.
I lived for many years on a commune where we strived to grow most of our own vegetables, and I always got a very culty vibe from permaculture folks, too (pot, kettle, some might say, but I distinguish cults and communes based on how welcome differing ideas are).
Mostly because they seemed so didactic about it: oh yes, sure you're growing vegetables for yourself, but you're doing it wrong, not observing principle X or Y.
Christopher Alexander adherents were always my favorite visitors, they'd talk about patterns as they understood them and ask questions about whether they applied. Somehow the permaculture folks all gave off a my-way-or-the-highway kind of vibe.
Whilst I love this kinda stuff I have to admit describing things as systems and the like felt extremely buzwordy as if to make people feel like it was deeper than it actually is.
I also feel like a good few of the things people did seemed like things invented or perpetuated by influencers so they could keep yapping on about something.
Vermiculture is something I do for example. It makes no sense from a time/ effort perspective on a small scale compared to other composting methods but I liked that what i got out of it as amendment for my potting was at least weedfree by virtue of my own sorting and went trough it all relatively quickly. If I had to restart on my plot I wouldn't bother but hey it was fun and whilst a good part of of my garden is extremely productive I also grow some stuff that takes waaay too much effort for what I get out of it just for fun.
But people are out there taking it to extremes without any second thoughts about whether it works and swear by it and end up dogmatic about things like compost teas.
All fine and dandy when it's a little hobby but when it becomes more than that I hope most can differentiate between actually useful things and barely usefull gimmicks pushed by people selling more books and courses than veg.
Some people appreciated it, and one person said it gave them a lot of material to work on (downthread).
I was only reporting on the work of other well-known permaculturists and regenerative farmers
, although I have an interest in permaculture and had done some organic gardening for a few years earlier. But that work I had done (literally hands-on) gave me some background and perspective to be able to think about their work as they talked about it through their videos, which is why I decided to post that comment.
Permaculture is a balm to the soul for techno-jaded coders. Having visited locations in N California, UK, Spain & South Africa there is clearly a strong appeal of natural systems design for technological systems designers.
In a sense, designing a living environment is like coding. Maybe you're a full-stack developer and you want to terraform your land - run the digger routine to build some swales and ponds. Sprinkle in some pioneer species functions to structure the sub-soil and add nitrogen and provide shade. Run the groundcover script to stop evaporation and erosion and plant a few fruit trees.
Then add whatever framework of your choosing for creepers, vines and berries.
Start some background processes of mulching and compost turning (this is a sweaty function), maybe add a worm bin for your kitchen and food waste.
Then just watch your biological programme running, the plants, birds & bugs and it is good.
..................
Maybe permaculture isn't going to feed the world, but there are some important takeaways:
1. Focus on perennial plants. If you have a garden or land and you don't have lots of time or energy, don't waste your time with annual vegetables instead plant perennial food plants and trees...too many to mention but good, hardy, high producing options are granadilla (passion fruit), mulberry, pecan (and other nuts depending on your location), rhubarb, kale, spinach, ginger, figs, lemons and other citrus.
2. Never leave soil bare. "Nature abhors a vacuum" so weeds will grow, mulch any exposed dirt or plant a groundcover.
3. Observe the edges between everything, that's where the magic happens. Create more 'edge', in other words instead of a perfectly round pond, make an irregular pond with protected areas for critters to breed in. Instead of a straight path, have some curves.
4. "The problem is the solution" probably the most popular permaculture saying there is, but a useful concept. If you have slugs and snails in your garden you don't have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency. Got ducks to eat the snails? but pong their pond smells...this is a problem, but its also the best fertiliser water you can get to put on fast growing plants so its the solution to your fertiliser needs.
It’s sad how many people here cannot see the world through any other lens but money made on the market.
The fundamental issue with our environmental crisis is externalities. Chopping down every tree and strip-mining the planet is not a good idea just because it’s profitable in market terms. Growing food 100 years from now is important. An ecology that supports human life 100 years from now is important. More important than whether you can get rich from depleting natural resources.
Was about to say... Some comments marvel that the techies on this site know what dirt is, I see the comments and think it attracted among the worst takes I've seen. "But can you make money from it?" "Check out my permaculture app!" "It doesn't scaaaaale!" "Permaculture is like coding, it's also a solution you can slap onto burnout so you can get right back to coding!"
I first learned about Permaculture from reading my parent's copy of "The Next Whole Earth Catalog", which reviewed Mollison's "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual" (which, BTW is one of the greatest books on design that I've ever read, not just for farms!)
So, to me, it's mixed up with things like Christopher Alexander's "Pattern Language", and Bucky Fuller's synergistic "Dymaxion" worldview.
Basically, in a nutshell, there is a possible (technically and economically feasible) world that's much nicer than ours, just on the other side of an imaginary barrier that exists only in the human mind. Or so I believe...
We can provide for ourselves the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy, "Physiological needs" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs ) in a way that is fun, easy, harmonious with other living things, deprives no one, etc. "and nobody has to get nailed to anything". I don't know if this is true, but I don't see any physical reasons why it wouldn't work. (Everybody always says "but what about human nature" at this point, and I'll get to that in a moment.)
I have finally, at long last, acquired some land with the express purpose of testing out this hypothesis. (Twenty acres in N. California.) I'm going to employ a mix of Permaculture, Syntropic Agriculture, Alexander's Pattern Language, Bucky's ideas, etc. and robots and automation to create a kind of bubble of this alternate reality, or a time-warp (just a little one) to the Star Trek-style future.
Assuming this works out, the idea then is to facilitate more people and land living this way. I see this as a kind of economic phase change that has to happen (I believe we have to live in harmony with Nature or our civilization could collapse.)
If this sounds interesting to you, and you more-or-less have your act together and would like to help out, let me know. [email protected]
- - - -
In re: the "but what about human nature?" argument against the possibility of a better world:
First, as I get older I get much less sympathy for that in general. Get over your bullshit and act like a decent human being. It's not that hard and the rewards are worth the effort.
Second, I suspect that's what's really going on here: this is a sim, and the win condition is just not to be quite such a shithead. Good Character is the only thing you take with you when the game ends, so build it up now while you can!
Third, even though they don't get a lot of fanfare in the mass media, there are numerous protocols and techniques for better communication and mental and emotional healing. Things like Non-Violent Communication, or the Core Transformation Process. I have high hopes that the new talking computers will make inexpensive, inexhaustible perfect therapists. I think the computers will talk us down off the ledge, so to speak.
"Permaculture" (n) - growing things in your garden to eat alongside supermarket-bought food, while pretending to be a good green farmer.
Reality bites. You simply can not grow enough calories to feed yourself, in a way that scales to the whole planet. Or even a significant part of the planet. You need staple crops such as beans, potatoes, wheat that are not fun to grow. You need fixed nitrogen and likely phosphorus for fertilizer, unless you happen to live on a very good soil.
[+] [-] awhitty|2 years ago|reply
One of the most profound memories I have from that school is of Ms. Susan teaching us to say "thank you" to the plants when we took a few of their leaves for the tea. We'd look at the plant, find some good leaves, pluck 'em off, and then say "thank you" and move to the next one. It was kind of an intimate moment to share with a mint plant haha. It was probably also very cute for the teachers to watch a flock of kids roam around a garden and stare intently at some herbs for an hour.
It was the kind of thing that really sinks in when you're a kid. I didn't know it wasn't a "normal" kind of education, and I just figured, "we take our time and say thank you to the plants when take something from them" was a general rule of life that the adults follow too. I really cherish those memories now! Sometimes I thought they were boring af at the time - learning about compositing toilets isn't really priority #1 for a 9 year-old - but I hope other kids growing up are taught a similar connection to nature today. We've gotta say thank you to the plants!
[+] [-] ecnahc515|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw8383833jj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colordrops|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpmx|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] viraj_shah|2 years ago|reply
I took a permaculture class earlier this year, after having researched it on the sidelines for a few years. It started from looking at sustainability, agriculture, homesteading (wanting to "leave it all behind") and blossomed into a wonderful learning experience about a philosophy where I felt a little more at home. It was great. It introduced me to a few really cool friends whose values largely aligned with mine. Anyone interested in this, please feel free to reach out.
[+] [-] tremon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qubex|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qubex|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roboben|2 years ago|reply
Beside that, permaculture is nothing more than a framework for systems design. Can be applied to much more than your garden.
[+] [-] debacle|2 years ago|reply
1. At-home farmers who are eating healthier, but paying for the privilege.
2. People who are quiet because they're actually making very good money doing what they're doing.
3. People who haven't quite grasped that permaculture and/or homesteading are still farming, and farming is still hard work despite how blog-friendly you make it.
4. People trying to sell their "next best thing" marketing to hopeful mommmy bloggers.
I am currently a #1 hoping to become a #2 eventually. Online, I predominantly follow #2s and they never try and sell me classes, PDFs, etc, because they're busy making money farming.
[+] [-] 11235813213455|2 years ago|reply
your comment makes me think of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35847327
Permaculture is mostly about growing food for yourself and local friends
[+] [-] 1827163|2 years ago|reply
Yes I have a small hut in the woods, with electricity and Internet via fiber optic cable from a house nearby. There's a waterproof WiFi access point mounted outside the hut on a pole, with a surprisingly long range.
Recovering burnout victim here too, by the way.
[+] [-] woile|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goda90|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjohnson318|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kubb|2 years ago|reply
And contrary to what some people believe, it matters what kind of soil you have how much water, and what climate you're in.
I'd honestly just quit my job and do that, a shame that my partner couldn't be further from that desire for a different life.
[+] [-] Gordonjcp|2 years ago|reply
This is what the "but we don't need to farm animals, it's a waste, we can just eat the plants instead" crowd don't get.
You can't eat the kind of plants you can grow, where people grow plants to raise animals.
[+] [-] eikenberry|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 11235813213455|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mooreds|2 years ago|reply
Sure, keep saving to buy land, but don't forget it is something you can practice in the middle of the city too.
[+] [-] CapstanRoller|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_gardening
[+] [-] ankaAr|2 years ago|reply
The guy is from buenos Aires, doing everything with our selling anything and recycling everything with permacultura in mind.
As some of the comments said, it is more about how you see what you are doing in relation with others and why.
https://m.youtube.com/@ElRecicladorUrbano/videos
[+] [-] bovermyer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|2 years ago|reply
The idea with permaculture is that you minimize (ideally eliminate) the need for fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide imports using effective composting and crop rotation (biological nitrogen fixation) and integrated pest management (raising insects that eat crop pests etc.) and water recycling systems and so on.
Scaling this approach to tens of thousands of acres for reliably feeding even a medium-sized city seems challenging, but there appear to be some 1000-acre permaculture farms out there. However, yields are likely to be lower per acre with this approach as practices like using high fertilizer imports to allow double-cropping don't fit the permaculture model.
[+] [-] tspike|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KaiserPro|2 years ago|reply
First, assuming that people are growing all sorts of things, and not trying to monoculture, you will get an explosion in different kinds of insects and their predators.
Second, you should get an explosion of colour
thirdly, assuming the growth of trees, creepers and other vines, coolers daytime temperatures, and reduced winds
fourthly, and possibly more importantly, much higher water retention.
[+] [-] zeroCalories|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CapstanRoller|2 years ago|reply
Big Ag is extremely destructive to the environment, because it doesn't respect existing environments & ecosystems, instead seeing them as a blank canvas for terraforming and imposing industrial processes.
Where are you getting the idea that Big Ag has less environmental impact than a backyard garden???
>They will say stuff like "it's practically free to have all this free food I grew on my lawn", while ignoring the massive amount of labor they put in,
It doesn't require much labor. That's one of the main points — permaculture is about working with nature rather than against it. Instead of tilling and pumping soil full of mined fertilizer, you use the natural processes appropriate for your local environment to support your crops. When properly applied, permaculture is about minimal effort.
>the waste product that they managed to scavenge,
Yes, that's also the point of permaculture: diverting waste streams and closing loops. For example, composting is a great way to make high-quality soil while diverting food waste from the landfill where it would anaerobically rot and generate methane. Permaculture can (and should) be low effort.
>and the infrastructure they pay little to no taxes for.
Huh? Where are you getting the idea that permaculture encourages resource theft and tax avoidance?
[+] [-] throw8383833jj|2 years ago|reply
You should watch John Jai on Youtube. He's in thailand a country where the GDP per capita is a fraction of the US and yet he has more land, 3 small paid off huts and enough food to raise 4 kids all with plenty of time left over to read books. "Life is easy" he says, not bragging about his riches but rather to let people know about an alternative way of living.
[+] [-] lukas099|2 years ago|reply
People give modern farmers a lot of crap, but overall they are very interested in taking care of their land, and using as few fertilizers and pesticides as possible, if for no other motive than the profit one. As universities discover new best practices for regenerative ag, crop rotation and the like, farmers are overall very quick to adopt them, and the ones who don't go out of business. For instance, a lot of farmers have already adopted practices like no-till farming, cover cropping, and double cropping.
Another example, a soil scientist YouTuber named GardeningInCanada explained how the 'tilling' that farmers do with their giant machines is actually just slicing a cut a few mm deep in the soil with a disk, dropping in new seeds, then pushing the soil back over the cuts with another implement.
I think growing your own food is certainly more valuable than just having a giant turf lawn, but if you really wish to provide the most positive ecological impact, I think you should look into things like rain gardens or bioswales that filter rainwater runoff (helping fix the 'dead zones' that high nitrogen creates in our waterways and oceans), and growing a large diversity of plants native to your region that support the greatest number of specialist pollinators, which in turn will feed other life forms. The way I see it now, there is already an overabundance of food for humans in the world, but there is too little food for insects, birds, reptiles, other mammals, etc. In other words, there are plenty of grocery stores for people around but I want my yard to be a giant grocery store full of food for pollinators.
If you are in North America, you can grow some native food plants like American persimmon, paw paw, American blueberries, and wild strawberries. But most high-calorie crops are not native (even corn, beans, and squash came from Mexico iirc) and even the ones that were here before European colonization are genetically very different than the native plants that they came from and do not really support any wildlife.
[+] [-] modo_mario|2 years ago|reply
It's scalable to a large proportion of it especially in the west and other such areas with a fitting climate and should probably be incentivized tbh. One could say the same about lawns. Which were initially thing of the ultra few who could signal they could both afford to leave land unproductive and employ people to maintain it. Now there's a stupid amount of it.
And yes this type of agriculture requires a lot of extra labour which is often understated that I'll agree on.
>It's not even clear to me that "Big Age" is even a bad thing, seeing that their massive economies of scale allow them to produce more for less(money, environmental impact) than smaller farmers.
It's environmental impact is ridiculous I don't see how this is even debatable. Insect populations in many places have plummeted, topsoil is being eroded, etc.
It does indeed make more sense financially and by a good amount but a large part of that is due to cheap plentiful fertilizers a big share of which comes from fossil fuels and deposits in Morocco and the like that will at some point run out and/or get a lot more expensive to get. We could stretch these resources so so much if we were more efficient about using them by dropping/adopting some practices but we do not because it does not make financial sense to do so right now. Similar for irrigation issues in many areas.
The moment this inflow of fertilizer starts to end food becomes a lot more expensive, large scale tillage agriculture becomes more difficult and more labour intensive practices common in the permaculture community start making more sense imo. You can't keep going without such fertilizer inputs on soils that are ecologically near dead due to tillage, pest/herbicicides, etc
We can reduce our land use, amount of packaging materials and impact on the environment. We don't need to be dogmatic about it either since there's a wide open middle ground between what we do now and some kind of 0 impact, 0 pesticides, etc vision.
[+] [-] KaiserPro|2 years ago|reply
Permaculture has a much higher yeild, per unit of land compared to traditional western arible. The reasons are not really well understood. Possibly attention to pest levels, mixed crops, and much healthier soils (with a fucktonne of mushroom webs)
but permaculture isn't much different to subsistence farming.
But, the flip side is that industrial movement of food has stopped, limited or reduced the effect of localised famines.
There is a much mire equitable medium
[+] [-] vintermann|2 years ago|reply
I thought the whole point of permaculture was exploring tradeoffs between labour and space (i.e, that "yield per acre" of a small intensively managed gardening plot is surprisingly good, and conversely you can trade effort for yield with "forest garden" type stuff that requires less maintenance).
[+] [-] SuoDuanDao|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mythrwy|2 years ago|reply
He did buy all the Mollison books and talked about how he was going to get land and hire people to do the work. I never figured out how he was intending to pay the people with the 20 gallons of persimmons he was optimistically going to get.
I'm an agronomist by training so it was especially irritating arguing with him having been around at-scale food production, and this went on for months as he was totally obsessed.
There are some interesting theories in it. Like catching water on a hill with terraces. Which people did in earlier times and maybe still do in certain parts of the world. A lot of things that people living a simpler life found out a long time ago presented as a "system".
My takeaway though is that (as practiced anyway) it's a bit of an culty scam, but there are worse ones and people being outside and around nature and growing things is in sum a good thing in my opinion so maybe I'm being a bit harsh.
Anyway, I don't know everything, but it just doesn't seem practical at any scale to provide calories. I'd probably feel better about it had I not heard this guy's impractical cultish preaching for months. I hope he is doing fine wherever he is and got his land in the end.
[+] [-] mercutio2|2 years ago|reply
Mostly because they seemed so didactic about it: oh yes, sure you're growing vegetables for yourself, but you're doing it wrong, not observing principle X or Y.
Christopher Alexander adherents were always my favorite visitors, they'd talk about patterns as they understood them and ask questions about whether they applied. Somehow the permaculture folks all gave off a my-way-or-the-highway kind of vibe.
[+] [-] modo_mario|2 years ago|reply
Vermiculture is something I do for example. It makes no sense from a time/ effort perspective on a small scale compared to other composting methods but I liked that what i got out of it as amendment for my potting was at least weedfree by virtue of my own sorting and went trough it all relatively quickly. If I had to restart on my plot I wouldn't bother but hey it was fun and whilst a good part of of my garden is extremely productive I also grow some stuff that takes waaay too much effort for what I get out of it just for fun.
But people are out there taking it to extremes without any second thoughts about whether it works and swear by it and end up dogmatic about things like compost teas. All fine and dandy when it's a little hobby but when it becomes more than that I hope most can differentiate between actually useful things and barely usefull gimmicks pushed by people selling more books and courses than veg.
[+] [-] baremetal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vram22|2 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24827234
Some people appreciated it, and one person said it gave them a lot of material to work on (downthread).
I was only reporting on the work of other well-known permaculturists and regenerative farmers , although I have an interest in permaculture and had done some organic gardening for a few years earlier. But that work I had done (literally hands-on) gave me some background and perspective to be able to think about their work as they talked about it through their videos, which is why I decided to post that comment.
[+] [-] markus23|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morog|2 years ago|reply
In a sense, designing a living environment is like coding. Maybe you're a full-stack developer and you want to terraform your land - run the digger routine to build some swales and ponds. Sprinkle in some pioneer species functions to structure the sub-soil and add nitrogen and provide shade. Run the groundcover script to stop evaporation and erosion and plant a few fruit trees.
Then add whatever framework of your choosing for creepers, vines and berries.
Start some background processes of mulching and compost turning (this is a sweaty function), maybe add a worm bin for your kitchen and food waste.
Then just watch your biological programme running, the plants, birds & bugs and it is good.
..................
Maybe permaculture isn't going to feed the world, but there are some important takeaways:
1. Focus on perennial plants. If you have a garden or land and you don't have lots of time or energy, don't waste your time with annual vegetables instead plant perennial food plants and trees...too many to mention but good, hardy, high producing options are granadilla (passion fruit), mulberry, pecan (and other nuts depending on your location), rhubarb, kale, spinach, ginger, figs, lemons and other citrus.
2. Never leave soil bare. "Nature abhors a vacuum" so weeds will grow, mulch any exposed dirt or plant a groundcover.
3. Observe the edges between everything, that's where the magic happens. Create more 'edge', in other words instead of a perfectly round pond, make an irregular pond with protected areas for critters to breed in. Instead of a straight path, have some curves.
4. "The problem is the solution" probably the most popular permaculture saying there is, but a useful concept. If you have slugs and snails in your garden you don't have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency. Got ducks to eat the snails? but pong their pond smells...this is a problem, but its also the best fertiliser water you can get to put on fast growing plants so its the solution to your fertiliser needs.
[+] [-] fogzen|2 years ago|reply
The fundamental issue with our environmental crisis is externalities. Chopping down every tree and strip-mining the planet is not a good idea just because it’s profitable in market terms. Growing food 100 years from now is important. An ecology that supports human life 100 years from now is important. More important than whether you can get rich from depleting natural resources.
[+] [-] CatWChainsaw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carapace|2 years ago|reply
So, to me, it's mixed up with things like Christopher Alexander's "Pattern Language", and Bucky Fuller's synergistic "Dymaxion" worldview.
Basically, in a nutshell, there is a possible (technically and economically feasible) world that's much nicer than ours, just on the other side of an imaginary barrier that exists only in the human mind. Or so I believe...
We can provide for ourselves the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy, "Physiological needs" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs ) in a way that is fun, easy, harmonious with other living things, deprives no one, etc. "and nobody has to get nailed to anything". I don't know if this is true, but I don't see any physical reasons why it wouldn't work. (Everybody always says "but what about human nature" at this point, and I'll get to that in a moment.)
I have finally, at long last, acquired some land with the express purpose of testing out this hypothesis. (Twenty acres in N. California.) I'm going to employ a mix of Permaculture, Syntropic Agriculture, Alexander's Pattern Language, Bucky's ideas, etc. and robots and automation to create a kind of bubble of this alternate reality, or a time-warp (just a little one) to the Star Trek-style future.
Assuming this works out, the idea then is to facilitate more people and land living this way. I see this as a kind of economic phase change that has to happen (I believe we have to live in harmony with Nature or our civilization could collapse.)
If this sounds interesting to you, and you more-or-less have your act together and would like to help out, let me know. [email protected]
- - - -
In re: the "but what about human nature?" argument against the possibility of a better world:
First, as I get older I get much less sympathy for that in general. Get over your bullshit and act like a decent human being. It's not that hard and the rewards are worth the effort.
Second, I suspect that's what's really going on here: this is a sim, and the win condition is just not to be quite such a shithead. Good Character is the only thing you take with you when the game ends, so build it up now while you can!
Third, even though they don't get a lot of fanfare in the mass media, there are numerous protocols and techniques for better communication and mental and emotional healing. Things like Non-Violent Communication, or the Core Transformation Process. I have high hopes that the new talking computers will make inexpensive, inexhaustible perfect therapists. I think the computers will talk us down off the ledge, so to speak.
[+] [-] cyberax|2 years ago|reply
Reality bites. You simply can not grow enough calories to feed yourself, in a way that scales to the whole planet. Or even a significant part of the planet. You need staple crops such as beans, potatoes, wheat that are not fun to grow. You need fixed nitrogen and likely phosphorus for fertilizer, unless you happen to live on a very good soil.
[+] [-] mountaintimefrm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antoniuschan99|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]