WHAT “PERMACULTURE” MEANS TO GRIBLEY
PERMACULTURE:
What does it mean?
How does a forest have such an amazing ability to grow and flourish without the need for interventions from anyone or anything that is not already contained within its ecosystem?
Forests self regulate and keep themselves balanced.
They sustain life through seasons of saturation and drought and buffer themselves from wild variance in temperatures. They provide and increase nutrition in their soils. They reintegrate their own waste into the system. They promote diversity of life.
When compared to this system, it seems absurd that conventional wisdom leads us to work much harder for poorer outcomes in our managed residential landscapes and gardens.
Think about all the inputs any given modern homeowner brings onto their land every year: mulch, fertilizers, irrigation, tools, gas, firewood, little potted plants from the big box home store for $5 a pop. Not to mention the overhead of the riding mowers needing to be maintained, and the weedwhacker that takes 50 damn pulls to start, and the gas tanks, and noisy leaf blowers all Autumn long.
And then consider all the material that needs hauled off every year!
You have the weekly trash and recycle of course, plus all the pots, soil bags, and spring planting stuff, plus all the spring pruning brush that sits at the edge of the driveway until your tax dollars send out some men and a truck eventually. Then you have mounds of grass clippings and all the plants that die over the summer. Autumn brings an ocean of leaves that often are just blown over the property line or painstaking bagged and sat next to the curb (a practice I happily reap spoils of when I drive by, toss those bags in my truck, and bring them back to my house to make soil — thanks for the gift wrapping!).
It’s a stark difference between those two realities.
And the reason why that difference exists stems from a lack of understanding the rhythms and the needs of the land as it would be if left to be governed by its own rules. Plants, animals (including human animals), fungi, invertebrates, bacteria, protozoa, and all the millions of manifestations of life have been connected by the web of life through all the ages and until only very recently (evolutionarily speaking) has the individual human animal had the ability to intervene in such a total and impactful way.
Ironically, as we gained the technology to make land “easier” to manage, we lost sight of how Nature works by its own rules.
Though we are free to operate outside of those rules, Nature does not mind if we work ourselves to death trying to change her mind, and never will.
So comes the idea of Permaculture.
Permaculture is a framework for thinking about the web of life and our place within it.
Permaculture is a philosophical structure that helps to give a place to all the many details of the living world that makes sense when looked at next to any other detail, though they may not seem connected at first glance.
Permaculture gives us language to communicate these complicated ideas with one another.
Permaculture takes into account all the information, techniques, and understandings that our human ancestors all over the globe have learned through their relationships with the Earth through the ages.
Permaculture helps us to see the big patterns and distill those patterns into details that can be understood and acted upon.
Permaculture is some many things, but most importantly, it is way of living that focuses on prioritization of what is essential to the flourishing of life at all levels.
And just like with any other endeavor where you can “get into the flow,” permaculture becomes easier, fluid, more beautiful than you can imagine.
Stewarding land within the principles of permaculture allows the steward to be part of what is going on all around her or him and frees the ego from our often self-imposed martyrdom to the toils of the land.
Nature takes care of herself. My only role is to help where I can. Most often the two best things I can do to help are a.) nothing and b.) mitigating the damage done by poor management practices of the past.
And permaculture is beautiful, and fun, and infinitely interesting, and something that I am betting all my chips on.
Permaculture helps the decision process that so much of land-based living requires of us.
(Quick aside, there is no other kind of living for eating, breathing, drinking human animals like ourselves no matter how technologically advanced we like to believe we are).
For example, I probably wouldn’t make the decision to put compost bin at the bottom of a hill. Not because there is a law of permaculture that says “thou shalt not put compost bins at the bottom of a hill,” but because when I think about the patterns and rhythms of a life with composting as a daily function, I recognize that it is much easier to bring my small additions of compost bit by bit uphill over many weeks to save the effort of having to push full wheelbarrows of compost uphill to be incorporated in the soil.
Having a strategy for where Autumn leaves can be piled, decomposed, and returned to soil solves the problem of hauling them off in the Autumn, leaving soil bare all winter to die and erode, and then hauling back in mulch in the spring. Tons of work and so expensive to hire out!
One has the freedom to plant culinary herbs wherever she so chooses, of course.
But consider the cook standing over the stove with hungry mouths expecting dinner and who needs that sprig of fresh basil STAT(!), she will be much happier to have planted that basil in her “Zone 1.” This is what I call the “Slipper Zone” — the range from your kitchen door that you would walk into wearing your house slippers.
If your culinary herbs are any farther out of reach than this area, they simply won’t be harvested in that moment and the pasta sauce will be without basil. Truly a shame when one has done all the work to grow the basil and make the sauce and that last connection goes unconnected.
Permaculture is a decentralized and leaderless cause. It is instead a shared ethic among human animals across the globe and throughout time.
In the 1970s there were a few folks in Australia who tend to be credited as “founding fathers” of the “Permaculture Movement.”
Like the founders of the government of the United States, their ideas were an assemblage of ideas that had been tried and tested by legions of peoples and cultures from time immemorial. They codified and packaged these ideas for transport to a new and modern generation. They looked at the modern ecological and societal dysfunctions and saw that packaging the Web of Life into a digestible philosophy for we post-industrial people who mostly never have even seen a healthy, working, old growth forest let alone lived in communion with one. And also like the founding of the U.S., this philosophy is always working to be “more perfect” as we grow, reflect, evolve, adapt, and change (and address the biases, inequities, and misplaced credit of the past.)
A permaculture lens helps us focus our eyes to the natural world surrounding us and acknowledges our place within it and our connection to it.
We strive to do this without bias or preconception. We add to the body of knowledge. We increase fertility, abundance, diversity, and beauty over time.
This project, which I call Gribley Permaculture, is my attempt to help my friends and neighbors (and all my fellow human animals interconnected in this living web) live in right relation with the land that they exist upon.
I want to help you understand your land better and understand yourself better.
When we understand Nature better, we understand Human Nature better.
No two patches of Earth are identical. Likewise, no two human animals are either. However, an individual shares so much more with all other living things than we differ. At the microscopic, genetic, molecular, and atomic scales we are made up of the same constituent parts ordered by the same indefatigable rules, and there is much wisdom to be gained in seeking understanding of that reality.
Plus, it’s really fun to integrate chickens and gardens and beautiful functional structures into your life, and I am learning to do that with increasing ease with each passing day.
You can too. Every home and every person can benefit from the application of the principles of permaculture to the decision-making process.
Whether you are one person with a tiny home and just enough time, money, and space to grow a small kitchen herb garden or a dedicated and ambitious homesteader, or a city or town that manages public parks, the beauty of Nature is that its rules are make sense from the atomic scale all the way to the cosmic scale.
I can help you with the nudge you may need to finally get the rhythm of harvesting nutritious foods from your home all year long. I can help you manage the waste that we create by living — everything from food scraps to forest debris to the waste that comes from our bodies.
I have found a lot of “meaning” and “purpose” in the work I have done on my homestead, I believe you will too.
We’re all in this together, connected in the web of life, traveling the cosmos together on Spaceship Earth.
Let’s make that connection to one another and let me know how I can help you better connect to the land on which you live.