My wife and I went semi-nomadic in 2010, traveling the mountain West for almost two years. Not having a settled home was eye-opening, and taught me a lot about one of my perennial themes: how much humans lost when we became domesticated by agriculture.

For a committed permaculturist to give up a home and yard seems almost hypocritical, since a core tenet of permaculture is to deeply know a place and community. But our nomadic yen was strong. We were ready to leave the buzz of Portland, and in that fiercely Greened city I was feeling redundant. Yet no other place was calling us to live there. So, Kiel asked me, “Do we have to live anywhere? Why not travel?” Permaculturists are often asked to arrive at a new place and rapidly assess local resources, climate, culture, and the land’s character. Nomadism seemed a good way to hone those skills.

Kiel and I put our house on the market in the spring and moved into a small motorhome. We wandered though the Sierras, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and Montana, slowly, with long stops. Over time, we settled into a pattern of two or three month stays in a modest rental house, punctuated by a few transition weeks in the RV while we traveled to and explored a new place. We fell naturally into a pattern of moving with the seasons, and getting to know a place in between.

We both had a vague feeling that this journeying was going to be important. I quickly found that, indeed, my landscape-reading skills improved—we learned to spot, even in high desert, those hidden east-facing ravines that stayed cool and moist and boasted vast biodiversity in their sweet microclimates. And we learned the social landscapes as well. The small towns of rural America no longer felt like the ones where we both had spent our childhoods. Now, too many rural hamlets looked and felt like clones of the same suburb, each having a vacant core bypassed with sprawling parking lots dotted with indistinguishable WalMart, Costco, Applebees, and Rite-Aid stores. As we roamed, we knew that larger understandings awaited us. The one we felt everywhere was that the world is shifting beneath everyone’s feet, and learning to be nimble and flexible will be a valuable trait in weathering the shocks of Peak Oil, climate instability, and economic collapse. But the tug of nomadism felt so deep that we suspected there was more to it than honing skills or a break from home. And after one special stop, some of the pieces fell into place.

We spent the summer of 2011 on a ranch off the northeastern corner of Yellowstone Park, in the shadow of the Beartooth range. Having grown surprisingly fond of the grasslands around us, we wanted to venture deeper into them, and spent a day east of Billings, walking the famous battlefield on the Little Bighorn where in 1876 Custer met his end. After arriving, we joined a graying crowd of retirees for a ranger’s lively talk on the battle. He had a keen sense of drama, and pulled our gaze across the very landscape where it all happened. Pointing south, he showed us the cloud-covered Wolf Mountains where Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse took those many of their people who refused to become Christianized farmers on the newly mandated reservation. The gully right in front of us was Deep Ravine, where a few of Custer’s men fled before they, too, were killed. Our minds’ eyes easily painted pictures, and I felt a growing sense of sadness, but not just for the many who had died where I stood.

The battle at Little Bighorn had been a victory for the plains tribes, but their war—and way of life—was lost soon after. A few years before, in 1868, the Fort Laramie Treaty had mapped a huge reservation across adjoining corners of what are now South Dakota, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arikara people, among others, were moved there. Tales of gold in 1874 in the Black Hills spawned a surge of miners and settlers onto the reservation, in violation of the treaty. The US Army drove out some of them, but thousands more streamed in. Disgusted, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, the Hunkpapa leader Gall, and other warrior leaders brought thousands of their people into the unceded Indian territories, a chunk of northern Wyoming where treaty declared “no white person or persons shall be permitted to settle upon or occupy.” Here the native people could hunt bison and live as they wanted. But in 1875 they were ordered back to the reservation. They refused. The Indian Agencies branded them as hostile, and hot-headed George Custer came as part of the multi-pronged force sent to bring them in. The army’s humiliating loss at Little Bighorn spurred the US government to pour more troops into the Indian Wars, and within a few years most of America’s indigenous people had been forced onto reservations, killed, or driven into Canada.

As Kiel and I walked the battlefield, we spotted signs of the fight. I was moved by the pathetically shallow pits that Major Reno’s outnumbered men had scraped with their mess plates in an open meadow, trying to hide from a ceaseless hail of arrows and bullets. But I was more struck by what the land around us was saying. Here were enormous expanses of grassland and sage, with trees in the valleys and on the mountains, as far as we could see. It was rich land, and, having spent weeks in nearby Yellowstone where the valleys are tracked with renewed bison herds, it wasn’t hard to grasp the riches this land had held. It once swarmed with tens of millions of deer, elk, bison, bear, wolf, trout, and birds. The plains people lived amidst this abundance at choice seasonal camps across an enormous territory where sometimes hundreds of families gathered. They were hunters and foragers, not farmers, able to trust that the land would provide for them, that there was enough for all without working the soil or clinging to a piece of ground.  On the river below us had sprawled the huge encampment of families that Custer had attacked: at least 7500 Cheyenne, Lakota, Arikara, and others. Migratory people from many tribes, living on this land without owning it, all having converged there in 1876 after Sitting Bull had told them of his auspicious sun-dance vision: headless US soldiers falling from the sky, “raining down like grasshoppers.”

I stood looking at these now fenced, divided, roaded, bought and owned lands and the cattle and sheep grazing on them. Barbed-wire fences netted the grassland to the horizon in every direction. It made me numb, knowing that we—my ancestors and their companions—had taken and tamed every bit of this huge landscape, the unceded lands and much more, taken it away from those whom our eloquent ranger called “the freest people in the world.” We did this because, if I can use George W. Bush’s words more honestly than he ever did, we hated them for their freedom.

The war between farming people and nomads is as old as farming itself. It’s not that the two cultures are incompatible. But the mind of a farming people can’t conceive of harmony with foragers. The minds of agriculturists can’t conceive of harmony with much of anything. I’ve known gentle farmers. But I’m using the word “farmer” here as shorthand for a bundle of concepts, principally for the “civilized” mind that views the wild world as a threat to be subdued or a fragile, off-limits temple, rather than the one source of life and home that can always provide. When humans were domesticated by agriculture about 10,000 years ago, one of the key prejudices bred into us was that the only way to survive was to control nature. We can easily see how this applies to wild, exterior nature: You survived winter not by learning what food the land still held, but by hard laboring to make the land give up a hoardable surplus. But more importantly, we have tamed our interior nature as well. Those who wouldn’t subdue their own wild nature were brought under control. To use the communal grain storage that farmers were told would let them survive winter, to have your fields protected from thieves, to buy protection from the powerful, farmers have always paid the local strongman. If they didn’t pay their tithe to those who guarded the grain surplus, the leader’s goons would force them to, or run them off, or kill them. The root of the word “lord” is “hlaford,” or “keeper of the loaves,” showing the ancient relationship between controlling grain and controlling people. And when the same elites wanted to build their monumental tombs, you worked for them, or they took your crops and enslaved your family. It wasn’t just plants and animals that were domesticated.

We traded a great deal to become civilized. There’s a lot I like about civilization, from writing and the Constitution to ethnic restaurants and my iPhone. But Hobbes’s famous dictum, that the lives of “savages” were “nasty, brutish, solitary, and short” is nonsense written by a man who rarely left his desk. As I’ve written before, the advent of farming and the civilization that it allowed brought a decline in lifespan, health, leisure, and freedom. Famine is far more common among farmers than among foragers. Lifespan and health didn’t return to pre-agricultural levels nor did the certainty of famine recede until the unsustainable splurge of the oil age gave us the equally unsustainable technologies for converting whole ecosystems into food, medicine, and machines on a titanic scale. Both leisure and freedom have been in decline since farming began. Labor activists, the poor, and any post-9/11 traveler can attest that this process is still underway. I no longer see America’s increasingly ignored Constitution as a glorious step forward, but merely one of a long line of progressively more desperate holding actions against the immense power of elites to suppress the elementary rights of their subjects. To what state have we declined when only the revocable permission of the powerful can guarantee our basics? We gave up a staggering number of freedoms to have our food source guaranteed.

Why would anyone trade their freedom for poor health and a life of slavery? I’ve come to doubt that people became farmers voluntarily, and there are many recent examples of hunter-gatherer groups who took one look at farmers, saw what the trade entailed, and said no thanks (see Chapter 6 of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel). Foraging peoples are almost always converted into farmers by a combination of terror, coercion and the extinction of even the memory of an alternative. The people who once roamed the unceded lands of Wyoming could tell you how it was done, as could those all over the Americas, Australia, and Africa. Why should we believe it was ever different? Farming and the civilization it spawned are grounded in fear and oppression.

We can only speculate why people took up farming, but none of the common arguments explain our sacrifice, and they often contradict each other. One theory is that the climate deteriorated, making it necessary to settle and intensify food production. But an opposing theory is that humans found “gardens of Eden,” places so lush and productive that they settled there, had too many babies amidst the abundance, and then needed to grow more food. There are other guesses, too. What all the theories fail to explain is why: If agriculture is more work than hunting, shortens lifespan, increases disease, doesn’t prevent famine, and reduces personal freedom, why would anyone do it?

I can think of two good reasons, and together they form the heart of our culture: fear and coercion. The two theories I cite above, and most of the others, are based in scarcity. According to them either inhospitable climate caused hunger, or overpopulation caused hunger. Hungry people would be receptive to an alternative, even at the cost of leisure and freedom. They might resort to farming, especially if a charismatic leader were there to encourage them. But when conditions improved, wouldn’t they go back to hunting? Two other theories show why this might not happen. One is the Social Hypothesis, in which “Big Men” (the anthropologist’s term for strong but informal leaders) use a complex blend of loans, promises, and status to boost village food production for potlatch-style feasts that, while feeding many, increase their own power, in part by showing how good life could be under their rule. Once centralized power over food is in place, the leaders and their enforcers can hold onto it easily. Another theory is the hunter-ruler concept, in which an early farming village is raided and enslaved by well-armed hunters who find they like being at the top, and remain as a powerful and parasitic elite. Yet another is that people gathered at sites like Göbeckli Tepe in Turkey that predate agriculture, to build enormous temples under the direction of an elite priesthood. These huge projects outstripped the carrying capacity of the land, and the priests supervised additional workers to grow food for the builders—and for themselves.

Whatever the cause, farming creates a surplus that must be stored, and that leads inexorably to a concentration of power into the hands of those who control that surplus. In an agricultural society with its specialized labor, dependency on food storage, taxation of the masses, unequal land access, and controlling elite, Henry Kissinger’s cynical strategy is true: Food is an instrument of power. And that is why a farming civilization cannot tolerate nomads or hunter-gatherers. Nomads need nothing from civilization.  They can’t be controlled.

As I looked over the immense grasslands that spilled to the ends of Montana’s big sky, I wondered why my ancestors had insisted on taking it all. In this immense land, wasn’t there enough room for Sitting Bull and his clan to pull their travoix through one corner of it, hunt bison and make camp? But I quickly realized that it wasn’t about having enough room. It was about control. A wild people can’t be coerced. Make them pay taxes? There is nothing they need from the government, and much they don’t want. Christianize them and make them farm? The land is the source of spirit and offers abundant food for the gathering, while farming would kill all that. Offer them a fenced parcel? The land belongs to everyone and no one.

Can you see how frightening all this is to a people raised to believe in original sin, the mercilessness of God, the virtue of hard work, the value of being meek, the need for law and order, the certainty of Hell for the fallen, and all the other fear-based indoctrinations driven into us by an elite whose first need is compliant servants? We could never live in harmony with people who wouldn’t play according to those rules. That way lay chaos, and a freedom that we find inconceivable and terrifying. To trust that nature and the land would provide everything we need meant that all our hard work has been a waste—that we’ve been foolish slaves all our lives. We couldn’t stand to have our world view undermined that way. The idea that out there were free people living in a deep union with nature while we toiled behind the plow, quaked before a vengeful god, and tugged our forelocks respectfully at our betters—that was intolerable, to the toilers, yes, but especially to the elites who ruled them. The wild humans had to be domesticated, or killed. Always. Everywhere. Or else some of us might stop being afraid.

And that has been the trajectory of agricultural civilization. A trade of freedom for order and supposed security, made at the expense of health, cultural diversity, and leisure as well. Foraging and horticultural people don’t have a Bill of Rights because they don’t need one. There is rarely enough concentration of power in their culture great enough to take their rights away. They have art, music, shelter, language, food, tools, justice, medicine, history, play, wisdom—and freedoms in a sense so profound that I can only get glimmers of it. For all that we have lost, the only significant gain I can think of (Big Pharma? The military? Welfare? Freeways? Processed food?) is writing. The rest becomes unnecessary when you leave the culture of fear. And I suspect someone could have come up with writing without civilization.

Can a farming civilization ever stop being afraid? Only if it is no longer brainwashed into the belief that domination, labor, and order are what protect it from the caprices of an untrustable nature. Can it ever allow other cultures to exist alongside of it? I’m not sure. I have a vision of farmers living only where farming has proven to be more or less sustainable, in large river valleys like the Nile and Mississippi, while nomads, foragers, and some horticulturists live in the hills, the smaller valleys, and the delicate lands that agriculture can only destroy. But that would demand that those farmers not fear the freedom of the nomads, and so far, that hasn’t happened. I hope we can mature to that point. I wish someday the descendants of Sitting Bull, as well as mine, can ride again across unfenced plains to hunt bison and gather in transient villages along the Little Bighorn, and anywhere.

My wife and I are not true nomads, and couldn’t ever be. Those days died in 1876. Our nomadism relied on fossil fuels, landlords with furnished rentals, farmers to sell us food, and the whole bloody infrastructure of civilization. I have no illusions about whose shoulders—and corpses—I’m standing on. But I’ve now had the chance to stretch my leash far enough to glimpse the larger features of a culture grounded in fear-mongering and violence, whose very laws, values, work ethic, and traditions enshrine the domination of the many by the powerful few. That is a culture that is killing a planet.

I’m still struggling to stay out of that culture. When I was about to graduate from the prep school that my father strained to afford, and I was blindly following my ordained trajectory by applying to college, a vague unease hit me. I remember telling a friend, “I know that all this schooling has bred me for it, but I don’t really want to contribute to this culture.” That has stayed with me. Sometimes I haven’t had the strength of character to stay true to that vision. Since those days, I’ve moved in and out of mainstream culture a couple of times. But this episode of nomadism has helped firm one thought: that at the end of my life, I hope I’ve done more to stop this culture of fear and create alternatives to it than contribute to it. And I will always be grateful for the gift of clarity and commitment given to me by the freest people in the world on that day overlooking the Little Bighorn River.

—Toby Hemenway, January 3, 2013

Permaculture is notoriously hard to define. A recent survey shows that people simultaneously believe it is a design approach, a philosophy, a movement, and a set of practices. This broad and contradiction-laden brush doesn’t just make permaculture hard to describe. It can be off-putting, too. Let’s say you first encounter permaculture as a potent method of food production and are just starting to grasp that it is more than that, when someone tells you that it also includes goddess spirituality, and anti-GMO activism, and barefoot living. What would you make of that? And how many people think they’ve finally got the politics of permaculturists all figured out, and assume that we would logically also be vegetarians, only to find militant meat-eaters in the ranks? What kind of philosophy could possibly umbrella all those divergent views? Or is it a philosophy at all? I’m going to argue here that the most accurate and least muddled way to think of permaculture is as a design approach, and that we are often misdirected by the fact that it fits into a larger philosophy and movement which it supports. But it is not that philosophy or movement. It is a design approach for realizing a new paradigm. And we’ll find that this way of defining it is also a balm to those in other ecological design fields and technologies who get annoyed, understandably, when permaculturists tell them, “Oh, yes, your work is part of permaculture, too.”

Humans are a problem-solving species. We uncover challenges—How do we get food? How do we make shelter? How do we stay healthy?—and then we develop tools to solve those problems. Permaculture is one of those tools. For the last 10,000 years, agriculture and the civilization it built have been the way humans attacked the problems of meeting basic needs. Because we live on a planet that for millennia was large compared to the human population and its needs and impact, our species could focus on expanding and improving agriculture’s immense power to convert wild ecosystems into food and habitat for people, and we could ignore ecosystem health. But our industrial civilization of seven billion is chewing up ecosystems relentlessly. We are learning that without healthy ecosystems, humans—and everything else—suffer. So we cannot focus solely on the problem, “How do we meet human needs?” but must now add the words, “while preserving ecosystem health.” Rafter Ferguson has offered that question as a definition of permaculture. He’s onto something, though I think that “meeting human needs while preserving and increasing ecosystem health” is the goal of permaculture, and not its definition. But it gives some clues toward defining it, and helps untangle the knots wrapped around “What is permaculture?” It names and clarifies the problem that permaculture is trying to solve.

Thomas Kuhn, in his masterwork, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, uses the word “paradigm” to mean the viewpoint that defines the problems to be solved in a particular field. Kuhn explains that the proper framing of a paradigm reduces the number of blind alleys that researchers go down by re-stating a problem in clearer terms. New paradigms usually require—and spur the development of—new tools to solve the now-reframed problem.

“Paradigm” has been trivialized through overuse and I’m sure that Kuhn is spinning in his grave. But I don’t think it’s abusing the term to view the change in humanity’s principal goal from “meeting human needs” to “meeting human needs while preserving ecosystem health” as a paradigm shift. It changes the tools that we use, and the mindset required to develop and use new, appropriate tools. It restores a relationship between people and nature that agriculture, by treating nature like a mere resource to be subjugated and consumed, had severed. Suddenly, agriculture and industrial society look like scourges and technologies of destruction, rather than the saviors of humanity that we’ve regarded them. That’s quite a shift.

Permaculture and other ecological approaches are attempts to articulate this new paradigm, by framing the problem and offering tools and strategies to pursue its solution. When the larger problem is framed so that it reveals the interdependent relationship between human needs and ecosystem health, we can more clearly see the steps to the solution. Now we can ask, what are human needs, and how can each of them be met while retaining, restoring, and improving ecosystem health? We know how to articulate human needs, and we have metrics to gauge ecosystem health. Our problem now is to reach this twinned goal, and permaculture offers us hope.

So, why, then, is permaculture so confusing to define? I think it is because in the early days of any new paradigm, the boundary between the new paradigm and the tools—mental and physical—needed to articulate and solve it is blurry. We’re confusing the mindset required to do permaculture effectively with the work of doing it. Let me give a historical example to show what I mean.

In the 18th Century, combustion was explained by something called phlogiston. Matter was thought to be composed of elements plus principles, and phlogiston was the principle of combustibility. When an element burned, it released phlogiston, and burning stopped when all was released. The residue contained the principle of calx, the true elemental substance. The theory was backed by the fact that many things, such as wood and other fuels, lose weight when they burn.

In the 1770s, cracks began to appear in phlogiston theory. Antoine Lavoisier, using careful experiments and new, accurate balances, found that many substances gained—not lost—weight when they burned. In 1771, Carl Scheele, and later Joseph Priestley and others, produced samples of a gas (the yet-unnamed oxygen) that made flames burn more brightly and longer. They called this “dephlogistonated air,” since, to fit into the theory, it had to be able to accept more phlogiston from burning substances than air could. This sort of stop-gap, convoluted reasoning is one of the first signs that a theory is failing. By 1777, Lavoisier was sure this gas was a pure element that combined with others to support burning, and began to reject phlogiston theory. Priestley and others objected; the were simply not able to recognize oxygen for what it was. They knew that elements contained principles, like phlogiston and calx, and these principles combined with elements, were hidden or revealed through processes such as burning, and were emitted, unchanged. The idea that a substance could chemically bond with another and be transformed did not fit their paradigm of matter. It was, literally, inconceivable. But phlogiston theory was doomed by the piling up of inconvenient facts, and by 1800, what is now called the chemical revolution had swept it away.

The rejection of phlogiston and the acceptance of the chemical revolution was logically simple—the oxygen theory of combustion snuffed out the contradictions of phlogiston—but it was cognitively difficult because of the mental barrier created by phlogiston thinking. It took a revolution in thought to see oxygen.

Many of the pioneers of this revolution called themselves natural philosophers, and they led an enormous shift in worldview that required and prompted a new way of thinking about nearly every natural phenomena and event. From the 1500s to the early 1800s, the new astronomers, chemists, and physicists were seen as radicals and a threat to the social order. They often were: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and other revolutionaries were promoters of this new scientific approach based on measurement and experiment. The philosophy that guided their work was, at that time, hard to distinguish from their work itself. Nowadays we view chemistry and the other sciences bred during this tumultuous era as settled disciplines that are neatly split from politics and philosophy, but in those days, to practice chemistry or astronomy was part of a radically new worldview, and the boundaries between the scientists’ radical philosophy, the problems that it set for them to work on, and their experimental approach to those problems were not distinct.

Permaculture, like phlogiston-cramped chemistry, can’t be understood well under the old paradigm, and I think this is why it is often regarded as a movement and philosophy as well as a problem-solving approach. To grasp permaculture fully, we need to have made the shift to the new paradigm.

New tools and new paradigms mutually reinforce and strengthen one another, and permaculture is one of many examples of this. Lavoisier’s improved balances exposed inconsistencies that toppled phlogiston theory from its perch, and demanded a new way of thinking about gases and matter. In a similar vein, permaculture’s design methods such as zones, sectors, and needs-and-yields, by emphasizing relationships and consequences, reveal the weaknesses of thinking in terms of isolated events and static objects. The flaws in old-paradigm concepts like infinite growth, waste, and “externalities” become glaringly obvious under a whole-systems view. The tools encourage the new thinking, and the new paradigm helps create the appropriate tools.

Many people come to permaculture knowing that there is something wrong with the old worldview, but they don’t yet have a new paradigm to replace it. They are attracted to permaculture as better gardening or as a means of social change, and gradually adopt the new worldview as they see it overcoming the flaws and damage of the old. Others come to permaculture after shifting to this holistic paradigm because permaculture supports it and offers an approach to working within it. In both cases, it takes time to fully grasp the depth of permaculture in part because nearly all of us were raised in the old paradigm. After twenty years of practicing permaculture design, I still have trouble defining it.

Permaculture, then, is not a philosophy or worldview, and it is not a single tool, either. But to use permaculture well requires adopting a new worldview and new tools. Like the early chemists who called themselves philosophers, right now the boundary between the tools, the approach to using them, and the worldview that makes their effective use possible are blurry.

In some ways permaculture is in a class similar to the problem-solving approach called the scientific method, the experimentalist view developed by Lavoisier, Boyle, and their peers. It is not the paradigm, it is not the tools. It is the approach for using the tools—a way of working that is guided by the paradigm. So of course this is confusing. People have been arguing over what “the scientific method” is for centuries: is it deductive or inductive, does the hypothesis or the data come first? Most scientists can’t tell you. They learn the scientific method by using it, and it’s devilishly hard to explain what it is. Sound familiar?

With all this in mind, I think the definition of permaculture that must rise to the top is that it is a design approach to arrive at solutions, just as the scientific method is an experimental approach. In more concrete terms, permaculture tells how to choose from a dauntingly large toolkit—all the human technologies and strategies for living—to solve the new problem of sustainability. It is an instruction manual for solving the challenges laid out by the new paradigm of meeting human needs while enhancing ecosystem health. The relationship explicitly spelled out in that view, which connects humans to the larger, dynamic environment, forces us to think in relational terms, which is a key element of permaculture. The two sides of the relationship are explicitly named in two permaculture ethics: care for the Earth, and care for people. And knowing we need both sides of that relationship is immensely helpful in identifying the problems we need to solve. First, what are human needs? The version of the permaculture flower that I work with names some important ones: food, shelter, water, waste recycling, energy, community, health, spiritual fulfillment, justice, and livelihood. The task set out by permaculture, in the new paradigm, is to meet those needs while preserving ecosystem health, and we have metrics for assessing the latter. The way those needs are met will vary by place and culture, but the metrics of ecosystem health can be applied fairly universally.

This clarifies the task set by permaculture, and I think it also distinguishes permaculture from the philosophy—the paradigm—required to use it effectively and helps us understand why permaculture is often called a movement. Permaculturists make common cause with all the other millions of people who are shifting to the new paradigm, and it is that shift—not the design approach of permaculture that supports it—that is worthy of being called a movement. Permaculture is one approach used by this movement to solve the problems identified by the new paradigm. To do this, it operates on the level of strategies rather than techniques, but that is a subject for another essay. Because we are, in a way, still in the phlogiston era of our ecological awareness, we don’t know how to categorize permaculture, and we can confuse it with the paradigm that it helps us explore. Permaculture is not the movement of sustainability and it is not the philosophy behind it; it is the problem-solving approach the movement and the philosophy can use to meet their goals and design a world in which human needs are met while enhancing the health of this miraculous planet that supports us.

The Permaculture Flower, modified from Holmgren. The petals represent the basic human needs, and we work to meet them sustainably on the personal, local, and regional levels.

There’s been a lively discussion on permaculturists’ occasional planting of introduced species known to naturalize (or, in loaded terms, invasive species) at this blog. Some there have disputed that exotics can play critical roles in habitat, and I posted the words below to show that removal of exotics can be very damaging to native wildlife:

Here are hard data on introduced plants that have rapidly formed partnerships with native insects, from a paper, “Exotics as Host Plants of the California Butterfly Fauna,” by Sherri Graves and Arthur Shapiro, in Biological Conservation (2003) 110:413-433. It was sent to me by Mary McAllister, a SF blogger (http://milliontrees.me) concerned about wholesale removal of healthy exotic trees from large swaths of rural SF-area parks. Other ecologists questioning the wisdom of natives-only policies are Mark Davis, Dov Sax, Erle Ellis, Matt Chew, and Peter Del Tredici, if you want to find papers by them. There is, indeed, widespread criticism of invasion biology by biologists.

Dr Shapiro is an ecologist at UC-Davis. His findings:

In 1925, California had 292 species of naturalized exotic plants. In 1993, there were 1057. So about 75% of California’s exotics have been there less than a century. Yet overall, 32% of California’s native butterfly species are now feeding or breeding in non-native plants. Some specifics:

Yellow star thistle, a noted pest plant, is a major nectar source for many central valley and foothill butterflies. Eucalyptus is a major roosting species for Monarchs now that native trees have been decimated by logging and development along Monarch migration routes. Eucs may have prevented great reduction of Monarch populations. (I’ve seen a photo of thousands of Monarchs in a Euc.)

Marshland butterfly species, greatly reduced by development, have increased again by breeding and feeding on introduced wetland plants, and these non-natives stay green longer than the natives once did, allowing extension of the breeding season. These introduced hosts may have been critical for the survival of wetland butterflies decimated by development. In at least two, and possibly more cases, exotics allowed other butterfly species to extend their breeding from 2 to 4-6 or more generations per year, helping their populations rebound.

In the city of Davis, 29 of 32 butterfly species breed on introduced plants. 13 of them have no known native hosts in Davis at all. This suggests that introduced plants have prevented the extinction of local butterfly populations in developed areas. Alfalfa and vetch fields have been colonized by at least 12 species of butterflies, with extremely dense populations.

Shapiro shows many other cases where native butterflies are feeding and breeding on introduced plants like Cork oak, passionflower, Bermuda grass, Senna, Rumex, as well as Monterey pine outside of its natural range. On the downside, Shapiro noted two cases of butterflies breeding on exotics that were toxic to larvae, wasting those breedings. But the overall finding was that many species of introduced plants could each support many species of insects, and individual species of insects were able to feed on multiple introduced species.

There are many papers like this. Multiply this California paper on one order of bugs by 50 states and all the insect orders, and you have thousands of insect species relying, critically, on thousands of introduced plant species.

What is interesting here is that, like native enthusiast Doug Tallamy, Art Shapiro is an entomologist, yet the two come to opposite conclusions based on hard data. I think the data support both: native plants are critical for insect health, and exotics have rapidly co-evolved with many species of native insects for critical support, especially in cases where development has destroyed local hosts.

So I think it’s time to start dialing down the rhetoric about exotics breaking up native-species partnerships. In fact, to me this raises an irony. This paper shows that when development or farming has eliminated native hosts, removal of large areas of introduced plants can destroy the only available hosts for native insects. So I’d like to turn around the whole question raised by this blog: We have absolutely no evidence that permaculturists (as opposed to, say, nurseries) have ever introduced a species that has later escaped into the wild from their planting. That’s just a “what if” scenario with no support for it, so, quoting Beatriz (a poster at the above blog): “Where are the DATA” for this assertion?

But we know very definitely that natives-only people have removed from large areas, wholesale, valuable host species, like Eucalyptus, star thistle, and many others. Dr. Shapiro and many others have expressed abhorrence for this very damaging practice: Seehttp://milliontrees.me/2011/10/10/professor-arthur-shapiros-comment-on-the-environmental-impact-report-for-the-natural-areas-program/.

Permaculturists, unlike nativists, are not going into wild and semi-wild lands and exterminating valuable host species. Permies don’t have the kind of hubris that says we know what’s best for wild land (we have other forms of hubris!). We restrict our activities to planting valuable wildlife species in yards, farms, and other highly developed areas. We’re taught to stay out of the bush, as Mollison says. That is a far more conservative and safe action than messing around in the wild.

I think we can safely conclude that native plant enthusiasts have done far more damage to native insect populations than any permaculturists, real damage at scale, versus hypothetical damage. And I am grateful to Sue’s blog for the irony of helping to point that out.

Look, we’re all human, and we tinker with things we don’t understand, as part of our nature. Permaculturists are learning from nativists that it’s a bad idea to plant introduced species known to be local “naturalizers,” to use a neutral term. And I hope the nativists (and I am a native plant lover) will learn that it is equally unwise to exterminate naturalized species, because the roles of those species are not understood, but are known now to often be critical hosts to many natives. We have a lot to learn.

Whenever I feel like raising my blood pressure a few points, I read The Wall Street Journal editorial page. And the June 2-3, 2012 issue didn’t disappoint me. In an article called “Robin Hoods Don’t Smash Windows,” John Agresto, the former president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, makes the familiar arguments against the redistribution of wealth: Anyone who wants it believes “that others must give when they demand, that others are means, not ends.” He says that implementing wealth redistribution usually requires force and violence. And he’s right about all of this, just not in the way he means.

Mr. Agresto is locked in a small-picture nearsightedness here, and, unsurprisingly, it works to his benefit. He can’t see that corporate capitalism inherently causes redistribution of wealth upwards, from poor to rich. That is the definition, after all, of capital: accumulation of wealth and control of resources. Contrary to Agresto’s assumptions, concentration of wealth is not a law of nature or a reward for virtuous living. It is a deliberate result of policy. This wealth extraction has allowed a tiny group to seize control of the global commons, and they are selling it back at a price ruinous to everyone, including the planet.

Mr. Agresto, like many in power, fears a fairer distribution of wealth because it would disrupt a system that is working for them. They can’t see the many mechanisms explicitly designed to pull wealth from the pockets of the many and divert it toward the few. These methods are invisible background to him. If he sees them at all, they are the way things are meant to be. To change them, he says, would cause chaos and reward the undeserving. This is the ancient excuse of the elite: We are on top because we deserve to be, it is the natural order of things for us to be here, and if others want what we have taken from them, they are morally weak, jealous, greedy, and lazy. The upper class ignores the many processes, laws, and customs that, at threat of violence and imprisonment, keep wealth flowing disproportionately toward them. It is not, as he says, the left that sees other humans as merely means. It is the very rich, who use the entire populace as a means to more wealth.

Do you need examples of wealth extraction in action? One of the most widespread is the mortgage loan. Americans have been sold the notion that home ownership is a means to independence, when, rigged as the system is, it’s just the opposite: a road to dependence on your employer and eternal debt. Banks have fixed mortgage payments so that a borrower pays mostly interest in the first years of a loan, minimizing borrower equity. That’s wealth extraction. In a $200,000, 30-year mortgage at 5%, the total ratio of interest to principal is roughly 0.9 to 1. But in the first 5 years of that loan you’ll pay interest at 3 to 1 over principal, $48,076 compared to $16,341. And 25 years later, for the rare souls who stay in one house that long, those proportions are reversed. The bankers get theirs first, and only after decades do you get any real equity. A fair mortgage would keep interest and principal at the same ratio over the life of the loan. Here we have a game rigged by the powerful, and with 48 million mortgages in the US, it siphons about a trillion dollars each year—money that could be invested in equity for everyone—away from the many toward the few. Since the average house is sold after 7 years, resetting the payment schedule, most borrowers never get much equity at all. This is a conscious design to redistribute wealth upward, and it is maintained by force. Try making a more equitable interest payment, and see how long it is before the police come to throw you out of your house. Redistribution of wealth by force already exists, just not in the way the rich want us to think of it.

The home mortgage is only one of countless methods by which the rich use their power to move wealth toward them. Corporate and wealth-favoring tax breaks, high taxes on earnings versus low taxes on capital gains, redistribution of your taxes to corporate officers via government contracts and subsidies, expensive lobbyists who write the laws, exorbitant credit card interest, pre-payment penalties, executive salaries thousands of times greater than those of workers—these are all legal gimmicks to help the rich pull money out of the pockets of the rest of us. It is a system designed for the rich to direct resource flows toward them, not because they merit it, but simply because they control it.

So please, when you hear someone complain about the dangers of redistribution of wealth, remind them that we already have it. We redistribute wealth upwards. And indeed, it is dangerous.

—June 16, 2012

One of the scary factoids in circulation these days is the revelation that grocery stores hold only a three- or four-day supply of food. People wield this statistic to argue that our food system is appallingly insecure and in grave danger of failure. We’re only a few days from starvation, goes the frightening story, and we’re liable one day to find our supermarket shelves empty and the populace in panic.

To accept this forecast uncritically, though, means ignoring how complex systems work. We can scare ourselves by selectively focusing on a small piece of a larger picture and behaving as if that tiny bit were the whole story. It’s a natural tendency: Any organism interested in surviving needs to focus on what’s going wrong much more than what’s going right. But in this case, believing the tale of empty shelves may distract us from more urgent problems.

Storing large amounts of grains and other foods in cities is an ancient strategy, and it hasn’t protected against famine. Many European cities and walled towns kept grain supplies designed to carry them through hard times, yet, according to historian Fernand Braudel, famine remained a regular visitor. Continent-wide, famines that killed 10% or more of the population struck Europe 13 times in the 16th century, 11 times in the 17th, and 16 times in the 18th century. Local famines were far more common, yet most towns had large granaries. With a little thought, we can see why storing food in public granaries isn’t an effective strategy. How much food would a city of 50,000 need to store to get through months of utter crop failure? The math is brutal: the town would be almost knee deep in grain. And, more urgently, during a food panic, how many pounds of grain being handed to you by the state would make you calm down? Five? Ten? That’s only a couple of day’s supply for a small family. During a food panic, I suspect the government would need to hand out 20 to 50 pounds of grain per family every few days to calm a frightened populace. And during a panic, even the largest food storages are emptied quickly. The enemy here is fear, not the food system. In my book, anyone shouting “Run to the stores and buy as much food as you can!” deserves a special place in hell.

Storing more than a few days supply of food within a city makes little sense for a number of reasons. It requires dedicated storage buildings in cities—where space is most expensive. We’d need security forces to protect the food, a bureaucracy to run the logistics, and all that food must be cycled in and out for freshness. Plus, imagine a half million or more hungry people all converging on central granaries expecting to be fed. The logistical problems are enormous: think FEMA or TSA, and you can see why it’s the wrong level to operate at. A much more sensible place for emergency food storage is at the household level. If you are worried about food shortages, get your own stash and store as much as makes you comfortable. In designing a solution to a problem, it’s critical to intervene at the proper level, and here, the household is a far more effective level than the state.

Another reason for not instituting centralized food warehouses is that food systems are based much more on flow than they are on storage, and they usually have been. Claiming that our strategy for food delivery is precarious is not thinking in terms of dynamic whole systems, in which flows are far greater than storage—though both are important. Imagine someone panicking because they suddenly realized that their yard’s soil only contains enough water for four days of plant growth. That may be true, but we know also that water is constantly flowing in—storage is only one bit of the picture. Moisture is being pulled upward through the soil, rain is likely before long, plus we have the water line from the street, household graywater, and all the other ways that the tiny bit of water on that land is being renewed continuously. Yes, it’s possible that all the water delivery systems could break down simultaneously, just as the whole food system could, but that entails large-scale network failures—the utterly perfect storm—that would likely send signals well in advance and affect much more than water or food.

If we don’t look at flows, and don’t think in terms of whole systems, we can make ourselves very scared about the complex systems surrounding us. I call this tendency “drawing the box too small.” If we draw a boundary at, say, the city limits of Chicago and measure how much food is available within it, we can get frightened at how little there is: a few days supply. But that’s not really Chicago’s whole food supply, is it? If we enlarge the boundary to, say, what can be delivered to the city within an hour’s drive, suddenly that food supply contains all the farms and gardens, warehouses, cold-storage units, processing plants, feedlots, ships anchored in Lake Michigan full of grain, distribution centers, rail depots, and other sources of food within a 50-mile radius. That’s a lot more than a four-day supply. Then, enlarge the box to a day’s drive and the food supply will last for weeks. And if we increase the box to include the entire nation or continent—which is still only a part of our food system—we now have an essentially infinite supply of food, renewed every growing season, since the US is still a net food producer.

What makes think that something as unnatural as city limits is the boundary of a city’s food supply? And what kind of catastrophe would limit a city to the food within it? Obviously, a local disaster such as a hurricane or earthquake could do this, but it also could destroy any food grown or stored there, or start a panic that depletes even the largest supply. (Or takes martial law to protect it and draconian rules to distribute it. I’d rather store my own.) Even Hurricane Katrina didn’t prevent food from reaching New Orleans before many people went hungry. Perhaps a rupture of the transportation system would do it. But what would cause this? Rapid destruction of large parts of the highway or rail system is unlikely except in war or national strike (and striking workers and their families need to eat, too). These networks are highly distributed and redundant: There are many routes to any city. A major and sudden fuel shortage might do it, but I suspect that we’d quickly see rationing and redistribution of fuel away from many non-food uses, since governments know that hungry people start revolts. And actual transportation of food only uses 4% of the total energy in the food system (Weber and Matthews, Env. Sci. Technology, 2008, 42: 3508), so a fuel shortage would have less effect on moving food into cities, and more on the production and processing of food, which is a slower process that would unwind over weeks and months, not days.

There’s a lot wrong with our food system, but its “just in time” nature is not one of the flaws. We need to ask why the idea of four days of food on grocery shelves scares us, and why it makes us believe we have a precarious food system. Cities have always drawn from the surrounding countryside for their food. Why is it hard to trust that the current food system will continue to deliver food into cities? I suspect that part of our fear is that the size and number of components of the food systems is so vast that we can’t easily grasp how it works or believe that something that complex can continue to function long. It’s like worrying that your circulatory system—with its billions of red blood cells, pulsing lung tissue, ornately branching veins and arteries, and complicated gas exchange network—will fail and you won’t be able to get oxygen into your blood. It makes me dizzy just to think about it. Fortunately, complex adaptive systems such as our bodies and our food supply continue to function without our conscious control; they are highly networked and on many levels.

The long-term storage for our food supply is on the land, widely distributed, where it belongs. The food system has many tiers, and the “food stored in cities” level is a minor component. The system encompasses many levels of intermediate food storage components such as farms, cooperative grain-storage towers, processing plants, warehouses, shipping in transit, and distribution centers, each holding or supplying a significant percentage of our food supply and operating over a timeframe of weeks and months. It is a system in which flow makes up more of the capacity than storage. With a perishable good such as food, that’s as it should be. Having more than a few day’s supply of food stored at the end of the chain, in cities, would be a misallocation of resources away from the sources that generate the food and direct its constant stream toward the user. It’s smart for residents to store emergency food in their home, in whatever quantity makes them feel safe. But an expensive revamping of our food system to build collective infrastructure for urban food storage makes little sense when flow is the key element of any food system.

Our food system has many flaws. We need more locally grown food. The current system is far too dependent on fossil fuels, is concentrated in too few seed varieties and a handful of corporations, is subsidized toward unhealthy and unwise products, and wastes prodigious quantities of water and nutrients. But an absence of giant state-run granaries is not one of its failings. In a complex system, flows are at least as important as storages, and is the appropriate place to focus. A secure food system stems far more from the flow of food and the existence of many levels of nearby and faraway storages than from the amount of food on grocery shelves. To claim that our just-in-time system is precarious is drawing the box far too small, and ignores the flow-based nature of the complex, constantly readjusting systems that we depend on.

I have a kind of paralysis. I think many of us do. It comes when my ancient kitchen faucet leaks constantly—even with new washers—and I’m forced to replace it. It comes when a section of stovepipe rusts through. It comes, especially, when I can’t put off restoring our side porch any longer, and I look at the trees beyond our meadow, trying to decide which ones I will fell for the posts. I stand paralyzed at the task of selecting the least destructive option, paralyzed with reluctance at having to use more stuff. Is this what inventing a new culture is like, aching over every decision that will scalp over more forest or chew a new hole in the earth?

That constant twinge feels stronger than mere consumer guilt. I consume only a fraction of what I did ten years ago, but the ache is still there, and it’s wearing me out. So I’ve begun searching for patterns that can tell me when it’s appropriate to use things, when it’s justifiable to divert matter from the biosphere and geosphere and cycle it into my personal ecosystem. These patterns also provide a guide to right livelihood, as our jobs often affect the land more than our home lives.

I began my hunt for ecological patterns by exploring two of the sustainable systems I knew of: the indigenous cultures that dwelt in the Americas, Africa, and Australia for tens to hundreds of millennia; and natural ecosystems themselves. What are the dynamics, I wondered, that allow these systems to exist seemingly indefinitely, dynamics that are so patently lacking in our own economics?

Let’s take indigenous societies first. What level of resource use did these peoples deem appropriate and sustainable? Obviously, I can’t lump all native cultures together—there were hundreds in North America alone. But a simpler question may point us in the right direction. A people’s use of nature’s gifts and their regard for the environment are reflected in the land they inhabit. Thus we can learn much from asking this: What did our continent look like before Europeans arrived?

Before the Europeans: Myth and Reality

We could turn to our mythmakers for one answer. Longfellow tells us that before Columbus, North America was a “forest primeval,” in which “the murmuring pines and the hemlocks . . . stand like Druids of eld.” Historian Francis Parkman writes that in the 16th century, Verrazano surveyed from his ship “the shadows and gloom of mighty forests.” And my school textbooks said that a squirrel could travel from Maine to Louisiana without coming down from the trees.

Remember, though, that many of this country’s myths date from America’s early nationhood, which was the era of the Romantics: poets who described their hopes as often as they did reality. These idealists beheld a landscape whose use patterns had radically changed two centuries earlier with the arrival of whites. The Romantics extrapolated, from the thicketed remnants of eastern forest, a forbidding and impenetrable wilderness.

The truth is very different, and one that takes me into political incorrectness. Virtually the entire North American landscape had been extensively modified long before whites arrived. This landscape would not have existed had Native Americans practiced the deep ecology ideals mantled upon them by the New Age. I write this not to bash either Native Americans or New Agers, as I honor and hold many of the beliefs of both. But I am searching for truths that will guide my actions, and can’t allow idealism—however attractive—to mist my vision. What did North America really look like when the Europeans came?

Early European colonists wrote that from Maine to Florida, Native American settlements were surrounded by clearings of a few to hundreds of acres. Virginia was speckled with an estimated 300,000 acres of cornfields, some a thousand acres in extent. Major valleys, from the Shenandoah to the Ohio, out to Oregon’s Willamette and those on both sides of the Sierras, were maintained as open parkland by burning. The midwestern prairies, we are learning, were preserved in their treeless beauty more by human-set fires than by lightning. Upland forests in the East, the Rockies, and the Northwest were burned every few years to remove undergrowth and enhance game and food-plant habitat. These woods generally contained few late-succession species, but instead held an artificial array of relatively shade-intolerant trees such as oaks, walnuts, hickories, or Douglas firs. When whites halted the burning, the composition of these forests changed, and the tangle of undergrowth moved in.

All this was not much of a shock to me. Humans have long used fire for improvement of habitat. I just didn’t realize the extent: Burning by native people had altered most of a continent. I was particularly surprised to learn that indigenous people consumed certain resources on a large scale as well, particularly trees for fuel. In 1643, the Narragansetts, in what would become Rhode Island, asked arriving English settlers if they had come looking for firewood, a commodity in short supply. Verrazano’s logbooks, in contrast to Parkman’s romantic fables, describe Rhode Island as containing “open plains twenty-five or thirty leagues [75 to 100 square miles] in extent, entirely free from trees and other hindrances.” These plains were obviously human-maintained, since trees in New England, as the locals know, sprout the moment active clearing ceases.

Records show that the longer a native village had existed, the more distant were the nearest trees. The land around Boston harbor was so barren that the Pilgrims had to row to the harbor islands to gather fuel. And tellingly, iron axes were a valued trade item.

Our Changeable Views

These revelations came as an abrupt reality check, as I, like other guilt-burdened Euro-Americans, had lofted the original inhabitants of this land onto a tall ecological pedestal. The pendulum of our esteem has swung wildly: In contrast to the current view of indigenous people as deeply ecological, much of the early literature I read was written under a different, more vicious bias. A 1910 paper, by a forester who was unable to comprehend the enhancing role of fire, held particularly repellent phrases: “the Indian . . . was wasteful and destructive. . . . When he had abundance, he squandered like a pirate, and when want pinched, he stood it like a stoic.” The truth, centuries gone and diluted by white culture, is probably unavailable to us and lies somewhere between yesterday’s squanderers and today’s saints; it may lie on a different axis altogether, one which whites may never travel upon.

This ecological story is repeated on other continents. Australia saw an enormous increase in major fires with the arrival of the Aborigine about 40,000 years ago. In Africa, the savanna can only be maintained by a fire frequency far greater than what is natural. Recent evidence hints that the species makeup of the Amazon, too, has also been shifted by the indigenous inhabitants.

Humans long ago altered much of this planet, yet Gaia smiles on. I remain convinced that native cultures have an ecological understanding superior to ours, yet they modified entire continents without catastrophic ecological and climatological effects. Could it simply be in our nature to drastically modify our environment? As I researched, I began to suspect that western culture is not different from others in this regard, just frighteningly more effective.

Part of western culture’s efficacy at terraforming is due to sheer population size. Would a similar number of indigenous people wreak western-scale environmental havoc? This line of questioning made me ask how many people North America supported before whites arrived. Once again I’m striding toward controversy, as pre-Columbian population numbers have been stretched and shrunk to suit political purposes. Small numbers diminish the magnitude of the whites’ genocidal crime as well as the Native Americans’ ecological wisdom, while large numbers accentuate both.

The Force of Sheer Numbers

For most of the century, the official pre-Columbian population figure for the continent was a ridiculously small one million, a deliberately attenuated figure promoted by the authoritative anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (the father of writer Ursula K. LeGuin). Recently, estimates have ballooned as high as 100 million, but this number seems to me equally insupportable. This enormous figure was derived by taking solid data from a densely settled portion of Mexico and extrapolating it across all of North America, a method that clearly doesn’t match land use patterns or densities elsewhere (in 1500, China numbered only 80 million people; Europe, 40 million; the U.S. did not reach 100 million until 1920).

A reasonable figure, used by anthropologists and accepted by some influential Native American activists, is one derived by demographer Henry Dobyns from an exhaustive study of village sites, burials, and estimates of how many people can be supported by the types of agriculture and hunting used by Native Americans. Dobyns believes the human population of North America in 1500 was a minimum of 18 million. Even if the actual number were double this— 36 million—the per capita resource use and effect on the environment would have hardly been small: a continent was transformed by a population roughly a tenth the size of today’s. Western culture’s colossally destructive environmental impact may result more from sheer numbers and technology than from our land ethic. Fossil fuels and science have dismantled the governors that restrained the size, and thus the depredations, of other cultures. This is not a new idea, but it suggests that simply adopting the techniques, or the beliefs, of native peoples may not be sufficient to preserve planetary ecology.

Since I am not Native American, I can never truly understand the relationship between my home continent and its original inhabitants. But the native people modified the landscape from sea to sea—farming, cutting trees, burning forests and fuelwood, and gathering materials, in spite of an earth-based creed. A mischievous part of me wonders if some indigenous people have the same relationship with their religions that we do: Christian churches preach love and honesty, yet a brutally Darwinian economy rules our secular lives. Did shamans talk of Mother Earth while enterprising hunters fired the forests none the less?

This line of wondering gave me a clue toward achieving a right relationship with resource use. Contrary to the teachings of both the New Age and my grade school textbooks, many indigenous cultures were both earth-loving and landscape-modifying, and perhaps, with a proper spiritual outlook, I can be too. Though I don’t think I’ll ever be able to rent a backhoe without an episode of soul-searching, I might harvest the trees for my porch with honor rather than shame.

Following Nature’s Pattern

For guidance as to what and how much to use, I turn to ecosystems for inspiration. My training is in biochemistry, and I remember the awe I felt when I first understood the interlacing webworks in my books that described metabolic pathways. I wished then, as now, that every engineer could be forced to study nature’s chemistry. Nothing in life’s seething stew is wasted. A carbon dioxide molecule pops off of a sugar here, and is corkscrewed onto pyruvate there. A wisp of energy puffs from the crack of a phosphate bond, and is commandeered to weld an atomic union nearby. Elegant, perfect, economical cycles, in contrast to technology’s non-stop arrow of degradation from source to garbage-dump.

Western engineers, when they bother to mimic nature at all, create immature ecosystems. In a landmark paper on ecosystem development, Eugene Odum pointed out some hallmarks of young ecosystems:

• poor diversity of both patterns and species
• little role for detritus in nutrient regeneration
• linear food and energy chains (as opposed to multi-connected webs)
• low levels of standing (perennial) biomass
• high energy consumption per unit of biomass
• high production and consumption of biomass per unit of standing crop
• rapidly cycling, high levels of inputs and outputs

To me, these are a perfect description of factory farming. In contrast, mature ecosystems display just the opposite qualities in all those categories. To be sustainable, our culture must function as a mature ecosystem. Permaculture, by emphasizing perennials, deep mulches (i.e. detritus), and interconnections, kick-starts human-made ecosystems to a highly developed phase.

Mature systems rely on closed cycles, importing only enough to replace inevitable entropic losses. (These imports led me to ponder the way plant roots coax minerals from weathered rock. Perhaps, in addition to “everything gardens,” we can admit that “everything mines, a little bit.”) Developed ecosystems use huge amounts of resources, but materials are kept dancing in the biosphere rather than being dumped to a waste sink. This is where humans fail. Ecosystem health demands that recycling approach 100%, not the paltry 30% that cities hope for. (Here’s an example of nature’s efficiency: Ecologists found that in a mature forest containing 365 kg calcium per hectare in the biomass, only 8 kg need be weathered from rock each year. The remaining 357 kg (98%) is retained and recycled.)

The only limit to the amount of material that can be kept cycling is energy, provided toxins are degraded quickly. So, based on nature’s patterns, it may not be a crime to have a culture that manipulates large volumes of material, if recycling is near total and pollutants are kept low and degradable. Ecologically derived systems, self-regulated by their natural limitations of energy and matter inputs, will guide their own appropriateness. Western culture is far from any of that, but permaculture’s reliance on used goods and non-fossil energy is a good start toward mimicking a mature ecosystem. Ecosystems are not materially impoverished, and I don’t believe that ecological living demands that we stop using wood, metal, plastic, or semiconductors. We do need, however, to drastically curtail extractive industries, and recycle what is already in the technosphere.

Here we are then, then, in a heretical place. An earth-centered religion isn’t necessarily in conflict with technologies that modify the environment. And a culture, if it is based on ecological principles, can be materially abundant without guilt or environmental devastation. The key is to allow natural regulatory process to remain intact, and to listen to their urgings. Everything gardens, everything mines a little bit, and perhaps we can too.

Bibliography

Data on land use by indigenous peoples from:

1. Barrett SW and Arno SF. 1982. Indian Fires as an Ecological Influence in the Northern Rockies. J Forestry, 80:647-651.
2. Budiansky S. 1995. Nature’s Keepers: The New Science of Nature Management. New York: The Free Press.
3. Day GM. 1953. The Indian as an Ecological Factor in the Northeastern Forest. Ecology, 34:329-346.
4. Maxwell H. 1910. Use and Abuse of Forests by the Virginia Indians.William and Mary Qtly, 29:73-103.
5. Pyne SJ. 1991. Burning Bush. New York: Henry Holt.

Population data from:

1. Braudel F. 1979. The Structures of Everyday Life. New York: Harper and Row
2. Dobyns HF. 1993. Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
3. Jaimes MA (ed). 1992. The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance. Boston: South End Press.

Ecosystem data from:

1. Odum EP. 1969. The Strategy of Ecosystem Development. Science, 164:262-270.

Copyright 2003 by Toby Hemenway.

Published in Permaculture Activist No. 38.

Our food system is woefully dependent on petroleum, as writers such as Richard Heinberg (1) and Michael Pollan (2) have eloquently pointed out. Soaring food costs have brought on riots in some countries, and in unstable nations, famine continues to be a regular visitor. Fears of empty grocery shelves have made food security the centerpiece of many a post-Peak Oil plan, and among those watching energy descent, a common refrain is that the best way to guarantee your food supply is to buy a piece of land and grow your own.

Yet in the developed world, especially the breadbasket nations such as the US, Canada, and other food-exporting countries, the food network may be one of the last systems to fail during energy descent. In developing a wise post-Peak strategy, assessing relative risks is critical. Devoting large amounts of time and resources to events that are less likely leaves us unprepared for more probable difficulties. I don’t want to discourage anyone from growing food—I’m a serious gardener myself and could list dozens of excellent reasons for doing it. But I think there are many reasons not to be focusing primarily on food as the system most likely to fail. This isn’t to say that industrial, oil-based agriculture is invulnerable, let alone sustainable. And we may see temporary shortages of specific foods. But there are many reasons why our fears of a food collapse—particularly when they lead us to a go-it-alone, grow-your-own response—may be distracting us from focusing on more immediate and likely risks.

First, two notes of clarification: This article is about net food-exporting nations such as the US, where I live. In the less-developed world, where food growing has been abandoned for export crops that are sold for cash to import commodity food, the food system is far more vulnerable. And by “food collapse” I mean a prolonged inability to produce essential foods, not brief or local shortages of certain items, or high prices while supplies are ample. Volatile commodities markets, weather, and the other gyrations of our uncertain era mean that temporary or local shortages can always occur.

Food gets a lot of attention in part because we need it to survive, but also because one solution to a food crisis—growing your own—seems doable. I suspect we focus on food in part because providing it appears much more possible than, say, keeping the financial, health care, or automotive industries running.

Why would I argue that food collapse in breadbasket nations is not likely, when today’s farming is so dependent on hydrocarbons? Our food system is complex—much more so than it needs to be—but many of our society’s other structures are far more complex, and thus more vulnerable. Joseph Tainter (3)  and others point out that complex systems need increasing energy inputs, and eventually reach a point of diminishing returns, so that the costs of complexity eventually outrun its benefits. When inputs decline, the most complex systems are often the first to fail, since they need vast resources to maintain them. With that in mind, we can ask what is likely to fail first during energy descent. That way, we’ll know what we should direct our energies toward preparing for.

Is it any wonder that one of the first complex systems to collapse has been our financial system? The energy and complexity used in Byzantine financial instruments such as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, and in moving trillions of dollars through millions of highly orchestrated transactions each day, is immensely greater than what it takes to grow, process, and ship food. Another system teetering near collapse is health care, and it, too, is a fantastically complicated system needing sophisticated, expensive equipment and years of specialized training for practitioners, all administered by an insurance system of equally staggering complexity. Thus the most complex systems are already collapsing. When viewed through the lens of complexity, the relative robustness of the developed world’s food system, even as finance collapses and health care becomes increasingly unavailable, is less mysterious.

It would bolster my argument to show quantitative measurements of these systems’ relative complexity, and for these I’ll point to Howard T. Odum (4) and his concepts of emergy (not energy, but embedded energy) and transformity. Emergy measures the total solar energy used directly and indirectly to make a product or service. Transformity builds on this, and means the emergy of one type required to produce a unit of energy of another type. It describes conversion losses and energy quality. For example, think of a food chain. A million calories of solar energy can make a given quantity of algae. When plankton eat this, it might yield 1000 calories of plankton. These plankton, when eaten, become one calorie of fish. Thus the transformity of that one calorie of fish is one million calories: the amount of sunlight used at the beginning of the food chain divided by the one calorie of fish produced. The plankton, being lower on the food chain, have a lower transformity: 1000 calories, or a million calories of algae divided by 1000 calories of plankton produced.

Processes that have higher transformity don’t just need more energy per output. They also contain more energy conversion steps, which bring efficiency losses and places for the system to fail. Also, high-transformity systems usually need more complex technologies than processes of lower transformity. Plankton are simpler than fish.

So how complex is our food system? Odum’s work  tells us that food transformities in industrial cultures are on the order of 25,000 to 100,000 sej/J (solar emergy joules input per joule gained). This is low compared to nearly all other familiar goods and services. Odum says that the production of paper has a transformity of 215,000 sej/J; electricity, 200,000 sej/J; cement, 750,000,000 sej/J; and complex transactions based on digital technologies, such as investment banking, have transformities in the billions or higher. If complexity, transformity, and stability are related—and I think they are—then activities of great complexity and high transformities, including office jobs, electricity, communications, and nearly all social and economic services, will be disrupted before food production will be. We’re seeing that process unwind today. Training and supplying an investment banker or surgeon is more complex than doing the same for a farmer. As complexity plummets due to energy descent, jobs and products of lower transformity are more likely to remain.

But even if the food system isn’t all that complex, you might argue, we have paved over much of our farmland and use oil to make food. Let’s look at the numbers. The US is a net exporter of food, and produces roughly 4000 calories of food per person (5). To stock this larder, the US uses roughly 3 million barrels per day of petroleum, or 15% of our total consumption (6). Thus the US could cut the amount of oil used by the food system in half and still provide a basic 2000-calorie diet. That’s 1.5 million barrels per day or its equivalent, which should be available for some time. This means that neither complexity nor oil are likely to be limiting factors on food production in breadbasket nations until after the failure of other more complex, energy-intensive elements of our lives.

Cheap oil has freed us to pour staggering amounts of energy, both human and fossil, into non-essentials, such as the entertainment, recreation, tourism, sports, media, and other fuel-gobbling industries. Inexpensive oil lets much of the developed world endlessly buzz around in inefficient cars and jets. In other words, 85% of our fossil-fuel consumption is used for things other than food, usually wastefully. As oil becomes expensive we will choose to redirect a modest portion of that 85% away from long commutes, non-essential industries, and other symptoms of cheap oil, in order to feed ourselves. It’s likely that as we round Hubbert’s bend we’ll return to putting 30-50% of our energy use toward food production, as has been the case for most of human history (7). This reordering of oil priorities can buy us the time needed to reconfigure our grossly inefficient, hydrocarbon-based food system into something far more localized and sustainable, if we’re smart.

Another oft-cited argument for food collapse is that fossil-fuel supplies are unreliable. What if foreign producers cut us off? The US currently produces about 5.2 million barrels of oil per day. Canada and Mexico are the top two petroleum importers for the US, providing about 40% of our imports, or 3.8 million bbl/day (8). Thus 9 million bbl/day are currently available from nearby sources. That’s three times the oil used by our food system, and six times what is needed for a basic diet. Natural gas, used to make nitrogen fertilizers, is a critical agricultural resource that also comes from relatively stable sources. Canada provides 95% of America’s natural-gas imports. The continent’s intertwined economies and the realities of geopolitics make it probable that hydrocarbons will flow long enough for the US to shift to a less oil-intensive agriculture. Obviously, oil output will continue its decline, and there are bound to be periodic crises, but the numbers suggest that starvation in the US is far from a certainty.

Food production is truly the oldest profession. We’re good at it, we’ve been doing it for 10,000 years, and it is a relatively simple system to run. It is at the base of a large cultural pyramid, which makes it fundamental, so although disrupting it would be catastrophic, it is also more elementary and thus easier to keep running than all the systems above its level of complexity. There are gardeners in over 71 million American households (9), so there is a sizable knowledge base to help with the transition to more local food production.

Almost certainly, food will shift from being a minor piece of the US economy to once again requiring one-third to one-half of our labor and energy. The example of Cuba, which in a few years retooled its agriculture system after a sudden and near-total cutoff of oil, shows that food systems can be modified quickly. How long would it take us to convert the nearest city park, or a soybean field that’s growing feedstocks for newspaper ink and car lacquer, into food production if it were urgent? One season. The recent substitution of ethanol corn for soybeans over vast acreages in a single season shows how quickly farmers can respond to new markets. And as food prices rise, people thrown out of work by energy descent will find jobs growing food, as Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton have suggested in their book, A Nation of Farmers.

As cheap shipping disappears, can we feed ourselves locally? To gauge this, we need to know if there is enough farmland near cities to feed their populations. Researchers at Cornell University found that the basic calories to feed Rochester, New York’s population of 225,000 could be grown on existing cropland within 16.5 miles (26.6 km) of the city limits and would cover 36,000 hectares (90,000 acres) (10). This admittedly simplistic analysis looks only at caloric needs, not overall nutrition. To provide a balanced and diverse diet might require a larger area, so let’s say we’d need twice as much land, or 180,000 acres. That area is still within 25 miles of the city, close enough to easily bring goods to market. This could save much of the fuel used today to transport the infamous 1500-mile salad. Plus, the Cornell analysis assumes wasteful conventional agriculture techniques, not high-intensity ones that use local nutrient sources such as composted waste and animal and human manure, as well as other resource-saving methods that people dependent on local food would readily use. It’s probable that the largest cities, such as New York, would be unable to feed themselves locally, but it is likely that for them we will set fuel priorities to ship food from more distant farms.

And it is the reordering of fuel priorities that leads us to one of the most powerful reasons that food supplies are less likely to run out than almost any other resource. Politicians understand that hungry people topple governments. We’re deeply imbued with cultural lore reflecting this. Most people know little else about Marie Antoinette other than the apocryphal taunt to starving peasants that ensured her rendezvous with the guillotine, “Let them eat cake.” Trotsky noted that every society is only three meals away from a revolution. History shows that any functional state short of a kleptocracy will allow almost every other service—health care, banking, sanitation, schools, transportation—to languish before it allows its people to go hungry. Preserving the flow of at least 1.5 million barrels of oil per day for food will be a critical priority of the US government.

Let me be the first to admit that there’s still some chance of food collapse. Perhaps stupid or corrupt leaders will choose to direct energy resources not toward food but to the military or the rich. Or it’s possible that the link between the financial sector and food, via the futures and commodities markets, may play havoc with food supplies. And it’s certain that adjusting from today’s food consuming 10% of the average family budget to the historical norm of 30% to 50% will be disruptive.

Whatever your chosen post-Peak scenario, it’s smart to keep emergency food and water on hand, as much as makes you feel comfortable. But focusing on preparations for a food-system collapse reminds me of the story of the fellow searching for his keys under the streetlight. He didn’t lose them there, but that was the only place where the light was bright enough to see. In crisis, we often default to doing what we know even if it’s not the wisest action. We can’t individually fix the economy or health care, yet we certainly can grow some food, and that may be why it is central to many post-Peak plans. And I agree: growing food is simple. It’s an ancient skill that is at the heart of human culture, and even in its industrial manifestation, it is a robust system that is less complex and energy-intensive than most of society’s other activities. That’s why I suspect the food system will last longer than much of the rest of the oil society. Although brief disruptions are certainly possible, in breadbasket nations food is more likely than many other aspects of our culture to make it through the transition.

But for a thousand other reasons, plant a garden anyway.

References

1. Heinberg, Richard. “What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?” http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/188

2. Pollan, Michael. “Farmer in Chief,” New York Times Magazine, October 8, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html

3. Tainter, Joseph. The Collapse of Complex Societies.

4. Odum, Howard T. A Prosperous Way Down.

5. Putnam, J, J Allshouse, L. S. Kantor. U.S. Per Capita Food Supply Trends http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/FoodReview/DEC2002/frvol25i3a.pdf

6. I’m taking the middle of estimates that vary from 19%, (see Michael Pollan, above), to 10% (see Martin C. Heller and Gregory A. Keoleian; Life Cycle-Based Sustainability Indicators for Assessment of the U.S. Food System. http://css.snre.umich.edu/css_doc/CSS00-04.pdf

7. Braudel, Fernand. The Structures of Everyday Life.

8. Energy Information Administration. Crude Oil and Total Petroleum Imports, Top 15 Countries.  http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_l…

9. National Gardening Association, 2005. Environmental Lawn and Garden Survey.

10. Peters, Christian J., Arthur J. Lembo, and Gary W. Fick, 2005. A Tale of Two Foodsheds: Mapping Local Food Production Capacity Relative to Local Food Requirements. http://crops.confex.com/crops/viewHandout.cgi?uploadid=226

A mass emailing went out a while back from a prominent permaculturist looking for “projects where people are fully self sufficient in providing for their own food, clothing, shelter, energy and community needs. . .” There it was, the myth of “fully self sufficient,” coming from one of the best-known permaculturists in the world. In most US permaculture circles, the idea that anyone could be self sufficient at anything past a very primitive level was abandoned a while ago, and the softer term “self reliant” replaced it. But even self-reliance is barely possible, and, other than as way of expressing a desire to throw off the shackles of corporate consumerism, I don’t think it’s desirable.

I took a Googling cruise around the internet and found that “self sufficient” shows up as a desirable goal on several top permaculture websites. I’d like to hammer a few coffin nails into that phrase. My dictionary says that self sufficient means being “able to maintain oneself without outside aid.” Who lives without outside aid? No one. Let’s unpack that a bit further. The meaning of “self sufficient in food” is something most of us can agree on: supplying 100% of your food needs from your own land and efforts. I have never met anyone who has done this. I’m sure there are a few people doing it, but even subsistence farmers usually raise, alongside their food, a cash crop to buy the foods that are impractical for them to grow.

I hear people say they are growing 30%, 50%, even 70% of their own food. What they usually mean is that they are growing fruits and vegetables that make up some percentage of the total cost or weight—but not calories—of their food. Vegetables are high in wet weight, but low in calories. If you are growing 100% of your own vegetables, they provide about 15-20% of your daily calories, unless you are living mostly on potatoes or other starchy veggies. Most daily calories come from grains, meat, or dairy products. So if you’re not raising large-scale grains or animals, it’s unlikely that you are growing more than one-quarter of your own food, measured honestly by nutritional content. In that case, it’s not accurate to claim you are “70% food self-sufficient.” If you are getting most of your calories from your land, you’re almost certainly a full-time farmer, and I salute you for your hard work. Now we begin to see how difficult, and even undesirable, self sufficiency is. You won’t have time for much else if you are truly food self-sufficient, even in a permaculture system.

But even if you grow all your own food, can you claim you are self sufficient if you don’t grow all your own seeds? Provide all your fertility? Where do your farm tools and fuel come from? Permaculturists understand as well as anyone how interconnected life is. At what point do you claim to be disconnected from the broad human community in anything? Is there really a way to be “fully self sufficient” in food?

Let’s take a quick pass at clothing, shelter and energy. Even if you sew all your clothes, do you grow the cotton, raise the sheep? If you milled all the lumber or dug the stone for your home, did you forge the glass, fabricate the wiring? In the off-the-grid house, what complex community of engineers and factories assembled the solar panels? We’re reliant on all of that.

Claiming self sufficiency in almost anything insults and ignores the mountain of shoulders we all stand on. US permaculturists are a pretty politically correct crew, and it became obvious to some of us that “self sufficient” was not just impossible, but was a slap in the face to all those whose sweat provides for us, and was another perpetuation of the cowboy ethic that puts the individual at the center of the universe. So the term morphed into “self reliance,” to show that we know we are interdependent, but are choosing to be less reliant on others. At its best, self reliance means developing skills to provide for basic needs, so we can stop supporting unethical and destructive industries. But I see much less need for self-reliant people who can do everything themselves, and much more need for self-reliant communities, where not everyone knows how to weave or farm, but there is clothing and food for all.

There is still a deep prejudice in permaculture, as websites and emails show, that doing it all ourselves, and on our own land, is the most noble path. And insofar as our skills make us less dependent on corporate monopolies, developing the abilities that we think of as self-reliant is worth doing. However, the more we limit our lives to what we can do ourselves, the fewer our opportunities are. Each connection outside ourselves enriches us. When we create a web of interdependencies, we grow richer, stronger, safer, and wiser. Why would you not want to rely on others? To fully probe that would take us down a psychological rabbit-hole, but some of it is grounded in a belief that others are unreliable or unethical, and that we weaken ourselves by interdependencies. But the old saying “if you want a job done well, do it yourself” simply shows poor management skills.

If you’re still skeptical, I’ll resort to scripture: a quote from the Book of Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture, page two: “We can also begin to take some part in food production. This doesn’t mean that we all need to grow our own potatoes, but it may mean that we will buy them directly from a person who is already growing potatoes responsibly. In fact, one would probably do better to organize a farmer-purchasing group in the neighborhood than to grow potatoes.”

As veteran permaculture designer Larry Santoyo says, go to the highest generalization to fill your needs. Thinking “I must grow my food” is painfully limited. Thinking “I must satisfy food needs responsibly” opens up a vast array of possibilities, from which you can choose the most stable and appropriate. Individual efforts are often less stable and resilient than community enterprises. And they’re bad design: self-reliance means that a critical function is supported in only one way. If you grow all your food and get hurt, you are now injured, hungry, and watching your crops wither from your wheelchair. That won’t happen in a community farm. And for those worried about an impending collapse of society, the roving turnip-bandits are much more likely to raid your lonely plot while you sleep exhausted from a hard day of spadework, and less likely to attack a garden protected by a crew of strong, pitchfork-wielding farmers who can guard it round the clock.

Creating community reliance gives us yet another application of permacultural zones: Zone zero in this sense is our home and land. Zone one is our connection to other individuals and families, zone two to local commerce and activities in our neighborhood, zone three to regional businesses and organizations, zone four to larger and more distant enterprises. Why would we limit ourselves to staying only in zone zero? We can organize our lives so that our need for zone-four excursions—say, to buy petroleum or metal products—is very limited, while our interactions with the local farmers’ market and restaurants are frequent. This builds a strong community.

Self reliance fails to grow social capital, a truly regenerative resource that can only increase by being used. Why would I not want to connect to my community in every way that I can? If we don’t help fill our community’s needs, there’s more chance that our neighbors will shop at big-box stores. An unexamined belief in self reliance is a destructive myth that hands opportunity to those who are taking our community away from us.

If you love being a farmer, then yes, grow all your own food. And sell the rest for the other things you need, in a way that supports your community. But is there really a difference between a farmer exchanging the product of her labor—food—for goods and money, and me selling the product of my labor—education—for goods and money? We both are trading our life energy within a system that supports us, and I’d like to think that we are both making wise ethical choices.

A good permaculture design is one that provides for the inhabitants’ needs in a responsible and ecologically sound manner. But there’s nothing in permaculture that says that it’s important for all yields to come from the owner’s site! If I can accomplish one thing in this essay, it is to smash that myth. Permaculture design simply says that our needs and products need to be taken care of responsibly in our design, not on our own land. That design can—and must—include off-site connections. If you are an acupuncturist whose income is provided by your community and you are getting most of your needs met from mostly local sources you believe to be ethical, then that’s excellent permaculture design. Your design will be stronger if your needs and products are connected to many off-site elements and systems.

It’s very permacultural to develop skills that will connect you more deeply to land, home, and community. And sometimes the skills that we gained in search of self reliance are the same ones we need to be more community-reliant. But self reliance, as a goal in itself, is a tired old myth that needs to die. It’s unpermacultural.

Let me tell you about the invasive plant that scares me more than all the others. It’s one that has infested over 80 million acres in the US, usually in virtual monocultures. It is a heavy feeder, depleting soil of nutrients. Everywhere it grows, the soil is badly eroded. The plant offers almost no wildlife habitat, and since it is wind pollinated, it does not provide nectar to insects. It’s a plant that is often overlooked on blacklists, yet it is responsible for the destruction of perhaps more native habitat than any other species. Research shows that when land is lost to this species, native plants rarely return; they can’t compete with it. It should go at the top of every native-plant lover’s list of enemies. This plant’s name: Zea mays, or corn. Corn is non-native. It’s from Central America. Next on my list is the soybean, with 70 million acres of native habitat lost to this invasive exotic. Following those two scourges on this roll call of devastating plants is the European invader called wheat.

Wait, you say: these plants are deliberately spread by people; that’s different! But to an ecologist, it is irrelevant that the dispersion vector of these plants is a primate. After all, we don’t excuse holly or Autumn olive, even though without bird dispersal, they could not spread. Why are corn, soy, and wheat not on any blacklists? Because we think of them differently than plants spread by non-humans. This suggests that an invasive species is an idea, a product of our thinking, not an objective phenomenon. When we restore land, we restore to an idea, not to objective criteria.

Let me give another example of how our ideas dictate which species we’ll tolerate and which we won’t. The wooded hillside in rural Oregon where I once lived was thick with 40- to 120-year-old Douglas fir and hemlock. But as I walked these forests, I noticed that scattered every few acres were occasional ancient oak trees, four to six feet in diameter, much older than the conifers and now being overtopped by them. I realized that in these ancient oaks I was seeing the remnants of the oak savanna that had been maintained for millennia by fire set by the original inhabitants, the Calapuya people. The fir forest moved in when the whites arrived and drove off the Calapuya, and suppressed fire. So what I was seeing was a conifer forest created by human-induced fire-suppression, and it had replaced the oak savanna that had been preserved by human fire setting. Which was the native landscape? Both were made by people. If we say, let’s restore to what existed before humans altered it, we’d need to go back to birches and willows, since humans arrived as the glaciers retreated. But clearly that’s not appropriate.

In a similar vein, one of the rarest and most valued ecosystems in the Northwest are the native prairies, such as those found in the Willamette and other valleys. Yet these prairies are also the product of human manipulation. Prairies were predominant in the Willamette over 5000 years ago, but began to disappear not long after that. Ecologist Mark Wilson has written “As climate turned cooler and moister 4,000 years ago, oak savanna and prairie ecosystems were maintained only by frequent fires set by native people to stimulate food plants and help in hunting.” The local people used fire technology to maintain an environment that supported them even when the climate no longer supported that ecosystem.

So I applaud and encourage efforts to preserve native prairie in the region—they are valuable as endangered species habitat, examples of cultural heritage, and a way of preserving planetary biological wisdom. But we should restore these prairies with the strict recognition that we are creating—not recreating or restoring–a state that can not be supported by current climate and other conditions. Prairies are artificial in the Willamette Valley. The preservation of prairies there isn’t a matter of simply repairing and replanting a degraded landscape and then watching the prairie thrive, but constructing a species community and an environment for it that must remain on intensive life support, with constant intervention, for it to survive at all, as long as the climate remains unsuitable to it. The Willamette prairie remnants can’t be considered native; the only criteria they meet is that they were here in small patches when botanists first catalogued them. But so were dandelions. Botanists knew dandelions weren’t native, but the didn’t know that the prairies were human created, so the prairies were catalogued as native. Prairies in the Northwest haven’t been indigenous for 4000 years.

We love the local prairies and I firmly believe in the efforts to preserve them. But I want us to be clear that we are restoring to an idea. We are restoring because we want these things here, and not because there is a master blueprint that says they are the right ecosystem for the place. Ecosystems exist because current conditions favor those particular assemblages. Change the conditions, and the ecosystems will, absolutely, change. Both the climate and humans have changed the conditions plenty. Environmental change is the driving force behind shifting species makeup. With plants and most animal species, no evil species showed up and through sheer cussedness, killed off the locals. Instead, the conditions changed

The very concept of wild land, for most Americans, is founded on a misunderstanding: a very brief ecological moment during which a once-managed ecosystem was at the height of its degradation due to loss of its keystone species. The dark and tangled primeval forests, written about by Thoreau and Emerson, are simply the declining remnants of open and spacious Eastern food forests, turned to thicket after a century or two of neglect once their human tenders were killed. But this idea of wilderness is deep in our mythology, national imagery, and consciousness.

Let’s look at some of the causes of species change. First: terminology. The word “invasive” is loaded. We hate invaders. The term also places focus solely on the incoming species, yet the ability of a species to survive is due to interactions with the biological and physical environment. So I prefer a more neutral, and I think, ecological more correct and descriptive term, such as opportunistic. Kudzu is not a problem in its native habitat, but it will take advantage of opportunities.

What creates those opportunities for species shifts? Intact ecosystems are notoriously hard to invade. We know this because, for example, seed dispersal rates are truly astounding. Birds are a major dispersal agent. They can carry seeds from multiple plant species in their gut, stuck to their feathers, and in mud on their feet. So picture billions and billions of birds, for 60 million years or so, traveling tens to thousands of miles, seeds dropping off of them every wing-beat of the way. Add to that bats, which are actually more effective at seed dispersal, per bat, than birds. Plus land-animal dispersals, not as far-ranging as birds but bringing much larger seed loads via droppings and fur. Include water-rafted trees and other plants, wind-dispersed species, and more.

This gives a picture of the whole planet crisscrossed with billions of birds and animals for millions of years, seeds and spores going everywhere, eggs being carried to new environments, dispersal, dispersal, dispersal! So why isn’t the whole planet a weedy thicket? Because the mere arrival of a new species, even in large numbers, is not what causes a successful colonization. Ecosystems are very hard to invade, and several conditions must be present for that to happen.

A major reason for ecosystems being tough to invade is that nearly all the resources in undisturbed ecosystems are being exploited. Nearly every niche is filled, every nutrient flow is being consumed, almost every opportunity is taken. Two major changes make ecosystems invasible: disturbance, and the appearance of new resources. Take disturbance. Perennially disturbed places, like riparian zones, are sensitive to opportunistic species. So is farmland, or developed areas, or anywhere than humans or nature cause disturbance. It drives me nuts when I read that “species X” has destroyed 50,000 acres of habitat. When you do a little digging you find that, no, that area was farmed, or new roads cut, or logged, or polluted, or otherwise disturbed, and then the new species moved in.

For example, one poster child of invasion biologists is the brown tree snake, blamed for invading Guam and killing off several species of birds. The untold story is that for decades the US Navy used over half of the island as a bombing range, leaving most of it unfit for life. Much of what remained was crowded by displaced people, and developed by the military, and thus turned into poor and disturbed habitat. The tree snake just cleaned up the struggling remnants that were vulnerable in their poor habitat and already in serious decline.

Stop the disturbance, and you’ll almost always eliminate or reduce the effect of the new species. Land I lived on was clear-cut in the early 1970s and not replanted with fir until the 1980s, and was covered with patches of Himalayan blackberry and Scot’s broom when I arrived in the early 1990s. By the late 1990s, both species were gone from most places and nearly dead everywhere else, because the trees had grown back and shaded them out. The problem is disturbance, not that a species pushes out others because it’s tough or mean.

This suggests that we need to take care of naturally disturbed areas like riverbanks, since most of the species we’ve labeled as problematical thrive on disturbance. Even in these riparian zones, though, conditions are altered from what they once were because of the loss of the beaver and from damming. Thus nature is just trying to deal with our changes as best as she can, and she’ll use whatever resources she can find. A return to the former, natural disturbance regime may allow the once-present vegetation to return, if that is our choice for that land,

The second cause of successful invasion is the appearance of new resources. Often the new resources that that allow an otherwise intact ecosystem to be colonized are pollution and fertilizer runoff. For example, a number of aquatic opportunists, such as purple loosestrife, thrive in more polluted and higher-nutrient environments than the plants they replace. Many species that evolved in clean water are harmed by pollutants and they then decline. Loosestrife, though, has high rates of nutrient uptake, and this trait allows it to out-compete many other species in polluted water. But in permaculture, we say that that every problem carries within it the seeds of its own solution. And so loosestrife can be used in constructed wetlands and in natural environments to clean nutrient-rich water. They are an indicator of a problem, a response to it, and nature’s way of solving a problem, not the problem itself. If you really hate loosestrife and want it to go away, clean up the water. Without doing that, you’ll be flailing away at the problem forever. Spraying and yanking is not an effective strategy to remove unwanted species. Nature is far more patient and persistent, and has a bigger budget, than we do. To remove an unwanted species, change the conditions that made it more favored than the desired vegetation.

Unwanted species generally arrive because humans have changed the environment to make conditions more favorable for the new species. And when we “restore” landscapes, or more often, introduce a set of species that we have decided are the ones we want to see there, we are altering the landscape to suit our idea of what should be there, not to match some divine plan. These two understandings burden us with a huge responsibility to make intelligent choices, but more importantly, to recognize that we are often arbitrarily making a choice based on our own preferences, not because there is only one right choice for a landscape, When we put resources into landscape management, however, we direct the shape of that landscape toward only one choice. That’s the best we can do. Thus I’d like to see us be less dogmatic in the way we cling to those choices.

Unfortunately, dogma is present on all sides. Friends of mine approached the Portland city government with a plan to create some edible plant corridors along Springwater Trail, a 40-mile bicycle and pedestrian loop around the city. Their idea was for bikers and pedestrians to be able to snack on berries and fruit. The city official in charge said, “Nope, we have a natives-only policy on the trail.” The trail is a paved pathway that goes through industrial areas and along backyards, road right-of-ways, and scrubby vacant lots. It probably goes through a dozen or more different environments, based on soil, water, sunlight, and all the other factors that determine what plant communities will grow there. But the policy is natives only. Wouldn’t it make sense for the primary species that will be using that trail to have a habitat that suits that species’ needs for food and comfort, particularly since it’s in a busy urban area? But instead the landscaping is to be driven by an idea, by dogma. I totally support the idea of having natives-only areas on the trail. But let’s allow the new landscaping to serve those that it’s being built for, too.

I began this with corn and soybeans. One of my favorite snarky questions for natives-only people is: “What did you eat for breakfast?” I ask that because it is our choices that determine how much of our landscape is going to be consumed by non-native species. I didn’t eat camas cakes with pink-flowering currant syrup this morning, and I’ll bet you didn’t eat any local plants either. Of course, I’d rather see someone growing indigenous species in their yard rather than having a sterile, resource gobbling lawn. But my urban yard is not, in my or several other lifetimes, going to be part of a natural ecosystem. I might be able to cultivate some endangered native species in an attempt to pull a rare plant back from extinction. That’s one good reason I can see for growing indigenous plants in my yard. But the most frequent native plants I see grown in yards are salal, Oregon grape, and others that are in no danger of extinction and don’t, to my knowledge, support specialist species dependent only upon them. And since much of my yard is watered, it is inappropriate for me to grow natives that are adapted to our dry summers. It’s always stuck me as bizarre to see Northwest natives being irrigated.

But even more than indigenous plants, I’d rather see someone providing for some of their own needs from their yard. When we eat a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast, or oatmeal, or store-bought eggs, we are commissioning with our dollars the conversion of wild land into monoculture farms. I’ll bet that a large percentage people reading this buy local food, shop organic, and so forth. But the farms growing that food are almost all moncultures, and out of the urban matrix. In other words, it is farmland that, if consumption decreased, has a far better chance of being restored to a functioning ecosystem than does a home lot. If I grow some of my own food, that means that somewhere out in the country, a farmer won’t have to plow so close to the riverbank, or could let some of that back field go wild. That land has a far better chance of functioning as an ecosystem than my yard will. Oh, I have visions of how city and suburban landscapes could be functional ecosystems, but that’s another subject. My point is, we need to be putting money and energy into growing indigenous species where they will do the most good, where they can truly contribute to ecosystems and their functions. Many of our efforts in eliminating exotics are a terrible waste of resources at best, and at worst are repeated use of poisons to destroy a hybrid habitat whose function we don’t yet grasp. Let’s be honest at what we are restoring to: an idea of what belongs in a place. If we want to get rid of an invasive exotic, let’s get rid of some monocultured corn, and let a bit of farmland return to being a real ecosystem.

Recommended Viewing: Video: Native Plants and Permaculture

Copyright 2007 by Toby Hemenway

Jared Diamond calls it “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”(1) Bill Mollison says that it can “destroy whole landscapes.”(2) Are they describing nuclear energy? Suburbia? Coal mining? No. They are talking about agriculture. The problem is not simply that farming in its current industrial manifestation is destroying topsoil and biodiversity. Agriculture in any form is inherently unsustainable. At its doorstep can also be laid the basis of our culture’s split between humans and nature, much disease and poor health, and the origins of dominator hierarchies and the police state. Those are big claims, so let’s explore them.

Permaculture, although it encompasses many disciplines, orbits most fundamentally around food. Anthropologists, too, agree that food defines culture more than our two other physical needs of shelter and reproduction. A single home-building stint provides a place to live for decades. A brief sexual encounter can result in children. But food must be gotten every day, usually several times a day. Until very recently, all human beings spent much of their time obtaining food, and the different ways of doing that drove cultures down very divergent paths.

Anthropologist Yehudi Cohen (3) and many subsequent scholars break human cultures into five categories based on how they get food. These five are foragers (or hunter-gatherers), horticulturists, agriculturists, pastoralists, and industrial cultures. Knowing which category a people falls into allows you to predict many attributes of that group. For example, foragers tend to be animist/pantheist, living in a world rich with spirit and in which all beings and many objects are ascribed a status equal to their own in value and meaning. Foragers live in small bands and tribes. Some foragers may be better than others at certain skills, like tool making or medicine, but almost none have exclusive specialties and everyone helps gather food. Though there may be chiefs and shamans, hierarchies are nearly flat and all members have access to the leaders. A skirmish causing two or three deaths is a major war. Most of a forager’s calories come from meat or fish, supplemented with fruit, nuts, and some wild grain and tubers.(4) It’s rare that a forager will overexploit his environment, as the linkage is so tight that destruction of a resource one season means starvation the next. Populations tend to peak at low numbers and stabilize.

The First Growth Economy

Agriculturists, in contrast, worship gods whose message usually is that humans are chosen beings holding dominion, or at least stewardship, over creation. This human/nature divide makes ecological degradation not only inevitable but a sign of progress.

While the forager mainstays of meat and wild food rot quickly, domesticated grain, a hallmark innovation of agriculture, allows storage, hoarding, and surplus. Food growing also evens out the seasonal shortages that keep forager populations low.

Having fields to tend and surpluses to store encouraged early farming peoples to stay in one place. Grain also needs processing, and as equipment for threshing and winnowing grew complex and large, the trend toward sedentism accelerated.(5)

Grains provide more calories, or energy, per weight than lean meat. Meat protein is easily transformed into body structure—one reason why foragers tend to be taller than farmers—but turning protein into energy exacts a high metabolic cost and is inefficient.(6) Starches and sugars, the main components of plants, are much more easily converted into calories than protein, and calories are the main limiting factor in reproduction. A shift from meat-based to carbohydrate-based calories means that given equal amounts of protein, a group getting its calories mostly from plants will reproduce much faster than one getting its calories from meat. It’s one reason farming cultures have higher birth rates than foragers.

Also, farming loosens the linkage between ecological damage and food supply. If foragers decimate the local antelope herd, it means starvation and a low birth rate for the hunters. If the hunters move or die off, the antelope herd will rebound quickly. But when a forest is cleared for crops, the loss of biodiversity translates into more food for people. Soil begins to deplete immediately but that won’t be noticed for many years. When the soil is finally ruined, which is the fate of nearly all agricultural soils, it will stunt ecological recovery for decades. But while the soil is steadily eroding, crops will support a growing village.

All these factors—storable food, surplus, calories from carbohydrates, and slow feedback from degrading ecosystems—lead inevitably to rising populations in farming cultures. It’s no coincidence, then, that farmers are also conquerors. A growing population needs more land. Depleted farmland forces a population to take over virgin soil. In comparison, forager cultures are usually very site specific: they know the habits of particular species and have a culture built around a certain place. They rarely conquer new lands, as new terrain and its different species would alter the culture’s knowledge, stories, and traditions. But expansion is built into agricultural societies. Wheat and other grains can grow almost anywhere, so farming, compared to foraging, requires less of a sense of place.

Even if we note these structural problems with agriculture, the shift from foraging at first glance seems worth it because—so we are taught—agriculture allows us the leisure to develop art, scholarship, and all the other luxuries of a sophisticated culture. This myth still persists even though for 40 years anthropologists have compiled clear evidence to the contrary. A skilled gatherer can amass enough wild maize in three and a half hours to feed herself for ten days. One hour of labor can yield a kilogram of wild einkorn wheat.(7) Foragers have plenty of leisure for non-survival pleasures. The art in the caves at Altamira and Lascaux, and other early examples are proof that agriculture is not necessary for a complex culture to develop. In fact, forager cultures are far more diverse in their arts, religions, and technologies than agrarian cultures, which tend to be fairly similar.(3) And as we know, industrial society allows the least diversity of all, not tolerating any but a single global culture.

A Life of Leisure

We’re also taught that foragers’ lives are “nasty, brutish, and short,” in Hobbes’s famous characterization. But burial sites at Dickson Mounds, an archaeological site in Illinois that spans a shift from foraging to maize farming, show that farmers there had 50% more tooth problems typical of malnutrition, four times the anemia, and an increase in spine degeneration indicative of a life of hard labor, compared to their forager forebears at the site.(8) Lifespan decreased from an average of 26 years at birth for foragers to 19 for farmers. In prehistoric Turkey and Greece, heights of foragers averaged 5′-9″ in men and 5′-5″ in women, and plummeted five inches after the shift to agriculture (1). The Turkish foragers’ stature is not yet equaled by their descendants. In virtually all known examples, foragers had better teeth and less disease than subsequent farming cultures at the same site. Thus the easy calories of agriculture were gained at the cost of good nutrition and health.

We think of hunter-gatherers as grimly weathering frequent famine, but agriculturists fare worse there, too. Foragers, with lower population densities, a much more diverse food supply, and greater mobility, can find some food in nearly any conditions. But even affluent farmers regularly experience famine. The great historian Fernand Braudel (9) shows that even comparatively wealthy and cultured France suffered country-wide famines 10 times in the tenth century, 26 in the eleventh, 2 in the twelfth, 4 in the fourteenth, 7 in the fifteenth, 13 in the sixteenth, 11 in the seventeenth, and 16 in the eighteenth century. This does not include the countless local famines that occurred in addition to the widespread ones. Agriculture did not become a reliable source of food until fossil fuels gave us the massive energy subsidies needed to avoid shortfalls. When farming can no longer be subsidized by petrochemicals, famine will once again be a regular visitor.

Agriculture needs more and more fuel to supply the population growth it causes. Foragers can reap as many as 40 calories of food energy for every calorie they expend in gathering. They don’t need to collect and spread fertilizer, irrigate, terrace, or drain fields, all of which count against the energy gotten from food. But ever since crops were domesticated, the amount of energy needed to grow food has steadily increased. A simple iron plow requires that millions of calories be burned for digging, moving, and smelting ore. Before oil, one plow’s forging meant that a dozen trees or more were cut, hauled, and converted to charcoal for the smithy. Though the leverage that a plow yields over its life may earn back those calories as human food, all that energy is robbed from the ecosystem and spent by humans.

Farming before oil also depended on animal labor, demanding additional acreage for feed and pasture and compounding the conversion of ecosystem into people. Agriculture’s caloric yield dipped into the negative centuries ago, and the return on energy has continued to degrade until we now use an average of 4 to 10 calories for each calorie of food energy.

So agriculture doesn’t just require cropland. It needs inputs from vast additional acreages for fertilizer, animal feed, fuel and ore for smelting tools, and so on. Farming must always drain energy and diversity from the land surrounding cultivation, degrading more and more wilderness.

Wilderness is a nuisance for agriculturists, a source of pest animals and insects, as well as land that’s just “going to waste.” It will constantly be destroyed. Combine this with farming’s surplus of calories and its need for large families for labor, and the birth rate will rise geometrically. Under this brutal calculus of population growth and land hunger, Earth’s ecosystems will increasingly and inexorably be converted into human food and food-producing tools.

Forager cultures have a built-in check on population, since the plants and animals they depend on cannot be over-harvested without immediate harm. But agriculture has no similar structural constraint on over-exploitation of resources. Quite the opposite is true. If one farmer leaves land fallow, the first neighbor to farm it gains an advantage. Agriculture leads to both a food race and population explosion. (I cannot help but wonder if eating high on the food chain via meat, since it will reduce population, is ultimately a more responsible act than eating low on the food chain with grains, which will promote larger populations. At some point humans need to get the message to slow their breeding.)

We can pass laws to stop some of the harm agriculture does, but these rules will reduce harvests. As soon as food gets tight, the laws will be repealed. There are no structural constraints on agriculture’s ecologically damaging tendencies.

All this means that agriculture is fundamentally unsustainable.

The damage done by agriculture is social and political as well. A surplus, rare and ephemeral for foragers, is a principal goal of agriculture. A surplus must be stored, which requires technology and materials to build storage, people to guard it, and a hierarchical organization to centralize the storage and decide how it will be distributed. It also offers a target for local power struggles and theft by neighboring groups, increasing the scale of wars. With agriculture, power thus begins its concentration into fewer and fewer hands. He who controls the surplus controls the group. Personal freedom erodes naturally under agriculture.

The endpoint of Cohen’s cultural continuum is industrial society. Industrialism is really a gloss on agriculture, since industry is dependent on farming to provide low-cost raw materials that can be “value-added,” a place to externalize pollution and other costs, and a source of cheap labor. Industrial cultures have enormous ecological footprints, low birth rates, and high labor costs, the result of lavishing huge quantities of resources—education, complex infrastructure, layers of government and legal structures, and so on—upon each person. This level of complexity cannot be maintained from within itself. The energy and resources for it must be siphoned from outlying agricultural regions. Out there lie the simpler cultures, high birth rates, and resulting low labor costs that must subsidize the complexity of industry.

An industrial culture must also externalize costs upon rural places via pollution and export of wastes. Cities ship their waste to rural areas. Industrial cultures subsidize and back tyrannical regimes to keep resource prices and labor costs low. These tendencies explain why, now that the US has shifted from an agrarian base to an industrial one, Americans can no longer afford to consume products made at home and must turn to agrarian countries, such as China and Mexico, or despotic regimes, such as Saudi Arabia’s, for low-cost inputs. The Third World is where the First World externalizes the overwhelming burden of maintaining the complexity of industrialism. But at some point there will be no place left to externalize to.

Horticulture to the Rescue

As I mentioned, Cohen locates another form of culture between foraging and agriculture. These are the horticulturists, who use simple methods to raise useful plants and animals. Horticulture in this sense is difficult to define precisely, because most foragers tend plants to some degree, most horticulturists gather wild food, and at some point between digging stick and plow a people must be called agriculturists. Many anthropologists agree that horticulture usually involves a fallow period, while agriculture overcomes this need through crop rotation, external fertilizers, or other techniques. Agriculture is also on a larger scale. Simply put, horticulturists are gardeners rather than farmers.

Horticulturists rarely organize above the tribe or small village level. Although they are sometimes influenced by the monotheism, sky gods, and messianic messages of their agricultural neighbors, horticulturists usually retain a belief in earth spirits and regard the Earth as a living being. Most horticultural societies are far more egalitarian than agriculturists, lacking despots, armies, and centralized control hierarchies.

Horticulture is the most efficient method known for obtaining food, measured by return on energy invested. Agriculture can be thought of as an intensification of horticulture, using more labor, land, capital, and technology. This means that agriculture, as noted, usually consumes more calories of work and resources than can be produced in food, and so is on the wrong side of the point of diminishing returns. That’s a good definition of unsustainability, while horticulture is probably on the positive side of the curve. Godesky (10) believes this is how horticulture can be distinguished from agriculture. It may take several millennia, as we are learning, but agriculture will eventually deplete planetary ecosystems, and horticulture might not.

Horticulturists use polycultures, tree crops, perennials, and limited tillage, and have an intimate relationship with diverse species of plants and animals. This sounds like permaculture, doesn’t it? Permaculture, in its promotion of horticultural ideals over those of agriculture, may offer a road back to sustainability. Horticulture has structural constraints against large population, hoarding of surplus, and centralized command and control structures. Agriculture inevitably leads to all of those.

A Steep Price

We gave up inherently good health as well as immense personal freedoms when we embraced agriculture. I once thought of achievements such as the Hammurabic Code, Magna Carta, and Bill of Rights as mileposts on humanity’s road to a just and free society. But I’m beginning to view them as ever larger and more desperate dams to hold back the swelling flood of abuses of human rights and the centralization of power that are inherent in agricultural and industrial societies. Agriculture results, always, in concentration of power by the elite. That is the inevitable result of the large storable surplus that is at the heart of agriculture.

It is no accident that permaculture’s third ethic wrestles with the problem of surplus. Many permaculturists have come to understand that Mollison’s simple injunction to share the surplus barely scratches the surface of the difficulty. This is why his early formulation has often been modified into a slightly less problematic “return the surplus” or “reinvest the surplus,” but the fact that these versions have not yet stabilized into a commonly held phrasing as have the other two ethics, “Care for the Earth” and “Care for People,” tells me that permaculturists have not truly come to grips with the problem of surplus.

The issue may not be to figure out how to deal with surplus. We may need to create a culture in which surplus, and the fear and greed that make it desirable, are no longer the structural results of our cultural practices. Jared Diamond may be right, and agriculture and the abuses it fosters may turn out to be a ten-millennium-long misstep on the path to a mature humanity. Permaculture may be more than just a tool for sustainability. The horticultural way of life that it embraces may offer the road to human freedom, health, and a just society.

Acknowledgement

I am deeply indebted to Jason Godesky and the Anthropik Tribe for first making me aware of the connection between permaculture and horticultural societies, and for formulating several of the other ideas expressed in this article.

References

1. Diamond, Jared. The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. Discover, May 1987.
2. Mollison, Bill. (1988). Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual. Tagari.
3. Cohen, Yehudi. (1971). Man in Adaptation: The Institutional Framework. De Gruyter.
4. Lee, R. and I. Devore (eds.) 1968. Man the Hunter. Aldine.
5. Harris, David R. An Evolutionary Continuum of People-Plant Interactions. In Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation. Harris, D. R. and G.C. Hillman (eds.) 1989.
6. Milton, K. 1984. Protein and Carbohydrate Resources of the Maku Indians of Northwestern Amazonia. American Anthropologist86, 7-27.
7. Harlan, Jack R. Wild-Grass Seed Harvesting in the Sahara and Sub-Sahara of Africa. In Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation. Harris, D. R. and G.C. Hillman (eds.) 1989.
8. Goodman, Alan H., John Lallo, George J. Armelagos and Jerome C. Rose. (1984) Health Changes at Dickson Mounds (A.D. 950–1300). In Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, M. Cohen and G. Armelagos, eds. Academic.
9. Braudel, Fernand (1979). Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century: The Structures of Everyday Life. Harper and Row.
10. Godesky, Jason (2005). Human Societies are Defined by Their Food. http://rewild.info/anthropik/2005/10/thesis-8-human-societies-are-defined-by-their-food/index.html

Copyright 2006 by Toby Hemenway.

Published in Permaculture Activist #60, May, 2006)

You know what a stream looks like. It has a pair of steep banks that have been scoured by shifting currents, exposing streaks and lenses of rock and old sediment. At the bottom of this gully—ten to fifty feet down—the water rushes past, and you can hear the click of tumbling rocks as they are jostled downstream. The swift waters etch soil from first one bank, then the other as the stream twists restlessly in its bed. In flood season, the water runs fast and brown with a burden of soil carried ceaselessly from headwaters to the sea. At flood, instead of the soft click of rocks, you can hear the crack and thump of great boulders being hauled oceanward. In the dryness of late summer, however, a stream is an algae-choked trickle, skirted by a few tepid puddles among the exposed cobbles and sand of its bed. These are the sights and sounds of a contemporary stream.

You don’t know what a stream looks like. A natural North American stream is not a single, deeply eroded gully, but a series of broad pools, as many as fifteen per mile, stitched together by short stretches of shallow, braided channels. The banks drop no more than a foot or two to water, and often there are no true banks, only a soft gradation from lush meadow to marsh to slow open water. If soil washes down from the steep headwaters in flood season, it is stopped and gathered in the chain of ponds, where it spreads a fertile layer over the earth. In spring the marshes edging the ponds enlarge to hold floodwaters. In late summer they shrink slightly, leaving at their margins a meadow that offers tender browse to wildlife. An untouched river valley usually holds more water than land, spanned by a series of large ponds that step downhill in a shimmering chain. The ponds are ringed by broad expanses of wetland and meadow that swarm with wildlife.

Until the arrival of Europeans in North America, this second vision was, almost without exception, what streams looked like. They were transformed into the gullied channels we mistake for the natural state of streams soon after the killing of millions of beaver. Most European settlers never saw the original condition of our watersheds, because the trappers came before them, a deadly colonial avant-garde that swept relentlessly from Atlantic to Pacific coast and hunted the beaver to near extinction. Deeply gullied ravines had been the norm in an anciently beaver-cleared Europe, and they quickly became the norm here too. Removing the beaver drastically altered and simplified the landscape.

Before Europeans arrived, there were an estimated 100 to 400 million beaver in North America. Today there are roughly 9 million, with their numbers having rebounded from an even lower nadir at about 1900. Early records show that beaver lived in nearly every body of water in New England.

The first white settlement in New England began with the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, and in the decade following, 100,000 beaver were skinned in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Having quickly depleted the coastal stocks, trappers moved west into New York and killed another 800,000 beaver from 1630 to 1640. In 1638 England’s Charles II declared beaver fur to be mandatory in the manufacture of hats, to the animal’s further misfortune.

As the slaughter spread westward, the numbers increased: The French port of Rochelle received 127,080 beaver pelts in 1743 alone (beaver were not the sole target—1267 wolves and a staggering 16,512 bears were also shipped to Rochelle that year). By 1850, beaver were nearly extinct from the Atlantic to the Oregon Territory. Entire deciduous riparian forests disappeared from the west coast. Without the beaver’s omnipresent influence, streams in every watershed eroded into the deep channels we know today, and soil washed to the sea.

Keystone of the Watershed

As Bill Mollison has observed, everything gardens. The beaver, however, goes far beyond simple gardening to feats of complex ecosystem transformation. Beaver don’t merely build dams that create ponds. They control the flow of vast amounts of energy and material. With tough incisors and instinct, beavers create a shifting mosaic of moist and dry meadows, wet forests, marshes, bogs, streams, and open water that change the climate, nutrient flow, vegetation, wildlife, hydrology, and even geology of entire watersheds.

One of permaculture’s core principles advises that we intervene at the point of maximum effectiveness—achieve the greatest result with the least effort—and beaver epitomize that axiom. The beaver understood how to hold water and soil on the land long before Keyline originator P.A. Yeomans, and the stunning increases in diversity and sheer biomass achieved by the beaver serves to confirm the wisdom of Yeomans’s vision. We can learn much that is useful to permaculturists from a closer look at how the beaver works, and how their actions reach deep into the heart of ecosystem health and function.

When a beaver fells an aspen—their favorite food and building stock—the tree sends up suckers. The new shoots respond to the cutting of their parent tree by producing bitter alkaloids that beaver don’t like. This promotes a dynamic balance between aspen growth and beaver felling. However, the young suckers are just right for moose and elk, and these large mammals prosper in the tasty browse where inedible treetrunks once grew.

Tree-cutting by beaver changes the course of ecological succession by opening the canopy and removing certain plant species. Light-loving plants, such as alders, hazels, and spruces, thrive and multiply. The chips and abandoned brush from the felled trees offer shelter and food to insects, small mammals, and birds. Most of the tree, though, is used by the beaver for dams and lodges.

Beaver choose the gently sloping lower reaches of valleys for their work. A small dam on flat land impounds more water behind it than one on a steep slope, doing the least work to create a large pond. The water that backs up behind the dam saturates the soil beneath it, creating a blend of anaerobic and aerobic pockets, varying with water depth, vegetation, soil type, and distance from the pond edge. Decomposition at the anaerobic sites is slow, preserving organic matter. Dead trees and snags left by the beaver or killed by flooding become home to a wide array of animals and microbes. The structural, biological, and chemical complexity of the region increases.

Vegetation drowned by the pond rots, releasing vast flows of nutrients into the water. The pond bubbles methane into the atmosphere. Erosion caused by the lapping of the expanding upstream shoreline pulls more nutrients into the water. In the pond and downstream from the dam, biomass now surges because of the water’s increased fertility. The growing plants and animals trap these nutrients and begin to cycle them.

Ecosystems that retain nutrients recover more easily from disturbance than nutrient-losing ones. This means the pond communities and those around it are likely to persist for a long time.

Because the pond has slowed the once-rushing water, it can’t carry as much sediment. The released burden settles onto the pond bottom. The small dam’s ability to collect sediment is enormous: An average beaver dam, containing four to eighteen cubic meters of wood, will eventually retain 2000 to 6500 cubic meters of sediment behind it. That’s tremendous leverage, and very effective use of resources! Paleoecological evidence shows that entire valley floors have been raised many meters by beaver pond sediments.

These sediments contain carbon, potassium, phosphate, and other nutrients, which are slowly released into the pond, or provide food for burrowers and other burgeoning denizens of the soft bottom. The burrowing worms and other creatures alter nutrient flows as well. They stir up the sediment, releasing soluble chemicals into the water, but they also trap and retain nutrients, storing them as bodies and food, and coating their burrows with organic matter.

Huge numbers of tubeworms and clams are nurtured by the slow water-speeds and the sediments that result, as well as abundant dragonflies and other predatory insects. Because of these predators, fewer blackflies and mosquitoes infest beaver ponds than man-made ponds.

Sediments in beaver ponds and wet meadows at their margins are warmer than those in dry meadows and forests, which means faster growth of plants and soil organisms. In many cases, beaver ponds also raise the water table, making moisture more available to roots and soil life. Shrews, voles, and other small mammals thrive in the warm, verdant growth.

More fish species are found in and near beaver ponds than in open streams. Overall, the diversity and biomass of plants and animals in beaver ponds is two to five times that of riffling streams.

The ponds themselves can vary hugely, creating many different habitats. Some ponds are squeezed into deep, narrow uplands, and others spread across broad, low valleys. Downstream ponds are closer to permanent aquatic habitats at river mouths, and thus trade species with them. Dams regularly collapse, and some are not repaired, so ponds are often in various stages of conversion to dryer habitats.

But just as significant are the varied habitats that ring beaver ponds. Upstream and down are open stretches of flowing water, home to stream species. At the pond edges the beaver have created bogs, marshes, wet meadows, and riparian forests. The new wetlands and meadows contain more nutrients than the older uplands, and so support more types and numbers of living beings. Edging the wetlands are dry meadows and woodlands. And beaver meadows are very persistent, because their previous flooding has acidified the soil, helping them resist invasion by shrubs and trees.

All these habitats are flooded in a very complex pattern that varies with both the flow of water over the seasons and the beaver’s activity. This means the conditions in all these communities vary widely over time, allowing yet more biodiversity.

Beaver create a stunningly diverse mosaic of habitats that shift over both space and time. Scientists in Minnesota found that returning beaver transformed a section of uniform deciduous forest into 32 different aquatic, emergent, shrub, and forested wetland communities at various successional stages.

On the left is a stream before beaver damming; the right side shows the same stream after beavers built 3 dams. Edge area of stream and water table margin was significantly increased, and habitat types (shown by numbers) rose from one to four. Redrawn from R.J. Naiman et al. (1988), BioScience 38: 753-762.]

A beaverless watershed will most likely contain a deeply gullied stream with a dry edge. A watershed with beaver will have open, shallow streams, many ponds both active and abandoned, wet and dry meadows, drowned, riparian, and dry forests, and different wetlands of all sizes, types, and successional phases. This whole network and the many species living there will shift and repattern as beaver move out of ponds or return to abandoned dams. These animals and the work they do are the key to biodiversity in the watershed.

Busy Little Engineers

The importance of the beaver hasn’t gone unnoticed by ecologists, and these creatures also offer both conceptual tools and affirmation to permaculturists as well. Recently, ecologists have coined a phrase to describe animals like the beaver: Ecosystem engineers. These are organisms that directly affect and regulate the availability of resources to other species, by causing physical changes in biotic and abiotic materials. In doing this they create and/or modify habitats.

I’m not wild about calling animals “engineers,” as my personal view of engineering is that it is not as creative, inspiring, or appropriate as what nature does—I’d rather call engineers “retarded beavers”—but the term is well established and will have to do here.

Ecosystem engineers fall into two camps. In the first are creatures like the beaver and earthworm, which work their magic by manipulating living and non-living materials (they are called allogenic engineers, for those who like fancy terms).

The second group are those which alter the environment by changes in their own bodies (autogenic engineers). Trees are the consummate example of autogenic engineers, and Mollison has written brilliantly of the way trees interact with and affect their environment. However, he focuses mainly on the effects of trees on the non-living world: how they affect rainfall, hydrology, soil, clouds, and wind. One could deepen his essays by describing how trees regulate the other species around them. They create habitat for many species amidst their trunks, branches, water-filled crotches, leaves, and roots. The roots provide cavities and aeration, and change soil texture and infiltration rates, which affect both underground and surface dwellers. Leaf litter changes the drainage, moisture level, and gas and moisture exchange rates in soil habitats, and creates barriers to or protection for microbes, seeds, seedlings, and animals. Trunks, branches, and leaves drop into streams, altering flow and otherwise providing new habitat. This list could go on: The ways that trees “engineer” habitat are multifold.

The principal point to grasp about ecological engineers is that they act at points of maximum leverage to change the flow, availability, and pattern of energy, nutrients, and other resources that are used by other species. They often are not part of these flows themselves, thus their interactions are on a very different level from the predator/prey relations (trophic level) upon which so many of ecology’s precepts are based.

Ecosystem engineers “design” their own habitats and those of others, and exert a great deal of control over them. This means they create stable, predictable conditions for themselves and for the ever-increasing numbers of creatures who become dependent on them, and for ecosystem processes. They damp the wild flows passing through their homes. They usually enhance biodiversity and make environments more complex.

Sound familiar? The whole idea of ecosystem engineers drops neatly into the permaculture toolbox. These species, like good designers, create and improve habitat for many species as a by-product of enhancing their own environment. They cooperate with ecosystem processes and energy and matter flows, directing them with minimal, efficient intervention, and they benefit themselves and others by doing so.

By understanding ecosystem engineers like the beaver, we can shine a bright, critical light on many of the practices and principles of permaculture. The effects of beaver on a watershed sound to me like nature’s application of P.A. Yeomans’ Keyline concepts, and support permaculture’s belief that earthworks and ponds are critical for restoring ecosystem health. In sites where beaver have returned after a century or more of absence, we have natural models that demonstrate the hugely beneficial effect of holding water on the land.

Trees, as Mollison understood, are another ecosystem engineer to learn from. Others that could be integrated into the permaculture corpus of knowledge are:

• Reef-building corals
• Earthworms and other burrowers (the whole class are called bioturbators for their churning of sediments)
• Certain key fungi and other microbes, which mobilize nutrients
• Algae, which change how light and nutrients are distributed in water
• Elephants, which uproot, trample, and eat whole forests and then deposit huge manure loads elsewhere, stimulating new growth
• Woodpeckers, which alter insect abundance and create nest sites and shelter in trees for many species
• Alligators, which dig wallows that create new habitats

The final and most drastic ecosystem engineer is, of course, Homo sapiens. We’re not very good at it. Usually the effect of our ecosystem engineering is to reduce the possibilities for every other species, rather than to enhance them. But by looking more carefully at the many ways in which nature’s ecosystem engineers improve their own homesites while boosting the productivity and diversity of the larger environment, we can become wiser in our own manipulations.

Bibliography

1. Jones, CG, JH Lawton, M Shachak (1997). Positive and Negative Effects of Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers. Ecology 78:1946-1957.
2. Matthiessen, P (1959). Wildlife in America. Viking Press, New York.
3. Naiman, RJ (1988). Animal Influences on Ecosystem Dynamics. BioScience 38:750-752.
4. Naiman, RJ, CA Johnston, JC Kelley (1988). Alteration of North American Streams by Beaver. BioScience 38:753-762.

Published in Permaculture Activist #47

How many times have you seen a vegetable garden tucked away in the back of a yard, choked with weeds and lurking with unharvested zucchini the size of baseball bats? Instead of being outside the kitchen window where those weeds and past-due vegetables would alert someone washing dishes, the garden has been hidden. And since it’s not on the way to anywhere, visiting the garden means a dedicated journey, not a casual stopping by. It’s in the wrong place.

Here’s an indoor example of the same problem. You get a craving for a steaming café latte. But the cappuccino machine is in a cupboard high above the fridge, stashed behind the turkey roaster and fondue pot. Excavating it is a little too much work, so you abandon your decadent impulse and just grind some beans for the Krups on the counter.

Those small energetic hurdles are just enough to keep us from fully enjoying the things around us. Proper placement is integral to good design. Even if we’re not professional designers, we’re constantly arranging our living environment, from furniture to desk drawers to flower beds. Knowing a few simple principles to guide what goes where can save time, resources, and energy, and help us do more with our day.

Architects and designers have long known the importance of proper placement. Well-designed buildings cluster their plumbing in a “wet wall,” so that kitchen and baths often share walls or are stacked over each other. This saves material by trimming pipe runs, and conserves time, water, and energy: We’ve all dawdled next to a blasting faucet as hot water makes its snail-paced traverse from a distant water-heater.

However, you don’t need an architecture degree to learn how to put things in the best place. From permaculture comes a simple method of proper placement called the Zone System. It works at almost any scale: in landscape layout, in the home or office, even for arranging a desktop or kitchen cupboard. The cardinal rule of the Zone System is to place the items you use the most, or that need the most frequent care, closest to you. The gourmet will want a mesclun bed and herbs by the kitchen door, and baby carrots not much farther away. The “Come on over after work” type will give the patio pride of place. Whether it’s a salad bed, favorite ornamental shrub, cozy porch swing, or your personal miniature golf course, what you enjoy most goes right outside the door. If it’s farther, you simply won’t use it as often.

The key to using zones is: Rather than thinking of objects in static classes—pots, chairs, trees—think of how you interact with them: at every meal, when you sort the mail, on sunny weekends. Then, the right location will become clear.

To understand zones, imagine the whole space you’re working with as being overlain with a set of concentric circles. Where you are based is Zone Zero, and radiating outward are Zones One through Five. For example, if you’re designing a landscape, Zone Zero is the house, your base. Zone One, where oft-used items should go, is a roughly circular area within about twenty feet of the house. I say roughly because the vagaries of topography and hardscape will distort that circle. A steep hill, even if it’s near the house, won’t get much use. And a well-worn path to the garage or mailbox will be in Zone One, but a walkway from a rarely opened side door might be in Zone Two.

Larry Santoyo, an ecological designer in San Luis Obispo, California, is savvy about zones. He tells his clients, “Put your garden somewhere between your front door and your car door.” When you get home from work, you can pluck a dinner’s worth of greens and cherry tomatoes while walking in from the car. Saving a second trip outside means you’ll be more likely to dine on fresh greens than on that frozen dinner in the fridge.

That refrigerator itself should be in the kitchen’s Zone One. Since the 1950s, interior designers have endorsed the “kitchen triangle” for efficient layout: The refrigerator, stove, and sink should form a triangle whose sides total less than 26 feet. This triangle defines the kitchen’s Zone One. Kitchen tools you use often should lie within the triangle. Whether those tools be microwave, Cuisinart, or mortar-and-pestle depends on your personal cooking style.

Less needed items can be stored farther away. Many people keep odd-ball bakeware behind the everyday pans (in the kitchen’s Zone Two), and formal dishes in a hard-to-reach upper cabinet (Zone Three), with this system culminating in those old cans of pumpkin pie mix in the back pantry (which in our house is truly a wilderness area, or Zone Five). These aren’t new kitchen ideas, but placing those often unconscious decisions within the zone framework lets us be systematic and efficient.

Larry Santoyo offers another example. “We had a house with the compost bin under the kitchen window. It was great fun at dinner parties to see the guests’ reactions as we scraped the plates right out the window. Very medieval!” A less unusual use of a kitchen window is to grow culinary herbs in window boxes; no need to go out in the rain to season your omelet.

You can also apply the Zone idea in the office, again according to your own personal patterns. In an office, Zone One might include computer, phone, pens, a writing space, and frequently used files. Because I’m a writer, I keep a dictionary and favorite English-usage books in arm’s reach—the office-scale Zone One—and it’s a short roll of my chair to the main bookshelves, in Zone Two. Even my books follow the Zone System: Important reference works are at eye level and closest, and from there, books radiate outward according to frequency of use, grouped by subject.

In Colorado, permaculture designer Jerome Osentowski has used the Zone System to good advantage in his garden. A neighbor gives him spoiled hay, but as any gardener knows, mulching with hay—loaded with seeds—will saturate a garden with weeds and grasses. The solution for Jerome is the steeply sloping chicken yard in his Zone Two. “I just toss the hay in the top of the chicken yard,” he says. “The birds eat the seeds, manure it, keep busy playing with it, and don’t get muddy. In a week or two, gravity and the birds work the hay to bottom of the yard , where I’ve put a gate.”

Jerome grabs the weed-free, well-fertilized hay and mulches his Zone One and Two gardens, which adjoin the chicken yard. This clever placement—rather than hard work—turns a waste product into a valuable resource, and grows chickens as well.

Sometimes good use of zones has multiple benefits. Adjoining our kitchen is a 5000-gallon concrete cistern that catches rainwater. I nailed a cedar deck over this ugly box, but the deck was too hot to use in summer’s glare. So over it I built an arbor that’s covered with jasmine and seedless Himrod grapes. Now, just outside the kitchen door we dine in shady comfort, plucking overhead grapes in season. Plus, the shaded deck and kitchen stay cool in summer, but the leaves drop to let in winter light.

Zones can turn labor into pleasure, too. Our old garden was a deer-fenced enclosure a good hundred feet from the house. I grew less enamored of the tool-laden trudge; it felt like leaving home for work, and the garden showed my neglect. Finally we found an unobtrusive way to fence in a part of the yard by the house (deer make it impossible to grow any food outside a fence here; I’ve tried everything). Now we have a real Zone One garden. Even in the foulest weather, I just step out the door to pick salad greens, herbs, or flowers. When my wife and I are chatting in the yard, it’s nothing to stoop and yank a couple of tiny weeds. It’s no trouble to toss a handful of mulch onto a patch of bare soil, or to squirt the hose on a drooping seedling. And best of all, we live in this garden, instead of just working there.

Zones help us place the pieces of our design in optimal relationship with each other and with ourselves. They allow us to weave order not by static categories, but by how often we use or need to care for something. Well-planned zones save steps and time, make it easy to keep up with both tasks and play, and truly personalize a home and landscape.

Copyright © 2002 by Toby Hemenway

(Published in Natural Home, May/June, 2002)

Many people in the Peak Oil community chafe at the label of doomer, but a lot of us do have an apocalyptic bent. Although plenty of Peak Oil commentary is sober analysis, a survey of the major websites and books quickly brings up apocalyptic titles like dieoff.org, oilcrash.com, The Death of the Oil Economy, The End of Suburbia,and The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. Peak Oil writings are sprinkled with predictions that billions will die, civil order will collapse, and even that civilization will end. Scientists, too, aren’t immune. During geologist Ken Deffeyes’s Peak Oil presentations, he displays the words “war,” “famine,” “pestilence,” and “death”—the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The Right, the saying goes, has the Left Behind books, and the Left has Peak Oil. Both predict that the end is near. One fascinating aspect of doom scenarios is that they have evolved over the centuries to suit the times. Once you get familiar with the history of apocalypse stories, it’s no surprise that in our technological age, technology—and not a god, an emperor, or the stars—is the bringer of the end.

After I published an article suggesting that Peak Oil may lead “merely” to widespread unemployment and hardship rather than collapse, hundreds wrote to tell me I was a naïve optimist and a cornucopian. A significant part of the Peak Oil community holds the rock-solid sentiment that the only future is one of chaos. While the end of the oil era possesses “death and taxes” certitude, plausible post-peak scenarios span a wide scope. So why is the most touted one the most extreme? Predictions of any stripe, a review will quickly show, are almost always wrong. The future rarely goes in the direction we expect. The certainty of coming doom held by so many made me wonder why we are drawn to societal collapse and our own extinction.

I’m not arguing here for or against a Peak Oil collaps, because that’s a futile debate that won’t end until we enter that future. And I’m not discussing whether our civilization deserves to continue. Rather, this is an exploration into why, given an impending crisis or major challenge, many people in our culture spiral so quickly and automatically toward an “end of the world” vision rather than imagining any of the countless other options.

My earliest hypothesis was that a person’s chosen energy future was based more on personality than on data: Given the same information, people I knew to be optimists generally envisioned a positive future, while pessimists descended into doomerism. But in this simplistic reasoning, I was leaving out a growing mass of critiques of civilization itself by authors such as Joseph Tainter, Derrick Jensen, and Daniel Quinn, and others esteemed by many Peak Oil adherents. While many of these writers argue that civilization is evil, unsustainable, and must collapse, they also posit that human beings deserve something better that can only arise after this culture dies. This death-and-rebirth thinking didn’t fit my “optimist versus pessimist” hypothesis. And seeing how vehemently and urgently people argue for doom-and-gloom—I’ve literally had my lapels grabbed—made me suspect that neither individual psyche nor the cold logic of pure reason was at work here.

I now believe that Peak Oil catastrophism is largely a manifestation of our primary cultural myth: that all things end with suffering, death, and then resurrection. Belief in apocalypse is programmed into western civilization. Given our heritage, “the end is nigh” is the nearly unavoidable personal and collective response to times of uncertainty and rapid change.

Apocalypticism is at the core of the Judeo-Christian social mythology, and it influences our beliefs far more than we are conscious of. I can hear the objections: “I’m not religious—I’ve never even been to church.” But that’s like saying, “I never studied Greece, so ancient Greek culture hasn’t influenced me in any way.” Cultural beliefs are in the air we breathe. We are programmed by our knowledge of mortality and of the natural world, as well as by millennia of myth-telling, to believe that all things, from organisms to businesses to civilizations, progress from birth to a shuddering death and, often, a renewal in new form. As much as the Religious Right’s boast that America is a Christian nation makes liberals uncomfortable, there is some truth to it. From the Declaration of Independence’s “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” and the dollar’s “In God We Trust,” to once-pagan, Christian co-opted Easter egg hunts, Judeo-Christian beliefs saturate our culture. And the idea of apocalypse, that some time soon the End Times will be upon us and all will be transformed, is one of the most fundamental tenets of that system. A look at the history of apocalypticism proves this, and reveals that Peak Oil catastrophism conforms to our apocalyptic myth in such detail that it is difficult to deny its role.

The archetypal apocalypse story in the West is, of course, that of Jesus of Nazareth. Both his life’s story and his messianic prophecies of Judgment Day reflect oppression, death, and transformation, following the common arc of the apocalypse myth. This trajectory is echoed in the Peak Oil projection of increasing global despoliation and chaos, collapse, and the belief that “after Peak Oil, everything will change.” But this myth has also emerged hundreds of other times in our history. Jesus would have remained one of thousands of minor apocalyptic prophets, all predicting a similar end, if not for the brilliant public relations of Saul of Tarsus and other early Christians. And one of their tactics was to piggy-back onto already existing apocalypse stories.

Apocalypse myths predate Jesus by centuries. Ancient Greece, Persia, and Egypt are their primary birthplaces for the West. In Greek mythology, Zeus destroyed the world several times via flood, fire, and war. In one typical example, Zeus, seeing that humanity had become corrupt, ended the world by flood, sparing only two people to found a new race. And there it is: the basic pattern of apocalypse that’s been followed ever since. Humanity becomes wicked and is destroyed except for an elect, who go on to birth a new world.

Always a Social Context

Most people think of apocalyptic groups as religious sects. But as religion has been replaced with other organizing principles such as science and economics, so too have the reasons for apocalypse. Religious people express their doomsday belief through acts of their deities, but the common feature of apocalyptic belief is not religion. It is a social background of upheaval and anxiety. When times get uncertain, people in Judeo-Christian culture gravitate to the idea that the end to the misery will come not through benign relief, but through disaster and collapse.

An example is one of the first Western apocalypse stories with a known historical setting, Daniel’s prophetic dream of the world’s end in the biblical Book of Daniel. Here, political and social strife paints the background. This story was written about 165 BCE, during the height of a Jewish revolt. Jews had enjoyed several centuries of peaceful rule under first the Persians and then Ptolemy, but Palestine then fell under a Syrian-Greek tyrant. He trampled on civil and spiritual liberties, and forbade Jewish religious ceremony. The result was the Jewish Maccabean uprising. During this, Daniel dreamed of four beasts, each representing a successive ruler of Palestine, in which the final beast would “devour the earth . . . and break it in pieces.” This rapacious empire would then be overthrown, and only Israel would be saved. Nearly every subsequent example of apocalyptic belief occurs in a similar social context of upheaval, oppression, and alienation.

The hallucinatory Book of Revelation is the best-known apocalyptic text, but early Christians and Jews had many other books for solace in difficult times. The first-century books of Ezra andBaruch, excluded from the Bible, tell of a time of terrible hardship and injustice, symbolized by the wrath of a devouring eagle. The eagle was the well-known emblem of the Roman Empire,which, it was prophesied in these books, would soon be destroyed by a mighty warrior, and all those who collaborated in the empire’s rule would die.

A later set of end-times texts, known as the Sibylline books, first appeared in the fourth century during the chaos after the death of Emperor Constantine. The Sibylline books tell of a time of tyrants who oppress the poor and enrich the guilty. But a new leader will appear and destroy the heathens and their temples. A similar set of Sibylline books appeared when Syrian Christians suffered under Moslem rule in the seventh century. In all these cases, people hoped for the end of social disorder through catastrophe.

Countless other apocalyptic movements arose in similar contexts of confusion and oppression. In 13th century Germany, Frederick II was enmeshed in bitter conflict with the Pope, claiming that the Church was irredeemably corrupt. During this clash, Joachin of Fiore arose as a prophet to preach of approaching last days when the Church would be destroyed, choosing 1260 as the date of its collapse. Later, in the reign of the singularly ineffective Frederick III, when the gap between rich and poor grew enormous and lawless nobles extorted the populace, the Bohemian Wirsburg brothers attracted thousands who believed the final days would come in 1467. Apocalyptic cults arise, it seems, in a context of oppression, uncertainly, and corruption.

But didn’t the old apocalypts speak of destruction brought by supernatural powers, while the end times we face now stem from scientifically proven sources such as ecological damage and resource depletion? This, too, follows the trend of constant updating and modernization of the Last Days myths to suit the times. In biblical times the apocalypse was brought by a god. In the early centuries of the common era, human warrior-leaders were the destructive force. In the late Middle Ages, during a major migration of peasant farm-workers toward urban centers, it was not a god or prophet, but the fury of the newly empowered laborers in the Jacquerie rebellion of 1356 and others that was predicted to bring down the nobility. The reasons for apocalypse are constantly evolving.

The Modern Doomsday

America is perhaps the most apocalypse-believing nation on Earth. It was so from the beginning, even before the stormy death-rebirth cycle of the American Revolution. After Christopher Columbus’s third journey to the New World, he began signing his letters “Christ-carrier” and wrote that the world would end in 1650.

America’s apocalyptic tendencies peak in hard times. In the 1830s, the rise of the anti-slavery movement coincided with a resurgence of doomsday sects and prophets. William Miller, an abolitionist minister with 50,000 followers and perhaps a million more sympathetic to his message, predicted that Judgement Day would arrive on October 14, 1844. After that date, his movement collapsed. But the abolitionists and their foes, as their acts became more violent, continued to invoke end-times rhetoric in their arguments. Slavery was seen, with good reason, as having the potential to destroy the nation.

In recent centuries, people’s lives have become less occupied by piety and the church, and more oriented toward technology and economics. So too have the causes and results of the apocalypse. In the 16th century, astrology was the favored method of predicting the future, marking early stirrings of the scientific view. The newly improved methods of planetary observation were conscripted by catastrophists. In the 1530s, French astrologer Pierre Turrel used four different methods to calculate final dates of 1537, 1544, 1801, and 1814. Astrologer Richard Harvey marked the end as 1583, during a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.

The newly refined sciences were enlisted to prove the end was near. In 1578, physician Helisaeus Roeslin of Alsace used observations of a nova visible in 1572 to foretell a final date of 1654. In 1688, John Napier, inventor of the logarithm, made his first doomsday calculation based on a mathematical analysis of the Book of Revelation. Other scientists chose end dates of 1892, 1911, and December 17. 1919. David Berg, leader of the Family of Love, predicted that Comet Kohoutek would destroy the planet in 1974. A few of the dozens of other scientifically oriented causes of a predicted world’s end were a planetary alignment in 1982, comet Schoemaker-Levy 9’s 1994 collision with Jupiter, and of course, Y2k. As science has replaced God as our source of certainty and faith, so have our myriad predictions of apocalypse become more rationally defensible.

The doomer Peak Oil scenario also replicates the final phase of the apocalypse story: that of rebirth after the collapse. Richard Heinberg, in a speech to the E. F. Schumacher society, said that after the peak, we will return to a more agrarian way of life, when “we actually regain much of what we have lost.” He and others envision a future with far fewer people, many of them living rurally and raising most of their own food using permaculture and bio-intensive gardening. Some argue that post-peak, only those with primitive skills such as tanning and flint-knapping will survive. Suburban drones will die. So after the collapse, we follow the myth’s final trajectory into the survival of an elect, and a rebirth in the Garden and simpler times.

Again, my point here is not that Peak Oil doomerism is wrong. The apocalypts may be right this time. We face enormous crises and we have the tools to end civilization. But remember, as you feel yourself drawn to the apocalyptic story, that it is the natural place to go in uncertain and dangerous times. We are culturally programmed to do it. Whether we are describing first-century Christians who were threatened with death for their beliefs, 14th-century weavers whose jobs were being automated and outsourced out of existence, or oil addicts about to tumble down Hubbert’s Curve, people who take the apocalyptic view often have good reason to believe they are in mortal danger. The source of the threat varies—an angry god, a brutal empire, a class struggle, or resource depletion—but the response has remained the same over the millennia. The path to “end of the world” thinking is well trod, most heavily so in times of oppression, uncertainty, and corruption. But perhaps some of us can recognize how familiar is this dark road, resist the natural urge to repeat the story once more, and remember that there are many routes into the future other than the one toward the lowest common denominator.

Bibiography

1. Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium. Oxford University Press, 1970
2. Gallup, George Jr., and Jim Castelli. The People’s Religion: American Faith in the 90s. Macmillan, 1989.
3. Strozier, Charles. Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America. Beacon Press, 1994.
4. Weber, Eugen. Apocalypses. Harvard University Press, 1999.

Copyright 2006 by Toby Hemenway

Lately I’ve been lucky enough to teach permaculture courses on the Big Island of Hawai’i at La’akea Gardens. And at each course an odd thing happens. First, let me point out that La’akea generates all its own solar electricity, collects its water from rooftop catchment, uses composting toilets, recycles greywater, sheet mulches copiously, and has a mature food forest (intercropped with nitrogen-fixing trees, of course) hung so heavily with fruit that in five minutes I can fill a five-gallon bucket, in season, with avocados, citrus, abiu, papayas, or spike-skinned rolinias. And don’t get me started on all the different varieties of bananas and timber bamboo.

But regularly I hear new students or visitors say, “I’m disappointed that La’akea isn’t doing much permaculture.” The first few times that happened, I just stood there with my jaw hanging open, wondering how someone could miss something so obvious. However, I’ve finally figured out why people feel that way. It’s because La’akea doesn’t have many garden beds full of vegetables. And food is at the center of most people’s concept of permaculture. An obvious garden bursting with tomatoes, lettuce, and other favorite veggies screams “food production!” in a recognizable, comforting way. To the untrained eye, even one in the middle of an off-the-grid, food-forest paradise, no vegetables equals no permaculture. It’s a preconception so firmly ingrained that it takes the first few days of a tropical design course to shake it loose. But vegetables—especially familiar temperate ones like broccoli, lettuce, and peas—can be difficult to raise in the tropics. Other foods, such as tubers and tree crops, are much easier and more appropriate to grow.

Novice permaculturists aren’t the first to visit the tropics and mistake a lack of garden beds for a lack of food production. Until the late 20th century, western anthropologists studying both ancient and current tropical cultures viewed equatorial agriculture as primitive and inefficient. Archeologists thought the methods were incapable of supporting many people, and so believed Central and South America before Columbus—outside of the major civilizations like the Aztec, Maya, and Inca—held only small, scattered villages. Modern anthropologists scouted tropical settlements for crop fields—the supposed hallmark of a sophisticated culture—and, noting them largely absent, pronounced the societies “hunter gatherer, with primitive agriculture.” How ironic that these scientists were making their disdainful judgements while shaded by brilliantly complex food forests crammed with several hundred carefully tended species of multifunctional plants, a system perfectly adapted to permanent settlement in the tropics. It just looks like jungle to the naive eye.

Even those westerners who recognized the fantastic productivity of these tropical homegardens still had nothing good to say about the underlying rotational pattern that maintained fertility in tropical soils, the much maligned slash-and-burn system. I remember, as a grade-schooler, being taught this concept in words that soured my mouth: Ignorant villagers burn a patch of beautiful tropical forest, plant some annual crops, ruin the soil in just a few years of brutish scratching, and then are forced by their own stupidity to move to another section of virgin rain forest and burn it down in turn. The image combined the worst aspects of nomadic rootlessness, plundering of nature, and subhuman consciousness. Oh, the stupid savages!

As is often the case, the truth is far different. Slash-and-burn, technically referred to as swidden-fallow, has undergone a rehabilitation comparable to that of Stalin’s discredited dissidents when perestroika swept Russia. For swidden-fallow agriculture turns out to be a model for sustainable living in both tropical and temperate lands. Far from being a system of burning, depleting the soil, and walking away, it is a careful and complex form of high-yield permanent husbandry that yields diverse resources from a single patch for decades. Few anthropologists had the mindset, the patience, or a grant cycle lengthy enough to notice that the supposedly abandoned plots were anything but.

The word fallow—to rest a piece of land from cultivation—is familiar to most of us. Swidden, a less-encountered word, means a plot temporarily cleared of cover by burning. The details of the system vary across the tropics, so let’s look at a few examples.

Beyond the Three Sisters

The Lacandon, Ketchi, Huastec, and other Maya of Central American practice an intricate sequential agroforestry on plots called milpas that includes the famed trio of corn, beans, and squash. Since the process is a cycle, I must pick an arbitrary beginning point. We’ll start with the clearing of a fallowed plot. The farmers cut down most of the trees on a site, but spare many nitrogen fixers, timber trees, and good firewood species. Then they fire the remaining brush. The burning coats the soil with nutrient-rich ash, and cures the firewood trees, which are cut and later carried home on the return leg of planting visits.

Corn, beans, and squash fill much of the milpa the first two years or more, but after the first harvest, the farmers dig in seedlings of bananas, papayas, guavas, and other fruit trees, and interplant them with manioc, tomatoes, chiles, herbs, spices, other favorite food and fiber plants, and some native forest seedlings. Nitrogen-fixing and firewood tree seedlings (such as Gliricidia, which is both) weave a border around the plot. The three sisters and other annuals cover the remaining ground for a few more seasons, but over the next five to eight years, the fruit-tree canopy closes in, and the farmers stop planting annuals. That activity shifts to a new plot, but meanwhile, back at the milpa . . . new cycles begin. By now most anthropologists have gone home and are missing the rest of the picture.

In some spots, farmers pull out a few non-flowering trees and bring in beehives. They also coppice trees known to stump-sprout (often leguminous) and begin growing firewood or craftwood. The tree fruits attract game animals, which supply meat, skins, and feathers. Cattle, tied to large trees, forage amid the greenery. Some of the other originally spared trees become trellises for vanilla beans and other vines, which yield for 10 to 12 years. Fruit rains down.

About this time, when the canopy is furiously spreading to complete closure, the farmers begin directing the milpa toward its final stage in the cycle, the managed forest. Sometimes they’ll choose a particular set of tree species to spare: palms, or timber trees, or certain fruits, and develop a plantation or orchard. But more often they’ll nudge the milpa toward a heterogeneous and seemingly haphazard assortment of lightly cultivated trees enriched with useful understory species. This is what is usually called “fallow,” although these managed forests are yielding plenty.

The managed forests of the Huastec Maya in northeastern Mexico are packed with up to 300 plant species, including 81 species for food, 33 for construction materials, 200 with medicinal value, and 65 with other uses (the numbers add up to more than 300 since these are multifunctional plants). In these forests, Maya farmers often create different subpatches that concentrate specific guilds of domestic species (such as coffee guilds) amid a background of natives. And all the while, they are tucking small gardens of bananas, chiles, manioc, and other edibles into any clearings. The managed-forest stage may last for 10 to 30 years. Then the cycle begins anew. Since the whole process is rotational, any given area will hold swiddens and fallows at all different phases. This complexity would understandably delude a cornfield-programmed anthropologist into thinking he was looking at raw jungle.

Food Forests of the Bora

This sort of farming is widespread throughout the tropics. I’ll briefly give another example from the Bora Indians of eastern Peru in the Amazon Basin. The Bora clear small plots of forest, one-half to two acres in size, with axes and machetes. Again, they spare valuable timber and other useful trees such as palm and cedar. After drying for a couple of weeks, the fallen plants are burned. Next, the crops go in. The staple is manioc—the Bora cultivate 22 varieties of sweet and bitter manioc. Among the manioc they plant pineapple, corn, rice, peppers, cowpeas, bananas, peanuts, coca, and medicinal herbs. Clustered on higher ground are guava, avocados, cashews, peach palm, breadfruit, and many other fruit trees less familiar to us. Manioc and other annuals are replanted for several years, but by three years, the canopy cover reaches 30% and the annuals slow down. The fruit trees are beginning to yield.

By the time the swidden is six years old, the trees are crowded, so some are thinned out for timber or firewood. Others are coppiced. A few patches of coca and peanuts remain in deliberate small clearings, but elsewhere the canopy is completely closed. Over the next few years, the swidden is tweaked toward the orchard-fallow phase by selective cutting. For the next decade or two, food comes mostly from large breadfruit, palm, and macambo trees, while other species are used for thatch and timber. The Bora also take game and edible grubs from the maturing forest. Twenty to 40 years after the first clearing, the Bora begin the cycle again.

Both of these systems, and other similar techniques in Indonesia, the Philippines, Africa, and other tropic locales, show an intelligent blending of human stewardship with natural succession. After all, clearing a forest is hard work—why replant annuals every year when you can plant trees and be rewarded over twenty years instead of one? Combined with intensely cultivated dooryard gardens and occasional permanent cropland, the swidden-fallow system offers renewable resources over the long term. It’s not time-consuming work, either: People using these practices spend no more than two hours a day tending their plants. With food taken care of, only a couple more hours a day need be spent obtaining life’s other necessities, leaving plenty of time for leisure and art. Not a bad life.

Discovery of these immensely productive food forests has forced anthropologists to revise upward their guesses of how densely populated the Americas were before Columbus. And with their eyes now opened, they overturned another myth. We’ve all been told how terrible the Amazonian soil is: cut down the trees and you’re left with nothing. But at least 10%—possibly much more—of the Amazon Basin (an area the size of France) is covered with a rich black earth called terra preta. Terra preta soils hold their nutrients even in tropical downpours, and are rich with soil life. They seem to regenerate themselves, and were used by Amazonian Indians to inoculate less fertile soils, kick-starting nutrient cycles. They also last for many centuries. And terra preta, scientists have finally agreed, is human-made. Using nitrogen-fixing trees, permanent crop cover, deep mulching, manure, and other techniques so familiar to permaculture, the Amazonians built feet-thick soil over much of the basin.

Earth as a Garden

As researchers examine the Amazon more carefully, it appears that huge areas contain not only wild plants, but have been stocked with people-friendly cultivars of useful species. More and more, it looks as if the Amazon, like much of the Americas, was a carefully cultivated garden before the Europeans showed up and abused it into a thicketed wilderness. It appears that our idea of wilderness—black forest so dense you can barely walk, where people “take only photographs and leave only footprints”—is a notion burned into our psyches during an anomalous blip: the first two centuries following the Mayflower, in which the gardeners who had tended the Americas for millennia were exterminated, leaving the hemisphere to descend into an neglected tangle of “primeval forest.” It’s likely that this so-called intact forest had never existed before, since humans arrived here as soon as the glaciers receded and began tending the entire landmass with fire and digging stick. The first white explorers describe North America’s forests as open enough to drive wagons through. Two centuries later these agroforests had deteriorated to the black tangles immortalized by Whitman and Thoreau.

Wilderness may be merely a European concept imposed on a depopulated and abandoned landscape. The indigenous people of the Americas were master terraformers, using a hard-learned understanding of ecological processes to preserve the fundamental integrity of natural systems while utterly transforming the land into a place where humans belonged and could thrive. They were truly a part of nature, and likely did not make a distinction, as environmentalists do, between land where people belong and land where we do not. I’ll certainly agree that people carrying chainsaws and riding bulldozers don’t belong everywhere. But I’m beginning to think that gardeners, with gentle tools and sensitive spirits, have been and might again be the best planetary land managers the Earth can have.

Bibliography

1. Alcorn, JB, 1990. Indigenous Agroforestry Systems in the Latin American Tropics, in Agroecology and Small Farm Development, Altieri M, and Hecht, SB eds.
2. Denevan, WM et al, 1984. Indigenous Agroforestry in the Peruvian Amazon. Interciencia 9:346-355.
3. Mann, CC, 2002. 1491. Atlantic Monthly, March 2002:41-54.

Copyright 2004 by Toby Hemenway.

(Published in Permaculture Activist No. 51)

It’s easy to grasp the wisdom in the first two of permaculture’s three ethical principles. The benefits of “care for the earth” and “care for people,” are obvious, and it’s not a difficult step to put those principles into practice. But then comes that third, more challenging principle, “share the surplus.” That’s where some of us waver a bit. How large a pile do we need to store up before some of it spills over into the category of surplus? What if we give the surplus away and then badly need it tomorrow?

Even if we’re able to see the intelligence in sharing the surplus, doing it is a tough step to take. In a culture that exhorts us to be sharp investors and to save for those ever-looming rainy days, and that equates our worth with our bank balance, what heresy it is to urge that we give that valuable surplus away!

How can we know how much is enough and learn to share the remainder? I’ll start by offering a practical reason to abandon the urge to hoard. From a simple physical viewpoint, a surplus is a bother: It must be stored. Storing something is expensive and nearly always causes it to lose value. Think of hiding money in a mattress while inflation chews away at it, or having food rot in the cellar. The value of most goods comes not when they are stored, but from use, from the benefits of flow. For example, the fertility of soil isn’t properly measured by the amount of nutrients present–many are in unusable form–but by the flow of those nutrients to plants and soil life. Likewise, money best retains its value when it flows: when it is exchanged for useful goods, employed as capital, or invested in a bank, business, or government which will then put it to use.

Thus surplus money must come out of the mattress and be made to work. However, when money is invested it can do great harm. What businesses are we comfortable owning stock in? How about government or corporate bonds? Land, an investment option I often hear suggested, is not a liquid place for savings. To get cash back from land, the property must be sold, and usually on contract (banks rarely loan money on raw land), so the seller carries obligation and risk for decades. And whenever land is sold–as I know from bitter experience–it is logged or otherwise developed, because land only has monetary value when it is consumed by the economy.

Also, it’s easy to become obsessed with shepherding our surplus. A wealthy relative of mine, a brilliant and creative man who retired young, now spends much of the day watching the stock channels. His surplus controls him. Holding more than we need means devoting concern and effort to its care.

The Uncertain Line of Time

However, I doubt if practical arguments will persuade people to share the surplus, because the desire to hoard isn’t really grounded in reason. In part, the insecurities that drive people to hoard stem from our transition, long ago, from cyclical to linear time.

Archaic humans experienced time as cyclical, where events weren’t singular, but recurrent. Time seemed not to progress so much as to loop. Human activities were embedded within cycles of sun, moon, tides, solstice and equinox, and other patterns of return. A hard and hungry winter was inevitably followed by a gentle spring and bountiful summer. People knew that times of scarcity didn’t last forever. During a grim season, their comfort came from the certainty that lean times had always ended in the past, and would end this time too. Hence they didn’t need an eternally expanding storehouse to reassure them, merely enough to get through the drought, the deluge, or the winter. For these people, decrease and increase ebbed and flowed in a timeless and familiar rhythm. Each person’s life was safely embedded in a well-worn pattern of cycles within larger cycles.

But we have unwound these comforting cycles and hammered them straight, into the arrow of linear time. We see each event as unique, separate, and not enmeshed within a larger periodicity. For us the past recedes into dimness, and the future extends toward uncertainty. Linear time offers no recurring pattern of birth, maturity, death, and renewal, only the whirling of numbers—bank balances, dates, odometer mileages, the NASDAQ index–that mount or diminish. Having lost the knowledge that this, too, shall pass, and that tomorrow always brings renewal, we can only gird ourselves against the worst possible case, and here our imaginations are fertile. No storehouse or bank account can be large enough to protect us from a murky, unraveling eternity where anything can go wrong, and stay wrong forever.

With no faith in renewal, it’s easy to believe that we could lose everything. This fosters the illusion that we live in a world of scarcity. Economics itself, our secular religion, is defined as “the allocation of scarce resources among competing demands.” That’s a bitterly Darwinian view of human interactions. If we limit ourselves to that world, where armored ATM machines parcel out twenty-dollar bills in miserly driblets, we can be fooled into believing that scarcity is the rule.

But scarcity is not life’s law. Outside my window as I write this, high springtime is turning the corner to summer. A foot or more of new growth shoots in a green fountain from every tree branch, seedheads hang heavy on the tall grass, and nature’s fecundity is a palpable presence. Nature’s model is one of supreme, unbridled abundance. It seems ironic, then, to live in an economic system based on lack. When a single ear of corn can yield hundreds of grain-stuffed plants, how puzzling to find that our economy is based on a science of scarcity.

Economic Mythmaking

Yet economics, whose own practitioners call it the “dismal science,” has at its core a number of untruths. One is that, in any transaction, it is a deep trait of our nature to squeeze every ounce of value from the exchange. We’ve all been taught a homey little myth to reinforce this point. It says, in olden times people used barter to exchange their labor and resources: I’ll make you a pair of shoes, you trade me your ax. But barter, this myth says, was inconvenient—perhaps the village ax-maker already had plenty of shoes—so humans invented money to create a system of universal exchange and to standardize values. That way people could know they were getting equal or better value in any transaction.

The problem is, barter societies don’t seem ever to have existed. In the 1920s the maverick French economist, Marcel Mauss, cited anthropologists who found that moneyless societies rarely use a strict barter system. Instead, most goods circulate as gifts. One person in a community gives something to another who needs it, even though there may be no hope of immediate return. This open-ended giving links both people, and points toward a future exchange. The giver is seen by the group as useful, reliable, and generous, and is accepted into the communal flow of goods and labor, while the receiver is indebted to a system that supports him. I watched this process in action during a stay on Bali about 15 years ago, which at that time still had a largely cash-free culture. When a young couple married, a relative gave them a corner of land. Then friends built them a house from donated supplies and stocked it with food, furniture, and utensils. Later, the couple helped out at subsequent house-raisings.

These open-ended exchanges knit close personal bonds that overshadow the value of the gift. Often a long-circulated gift will become invested with a value far beyond its utilitarian worth. Mauss says that societies even developed methods to prevent calculating who had given how much to whom, specifically to stop careful accounting from restricting the flow.

Our culture still bears vestiges of a gift economy, perhaps because it is more natural to us than the so-called “free market” that’s often touted as inevitable and superior. When a friend drops by with a jar of homemade jam, I feel warmly obligated to return the favor and prolong the friendship. And the most coveted and valuable items in our culture—diamonds, works of art, sacred relics—have little usefulness, but derive their worth from intangible sources such as history and myth. The existence of gift economies and the lack of true barter pokes a nasty hole into the inevitability of the economics of scarcity.

So why is scarcity such an easy sell? Why is it so difficult to achieve the sense of having enough, and the belief that goods are abundant, that is the prerequisite to sharing the surplus? A deeper look at gifts begins to point to an answer.

Filling the Hole

One form of gift is that which so-called primitive people offer as sacrifice. They know that all we are given in life flows freely from the earth and from the gods, and sacrifice begins the process of repayment. These peoples’ connection to the divine lessens the terrible sense of emptiness and loneliness that humans bear. Humans are born alone and we will die alone, and that knowledge, whether called original sin or existential angst, causes nearly unbearable pain from which we try desperately and creatively to distract ourselves. For millennia, humans have known that a relationship with spirit was the path to filling this huge hole within themselves. The divine gave humans relief from the emptiness. To pay back this awesome debt, people once offered their surplus as a sacrifice or gave it to the church. Gifts to a Creator allowed people to pay back the ultimate gift of peace they received. These gifts, by returning what was given, also insured that the cycles of abundance would continue.

Because they were connected with spirit, archaic people felt full, so they didn’t need to hoard. We hoard because we feel empty, and have nothing to fill our emptiness except material things. Modern people feel this emptiness so acutely because we are too clever to believe in the divine. We have bludgeoned God to death with the tools of science, logic, and philosophy. Only what we see and measure is real, and consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of brain chemistry, not a link to the Creator. The scarcity ethic has its true roots in the immaterial, in our disconnection from spirit and the resulting sense of loss that our corporeal existence forces on us. Since this spiritual emptiness can no longer be filled with spirit, we look for completion to the only things we believe in: goods, endless activity, and most of all, money.

Goods and activity quickly reveal themselves as unsatisfying, but money never seems to. When we are bloated on food, we stop eating. After buying that vacation home, most people cease acquiring real estate. Sex and drug-taking pale after a while, or cause enough damage to drive us into a 12-step program. But money . . . money is something different. Money is non-material—it merely represents wealth, and is convertible to wealth of any kind—and thus holds the most promise to fill our non-material, spiritual emptiness. And being non-material and limitlessly convertible, money never tells us when we have enough. A story told of Andrew Carnegie is that a reporter asked him, “Now that you’re the richest man in the world, how much money will be enough for you?” He answered, “Just a little bit more.”

We have traded our gods for cash. Today we worship at a less satisfying, less meaningful shrine, but one that is difficult to turn away from. The gleam of gold holds the eye, and watching the pile grow larger is nearly irresistible. During a controversy over whether Christians should accept interest on invested money, a 5th-century Syrian bishop, Jacob of Saroug, had a vision of the devil, who was all in favor of interest. “I do not mind,” the devil told the bishop, “if the priest uses the interest he draws from his money to buy an ax with which to smash the temples of my idols. The love of gold is a greater idol than any image of a god. . . . They have cast down the idols, but they will never cast down the coins that I shall put in their place.”

Without a relationship with spirit to make possible the divine exchange of surplus for the gift of wholeness, we have little choice but to store up all we can in an attempt to fill our emptiness. That rainy day looms too ominously for us to be generous. Of course, whatever we hoard still isn’t enough–how could mere matter or money fill that spiritual hole?–so in misdirected hope we work harder, produce more, earn more, and mound up our nest egg.

The result of this is the growth economy. Only by believing in endless growth and progress can people be certain they’ll soon have still more, that tomorrow will surely be better than today. If I didn’t believe that tomorrow I will get a raise, that next year I’ll live in a bigger house, that someday I’ll have my boss’s job, I would have to look around me and be miserable at the sight. Without the promise of growth to distract me, I’d be forced to see what I had today—that crummy job, the ugly house, the abusive boss—and realize that it was horrible, wasn’t going to change significantly, and was a result of a dismal system in which I was trapped. And that would be a revolutionary discovery, one that the advocates of growth have not made or pray we won’t make. If we believe tomorrow will be better, we can acquiesce to today’s injustices and inequities. But the truth is that tomorrow we will still be mired in the economics of scarcity. Tomorrow will be very much like today. Only by understanding that today we have enough can we abandon our empty, ceaseless striving.

A Permacultural View

It would be pleasant to wrap up this essay by offering a simple solution that everyone can adopt and instantly be cured of a sense of emptiness. But I can’t offer a fail-safe technique for developing a sense of surplus. The solution won’t come from outside. However, let’s take a permacultural view of the problem. One of permaculture’s strengths is that its solutions are not one-size-fits-all techniques, but derive instead from a way of looking at things, and at this new vantage many problems dissolve into solutions. Permaculture suggests that the best solutions to most problems is to observe, and to model designs and actions after natural rhythms and time-tested ways. Learning to share the surplus follows this pattern. By observing the physical consequences of the need to hoard, it becomes obvious that the cost is high. But recognizing when there is a surplus is not done only by measuring and counting. It comes with a deeper observing: understanding where the sense of “not enough” stems from. That emptiness comes from inside. It can be relieved in part by reconnecting to the cycles of natural abundance through a closer relationship with nature.

Perhaps more importantly, inner emptiness and the resulting drive to hoard can be alleviated by reconnecting to the divine, whether it’s spiritual practice, some form of talking therapy or experiential self-exploration, Earth rituals, or a few visits to the church you went to in childhood. By linking to natural cycles and the constant flow of gifts from spirit, it’s possible to know how much is enough, to give away the surplus, and to be sure that the gift will be returned.

Copyright 2005 by Toby Hemenway

(Published in Permaculture Activist No. 46)

The phrase “the end of the world as we know it” has been uttered so often in the last decade that some Peak Oil advocates simply use its acronym, TEOTWAWKI. This awkward shorthand was once employed by Y2k catastrophists, and that heritage alone—the most unnecessary “sky is falling” panic in my lifetime—is enough to make me skeptical of the negativism embraced by many of my fellow Peak Oil believers. Peak Oil is as inevitable as death and taxes. But for every convert that Peak Oil’s doom-and-gloom extremism sweeps up, it alienates plenty of people who might otherwise climb down from their SUVs. Peak-Oil catastrophism’s repetition of doubtful facts and its sometimes muddied thinking betray a lack of critical analysis that discredits the Peak Oil movement. I’d like to delve into some of the errors and half-truths surrounding Peak Oil catastrophism, not as encouragement for those who want to party on blindly into the end of oil, which would be tragic, but as a way of refining and bolstering those arguments around Peak Oil that are valid.

There is no doubt that oil is running out. But to believe that it will surely bring the end of the world, you must believe that:

1. Our demand for oil is unchangeable and is not significantly affected by price.
2. We are so badly addicted to oil that we will watch our civilization collapse rather than change our behavior.
3. Significant oil conservation is not possible in the time frame needed.
4. Even with conservation, demand will be more than oil plus alternatives can possibly meet.
5. Society is so fragile that it cannot withstand large shocks.

These are the significant beliefs needed to be a Peak Oil catastrophist. Each is false. Let’s look at them.

The starting point for most Peak-Oil catastrophism is Hubbert’s curve. M. King Hubbert was a petroleum geologist who published papers in 1956(1) and 1974 (2) showing that US and world oil production should follow a simple bell curve. He believed US production would peak around 1970, and world output around 1995, followed by a drop as steep as the rise. He offered no equations and little mathematical basis for his hypothesis, but showed data for the rising side of the US curve.

Hubbert’s US peak prediction was accurate, and the decline initially followed his curve. It has lately deviated significantly (see Figure 1). World production has not followed Hubbert’s curve since the late 1970s (Figure 2). Production levels for other countries have followed Hubbert’s curve in only 8 of 51 cases (Figure 3). (3) Those facts have not bothered the catastrophists, but some theories are so attractive that it is hard to abandon them when facts disagree.

Falling Off Hubbert’s Curve

Let’s engage in a little critical thinking about Hubbert’s curve. Domestic oil production began to fall sharply around 1970. Why the steep drop? If we’re blinded by theory, we’d say “because supply dried up” and leave it at that. But a careful thinker must look for other explanations that may have an effect. Although roughly half the US oil reserves were, indeed, consumed by 1970, just as Hubbard predicted, several other factors contributed to the steep decline in production: A major oil spill off California in 1969, the first Earth Day in 1970, and many other events spawned a rise in environmental consciousness in the 1970s, and soon, public outcry forced the US to block off-shore drilling and other sources of domestic oil because they damaged our environment. This reduced access even though these reserves were still present. Then, the 1973 Arab oil embargo sent prices skyward, and Americans bought small cars and turned down thermostats, squelching demand and thus domestic production. And, the 1960s and 1970s saw both the rise of the multinational corporation and Britain’s retreat from its Middle-Eastern colonies, a combination that encouraged the oil majors to abandon US oilfields and to enormously boost Mideast operations, where regulations were lax, labor cheap, and supplies huge.

Thus the fall in US production that was a result of the depletion of easy-to-drill domestic deposits, was made increasingly steep by many other causes. The shape of Hubbert’s curve is not dictated only by how much oil is in the ground, but by political, environmental, and economic forces. Today, lapsed US oil leases are being bought back by the oil majors, who are developing these deposits with new techniques. Congress has re-authorized off-shore drilling, and US production has stopped falling. We’re not on Hubbert’s curve any more. To think that domestic oil production declined only because the US began to run out of oil in the 1970s is simplistic and ignores a strong drop in demand, while focusing wrongly on a much milder decrease in supply.

Price Dictates Demand

Oil production levels are shaped by more than supply. Price has an enormous effect, and production levels reveal that story. From 1960 to 1973, as oil prices declined, production ramped up by over 6% each year.(4) Then came the Arab oil embargo’s high prices, and production grew only 1.5% per year from 1973 to 1979. The world began to conserve. Prices rose further in 1979, and production growth slowed again, to 0.75% per year and below, where it has remained since. In other words, we cut our annual growth in oil use by 87.5% in about 6 years (1973 to 1979) and kept it down, which shows how malleable, and sensitive to price, oil consumption levels are.

Catastrophists use scary statistics like “if world oil consumption increases by only 5% per year, we’ll use all the world’s oil in 15 years.” Since world consumption has grown only 0.75% per year for 25 years, it is irresponsible to pretend such inflated numbers are likely.

Per-capita energy use is cited by some catastrophists, such as geologist Richard C. Duncan,(5) as a measure of our plight. They note, correctly, that per-capita use has begun to drop world-wide, and they leap to the conclusion that this can only mean we’re headed back to the Stone Age: Less oil per person must be just like less food or money per person, so civilization is going to end, this sloppy thinking goes. However, US oil consumption per capita has declined substantially since 1979 and we’ve got more toys than ever. From 1979 to 2003, our economy grew by more than 100% and population by 30%, but US oil use only rose by 9%, or 0.25% per year. Per capita oil use declines not just due to supply tightening, but more importantly because we now use vastly less energy to get the same results—a major, very positive reason ignored by catastrophists. The lesson, again: Don’t stop thinking at the first explanation that comes to mind.

In 1973, US cars averaged 13 miles per gallon (mpg). In the wake of price increases, mpg shot up to 24 by 1981, a near-doubling in 8 years.(6) Prices have been steady or lower since then, and average mpg has been unchanged (there’s that tight link between price and consumption again). Higher prices reduce demand, and they spur us to make more efficient use of oil, further slowing demand. That double damping of demand can buy a lot of time to retool.

We currently have technology that can double or quadruple gas mileage, and as prices rise, we’ll use it broadly and consumption will drop, stretching out the right side of Hubbert’s curve substantially. We’ve already shifted the curve in the US, by doubling gas mileage and slowing our increase in oil use from 6% a year to 0.25%. And most of the developed world has conserved better than we have.

The following statement, typical of that on many Peak-Oil web sites, reveals a sad lack of economic knowledge: “[Hubbert] also predicted global production would peak in 1995, which it would have had the politically created oil shocks of the 1970s not delayed the peak for about 10-15 years.”(7) But that’s precisely the point: Price increases dramatically reduce demand, and extend the number of years of oil reserves left. And high prices don’t just make us look for alternatives; overall energy use declines as we conserve. The right side of Hubbert’s curve gets longer each year.

Thus beliefs one and two above, that prices don’t affect consumption, and that we’d rather watch civilization collapse than change our habits, aren’t true.

A Just-in-Time Species

Humans are activated by crisis, and often do little until it arrives. We waffle and deny as a bad situation builds, such as during Hitler’s repeated aggression in Europe in the late 1930s. Then we pass a trigger point and leap into all-out efforts; we are galvanized into war or its equivalent. Look at aircraft production in World War Two: In 1939, the US built 180 airplanes per month.(8) In 1940 we made 1600 each month, and by 1944, 8000. That’s a 4500% increase in 5 years. I’ve not heard any White House statements about “the war on oil dependence,” but when they come, I am certain we’ll make a similar effort, even if it is one of learning to make less rather than more.

Warnings about Peak Oil abound, but catastrophe enthusiasts believe that since few are heeding the warnings now, society won’t do anything until it’s too late, and will collapse. Yet already, the major oil companies are running full-page ads about Peak Oil. Ford is hyping hybrid cars, sales of which are skyrocketing. General Motors’ Washington spokesperson says we must move away from petroleum. Toyota is lobbying lawmakers to make energy independence and multiple energy sources an election issue. SUV sales are way down. We are already reacting, and each bit of conservation now buys us more time in the future. Hubbert’s curve is broadening.

Though we have slowed the growth of oil consumption, we still consume more each year. Can we consume less? And how much would consumption need to drop to avoid disaster? Here are some numbers.

In 1965, world oil production was 12 billion barrels. It may peak soon at 30 billion. Estimates project that in 2040, production will have slipped to 12 billion barrels—back to 1965 levels. To descend to that point would require a drop in consumption of 2.2% per year for 35 years. Can we do this? I think so. From 1973 to 1975, and again from 1979 to 1983, consumption fell by roughly this much per year. When prices fell, consumption rose again. For a glimpse of the future, note that when gasoline prices briefly spiked 30% due to Hurricane Katrina, US usage dropped 6% over two weeks. Saving 2.2% each year is well within reach.

Price and demand are tightly linked. We change our behavior dramatically when prices rise. Those are basic facts that Peak-Oil catastrophism ignores. China and India may be industrializing, but they are doing so into an era of expensive oil. Their relatively low per-capita income means most people there cannot afford much oil. This will make economizing and conservation unavoidable, and these countries’ attempt to mimic Western profligacy may simply be choked off as their own demand forces prices to rise.

Can we conserve enough to make a difference? Energy consultants such as Amory Lovins point out that as much as 90% of the resources and energy used by manufacturers and power plants are wasted. The cheapest way to make more oil available is to insulate, use lighter materials, and otherwise conserve. Simply doubling gas mileage would reduce oil consumption by 25%, shifting Hubbert’s curve far to the right in a single action. We could easily reduce oil use by 50% with no change in our standard of living, just by simple conservation. And 70-80% reductions are well within reach.

Catastrophists often point to all the other incipient disasters we face besides Peak Oil—global warming, aquifer depletion, soil loss, active volcanoes near cities, killer storms—and say “Take your pick; one of them is bound to get us.” They underestimate the resilience of culture and ecosystems. If we recite the list of disasters just in the US in the last 25 years they seem terrifically daunting: A series of Class 4 and 5 hurricanes, the eruption of Mount St. Helens, years of surging inflation, a stock market crash, two major earthquakes in California, huge floods, September 11, a stolen election or two, multi-state blackouts, the destruction of New Orleans—and yet the US, and the world, stumble along somehow.

Adaptive and Complex

Cultures and ecosystems are incredibly resilient because they are made of large numbers of loosely coupled, compartmentalized sub-systems. One or more compartments—such as a chunk of the power grid—can go down, but in response other components ramp up or down and otherwise adjust, and the whole system re-stabilizes at a new, or often the same, level. Hurricane Katrina illustrates this. We lost up to 30% of our oil and gas production, and a major city, overnight. Petroleum prices spiked, but other compartments in the system compensated, and gasoline prices quickly settled and slipped to below their pre-Katrina levels. Natural gas, more difficult to ship, with many sources still off-line, has not fallen in price since Katrina. If its price stays high, we’ll see conservation measures such as insulation and better windows, and a shift to other fuels, including a demand for more nuclear power (a move I don’t relish but view as inevitable). And we’ll see a drop in natural gas demand, some of which will be made up by other sources, but some will simply disappear due to higher efficiency and an adaptive cultural ecosystem that shifts its emphasis to more effective strategies.

Everything may be connected to everything else, but only loosely. Scenarios of a lock-step march to disaster betray a poor understanding of the complexity, loose linkage, and resilience of global systems.

If oil were to disappear overnight, we’d be in big trouble. But we have 35 years to gradually descend merely to 1965 levels of consumption. Nineteen-sixty-five wasn’t so bad. Even though world population is greater, energy efficiency increases are greater still. We are an adaptable species—it is our hallmark trait—and the world will change much in 35 years. My bet is on the hairless monkey.

Peak-Oil catastrophists have performed an important service by scouting out the worst parts of the terrain ahead, and by being noisy enough to have alerted many complacent people to the possibilities we face if we act stupidly. And my own scenarios aren’t exactly rosy. Even if we conserve, even if China builds more one-cylinder cars and we all have only one child, the end of the oil age is going to be rough. Worldwide depression and soaring unemployment are almost inevitable as oil gets expensive. Yet even that very dark cloud is lined with silver. Depression, by definition, is a shift from economic growth to contraction, and that in itself means less oil consumption. More importantly, a culture addicted to economic growth will find its absence painful at first, but the end of “bigger is better” can leave room for other types of growth where value is not measured in money: cultural, artistic, intellectual, social—all those things that our crude fixation on economics as the centerpiece of life tends to destroy.

High unemployment could be transformed into fewer people making, buying, and needing to earn money for unnecessary widgets; spending less time at jobs they hate; and producing, alone and in community, a larger share of what they actually need—which does not take 40 or more hours a week. It is an opportunity for the role of economics in our lives to shrink, and for an expansion of time for the many things money cannot, or should not, buy.

Humanity has reached the stage, finally, where basic survival is not in doubt for many people. We have not yet grasped that the struggle for survival is essentially over, and we have overshot. Instead of noticing that as a species we no longer need to labor all our waking hours for the basics of food and safe shelter, and to fight off disease and predators, we cannot get off the survival treadmill. So we just keep making more stuff, rather than looking up, taking a breath, and enjoying all the wonders possible from being a conscious, intelligent animal that has mastered survival. Perhaps Peak Oil, and a return to a time when resources are dear and labor is abundant, will remind us that there is much more to life than the manufactured desire to have more toys. Perhaps we can lose our small-minded obsession with getting and spending, and finally grow into maturity as a species.

References

1. Hubbert, M. King, “Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels,” Drilling and Production Practice, 1956.
2. Hubbert, M. King, U.S. Energy Resources, A Review As Of 1972.1974
3. Campbell, C.J., The Essence of Oil & Gas Depletion, 2003.
4. Oil production numbers from US DOE and Energy Information Administration.
5. Duncan, Richard C., The Peak of World Oil Production and the Road to the Olduvai Gorge. www.hubbertpeak.com/duncan/
6. US EPA.
7. www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
8. American War Library.

Copyright 2006 by Toby Hemenway

This article published in Permaculture Activist #59, February, 2006

Review of Invasion Biology: Critique of a Pseudoscience, a book by David Theodoropoulos

Avvar Books, Blythe CA. 2003. 237+xiv pp. Paper. $14.50

One of my favorite ways of setting off small explosions is to tell a group of gardeners that I don’t dislike invasive plants. Since the polarization over the natives-versus-exotics issue is fierce, the discussion quickly heats up. But lately I’ve noticed some thinning of the ranks of the natives-only army, and the debate has grown much more nuanced and sophisticated. Many people still cling to the simplistic battle cry of “natives good, exotics bad” that was once almost the only view to be heard—or to get funding. But the murmurs of a few questioning voices have now grown to a full-scale argument, with a growing body of data on the “don’t blame exotics” side.

David Theodoropoulos, a conservationist and founder of an excellent resource for seeds of multi-functional plants, J.L. Hudson Seedsman, has waded into the battle with an arsenal of scholarship. His book, Invasion Biology: Critique of a Pseudoscience, ranges beyond an examination of invasive-plant science (more properly, the lack it) and also explores the psychological, political, and cultural reasons behind our eagerness to hate certain species.

Theodoropoulos opens by reviewing the underpinnings of the anti-exotics movement, or invasion biology—the idea that certain organisms belong in certain places, and others don’t. Quickly we see that unlike most scientific reports, papers in even academic journals such as Conservation Biology and Restoration and Management Notes bristle with xenophobic rhetoric: “all [species] should be treated as threats . . . unless proven otherwise.” Species are labeled “nefarious,” “stealing,” “stormtrooper plants,” and “intruders” that should be “weeded out” to “prevent their escape.” Hardly the language of objective science.

Good science also requires that definitions and operating terms be rigorous and uniformly applied. Yet invasion biologists have not defined their terms and use them in varying, idiosyncratic senses. The usage of the words native, exotic, diversity, natural community, and other terms slip and slide in Humpty Dumpty fashion: The words mean whatever they want them to mean. What is a native? In the most recent one percent of the Earth’s history, figs and breadfruit have grown in Wyoming, and neotropicals in Alaska. Elms and chestnuts thrived in California in the early Pleistocene—just yesterday. But no one calls them native to those places. And many species labeled as native turn out to have arrived a few years before, or a century ago, or 500 years. Native seems to mean simply, “It was here when I got here.”

What defines a native’s range? Monterey cypress, osage orange, and black locust are being exterminated as exotics only 100 miles from their accepted native habitat. Yet species can naturally extend their range that far in a few years.

And what is diversity? A patch of exotics and one of native plants can both offer equally high diversity, in all of the term’s accepted meanings, whether number of species, species turnover, or relative abundance of each species.

Theodoropoulos reviews the claims of the invasion biologists: that we are in an invasive-species crisis; that humans are moving species faster and farther than nature ever could; that many species have become extinct solely due to exotics; that invasion corrodes ecosystem processes, lowers diversity, and is destroying our wildlands. Admirably, he goes to the original sources cited by the doomsayers, and shows that the data do not support a single one of these claims. Purple loosestrife, the poster child of invasion biologists, harbors slightly more native insects and birds than nearby native plants. It also is an excellent nutrient accumulator, thriving primarily in—and cleaning up polluted waters (which hints at the real reason for its abundance). There is no evidence that tamarisk, scourge of the southwest, has displaced any native species or changes riparian hydrology, and it too supports as many species as natives (including a rare flycatcher), and more species than indigenous cottonwoods. Theodoropoulos hauls out bags of similar evidence on all the big-name invasives and many lesser ones to firmly scotch the prejudice that non-natives alone can harm ecosystems.

Obliterating the claim that humans have sped up dissemination of species, Theodoropoulos cites, among many, Darwin’s studies of individual birds and insects carrying dozens of seed species a few to thousands of miles. Multiply that by billions of animal carriers, and it equals or dwarfs human plant exchanges. Fifty years after isolated Krakatau blew up, 1100 species had crossed open ocean to repopulate the island. Other evidence of the astounding rate of natural transport is offered in abundance. He notes also that the mixing of the Red Sea and Mediterranean biotas caused by the Suez Canal, as rapid and large-scale an exchange as we are likely to encounter, seems not to have resulted in any extinctions.

The book also reveals the connection between invasion biology and the pesticide industry. A founding board member of the California Exotic Pest Plant Council is a Monsanto executive who was instrumental in developing Roundup. The industry generously funds these councils and similar organizations.

Invasion biology also suffers from number bloat. An oft-cited paper by noted biologist David Pimentel states that exotics cause $137 billion in damage every year, but examination quickly reveals some wild assumptions and flagrant bias. Loss from cats is pegged at $17 billion (12% of the total!) but the basis is speculation on the number of birds killed and a $30 value for hand-rearing each bird, when little money is actually spent replacing dead birds. And why aren’t rats, mice, and crop-eating birds that are killed by cats subtracted from this absurd number? Theodoropoulos rightly suggests that by this logic, we should puff the total cost into the trillions by adding the estimated price of restoring all Midwest farmland to pristine prairie. After all, corn and soybeans may be the continent’s most widespread and damaging invasives.

The author barely suppresses laughter as he shows the contradictions of this so-called science. When native species drop mulch, fix nitrogen, attract new pollinators, or create shade, it’s called beneficial. When an exotic does exactly the same, it’s labeled ecosystem disruption. The bias dies hard: Researchers found that native plants dominate undisturbed prairie (10,700 natives to 2 wild carrots) while exotics require disturbed soil, yet they still opened their paper with “Invasion by exotic plant species is a serious threat to the integrity of natural communities.” One proponent of natives recommends we “choose breeding stock carefully to avoid inbreeding and genetic contamination,” forgetting that you can’t avoid both simultaneously. And on and on.

So what’s happening here? If the data do not support it, why the rage and fear toward non-native species? Here Theodoropoulos turns, in the middle third of the book, to the psychology, politics, and pseudoscience driving the hate campaign against non-natives.

Humans have an innate and sometimes-justified fear of change in our environment. Change may introduce a potential danger, hence one reaction to change is fear unless we examine the fear or make its cause conscious. Also related is xenophobia, fear of the other. For animals at the mercy of their environment, these can be useful defense mechanisms. But for animals who have evolved into technological humans, they are destructive atavisms that isolate us from nature.

As one illustration, the author describes the native-plant campaigns of Hitler’s followers, though he is very careful not to call exotics-haters Nazis. He believes invasion biology is rooted in the same fears and prejudices that power Nazism and other racist, genocidal ideologies. A desire for genetic purity and preservation of the homeland, dissatisfaction with current status, an easily identified enemy, and a simplistic answer—extermination—are elements that these ideologies share. And he does call invasion biology an ideology, demonstrating that it cannot justifiably be called a science. In no scientific discipline can data be suppressed or used selectively to support a preconception as is done in invasion biology. Pseudoscience is known for refusing to acknowledge conflicting data, not testing assumptions, exaggeration of limited truths, and circular arguments. (“If it’s not native it’s bad, and the reason it’s bad is because it’s non-native.”) Invasion biology fits this pattern.

We greatly prefer to find simple, physical causes for problems and then eradicate them. We’re very good at spotting and killing enemies, and we feel virtuous while we do it. We’re far less successful and confident when causes are multiple, the solution requires changes in our thinking, and the “enemy” is our own behavior.

Most harm resulting from introduction of non-native species should be blamed not on the species themselves, but on human destruction of habitat and on practices that change landscapes so they no longer support their native vegetation. Non-native species are almost never capable of competing successfully with species in an intact native ecosystem. (The author points out one oft-heard contradiction here: that exotics often drive out the better-adapted natives. Say, what?) Clearing, soil disturbance, creation of sunlit edges, harvesting, and the other collateral damage of development all degrade native habitat to render non-natives more suited to the new conditions. Thus yanking the exotics will do no good—they’ll come back faster than the now-handicapped natives under the changed conditions.

Another harmful manifestation of exotic-species hatred is our hubris: the conviction that we know better than nature which organisms should be living somewhere. Eradication of non-natives has often had a Vietnam-village effect of destroying what we are trying to save, and can in fact damage ecosystem function more than the exotics. Evidence is mounting that the vigorously growing blends of native and non-native plants that “invade” damaged land are yet another example of nature’s wisdom and resourcefulness. Nature creatively mingles both native and exotic without prejudice, using all resources available to throw a green Band-Aid over ravaged landscapes. We demean her intelligence and set back the healing process when we hack away these recombinant communities. The book’s final section uses this view as the basis for a new relationship with human-dispersed species.

Theodoropoulos seems to have modeled his book on The Origin of Species, wherein Darwin assembled an overwhelming number of examples to support his view and in effect crushed his enemies by sheer weight. Invasion Biology is similarly exhaustive, which at times makes for repetition, although I think the author was right to show that he was not just selecting a few isolated favorable examples. His ranging into aspects of psychology and politics carries him into fields where he is not well-versed, but these are territories that are clearly relevant and needed inclusion. He has opened the door for specialists to follow and deepen his opening arguments that link the hate-speech of invasion biology to its cultural roots.

The book is self-published (and cheaply bound—my copy’s binding is failing) and deserves a much wider readership than its limited distribution is getting. If you find yourself incensed at what you’ve read here, or are asking, “But what about…” you should read this book, as this review can only hint at the wealth of evidence and arguments. And it’s just the thing for permaculturists confronted by natives-only partisans. It is available from the author (David Theodoropoulos, Star Route 2, Box 337, La Honda, CA 94020 USA, www.dtheo.com/BookOrder.htm) and some major booksellers. Or ask your local bookseller to order it, and get it on the shelves for others to see.

Copyright 2005 by Toby Hemenway

In mid-August I drove to a party in the country outside of Portland, Oregon. Twenty miles of freeway took me to a two-lane road that wound ten miles up steep forested hills and down through remote valleys. As the roads grew narrower and less traveled, I began to wonder how, if gas hits $5 or $10 a gallon, people and supplies will reach these isolated spots. What kind of post-oil vehicle will climb this hilly, winding road that quite literally goes nowhere—a converted truck run on home-made biodigested methane? Then, after I arrived at the secluded acreage, I questioned whether, that far from centers of production, my hosts could really supply most of their own needs, just the two of them and their kids.

I think these isolated places will disappear the way that Roman outposts in Britain and Gaul did during the empire’s decline.

In a recent issue of this magazine (Permaculture Activist 54 p. 2, “Designing Beyond Disaster”) I wrote that when I moved to the country 11 years ago I assumed that rural people use fewer resources than urbanites, but now that I’m back in the city I can see that isn’t true. That article has generated more response than any other I’ve written, and has been reprinted around the Web many times, often with some furious comments. Obviously, a lot of people are thinking about the same topics. I’d like to re-visit the subject, respond to some of the commentary, elaborate on my reasoning, and describe some new thoughts on the subject.

First, a clarification on word usage. When I speak of rural, I generally mean places where people live on acreage outside of towns, with most services too far to walk to. Small towns decreasingly can be called rural, as their takeover by chain stores, engulfment by sprawl, and reliance on non-local goods renders many indistinguishable from suburbs.

Inspiration for my article came from a piece called “Green Manhattan” by David Owen in the October 18, 2004 New Yorker. Owen argued that Manhattanites have a far smaller ecological footprint than the average American, whether urban, rural, or suburban. In Manhattan, hardly anyone drives cars, dwellings are tiny (even a ritzy Park Avenue apartment is much smaller than a typical suburban McMansion), and per-capita energy use is relatively low, since far less energy per person is used to heat and cool an apartment building than single-family dwellings housing the same population. No, New Yorkers aren’t growing their food, but then, neither are most other Americans.

But, you ask, what about all of New York’s infrastructure? It’s got enormous water pipes, thousands of miles of roads, and so forth. Doesn’t that use a ridiculous amount of resources? Well, yes. But that densely compacted infrastructure serves many million people. Owen pointed out that if the inhabitants of New York City were spread out at the same density of the small Connecticut town where he now lives, they would occupy all six New England states plus Delaware and New Jersey. Think of all the roads, wires, pipes, fuel, and so on, those spread-out suburbanites would consume—far more than what New York uses now. Living in rural Connecticut, Owen uses seven times the electricity he used in Manhattan. Other non-urban sites fare as badly. An average apartment in San Francisco uses one-fifth the heating fuel per capita burned by a tract house out in the suburbs. Given two present-day urban and rural populations of equal size, the urban one has a much smaller ecological footprint.

Some readers of my article thought I was saying that cities are paragons of ecological living. Please. Little in the US, let alone an enormous city like New York, is sustainable. Manhattan may use a bit less energy than some places, but the practice of pouring billions of tons of resources, gathered from millions of acres, into a few square miles to supply many million people in sky-high buildings is only feasible in an era of cheap oil. And we all know that era is ending. When oil hits $200 a barrel, riding an elevator or pumping water to a 17th-story apartment won’t be an option for any but the ultra-rich. I think the mega-metropolises like New York, Atlanta, Houston, and Chicago will decline as energy costs skyrocket. Some economies of scale become dis-economies when fuel is expensive.

Apocalypse, Not

I’m not a believer in the Peak Oil “end of the world” scenario, where decreasing oil production somehow mutates into the sudden, permanent shutoff of urban water supplies, and contented suburbanites are transformed overnight into looting gangs. Yes, fossil fuels surely will become much more expensive in the next decades, and scarce soon after. I don’t doubt that several tipping points will be broached along the way, with rapid and unexpected changes cascading through society. But civilization won’t end. People have repeatedly predicted the apocalypse: in millennial 1000, again in 1666 (the number of the beast), and many times between and since. Is our memory so short that we have forgotten the foolishness around Y2k? Or are we so wedded to the delicious notion of our annihilation that we grasp at any possibility? Why do we hunger so for our own extinction?

Many Peak Oil disaster scenarios are premised on an overnight catastrophe, as if suddenly all over America we’ll flip the light switch or turn the tap and nothing will happen. Yes, that would result in riots, martial law, and chaos. But Peak Oil almost certainly won’t look like that. We won’t drop from today’s production of 80 million barrels per day to nothing overnight, or even in 20 years. We’ll go to three-dollar-a-gallon gas, then four, then six, with increasing conservation steps along the way. Comparisons to major power outages or massive storms are wrong. Acute and chronic problems wreak very different results.

The US economy has gone from $1.50 per gallon gas to near $3 with nary a hiccup. A group of 60 economists predicted that gas prices will have to pass $4 per gallon before the economy even begins to slow perceptibly. So where is this magic trigger point that will spark the end of civilization?

Like any addict, we will fight for our fix. As the price of oil rises, hard-to-extract deposits will become worth refining, even in disregard of net energy yields (since large concentrations of money make it possible to temporarily ignore long-term economic reality). In August, Congress began authorizing states to drill in previously unavailable off-shore reserves. Record petroleum profits will be poured into new extraction techniques. We’ll probably—sigh—build a lot of nuke plants. And high prices will reduce demand and encourage conservation: SUV sales are already down nearly 30%. We’ve already cut back in response to high prices. Although the economy has doubled in size since 1979, oil use has only grown 9% (US DOE statistics). I’m not trying to paint a rosy scenario here—Peak Oil will hurt—but we won’t all die. Even a societal collapse (read Jared Diamond’s book) takes decades or centuries.

Some experts estimate that over 90% of all resources are wasted by the time the finished product or energy is used, so there is plenty of room for upping efficiency. Simply by doubling car mileage—which is within easy technological reach—the US would cut oil use by 25%, taking us back to the consumption levels of the 1950s. Conservation is the cheapest way to create more resources. So my bet is on a decades-long slide—not a sudden crash—into a post-oil age, while we learn to be far more efficient, urged on by skyrocketing costs. In the end, we won’t be cranking up the air-conditioner, but we won’t be scratching in the mud, either.

Size Matters

Neither the mega-cities nor the survivalist’s bunker will be viable in a post-oil future. The places with the best chance of surviving an oil peak will be cities of less than a million people, ranging down to well-placed smaller cities and towns. Cities of a million or so existed before fossil fuels—ancient Rome proper held roughly a million people—thus they are clearly possible in a limited-oil era.

Scale works to the advantage of sensibly sized cities. For example, Portland’s 500,000 people are served by two sewage treatment plants that use about 2000 miles of pipe to reach every home. Building this cost in the low hundreds of millions of dollars (exact figures don’t exist). Compare this to the sewage system for 500,000 rural people. That’s roughly 125,000 septic tanks, each with 300 or more feet of drain-field pipe, plus trenching and drain rock for all. A septic system costs about $10,000 to build, so the cost of 125,000 of them is $1.25 billion, several times that of the urban system, and the ruralites need 7000 miles of pipe compared to Portland’s 2000 miles. Of course, composting toilets and graywater systems would obviate the need for both of those unsustainable, resource-intensive methods of waste treatment, but I’m talking about what exists right now. Virtually any service system—electricity, fuel, food—follows the same brutal mathematics of scale. A dispersed population requires more resources to serve it—and to connect it together—than a concentrated one. That fact cannot be gotten around.

Some readers confused my concerns over the sustainability of rural life with my disappointment with the quality of my own rural community. Wonderful rural communities exist (as do wonderful urban ones). We happened not to choose one when we moved to the country, but rather, an area depressed by the collapse of the timber industry, where alcohol, spouse beating, methedrine, and child abuse were rampant responses to a shattered economy. But sadly, that describes most of the rural Pacific Northwest, and much of the rest of rural America. Our county was not unique. Country people in Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and the stricken farm states are not exactly flush with cash and optimistic about the future. There are pockets of prosperity in the rural US, but overall the social and economic picture is miserable, and most people there lack the education and resources to cope with even today’s economy, much less one ravaged by an oil shortage.

Even if a country community is vibrant, having friendly neighbors does not reduce rural America’s immense ecological footprint. In rural areas, a car is even more essential than in suburbia. As the sewage-plant example shows, the laws of physics force a spread-out populace to consume more resources than one that is compact. The key question is, how large can that compact populace be and still be sustainable? What size of community is best for a post-oil world? No one knows the answer, but the mega-cities are surely too large, and the survivalist in his bunker is too small.

My guess at a post-oil scenario is for the disappearance of suburbs and a return to the city/country pattern as it existed for thousands of years before the oil age. In the film, “The End of Suburbia,” James Howard Kunstler calls the suburbs “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.” I believe as suburbs empty or condense over several decades they will be gutted for their re-usable resources and be replaced by what preceded it until forty years ago: small farms ringing every city, producing food in easy reach of urban markets.

I often hear the assumption that without land, urbanites will starve. Nonsense. Farmers were feeding urban populations long before the oil age, and they will do so after it. New Jersey’s seemingly absurd license plate motto, “The Garden State,” refers to its thousands of vanished market gardens that fed New York City until the 1960s. Even urbanites in triplexes will be able to buy locally grown food.

Giving up Fantasies

It’s likely that suburbs, many isolated small towns, and dispersed rural homes will wither and die. Tools and other essential supplies won’t be transported far from the cities where they are produced and where economic power is, so people outside urban areas will need to be virtually self-reliant.

One of the most common responses to the Peak Oil panic is, “We’re planning on moving to the country with our friends and producing everything we need.” Let me burst that bubble: Back-to-the-landers have been pursuing this dream for 40 years now, and I don’t know of a single homesteader or community that has achieved it. Even the Amish shop in town. When I moved to the country, I became rapidly disabused of the idea of growing even half my own food. I like doing one or two other things during my day. During my life.

Growing all your own food, repairing and maintaining tools, keeping livestock, cutting firewood, doing all the carpentry and plumbing, and so forth, is dawn-to-after-dark work. And learning to live in an intentional community is a supremely difficult task—I’ve been around plenty of them. Combine the donkeywork of survivalism with the stress of building a new community, and the failure rate climbs to near 100%. Post-oil, we will all still be as interdependent as we have been since before we came down from the trees, and the farther you live from other people, the poorer you will be.

One out of a thousand has the temperament to grow and make everything he needs. One out of a million—maybe—has actually done it. America’s pioneers were a tiny minority of the millions who stayed behind or came after the task of settlement was finished. If anyone reading this is utterly self-reliant, I would love to hear your story. And if anyone truly believes that fleeing to the country is the solution, then pack up now, because it will take a decade to develop the skills you’ll need to eke out a lonely subsistence.

Some of the back-to-the-landers do have one thing right. It will be healthy communities that will survive the end of the oil age. Even in the unlikely “roving terror gang” scenario, which neighborhood is likely to be invaded? One where each household and its own little garden is isolated, or one in which 30 neighbors are solidly looking out for each other?

Communities are much easier to create where people live near each other. They form when population passes a critical mass, and where people have similar interests and needs. During my rural sojourn, I was astounded by how little my neighbors had in common. Present-day development in rural areas is wildly haphazard, with mansions next to decrepit trailers. The makeup of the new ruralism is not yeoman farmers and ranchers (fewer than 7% of ruralites farm), but a cheek-by-jowl mix of retirees, poor refugees from cities and declining inner suburbs, low-wage workers in service or resource industries, and affluent dabblers in country life.

Consider our two-mile gravel road in southern Oregon. There were no farmers. My wife and I were middle-class urban refugees. Our nearest neighbor on one side was a meth-selling ex-con living in a trailer; on the other, a retired psychiatrist. Nearby were lower-middle-class ex-suburbanites living in a double-wide, a right-wing retired graphics artist, a liberal young school teacher, and a Christian auto-body mechanic. With no commonality, there was no hope of community where I lived, and it didn’t happen. This miscellaneous assortment of unlinkable diversity is common in the rural US. In rural areas (meaning where houses have acreage), neighbors often come from utterly disparate income brackets, lifestyles, and beliefs, with scant chance of finding common ground. In contrast, in cities, zoning and housing prices encourage people of similar incomes and backgrounds to live near each other. The city neighborhoods I know—and I’ve lived in a lot of cities—have far less diversity than rural ones. Cities overall have more diverse populations than most countryside, but they are generally segregated into neighborhoods having similar attributes such as affordability, hipness or staidness, and ethnic make-up. Of course, uniformity can lead to monotony, exclusivity, and a false belief that everyone is like you. But it also means that urban opportunities for community are much greater than in the country, from sheer proximity, from common backgrounds, and because more galvanizing issues arise to spark gatherings.

Breadlines Are a Good Sign

In my earlier article, I cited scholars who said that that in hard times, city dwellers had in general fared better than those in the country. A few readers argued that during the Depression it was in the city that breadlines formed, not in the country. But this proves the point. Breadlines, though the classic image of the Depression, occur when local restaurants and other businesses team up with city governments to bake bread, cook meals, and offer them at little or no cost. Breadlines mean a community is pooling its resources. That can’t easily happen where people are dispersed and don’t have cars to connect them. During hard times, in the country, hungry people just starve—or flee to the city. Some readers cited anecdotes of their grandparents having plenty of food on their Depression-era farm, but this is belied by the data showing hundreds of thousands of rural people abandoning their homesteads. One-third of all US farms failed, and not just in the dust bowl. Urban breadlines contained plenty of farm refugees. The Okies weren’t city folk.

To believe that ruralites will fare better, post-oil, than urbanites is to believe that scattered individuals are more resourceful and capable than large assemblages of people acting in concert. Of course, groups can be as stupid as individuals. But collective wisdom and action are usually far more effective than isolated single efforts. Just as most science, technology, art, culture, education, political and social action, money, and power are created and applied in the city, solutions for a post-oil world will also evolve among concentrations of people.

Will a post-oil era look like the Depression? The Depression was not a time of scarce resources, but rather of money. Peak Oil, however, means scarce resources, so comparisons may not be apt. One thing we know about the future is that predictions are almost always wrong. Perhaps the doom-and-gloomers are right and Peak Oil will result in an utterly calamitous crash and unspeakable horror. In that case, all bets are off and both cities and farms will be places of death and misery. But the fact that the end-of-the-world crowd has been crowing for millennia and still have a 100% record of error suggests that they are wrong this time too. Any of several other scenarios is more probable: a technological fix and business as usual (I’m not betting on that one, either), slight descent to a techno-green future (only a bit less unlikely given our political leadership), or a long decline to living within our true energy budget.

My point is not to trade the scenario of post-oil urban chaos for one of rural disaster. I don’t believe either place will be the nightmare that some claim. I simply want to counter the notion that we’d be better off abandoning the city. In the “end of the world” scenario, cities and everywhere else may be full of gangs roving and looting—and then starving with the rest of us. But I don’t buy that prediction. I think as oil prices rise, driving 20 miles to get your chainsaw repaired or to take your child to soccer practice will be the first piece of contemporary life to evaporate. When prices soar, country people will be far from friends, manufactured goods, medical care, and everything but their gardens—if they know how to garden. Urbanites will have mass transit and bicycles. And my favorite urban farms, my livelihood, and my friends will still be within walking distance.

[A note added after Hurricane Katrina: For some, the looting and assaults in New Orleans after Katrina are signs of what Peak Oil has in store for cities, but I don't agree. There will be rough spots, and perhaps even sporadic gasoline riots. A generation of smug “I've got mine” leadership in this country has instilled a beggar-thy-neighbor ethic sadly evidenced in a few cases in Louisiana. But the rapid evacuation and destruction of a major city and the sudden deaths of hundreds from flood and disease bear little resemblance to the much slower evolution of Peak Oil stresses. Looting an empty store in a ruined metropolis deserted by its populace and police takes no courage or organization. Someone trying the same in a functional city inhabited by gun-toting store owners, a police force, and wary neighbors generally ends up in jail or dead. The circumstances, scale, time-frame, and causes in the two cases have little in common. A comparison is both forced and unwise.]

Published in Permaculture Activist #58, November, 2005

Copyright 2005 Toby Hemenway

In 1994, my wife and I left Seattle and moved to rural southern Oregon. One of our many reasons for leaving the city was to finally pursue the dream of self-reliance: to create a permaculture homestead that would trim our resource use and let us tap in more fully to nature’s abundance. And in the back of my mind was the quietly nibbling worry that someday the overconsumption party would end—the oil would run out, and things might get ugly. I wanted to be settled where we could be less dependent on the fossil fuel umbilicus when the cord finally snapped.

We went a good way toward making that dream come true. The red clay of our former clearcut turned, in places, to chocolate loam, though I noticed that even as our trees matured I still seemed to be needing more wood chips from the electric company or manure from a stable two miles away. From the garden flowed a steady procession of fruit and vegetables, but I confess I tried to ignore how much well-water we were pumping once our rain catchment ran dry partway through Southern Oregon’s four-month dry season.

We became involved in the local community: Master Gardeners, an environmental group, town meetings. Although we were busy in regional life in the beginning, eventually I found I preferred to drive the hour to see friends in progressive-minded Eugene than fight the pro-logging consciousness that permeated our county. Over the years my few local friends fell away as I became more drawn to the mind-set of those in Eugene, and as the local economics made it necessary for me to be away for weeks to teach and do design work. We were on good speaking terms with all our neighbors, but never found much common ground with them. Local parties often began with watery beer and ended in drunken fights, so we went to fewer as time went by.

Slowly a mild paranoia set in. I started to wonder whether, if the Big Crash came, I was really in the right place. We had the best garden for miles around, and everyone knew it. If law broke down, wasn’t there more than a chance that my next door neighbor, a gun-selling meth dealer and felon, might just shoot me for all that food? How about the right-wing fundamentalists past him, who shot Stellar’s jays for fun and clearcut their land when they suspected spotted owls lived there? Or the two feuding families beyond them: One had fired a pistol during an argument, and neither would give way when their cars met on the road. I began to sense the outlines of a pattern that replicated one in society at large. We have the technical means to feed, clothe, and house all humanity. But legions starve because we have not learned to tolerate and support one another. People’s real problems are not technical, they are social and political. Down in Douglas County, I’d solved most of the technical problems for our own personal survival, but the social hurdles to true security were staring me in the face.

Our isolation also meant we were burning a lot of gas. A simple drive for groceries was a 40-minute round trip. Fortunately we both worked at home and had no children, so we could go for days without using the car. But the odometer was whirling to higher numbers than it ever had in the city. A couple of families had moved off our hill because they were exhausted by two to four round trips each day down our steep, potholed gravel road to work, school, soccer practice, music lessons, and shopping.

We cherished our decade-plus in the country, but eventually the realities began to pile up. There wasn’t a local market for the work we did. Community events left us saddened by the gulf between our way of life and theirs. And we were still tethered to the fossil-fuel beast, just by a much longer lifeline of wire, pipe, and pavement. That the beast looked smaller by being farther away no longer fooled us.

There was a positive side, too. We had achieved what we’d set out to do: to make sense of our lives, find the work we loved, and grow into ourselves. The portents now spoke clearly. It was time to return to where the people were, and to be in the thick of things once more.

So we have moved to Portland, and into the heart of town. We love it. The first of many good omens was the bio-diesel Mercedes across the street sporting a Kucinich sticker. And it’s a pleasure to be within walking distance of a bookstore, good coffee, and Ben and Jerry’s.

During the first few days in the city I would stand on the back porch, eyeing our yard with permaculture dreams in my head. The sole tree is a sprawling European prune plum. Other than that, the yard is a blank slate, dominated by a brick patio, a lawn, and an old dog run. And it’s small. I wondered how I would I fit all my favorite fruit trees in that tiny space.

The answer soon came. The plum tree straddles the fence we share with our neighbor Johnny, who has lived next door for 55 years. One day, on opposite sides of the fence, Johnny and I were gathering a small fraction of the branch-bending loads of plums when he called out, “Do you like figs?” I said I did, and soon a tub of black mission figs wobbled over the fence toward me.

We kept returning the basin to Johnny, but it found its way back almost immediately, full of figs. “You weren’t here in time for the apricots I’ve got,” Johnny told us, “But next year you’ll get your fill of them.”

As the buckets of plums began to fill up the yard, I tried to unload some on Theressa across the street. “Oh, no,” she said, “I’ve got my own tree. But when the Granny Smith’s come on, you’d better help me with them. And next year’s peaches will knock you out.”

When I met our neighbor Will, he begged me to take some of the pears that were plopping onto his yard. The American chestnuts up the street are bearing heavily, although the Asian community is all over them each morning before I wake up. I’ve cracked a few of the local walnuts, and they’re pretty good. And yesterday I discovered a nearby strawberry tree dotted with creamy mild fruit.

This informal assessment of local resources has revised my mental landscape design. I don’t need to grow all my favorite trees, only the ones that my neighbors lack (I’m thinking Asian pears, persimmons, and some early and storage apples). In permaculture parlance, my neighbor’s yards are my Zones Two and Three. Plus, Stacey and Troy on the next block have persuaded the owner of a vacant lot to let eight families create a community garden on the site. A local tree service will soon be dumping chips there for sheet mulch, and next year we’ll be awash in food.

The Big Rural Footprint

I had always assumed that cities would be the worst place to be in bad times. I’m revising my opinion. Granted, Portland is an exceptional city. (Shhhh! Don’t tell anyone!) But I can’t help comparing this neighborhood to our old one. There, we were twelve families on two miles of road, driveways hundreds of feet long, all served by long runs of phone and electric wire, individual septic systems and wells, each commuting long distances. And with political and social views so divergent that feuds, gossip, and awkward conversations about safe topics were the norm.

In the city, an equal group of twelve families use 10% of the road, wire, and pipe needed in my old neighborhood. Many of my neighbors bus or bike to work, or at worst, drive single-digit mileages. And our social and political views are close enough that I am fairly confident we can work in mutual support if times get tough.

This is not the place to go deeply into the question of whether cities are more sustainable than contemporary American country life, but at each point where I delve into the issues, I find suggestions that urbanites have a smaller ecological footprint per capita.

Over the last two decades, millions of people have moved out of cities. Many of them are people of modest means, driven out by the high costs of urban life. Unfortunately, they have brought their city ways with them. Our neighbors in the country all clearcut their land and planted acres of grass. Many built enormous houses, since low interest rates made more square footage affordable. Some put up glaring streetlights in their front yards. They bought boats, ATVs, RVs, and other gas-guzzling toys. Unlike earlier self-reliant country folk, these are simply city people with really big yards. And there are millions of them.

Sociologists Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford have each noted that during the Depression and other hard times, urban residents have generally fared better than ruralites. The causes mainly boil down to market forces and simple physics. Since most of the population lives in or near cities, when goods are scarce the greater demand, density, and economic power in the cities directs resources to them. Shipping hubs are mostly in cities, so trucks are emptied before they get out of town.

In the Depression, farmers initially had the advantage of being able to feed themselves, and the hard times hit them a year or two later than the cities. But farmers—and their relatives who thought they’d be better off away from the cities—soon ran out of other supplies: coal to run forges to fix machinery, fertilizer, medicine, clothing, and almost every other non-food item. Without the cash from population centers, farmers couldn’t grow food. Farms need markets; self-reliance eventually drains every resource that comes from off-site. Between 1929 and 1933, one-third of all American farms were foreclosed upon. And it wasn’t just the dust bowl that suffered. Farm failures were spread pretty evenly across the country, but one issue of geography was significant: Fewer farms close to cities failed. Those too remote from markets blew away with the Kansas dust.

Today the situation for farmers has worsened. Few farmers grow their own food. Agribusiness has made them utterly dependent on chemicals and other shipped-in products. The main lack of cities compared to farms is food-growing, but farms lack nearly everything else—and most of that comes from cities. Setting aside for the moment the all-important issue of social and political cohesion, for cities to survive a peak-oil crash, the critical necessity is for them to learn to grow food. For country people to survive, inhabitants will need to provide nearly every single other essential good for themselves. And since many country people today, in contrast to yesteryear, are transplanted urbanites lacking gardening or other land skills, but having the isolation that makes social cohesion unnecessary to learn (for now), their survival is even more doubtful. If catastrophe comes, the cities may be unpleasant, but I fear the countryside may be far worse off.

Real Survival Skills

One important tenet of permaculture is to design for disaster. While giving a talk on the wildfire that destroyed his cabin at the Lama Foundation, Santa Fe designer Ben Haggard was asked what his biggest lesson was. “Plan for disaster,” he said. “Whatever is the likely catastrophe at your site, count on it happening. Because sooner or later, it will.”

A technique displayed in good design that also happens to be a way to deter disaster is to meet destructive forces with mechanisms or attitudes that transform them into productive, or at worst, harmless energies. When this machinery of transformation is missing, even seemingly mild events wreak havoc. A gentle rain falling on bare ground will quickly sluice away topsoil and wash downhill in gullies. If instead plants carpet that same patch of earth, the rain becomes not an erosive force, but life-giving moisture whose energy is damped and welcomed by the vegetation. Instead of gullying, the water is held by the plants, stored over a longer time for them and for the animals that feed on or live among the vegetation. This is one of nature’s secrets: knowing how to create structures and systems that convert gales to refreshing breezes, change baking sun into sugars and living tissue.

What nature doesn’t do, and humans attempt so often, is to treat large forces as enemies to be vanquished and destroyed. This summer (2004), as hurricanes repeatedly battered the Caribbean, ridiculous proposals appeared in letters-to-the-editor columns: Let’s build giant fans on the Florida coast to blow away the storms. Pour oil over the Atlantic to smooth out the waves. And (inevitably), why can’t we toss a few nukes into those pesky hurricanes? (Whether it’s replacing the Panama canal or toppling Saddam, someone always seems to propose atomic bombs.)

Sector Acceptance

The conceptual tool offered by permaculture in dealing with disaster is to view large forces as sector energies: influences from off the site that are beyond the control of the designer. We deal with sector energies by designing systems or placing elements to deflect, absorb, or harvest these forces, or allow them to pass unhindered. This is nature’s way as well, and how she does it offers, as usual, some profound lessons.

As ecosystems mature, biomass and complexity increase. Ecologist Ramon Margalef, in his landmark 1963 paper, “On Certain Unifying Principles in Ecology” (American Naturalist97:357-374), suggests we think of biomass as “a keeper of organization, something that is proportional to the influence that an actual ecosystem can exert on future events.” In other words, we can think of biomass, complexity, and the other indicators of maturity as measures not only of the resilience of a system, but as a form of wisdom. That’s because as ecosystems mature, the aftermath of environmental tumult such as storm or drought depends more on the richness of the ecosystem than on the nature of the disturbance. A drought that withers a weedlot doesn’t faze an old-growth forest—the forest has learned what to do with drought. It has grown structures, cycles, and patterns that convert nearly any outside influence into more forest, and that protect key cycles during bad times. It has become wise.

Nature uses two principal tools to achieve this protection from catastrophe. The first is diversity in space: in size, shape, physical pattern, and composition. If all the pieces of a system are at the same physical scale—all the same size, or the same genetic makeup, for example—a disturbance occurring at that scale will wipe out the whole system. Diversity in scale brings protection. When a hurricane hits a trailer park, the trailers blow away, but the bacteria, mice, and other elements of very different size escape damage. A plague of cats, on the other hand, strikes at the scale of the mice, leaving the trailers and bacteria unscathed. Mature ecosystems have enough diversity in space that any catastrophe may knock out the pieces living at that particular scale but will almost never destroy the whole landscape.

The second protective tool of mature ecosystems is diversity in time‹in rate, frequency, and schedule. Understory shrubs often leaf out earlier in spring than canopy trees, which lets the shrubs grab enough light to build plenty of leaves. Then when the trees grow leaves, the shrubs have the photosynthetic area to gather ample light in the dappled shade. Another classic example of diversity in time is the hatching cycle of locusts. Timed to emerge at intervals of years having prime numbers such as 13 and 17, they frustrate the predators whose more regular breeding period requires their food to arrive more predictably.

Permaculture designers use similar approaches to design for disaster. Instead of using concrete embankments and other brute-force tactics to resist flood, we place fences that can lie down, reed-like as rushing waters advance and then can be easily set up afterward. Rather than gouging enormous barren firebreaks into their hillside, Lama Foundation stacks roads, swales, and plantings together in a multiply functioning firebreak. When monsoon downpours arrive in Tucson, instead of standing by as flooding street runoff pours down sewers, Brad Lancaster harvests the water with cleverly placed curb cuts that lead to mulched food-tree basins. All these examples are detailed in Permaculture Activist #54 (November, 2004).

By observing nature’s wisdom, permaculturists follow nature’s lead and use patterning, succession, edge, and cyclic opportunities to convert large pulses of energy into smooth generators of structure, harvest, and nutrient flow. Permaculture design inquires into the nature of some of these “large pulses” and shows how they can teach us to use their energy, aikido-like, to benefit ourselves and the larger ecosystem.

Copyright 2005 by Toby Hemenway. Published in Permaculture Activist No. 54.