By Bill Mollison
DESIGN FOR REMEDIAL ACTION
When we design for permanence, we go generally toward forests,
permanent pastures, lakes and ponds, and non-tillage agriculture.
That is our business. Until we get more clues as to
what will be sustainable, that is what we have to play with.
Industrial water can be supplied from roofs. Settlements can
use that water. America is simply sort of tanks. Now there are
different sorts of tanks. One is the kind you put under the downspout
from the roof of your house. Tanks of another sort are
the cheap tanks - earth tanks. Absolutely no problem. Always
enough water for all our uses - fresh water, which we presently
let go into the sea.
We have three ways of water storage. We can store it in the
soils; we can store it in surface earth tanks, and we can store it
in sealed catchments. For an agricultural situation, we will use
the soils. For domestic situations, we will use earth tanks. They
are very much cheaper. For every 5,000 gallons we can store
in concrete tanks, we can store 250,000 in Earth tanks at the
same cost.
We have legal and financial strategies. We can convert locally
into far more self-reliant bioregions. The people who are doing
that are adding greenhouses to their houses and doing
their own gardening. There is an immense conversion going on.
That’s where we start, dealing with an acre.
Now the thing that we have ignored, not only turned our
backs on but often fled from, is conversion of high level investment
capital to these low energy systems. There are a whole
set of strategies to do so that we are assembling as an "Earth
banks" service. Some of these strategies will benefit our social
happiness as well.
The only way we can do things fast is by making the least
number of moves in the fastest possible time, and by very rapid
delegation of work to people. There is no hope that we can get
this done in the next five years if we keep it to ourselves. Therefore,
I have come here to break the monopoly of the elite alternative
in America. We have got to let experts loose on the
ground. We need hundreds and hundreds of them. We don’t
want at any time to patent anything or to keep any information
to ourselves, not even keep our jobs to ourselves. The time for
that is gone. What we are involved in is a cooperative, not a
competitive, system. There are a very few of us operating at
this end of the system, therefore we have to act in a very efficient
way in order to create the greatest amount of change in
the shortest period of time.
I think we have an ethic here: to stop admiring the people
who have money. There has to be a big ethical change. It is an
interesting time to be living in. The big twist we have to make is
away from our educational system. All the methodologies and
principles we use arose as a result of observation of natural
systems, and are stated in a passive way. The mind twist that
has to be made to create permaculture is to realize that you
can get hold of that and do it. We have to make our knowledge
active. We have to move from a passive to an active thought
level.
" Agriculture is a destructive system."
What are the strategies by which we don’t need agriculture?
Agriculture is a destructive system. Well, we need a lot more
gardeners. Gardeners are the most productive, most hands-on
sort of agriculturists. They always have been. There never has
been any debate about it. When you make a farm big, you just
accept a suddenly lower productivity and yield, but less people
get it. That is why it is economically "efficient." When you talk
about efficient farming of this order, you are talking about dollars.
When you reduce the size of the owned landscape, providing
you don’t reduce the lots to less than a quarter of an
acre, the agricultural productivity goes up. You get a lot of arguments
to the effect that breaking up large farms into five acre
blocks is uneconomic. Five acre blocks are. One to onequarter
acre blocks are not. They are highly productive.
Now gardenersÉHow many gardeners are there in the United
States? Fifty-three percent of households now garden. They
garden only 600 square feet on the average. They make something
like $1.50 a square foot. These household gardens are
producing 18% of the food in the United States, at a value almost
equivalent to total agriculture.
Now let’s look at Russia. The peasant farmer, on a half-acre
to an acre, is producing some 84% of the food. The state
farms, which occupy most of the agricultural land, produce the
remainder. But the state farms are not doing their job. They
have a 6% deficit, which is shipped in from Canada or the United
States. The glamorous agriculture, the large scale, broad
scale agriculture, is not the agriculture that is producing the
food.
We are now down to about 20 basic foods. The day of soybeans
is probably arriving. You can make just about anything
out of soybeans.
Control of Seeds
I don’t think that there are very many seed companies left in
the world that don’t belong to a consortium of not more than
10 companies. It is certainly true in Australia. The seed is now
being grown for and distributed by the multi-nationals. Can you
buy a non-hybrid corn in the United States? Here and there. In
Australia, we can’t. But we do have one seed company. It is
called Self-Reliance Seed Company in Stanley, Tasmania. Maybe
we have two.
[Self-Reliant Seeds is now defunct, but it was replaced by
Phoenix seeds, also of Tasmania. Ed.]
The next move of the large seed-growing consortiums was to
have been seed-patenting legislation. At this point, a lot of people
started to get a bit suspicious. The patenting of biological
materials was a slightly suspicious move. Then the World Council
of Churches looked into the situation and produced Seeds of the Earth
. The cat was out of the bag. So there has been a general
ground-level revolt against takeover of a basic resource.
Kent Whealy’s Seed Savers Exchange is just one of these
moves.
But one thing this may have taught is that you can’t run away
from systems. Holing up in two acres out in the New England
forests isn’t going to get you out of the system unless you are
into a seed-growing operation and know exactly what you’re doing.
Most people do not. If you are training yourself to be a good
gardener, there are still certain areas you just haven’t got into,
and seed growing is one of them. In one valley in Tasmania,
among a group of hippies living there, you might find 50 Ph.D.s.
Most of them are sitting home knitting or weaving or running
around getting blackberries, just leaving it to the really ruthless
people to get on with what they are doing. We must involve all
our skills to organize life forces, not just a few.
In the permaculture garden, we must deal with the question
of ways in which elements are to be placed. Some of these elements
are manurial or energy-exchange systems for other elements;
others are defensive elements that protect other plants
in a whole set of ways; and some act as trellis systems for others
or provide shade. So there are physical relationships involved
and there are whole sets of rules that govern why certain
elements are put together. And we understand some of
these rules. A lot of them are quite obvious.
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