[Sdpg] Design for Living By Gianna De Persiis Vona (Report on the 5th Bay Area PC Convergence )

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

(Report on the 5th Bay Area PC Convergence )

Design for Living

http://www.bohemian.com/bohemian/08.13.08/greenzone-0833.html
What's permaculture, you ask? Oh, just a natural 
safety net for complete disaster, that's all

By Gianna De Persiis Vona

Until recently, I didn't know much about 
permaculture. I only knew that it had something 
to do with sustainable gardening practices, and 
that I was hearing about it with increased 
frequency. On one hand, I was correct in that 
permaculture is very much concerned with the 
growing of food, and that it is indeed a rapidly 
spreading movement. But this is hardly an 
accurate definition. Permaculture, as I learned 
at the recent North Bay Permaculture Convergence, 
is actually an ecological design system for 
sustainability, one that spirals into all aspects of life.

Benjamin Fahrer, permaculturalist and educator, 
was up from Big Sur for this three-day event in 
west Sonoma County, attended by some 150 people. 
The Convergence, the fifth of its kind for the 
North Bay, attracts permaculturalists from 
Monterey to Mendocino County and moves to a different location each year.

Think of "permaculture" as meaning "permanent 
culture," Fahrer tells me, where the goals are 
"Earthcare," "Peoplecare" and "Fairshare."

The first two concepts, Earthcare and Peoplecare, 
are pretty self-explanatory. There's really no 
reason that everyone in the world can't have a 
safe place to sleep, clean water to drink and 
enough food to eat. Yet as a culture, we seem to 
accept extreme disparities in lifestyle­some are 
millionaires, while others starve. This is where 
Fairshare comes in. Fairshare creates a cycle, a 
feedback loop that sets limits to consumption and 
churns our surpluses back to the earth and its people.

Currently, we live in a culture that throws 
things away, and according to Fahrer, we are 
temporary and complacent. Until we begin to put 
our egos in check by considering what we need and 
not what we want, then there will be a continued 
lack of surplus. Fairshare comes from 
understanding these concepts and from living a 
life that is not based on throwaway ideology and 
self-obsessed ultraconsumption.

Fahrer says that permaculture founders Bill 
Mollison and David Holmgren studied indigenous 
cultures in order to discover how they managed to 
exist in harmony with their surroundings. During 
their studies, Mollison and Holmgren found a 
consistent pattern. Successful indigenous 
cultures across the planet lived by three ethics: 
a reverence for the earth, a reverence for each 
other and a practice of giving back the surplus. 
Permaculturalists around the world have a vision 
of creating abundance­and by abundance they don't 
mean a red Ferrari and a pair of thousand-dollar 
jeans. They mean a full stomach, clean water and 
a sense of community that's more sustaining than the fanciest stick shift.

For his part, Fahrer is about to begin a tour of 
permaculture schools and sites from Baja to 
British Columbia. There is a shift happening, 
Fahrer assures. The masses are looking for 
solutions, and those solutions are appearing all 
over the world. With this shift in consciousness 
comes the potential for the permaculture movement 
to shift and change as well, but there needs to 
be the least change for the greatest effect; 
existing institutions need to remain or become 
sustainable, and personal agendas have to be put aside.

This brings us to a critical point in my learning 
process. I am sensitive to the human capacity for 
egotistical behaviors, and everything about this 
permaculture thing reeks of the potential for 
self-congratulatory carrot planting. Fahrer 
acknowledges this risk, which is why before 
eco-restoration, we must have ego-restoration. An 
integral aspect to permaculture is the 
relinquishment of power; the strength of 
permaculture lies within the network, not just 
the individual. The only way a movement can have 
true strength and resiliency is if the people 
within it are helping each other.

When disaster strikes, Fahrer asks me, where are 
you going to go? He has community all over the 
world­and in that community, people are making 
their own food, saving their own water and 
harnessing their own energy. These are places 
where people are learning to put their egos aside 
and to live and work together.


Driving home, I consider Fahrer's question. Where 
will I go when the shit hits the fan? Sadly, I 
know where I'll be. While Fahrer and his 
permaculture crew are eating goat cheese on some 
epic piece of land somewhere with a rainwater 
catchment system and a fully functioning 
composting toilet, I'll be at the North Bay 
equivalent of the New Orleans Superdome. I can 
already see myself, a small plastic bottle of 
emergency water clutched in my sweaty fingers, 
while I stand in a spiraling line of exhausted 
and desperate people waiting to use a reeking 
Port-a-Potty. This image fills me with a wave of 
sadness, and for the first time, I feel ready to 
reassess my self-imposed limitations and to seek change.

For more information on permaculture, visit www.permaculture.org.

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