[Scpg] The Ecstasy of Ecology: Penny Livingston and the Permaculture Institute

[Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

http://westbynorthwest.org/summer02/dedanan.perm.sum02.shtml

The Ecstasy of Ecology:
Penny Livingston and the Permaculture Institute
of Northern California

Text and Photo by Mary DeDanan

If commercial agriculture (with its bulldozers, mono-crops, fences, 
pesticides, and herbicides) is rape of the Earth, and if standard organic 
gardening is consensual sex with the Earth, then permaculture is ecstatic 
tantric union with the Earth. Just ask a permaculturalist. Notice those big 
smiles on their faces.

Consider Penny Livingston-Stark, informally known as the Permaculture 
Queen, who consults, designs, and teaches worldwide on the finer points of 
this ecological design system from her home in Point Reyes Station. Over 
the past ten years, she has created "food forests," designed gardens, 
constructed sensuous buildings, and restored severely degraded lands, all 
while training some of the best practitioners in the field. A beautiful 
middle-aged woman with blonde hair turning silver and a no-nonsense 
preference for cowboy boots, Livingston beams with energy. She's got to be 
up to something.

Her mission is nothing less than remaking the world, one garden at a time. 
While the basic permaculture system is rooted in agriculture, it quickly 
expands to include a multitude of global issues: soil restoration, clean 
water, waste systems, ecoforestry, alternative energy, housing, urban food 
security, and local economies -- and that's just for starters. 
"Permaculture is about overall sustainability," says Livingston. The term 
is a contraction of "permanent culture" and its concepts originated over 20 
years ago in Australia, from whence it's spread like a weed. "We're talking 
about 'permanence' in the dynamic sense," Livingston explains, "not 
necessarily keeping things the way they are right now, but the permanence 
of culture itself, of humanity on the Earth." This, as anyone paying 
attention understands, is now The Question.

Permaculture's sensible answer is for humans to ally themselves with nature 
instead of trying to control nature. It carefully studies natural patterns, 
cycles, and diversities, and distills this into a set of principles and 
concepts, which are then used as the framework. Permaculture insists on the 
whole picture, from soil microbes to global weather patterns. It takes 
advantage of every relationship and synergy. It uses local resources, or 
grows its own. It wastes nothing. It asks every element to serve multiple 
functions. Every need is filled by diverse resources. From these 
principles, "permies" design optimal systems that can be adapted to human 
settlements in any part of the world. Permaculture can create or remake 
homes, gardens, farms, and forests in a way that is low-impact, feeds the 
inhabitants abundantly, provides sanctuary for wildlife, and restores 
damage previously done. Above all, permaculture is practical and 
solution-oriented. Not least are the side benefits: a well-done 
permaculture project is luxuriantly beautiful and takes much less work to 
maintain than the norm. (Permaculturalists recommend that humans use that 
extra time in play, rest, and enjoyment.)

Permaculture is catching on. The work of Livingston and her husband James 
Stark has been featured in glossy magazines spreads and books, including a 
cover story in "Natural Home" Their exuberant display won the exhibitor's 
award at last year's huge San Francisco Garden Show. Through the 
organization she started and he helps maintain, the Permaculture Institute 
of Northern California, Livingston has taught permaculture all over the US. 
She's also taught in Portugal, France, Bali, and Mexico; she'll be doing a 
session in England this summer. Livingston trained permaculturalist and 
writer Toby Hemenway, who recently published the most accessible book yet 
on the subject: Gaia's Garden (2001, Chelsea Green; after reading it I was 
inspired to sheet mulch my entire front yard). Tours of the curious and the 
dedicated, from students to city council members, visit Livingston's own 
garden in Point Reyes.

And what a garden it is! Riotous yet ordered, a medley of fruit trees, 
vegetables, flowers, berries, natives, herbs, plants that attract 
beneficial insects, and plants that enrich the soil (some -- gasp -- might 
even be considered weeds elsewhere). It's lush, yet all done with a minimum 
of water, resources, or labor. The most important permaculture tool, says 
Livingston, is a hammock. First relax, observe, and think. "A well-designed 
garden, properly installed, requires very little maintenance," says 
Livingston. "Our garden, we kid around, is the 'ungardened' garden."

It is an entire ecosystem on one acre. There are ponds large and small, fed 
by rainwater collected from the roofs of hobbit-esque outbuildings made of 
cob. Ducks splash, then patrol for pests. (Livingston doesn't like the term 
"pest." "If you have a problem, it's not a pest problem. It's a 
lack-of-predators problem.") Chickens busily turn the soil, eating insects, 
fertilizing as they go. From the henhouse, Livingston gathers a couple eggs 
the size of elliptical tennis balls. Worms in bins, slow and sinuous, eat 
kitchen scraps and create rich castings, then a few are themselves fed to 
the catfish lurking in the aquaculture pond. The gardens surround the 
house, originally an ordinary '50s sort of place, now remodeled, inside and 
out, with thick earthern adobe and plasters colored with natural clay: warm 
golds, maroon, and terra-cotta.

Livingston delights in boasting of her soil, an opulent dark loam, noting 
that most gardens and farms deplete topsoil, or lose it to erosion. "We've 
built 18 inches of topsoil in seven years." It's soon apparent that the 
woman is passionate about soil. "Standard agriculture treats soil like 
dirt!" she says, and that's just to warm up. Nature takes 600 to 900 years 
to build one inch of topsoil. Modern agriculture is based on the European 
model, but Europe farming culture didn't evolve with the same harsh storms 
common elsewhere, particularly in the U.S. Plowed and exposed, those 
precious inches of topsoil can wash away overnight.

Commercial agriculture, says Livingston, is not sustainable. "The more we 
buy food that's been produced in a way that's creating soil loss and ground 
water pollution, and then sucks water out of the ground to irrigate it, and 
then salts the soil as a result of evaporation of that irrigation -- the 
more we pay that, we are buying our demise right there. I don't want to 
sound doom and gloom, but every single culture that was based on irrigation 
of dry lands has failed. Every single one." Eventually, she says, "Deserts 
are created, and, through convection, they actually propagate themselves, 
they spread." She points to civilizations of the once Fertile Crescent (now 
Iran and Iraq) and the Sahara. She talks of our own Central Valley, now 
dealing with created salinized soil problems.

The permaculture alternative is an abundance of family gardens -- "every 
garden can produce more food than the inhabitants can consume" -- and 
local, small-scale, bio-regionally adapted farms -- "the bread baskets that 
should be surrounding cities and towns." The goal is to provide for human 
needs in the places we live, instead of importing everything. It is not 
only much more environmental friendly, but basic, common-sense food 
security, surprisingly rare in the age of globalization. "You support your 
local farmers first and foremost," Livingston insists. I, spoiled, wonder 
if that means we'd have to give up our exotic staples. "If you want things 
like coffee or tea or chocolate," Livingston replies, "those are luxuries. 
Find out where you're buying it from. And think about the communities 
you're supporting globally when you are buying coffee. Coffee is a forest 
crop, it should be shade grown. It is a crop you don't have to monoculture, 
in fact, it's better if it's not monocultured. Same with cacao, chocolate." 
Permaculture, she notes, doesn't require sacrifice of one's pleasures, but 
awareness. Indeed, permaculture invites new pleasures.

"People can walk out their door and have a garden that is not only very 
beautiful to look at, but also provides for their needs, as well as the 
needs of wildlife, and birds, and their neighbors. So they start to create 
human-based ecologies. It's more than just a garden. It's whole system
design."

That whole system extends to the other needs of humans, whether energy, 
water, or social systems. For example, permaculture enthusiastically 
embraces the alternative energy revolution -- it meets the principles of 
appropriate scale, conservation, and diversification. "If everybody's 
getting their power from one way, that's not sustainable," says Livingston. 
"Instead we create diversities of how to get your needs met in many 
different ways, so if one doesn't come through for some reason, you have 
another. For example, doing photovoltaics and wind power and geo-thermal 
and micro-hydro -- and tying back into the grid with net metering. How many 
ways can you get renewal energy, not only from your individual site, but on 
a neighborhood scale, or bioregional scale? So we're also looking at a 
diversity of scales--what's the best way to work?"

Water, says Livingston, is another crucial example. "Not only where it 
comes from, but how many times can you reuse a resource, over and over 
again, before the needs of your system are met?"

Yet a third example is the budding Permaculture Credit Union, based in 
Santa Fe, New Mexico, which Livingston and her husband enthusiastically 
endorse. Small loans are given for planting and restoration projects, 
alternative energy systems, and so on. The revolution must be funded.

"With good design," says Livingston as we drink tea on a cold spring day, 
back in her warm, colorful earthern house, "humans can be part of the 
solution, instead of part of the problem. It's how we design our homes and 
our communities, and how we provide for our needs, thereby limiting the 
destructive type of consumption that happens all the time. That's the real 
point. Trying to create designs that provide for many of our needs onsite, 
or within our bioregion, as possible." She practices every bit of what she 
preaches, and obviously has fun doing it. What was once a front porch is 
now opened to the living room, letting in bright, pale sunlight. Pots of 
strawberry and golden raspberry starts fill the porch, waiting for their 
turn to go out.

Livingston smiles easily, in no hurry although consultations are scheduled 
for her afternoon. "It's important to recognize that we are a part of 
nature. That's the promise of permaculture, to reunite people back in the 
garden again."


contact info:
Permaculture Institute of Northern California
P.O. Box 341
Point Reyes Station, CA 94956

htttp://www.permacultureinstitute.com
email: info at permacultureinstitute.com

*** *** ***
© Copyright 2002 by Mary DeDanan. All rights reserved.

Originally published in the Pacific Sun, April 17, 2002.

Northern California writer, poet and photographer Mary DeDanan lives off 
the grid while she plants an edible landscape.

Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
(805) 962-2571
sbpcnet at silcom.com
www.sbpermaculture.org

"We are like trees, we must create new leaves, in new directions, in order to
grow." - Anonymous