Enjoy, or not, the KAB Man series from KABman.org, but whatever you do, stay tuned for the more serious side of recycling afterwards….

Episode I – Hiring a Superhero

Episode II – First Day on the Job

Episode III – KAB Man Gets a Sidekick

If you’ve spent half your lunch break chuckling over the above, now it’s time to get a little serious for the other half. No need to stop chewing though.

Recycling is a great thing. We need to do it, and we need to learn how to do it as efficiently as possible. It should become as natural to us as brushing our teeth. But, I want to make a point here about where our litter comes from in the first place.

Please take the time to watch the following video, where you’ll see KAB Man’s new sidekick, Iron Eyes Cody again (seen in Episode III above), but, more importantly, learn some interesting facts about the original Keep America Beautiful campaign – that, rather than an effort in genuine corporate social responsibility, it was in fact a campaign launched to stop the spread of laws that threatened the profits and ‘efficiency’ of industry. The campaign was a bid to shift focus away from the source of the litter (the corporations who capitalise on built-in obsolescence, and encourage rampant over-consumption), and to instead transfer the blame to the individual doing their ‘patriotic duty’ – the consumer. Specifically, the KAB campaign was "was created in response to Vermont’s 1953 attempt to outlaw disposable containers" (wikipedia). The bottling industries wanted to externalise costs by avoiding laws that forced them to deal with returned glass (I still remember taking glass bottles back to the store as a child to retrieve a few cents back). Instead of depost/return/recycling systems, they wanted to shift to disposable plastic bottles – leaving the onus of cleanup on the individual and on munipical (taxpayer financed…) recycling. The cost of the greenwash campaign was far less than their own glass recycling costs – and so disposable plastic bottles were born into the world.

Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage Duration: 19mins

KAB Man – a superhero, or a victim of corporate green-washing?

Not wanting to belittle the comedic efforts of the Keep America Beautiful people, I’d much rather see a campaign encouraging people to buy less by encouraging home gardens and cottage industries. The concept of ignoring the never-ending waves of fashion, look, and design, considering needs over wants, or developing systems of self-sufficiency, are never broached unfortunately. Also not mentioned is that recycling processes themselves consume vast amounts of energy on their own. The separate collections, the inability to recycle vast amounts of ‘recycleable’ material, etc. are hidden from the consumer eye.

Please take a moment to consider the definition of the following word:

Consume
verb transitive to use up; to devour; to waste or spend; to destroy by wasting, fire, evaporation, etc; to exhaust.

The concept of consumption always had a bad connotation up until about a century ago. So much so, in fact, that they assigned this name to a terribly deadly disease – Tuberculosis. This has all changed. Today, a good consumer is a model citizen of capitalist society. Our politicians are positively infatuated with the words “growth economy”. A healthy economy, we are told, is dependent on growth – and we cannot have growth without continual, ever increasing, consumption.

If the sink was overflowing, I could start a “Keep the Bathroom Beautiful” campaign, soliciting all of you to help with the cleanup. We’d all get busy with mops, right? We dare not regulate the flow of water by turning the tap off, you see – as keeping the water flowing is critical to progress.

The reality is that an economy that can only exist through a constant plundering of finite resources is to the earth what cancer is to the human body. Its success is made complete through the death of the host.

Some people think the permaculture flower is a remnant of the hippie’s flower power movement, or that it has something to do with New Age – just another consumerism idea to be sold to the confused and rich people of the middle classes. Oh no, the ‘flower power’ of the permaculture flower has real power. It has the power to reunite humanity with the complex systems of nature, so they can live in symbiosis, enriching each other. Nothing else possesses this power.

The petals’ colours are given by the pattern languages they cover. These adapt to place and culture, giving the flower a local color. The seven petals together support all aspects of life. It is not just a flower of beauty, or with a pleasant smell. No, this flower can provide you with everything you need, for all aspects of life. Nothing else I know can do that.

In the core you find what are most valuable, the basic ethics and the guiding principles. The core is like the heart of the flower; every permaculture design has its origin here. The evolutionary spiral path is the sign of the permaculture flower – it’s visionary, integrated into its genes. It starts with ethics and design principles, and it starts with you at a local level. The path is then moving outward connecting all the fields of the society into integrated patterns and pattern languages, making the world a living whole. And this spiral is eternal, like evolution is.

Even though I’m not a permaculture designer I’ve put some consideration into these guiding principles. Before I learned about permaculture these thoughts were hidden from me, but when I see the world from a permaculture perspective it looks different. Very different. But keep in mind these are just some loose thoughts from me, a deeper understanding are to be found at David Holmgren’s home page.

Observe and Interact

Good design starts with observation and interaction with place and history. Here we see the difference between permaculture projects and other projects – the time and energy spent to observe and understand the patterns of time and place, before implementing any new design. This is why I set up a list of criteria that should be met before you invest your time or money in a project. For example, an aid project:

1. The project is using time and energy in observing the patterns of place, nature, culture, community and history. This is done in cooperation with the native people they are intended to help.
2. The project is paying a lot of respect to the patterns of place, nature, culture, community and history, being very careful not to disturb any of these patterns, and that any new systems of design will enrich and strengthen the existing patterns.
3. The project leader should be skilled / experienced in decoding and implementing patterns.

Design from Patterns to Details

In a pattern language you start with the whole and put in the details as you go, if not the whole cannot evolve.

Every pattern has to be unfolded; a living process is by nature morphogenetic, using generative codes. A flower is made this way and nature works this way to avoid trillions of errors – errors that unavoidably occur if you try to force a design upon nature or a community.

If an embryo were shaped by fabrication, and not generated, the number of mistakes would be unbelievably large.

The human embryo is created by 50 doubling of cells. Starting with a single cell (the fertilized egg), after 50 doublings, the embryo has 250 cells. During this doubling process that occurs 50 times, each cell has the opportunity to adapt itself, and to remove possible mistakes by position, adaption, pushing and pulling. The total number of opportunities for correction, then, in the growing embryo, is (1+2+2²+2³+….2⁵⁰) = 2⁵¹. Reversing the argument, we may express this by saying that the assembly of embryo cells, if not given a chance for adaption and instead made by design and fabrication, would typically have 2⁵¹ mistakes – a truly enormous number, roughly 10¹⁵, or a thousand trillion mistakes. That is what would happen if an embryo were designed and built, not generated. If an embryo were built from a blueprint of a design, not generated by an adaptive process, there would inevitably be one thousand trillion mistakes. Because of its history as a generated structure, there are virtually none. – The Process of Creating Life, by Christopher Alexander, page 187-188

And the fundamental answer is, that there is a fundamental law about the creation of complexity, which is visible and obvious to everyone – yet this law is, to all intents and purposes, ignored in 99% of the daily fabrication process of society. The law states simply this: ALL the well-ordered complex systems we know in the world, all those anyway that we review as highly successful, are GENERATED structures, not fabricated structures.” – The Process of Creating Life, by Christopher Alexander, page 180

Always keep this in mind; a living structure cannot be fabricated, it has to be generated!

Integrate Rather than Segregate

The core of the pattern practice is to integrate rather than segregate. This means to use and value diversity, all in a meaningful relationship with each other. A completely integrated pattern language produces no waste, especially by not wasting human capital, which is the largest waste problem in our western societies. Our so called “modern societies” produce almost nothing but waste, and the more waste, the more “modern” according to most political and economical theory. Even recycling, which for the most part means downcycling, is mainly a waste of time and energy. See also.

A modern city like Brasilia is based on the completely opposite – segregate rather than integrate – which is the core of modernism. And this is a tragedy, because this is the opposite of an integrated life, and to live an integrated life is the meaning of life.

The world’s leading anti modernist, Christopher Alexander, has dedicated his life to creating an integrated world, which means a world that consists of a deep wholeness. Just take a look at pattern 9 in A Pattern Language.

Conflict

The artificial separation of houses and work creates intolerable rifts in people’s inner lives.

Resolution

Use zoning laws, neighborhood planning, tax incentives, and any other means available to scatter workplaces throughout the city. Prohibit large concentrations of work, without family life around them. Prohibit large concentrations of family life, without workplaces around them.

There is nothing I despise more than these monocultures of houses so common today; I hate them even more than lawns. To make the situation even worse are houses ordered in rows, like a plantation of houses, every house separated from one another, while in nature most things are ordered in clusters or guilds. Urban and rural design should have been based on house clusters.

Conflict

People will not feel comfortable in their houses unless a group of houses forms a cluster, with the public land between them jointly owned by all the householders.

Resolution

Arrange houses to form very rough but identifiable clusters of 8 to 12 households around some common land and paths. Arrange the clusters so that anyone can walk through them, without feeling like a trespasser.

Why can’t people understand that monocultures make life monotone?!?

The opposite of this madness is the ecovillage, but because of individualism (which today is identical with consumerism) and sectorialism (most visible in bureaucracy), people find it almost impossible to create something so nice today.

Still, my dream is someday to live in an ecovillage by Lake Mjøsa.

Use Small and Slow Solutions

Using small and slow solutions is maybe the most neglected principle today. There is a lot of talk about renewable energy and green technology, but almost nothing about using small and slow solutions, which could have been the most important solution. I recently learned that the amount of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas consumed every year within the European Union equals 12000 times the annual hydro power production of Norway. Where in the world is the EU going to get 12000 Norway’s worth of renewable energy to replace this? Maybe we have to reintroduce the slave trade, because this abuse of fossil fuels equals roughly 1000 energy slaves for each one of us.

Our large and fast solutions are enormously resource hungry, and not just for energy. For example, the amount of macadam necessary for the EU infrastructure equals 10 – 15 tons for every person every year. With an average life span at ca 75 years this means 750 – 1125 tons per person. Try to crush 1000 tons of granite by using a sledge hammer, and you might get an idea about how dependent we are upon fossil fuels to sustain our lifestyle.

Quite a lot of this is taken from the Norwegian mountains. When they find a proper mountain close to the Sea they produce the macadam this way:

First they drill a vertical hole down to sea level, where they make a cave inside the mountain for the crushing mill. Then they start crushing the mountain from above in a large circle around the hole, into which they pour the bigger stones going to the crushing mill. The macadam is transported from here to a ship – one ship every week. The hollowing of the mountain is placed in such a way that it’s not visible from the sea, so not disturbing the mountain’s profile and the tourists view from a cruise ship.

I came to think that our “modern societies” are like these mountains, just an illusion.

Much of this macadam is mixed with asphalt, and this way the people of Europe drive on the top of the Norwegian mountains every day, not even giving it a thought.

But macadam is also used as a bed for pipelines all over the continent, for transporting water and sewage in huge systems. Here where I live they catch the water from ca 200 meters below the surface of Lake Mjøsa, from where they pump it to people living up to 400 meters above the lake. For some of these remote dwellings there is no pipeline for the sewer, so they pump it into trucks driving it down to the sewage cleaning plants from where the water is finally pumped back to Lake Mjøsa.

You maybe call this a sick pattern, but it’s not a pattern at all, because a pattern is something which is in a meaningful connection with something else.

Part of the solution is pattern 178, a compost toilet. This small and slow solution uses no energy at all, still producing both compost and negawatts. Small and slow solutions produce a lot of negawatts – saving megawatts – the easiest way to “produce” new energy. In some countries 30-40% of the energy consumed by society is invested into the delivery of potable water and the removal of sewage. Pumping fluids is extremely energy intensive.

In addition about half of the 15 million tons of phosphorus exploited each year ends up in the oceans. Much of this flushed down the toilet. The world’s known phosphorus reserves can only supply us for another 30 – 80 years.

Our “modern societies” are almost completely running off large and fast solutions. Small and slow is mostly laughed at, as if they were romantic little dreams with no connection to reality.

Small and slow solutions give people control back over their own lives, and in this way giving them back their dignity. Large and fast solutions are left in the hands of specialised ‘experts’ only, destroying the dignity and responsibility of ordinary people.

I cannot think about anything more packed with small and slow solutions than an earthship. It’s a completely integrated system, ready to meet the collapse of our large and fast solutions – a collapse that is getting closer every day.

The symbol of this principle is a snail, known for its slow speed and small house. More than ever it is time for going to the snail to become wise.

Use Edges and Value the Marginal

Here I’ll just say a little about the last part of this principle – to value the marginal. The word marginal has many meanings. I’ll concentrate on the meaning “not of central importance” for the beauty of the area. This according to pattern 104, site repair:

Conflict

Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best.

Resolution

On no account place buildings in the places which are most beautiful. In fact, do the opposite. Consider the site and its buildings as a single living eco-system. Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, conformable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are least pleasant now.

I hardly think anything has destroyed the beauty of our world more than the violence against this pattern. It’s horrible to see how the rich and privileged people have put their holiday residences and mansions at the most beautiful spots along the Oslo Fjord. And this way they destroy both the beauty of the fjord and the access for ordinary people to these places.

We, the permaculture people, are designated to heal our world. This is why we should pay a special attention to this pattern.

But still I’m just a permaculturist by heart, not by diploma, so please forgive me my limited understanding. I have just started my walk at the evolutionary spiral path of permaculture. How I wish I had been given this path by birth. And please, share the permaculture flower, so that the world can recover. Let us create a new kind of world, a world sustained by real flower power.

The Uk may have to import waste to burn as it builds more incinerators than we can use, whilst waste pickers in the majority world – the poorest of the poor – complain that their livelihoods as recyclers are being destroyed by incineration plans. Oh – and there’s a car that runs on shit.

The modern-day education system is almost entirely bent on creating an army of university professors and other specialists. We have been systematically trained to specialize, and as a result we approach problem-solving by studying parts of a whole, where the connections between them are commonly ignored.

We’ve all likely been seeing the headlines these days about the floodwaters in southern Alberta. Flooding is almost always an indicator of deforestation. Forests provide for water storage and use, and moderate runoff from large rain events. Think about what would happen if you were to pour a bucket of water on a sidewalk. You would get a short-lived flood of water to the storm drain. But if you took that same bucket of water and poured on a vegetated area, you would have noticed that the water is retained, and only a small but steady spring of water will dribble out once saturated. Through destructive monoculture agriculture, we are systematically patterning Alberta like a sidewalk.

We have trained ourselves to work amongst each other as individuals, and we approach design and solve problems by addressing the parts. This has led to conflict, instability, and awkward and dysfunctional designs. Pattern is the connections and relationships between things. Understanding pattern helps us get to the root cause of challenges and guides the way to creating lasting human settlements that produce for the needs of people, while harmonizing with ecology.

A pattern is essentially an ordered arrangement of objects or events in time or in space. Everything from numeric sequences, cloud formations to economic boom and busts are all great examples of patterns.

Everything in nature is defined by a limited set of patterns! All of us have the power to understand the seemingly infinite complexity of the world around us through pattern understanding. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by huge environmental, social and economic problems, whether it’s about finding an ethical line of meaningful work, cleaning up a river system, or everything in between. The good news is that all the systems where these issues might lie (whether environmental, social, economic, or whatever) are all defined by these common sets of patterns. By understanding the world through how these patterns work, you can quickly start figuring out how to get started on addressing challenges and put your positive energy to work!

Every pattern we see has an associated message attached to it. Many patterns are sign posts of events that are going to happen. Yet other patterns are indicators of underlying and past conditions that are responsible for present conditions and events. The more we understand and decode the messages embedded in patterns, the more we can find effective solutions to problems, and create designs that harmonize with ecology. Pattern is central to design, and design is the topic of permaculture.

Here’s the best news of all: you already know just as much as I do about pattern! Humans as a species have highly evolved pattern recognition skills. Just observe any child and you’ll see it. All we have to do is dig back into our minds and start re-embracing this ancient ability.

Patterns are both predictive and postdictive

Plants that have evolved to grow in compacted and carbon-deficient soils commonly have tap roots. This kind of root in effect is a slow-motion pickaxe that breaks up the soil, allowing water and air to get in. When the plant reaches the end of its life cycle, the root itself decomposes into a rich column of compost, adding carbon to the soil. Whenever you see this kind of plant, you know right away which technique ecology is using to repair itself, as compacted carbon-poor soils are commonly those heavily disturbed by industry.

We all know that when we see a big white cloud that looks bubbly on top with a dark bottom that we should take shelter from impending rain. We know this and yet we don’t need a degree in meteorology! We all seem to associate that particular cloud pattern with storms. By seeing this particular cloud pattern, we can make a fairly accurate prediction about what the weather conditions will be in the near future and base choices around that. Pattern in predictive in that it help you understand upcoming and associated events that precede other indicative events.

Here’s another simple example: Let’s say you have a team member who’s always late. When doing planning, you’ll likely be figuring that person’s chronic lateness into the plan. This seems very obvious, but I say it because it’s a clear example of how we make sense of things by understanding pattern.

Now think about the dandelions growing in a section of your yard that you want to turn into a garden. Dandelions are a type of plant that have tap roots, which effectively break up compacted soil. Chances are really high that wherever you see dandelions, they are indicating an area of compacted soil. In essence, dandelions are a response to soil compaction. So the appearance of dandelions gives you a lot of clues to the past use of the land, and insight on how to go about repairing it. For example, densely seeding beneficial plants like daikon radish, which have well-developed taproots, will quickly break up areas of soil compaction and return life to the soil. So pattern understanding is postdictive, in that many patterns you see are in fact responses to particular conditions.

Here’s another example: think about chronic traffic delays. Is it just an indicator of too much traffic and we should widen the roads? Or is it postdictive indicator that our communities are shaped in such a way that we cannot meet our needs on our properties anymore and must drive to distant locations to fulfill them?

Fairy circles, as shown here, are tufts of extra vigorous grass commonly seen on lawns. Certain kinds of fungal mycelium function in a beneficial relationship with plants. While the plant provides sugars and starches for the mycelium, the mycelium harvests and transports minerals back to the plant’s roots from great distances. The grass in the fairy circle is visible evidence of this exchange at work.

Perhaps the best way to get started with pattern recognition is through observation. Careful observation can lead to a lot of information about the meaning of pattern. For example, a past permaculture student had parents running a blueberry farm in Nova Scotia. The problem they were facing was all sorts of competing plants growing in between the blueberry bushes, stealing their nutrients and sunlight. The parents dealt with this problem through herbicides, but the student was concerned about the application of these chemicals. Blueberries thrive in the wild in Nova Scotia. So she decided to go out into the wild to see how the native blueberries were doing it. She quickly found that blueberries thrived in acidic and fungal-based soils. Back at her parents’ farm, the soil was everything but this, and those herbicides kept killing more biology in the soil, which was more bacterial in nature. Many of the competing plants in her parents’ farm thrived in bacterial soils.

So there was the solution right in front of her eyes! The student knew then that in order to solve the competitive plant and herbicide problem, she had to take the wild blueberry soil pattern and bring it to her parents’ blueberry farm. She had to change her soil from being basic on the pH scale and bacterially dominant to acidic and fungal dominant, so that her blueberries would thrive, and those competing plants would not. She observed a pattern in nature and applied it to the design of her parents’ blueberry farm!

Here’s another example: I went out walking the other other day on a roadside in Calgary. The road stretched through open parkland. On the side of the road were numerous leguminous plants: all sorts of cow vetch, alfalfa, and yellow sweet clover. The pattern of the sweet clover was particularly interesting. It only grew directly on the edge of the roadside and didn’t grow further into the field next to the road where the vetch, alfalfa and grass was growing. So I went on the internet for some possible reasons why. After a short search, I found that yellow clover favours nitrogen-deficient soils that are alkaline. This is important because having information about your soil is key to understanding how you will go about designing your garden to building better topsoil. But I’ve just saved myself lots of money on soil testing just by observing the particular pattern of yellow clover as a soil quality indicator.

Pattern as a means to design

The herb spiral is a design inspired by nature and coined by Bill Mollison. The spiral is the most efficient way of storing things and saving space. The herb spiral can fit a large amount of growing bedding in a compact structure that is easy to fit outside your kitchen door. By understanding the advantages of the spiral, the herb spiral not only offers space-saving, but also provides a variety of habitat in one space for different kinds of herbs!

There is no coincidence that just about everything you see in the world (and beyond) is patterned in a certain way. Ecology has evolved to become the best engineer on the planet, with billions of years of experience on its resume. Just about all resource, planning and engineering challenges have been solved by ecology. Whenever we have to employ fossil fuels and lots of human labour to something, chances are really good that the design is wrong. If we pattern our designs correctly, the work needed is provided by components of the design itself, just as we saw in the blueberry example above. We need only to look to ecology as our teacher when redesigning human settlements, because all the answers of good design can be found there!

Think of pattern as another word for design. Whether we are designing our lives, our businesses or our gardens, we are in effect patterning them. As I mentioned above, patterning is the ordered arrangement of objects or events in time or space. A pattern emerges when two or more things are in some kind of meaningful connection with one another. For example, if I’m the owner of a cafe, I need fresh food for my sandwiches. I have a nice piece of land out back that has a lot of solar gain, so I’m going to provide that land for a community garden and greenhouse in exchange for fresh produce. Both parties benefit, and this will lead to the design of this community. You’ll find that everything in nature is arranged in two-way partnerships; ecology is inherently designed on cooperation and not competition.

This is Part 1 of 2 of Decoding Pattern. Stay tuned next month for Part 2, where you’ll learn about one general pattern model that explains and puts into perspective just about everything you see on this planet. You’ll never see everything around you the same again after you read Part 2!

In September 2007 I met a group of motivated, hardcore volunteer gardeners. When I say hardcore, some of these guys where involved with the guerrilla gardeners. They turn unused trashy areas and transform them into edible, self-sustaining gardens.

It started like this….

Some groups even go to extremes like dressing up in council uniforms or go out in the middle of the night and load their vans armed with fruit tree seedlings, compost and shovels.

Why are they doing this you might be questioning? Let’s go on a journey back to your childhood…. Do you remember the days of discovering and climbing a mulberry tree and climbing up to pick the abundance of fresh fruit and eating them with your friends – coming home covered head to toe in purple stains? These are the kind of memories that bring me the most joy from my childhood.

Now I see why these guerrilla gardeners volunteer their time for future generations. Imagine a future with fruit trees lining the streets! These people inspired me so I enquired to our landlord about the old unused car park down the back of our shop, Threeworlds, and proposed a community garden. They said YES! So there was born Urban Eden, right here in Mermaid Beach, Gold Coast, Queensland.

It’s been three years in the making….

This old trashy car park was covered in graffiti, piles of smashed beer bottles and weeds. There was even a guy living in a van out there! So we called local businesses who then donated materials such as soil, seedlings and a shade cloth. We even got a water tank donated and installed!

Together with local artists and donated paint we transformed the graffiti covered wall into an eye pleasing delight!

The word spread like wildfire, so we organised a working bee day to create garden beds, an area for workshops, music, fire twirling and other fun life-inspiring activities.

Not long after the Gold Coast Bulletin, Channel 9 and the ABC Radio somehow found out about the project. They were amazed to hear that the garden was made from recycled and donated materials.

In a year and a half the papaya trees had at least 30 fruits on them and we had basil, passionfruit and chillies coming out of our ears!

In June 2008 we held Eco Inspiration Week in the garden, organised by local wonder woman Kandy McCouat. It was a week full of activities, workshops, art and music. It was a huge success with over 100 people attending on the garden open day. Even the Burleigh Heads counsellor, Greg Betts showed up and donated local bush tucker plants.

Late February 2009 saw the introduction of the beautiful worm farm that was proudly donated by a demolished hotel down the road in Burleigh Heads. The worm farm is a productive way to transform veggie scraps from the kitchen into healthy, nutrient rich soil that looks like chocolate mud cake – the plants love it!

Today, Urban Eden is flourishing with people and plants and hosts the Threeworlds Organic Café – adjacent to the garden. The café started on a ‘pay as you feel’ basis in 2008. Yes, that means you could pay what you thought the meal was worth… just put the money in a box. I bet you’re thinking, that’s the craziest idea ever! Did it work? In all honesty it did work, but left people a little confused and baffled. Most people felt guilty so they put extra money in the box. From a business perspective it served as a great way to get the word out there – people where talking everywhere about the restaurant and how it works on a pay as you feel basis.

In September 2009 we came up with a ‘brainwave’. We put prices on the food!

Today Threeworlds is flourishing with heaps of workshops like laughter yoga, full moon bonfires and storytelling, organic gardening and Permaculture workshops, cooking classes, worm farming – not to mention the African drumming, fire twirling, didgeridoo, juggling and meditation classes that we hold every week. We also have concerts and live music in the garden. Next month we host open week – it’s jam packed full of these activities, free of charge, or if anyone is interested in coming on a tour on the Bongo Bus through the streets of Surfers Paradise… here we come playing our drums just for fun!

The spirit of Threeworlds is about community, bringing people together through teaching awareness and having fun. I look forward to seeing you all here!

In August 2008, my wife Michelle and I returned to Calgary, Canada, after spending one year traveling abroad in search of sustainability solutions. With backgrounds in mechanical engineering, our “sabbatical” started off in Denmark – we were drawn there by the lure of technological solutions to energy issues. After several months of volunteering and filling our brains with information (wind energy, solar applications, passive buildings, biogas, plant oil engines… and more) we ended up back in North America prepared to explore the U.S. and Mexico in our plant-oil powered Westfalia.

We knew that something thus far in our sustainability search was missing and were starting to suspect that the missing link might be permaculture (although we didn’t really know what it was quite yet). Our travels brought us to several eco-sites, including an ecovillage near Mexico City. We stopped to do some WWOOFing at a permaculture farm and then headed further south to visit the indigenous Mexicans of the Chiapas, interested to learn about their agricultural practices. An Earthship workshop and geodesic greenhouses in New Mexico and an education center and CSA project in Colorado to name a few other adventures. And to culminate this amazing year we signed up for a Permaculture Design Course at Bullocks Homestead in Washington. The entire experience was nothing short of amazing.

Next task – put all of this information to productive use! Oh boy.

Luckily, my mother-in-law is a good sport and agreed to allow us to use her home as an outlet for ideas and a test case for a permaculture transformation project. Our goal – grow as much food as possible on this urban site and retrofit the home to reduce fossil heating energy by 90%.

Our first task was to asses the property and get productive food systems up and running. We invited friends and family over for a work party, sheet mulched the yards and planted over 100 plants in the front yard mimicking a forest ecology. As we were covering the yard with heaps of composted manure and cardboard the neighbours would slow down as they drove by in awe to see the vast quantity of materials and the number of people running around like ants building a nest. By the end of the day we had a fully sheet mulched back and front yard and a food forest ready to burst next spring.

In the spring we decided that our garden needed to have some swales and trails – shovel in hand we got to work digging. Within a day or so we had shaped our garden beds, filled the trails with mulch from a local arborist and got ready to plant the garden once we were sure that there would be no frost. Calgary has very limited precipitation (300mm) and only about 100 frost free days so we had to be on top of the garden as soon as we were able to make sure we didn’t miss and inch of rain or a day of sun. In late Spring we covered the garden with 20kg of inoculated field pea and shortly thereafter planted the rest of our garden with seedlings started earlier in the year.

With the garden progressing on its own we started on the energy retrofits. Our primary focus was on improving the thermal envelope, heating appliance and thermal mass of the building as we had been inspired by a previous visit to the German Passiv Haus Institute while in Europe. The first project was to blow-in one meter thick of cellulose insulation into the attic. Although the salesman thought I was crazy (new built homes usually have 20-30 cm), I wanted to meet the Passiv Haus Standard with an R-value of R70. Also, cellulose is relatively inexpensive and is an easy “do it yourself” project.

Next we went straight to work on siding of the house. Being that the home was built in the 70’s the wall insulation was approximately 1.5” thick fiberglass insulation (R8) and leakier than a sieve. We first removed the siding, sheathing, old mouldy insulation and vapour barrier to expose the studs and plywood inner wall. Next we blew-in high density foam into the cavities between studs. To prevent thermal bridging from occurring through the studs we added a layer of 2” rigid foam sheathing before replacing the siding. And it only seemed fitting that the new siding color be green! The steps above reduced our air infiltration over 5 times and brought our net R-value from 8 up to 31.

We then installed triple glazed low emissivity & insulated fiberglass frame windows. These windows have a net R-value of R7 which means that they act as a thermal appliance and allow more energy in than energy lost per annum.

Another project we managed to squeeze in was the basement. The basement has also always been very cold in the winter in part due to the lack of insulation in the floor. We attacked this problem by laying a subfloor of rigid insulation.

Based on these upgrades, I calculated that we could replace our 29 kW furnace for a 3 kW one. However, when researching furnace options, the smallest available on the market is a 95% efficient 15 kW. This certainly illustrates how poorly we build our homes!

The retrofit is almost done with a few minor exceptions. This summer we will be installing a solar hot water system to heat all of our domestic water. With the siding off earlier in the year we also took the opportunity to install connections for a future grey water system to feed our new garden.

And so, we have learnt some great lessons from our transformation project and are excited to see how the house performs over the winter. Most exciting of all – our neighbour has requested that we extend our front yard food forest into his yard (he never did like cutting grass). Perhaps we will inspire many others in our neighborhood to do the same. 

The ‘Adobe House’, El Manzano’s ecological demonstration house.
All photos © copyright Craig Mackintosh

In the middle of the little El Manzano village, on display to all in the community, is the ‘Adobe House’. This demonstration house is a project by Eco Escuela El Manzano to demonstrate to the community several low-tech but effective techniques for improving quality of life whilst reducing a home’s impact on the environment.

Houses made from adobe bricks are common in Chile, although, increasingly, like many ‘developing’ countries, people are turning towards energy disastrous concrete instead. The Adobe House was not purpose built – rather, it is actually a very old house that was retrofitted in 2008. It is thus a good example of what many villagers could do if they had a mind to.

I’ll share a few of its features.

Against one wall they built a simple conservatory. The earth brick wall absorbs heat during the day, warming the home, and radiates it back out during the night – to ensure an extended frost-free period for vegetables. Well positioned terracotta tiles or other high thermal mass elements can increase this energy buffering as well (even just barrels of water can do the trick). Though not incorporated here, another addition can be to add vents between the conservatory and the home to allow excess heat to pass into the house.

During the hotter parts of the year the ends of the conservatory are easily opened up.

Outside the house and conservatory there’s a trellis hung heavy in grape. It creates an excellent, and edible, shade area under which sits an outdoor table and benches for summer breakfasts and lunches. The foliage dies back during the winter months to let more sunshine through.

Next to this sits a fantastic earth oven. And yes, the bread was as good as it looks:

Other elements include the all-important manual pump for water – without which this community would have suffered dearly during the recent earthquake (see Part I) – and a greywater system for biologically cleaning household waste water, returning it, slowly, to the water table after several stages of natural cleaning.

Potty Training

The ‘centrepiece’ of this demonstration site, however, is this:

A composting toilet (or ‘dry toilet’ as they’re called here)

This elevated, dual-chamber throne room (similar to the one at Zaytuna Farm) serves as the home’s fertiliser collection station. When enconsed therein, or thereon, as the case may be, the room is notable for its lack of odor. Any odor.

Although composting humanure should be regarded as an urgent… um… call of nature everywhere (the world is running out of potable water, and yet we’re crapping in it, and we still haven’t come to terms with the significance of phosphorus recycling yet either), it is arguably even more important here in El Manzano.

I say this for two connected reasons: 1) most of the community here rely on ‘long drop’ toilets (simple holes dug into the ground), and 2) the water table in El Manzano is incredibly close to the surface – in many places barely a metre below ground.

In case the obvious eludes you – this means that these smelly, bacteria-filled repositories will be seeping into the water table…. Yes, this is the same water table they’re pumping water from so as to quench their thirsty lips. If it weren’t for the very low population density here I think we could be looking at some serious health issues.

The Eco Escuela El Manzano team are therefore turning the problem into the solution, by demonstrating how a potentially disastrous waste stream can instead become a resource. The Abobe House has a constant stream of students and interns residing in it – all of whom are building site fertility rather than contributing to water contamination.

Continue on to read Part V: The Design Stage

Please consider contributing to this worthy cause – you can do so via donation links on this page!

Further Reading:

• Compost Toilet – Farallones (237kb PDF)
• Compost Toilet – Minimus (459kb PDF)
• Urine-Diverting Toilet, Vietnam (3.4mb PDF)
• Low-Cost Compost Toilets (3.45mb PDF)
• The Humanure Handbook

A former beautiful, bustling and touristy coastal town in Chile clings to an uncertain future after being engulfed by the 2010 tsunami.

A Dichato fishing boat scene, in waning evening light, exudes a serenity that
belies the realities of the almost complete destruction behind.
All photos © copyright Craig Mackintosh

Up to 90% of the buildings of Dichato were destroyed, creating a graveyard
of rubble, peppered with dilapidated buildings – many of which may soon end
up the same way.

Yesterday I visited the little coastal town of Dichato. A few months ago, such a trip might have included a bare-footed wade along the town’s tranquil beach, and, depending on the time of day, could have included a friendly wave or greater interaction with some of the smiling local fishermen bringing in their hauls. Afterwards I might have had a nice meal at one of the sun-drenched seaside restaurants or a coffee break in one of the town’s modest cafes, frequented by sea-loving tourists from near and far. It’s the kind of place many could envision themselves retiring in, or where you might establish a small business to accommodate a more leisurely lifestyle choice. Framed by green hills and groves, lined by a long sandy beach, and embraced by a beautiful natural cove that passively calms the restless South Pacific ocean, Dichato was, simply put, a very nice place to be.

Entire blocks were wiped out

Two months on and the cleanup seems barely started

But children find a way to play anywhere

The idyllic harbour’s natural calming effect on the sea is ironic, as two months ago these natural land formations worked instead to funnel and focus a quake-powered tsunami – creating a series of mammoth waves that engulfed the town of 3,000 people in a way that defies belief. Waves reached heights of 10 metres according to mainstream media reports, while some locals we spoke to pointed at salt water tree damage at heights that had to have been up to 14 metres. Either way, these are said to have been the highest surges and waves reported from the February 2010 Chile earthquake.

Waves washed right over these two story apartments.

The harbour’s shape intensified the tsunami and increased its destructiveness.

Compared to the physical destruction, loss of life was rather light. Locals here are experienced with earthquakes, and aware of the great waves that can follow. Indeed, municipal road signs – crudely portraying people fleeing with oversized waves behind – clearly mark tsunami danger zones and encourage retreat to higher ground. As a result, only about fifty people died in this particular town, and many of those were due to their returning too soon, believing the wave series had ended, or they were new residents from foreign countries who didn’t appreciate the wisdom in the calls to flee.

PRI Chile seeks to help

We came to Dichato because Grifen, Javiera and the others from Ecoescuela El Manzano (The Apple Tree Eco School) team wished to speak to the town’s mayor about ideas on sustainable building and community design. You’ll begin to understand their motivation behind this meeting when you see the pictures to follow.

A makeshift depot outside Chile’s second largest city, the heavily damaged
Concepción, loads prefabricated emergency housing onto trucks, ready to
erect into instant villages in destruction zones like Dichato nationwide.

The people of Dichato call this new tsunami refugee camp outside of town
‘the big neighbourhood’. This one camp will have 519 ‘homes’ in it, each
measuring 3×6 metres (18 square metres, or 193 square feet). The borders
of Dichato will host four or five more such camps,
albeit much smaller, before they’re done.

As much as we might wish we were, permaculturists are just plain not ready to roll out new sustainable communities of low-energy, earth-friendly, but low-cost eco-homes on the scale needed, and in the time frames needed, to address the immediate housing needs of survivors of such disasters. We have to be realistic here, as local mayors need to be in this respect. But, we can also recognise that our inability to fill the housing voids created by disasters such as this is largely because of a deficiency of common sense in our mainstream educational systems, a moderate supply of which could in turn bring a corresponding deluge of investment in appropriate preparedness via knowledgeable people throughout society. While we may not be geared up to take on the present challenge of housing thousands of people right now, we could be tomorrow if we are today showcasing the potential of appropriate housing to the right people and engendering their support and promotion of the same.

This is exactly what Grifen, Javiera and Co., with the backing of PRIs worldwide, are seeking to do.

Grifen and others talk to the mayor of Dichato

As it stands, the people moving from their temporary tents and hastily improvised shacks in other parts of the town (see pics at bottom) into one of these ‘beauties’ are being told that they should expect to put up with them for "no longer than one or two years". But, they have not been told what should happen after that…. In these tiny, uninsulated hutches, with winter arriving and a hot summer after that, one or two years will seem like an eternity – and yet, I think these dates are highly optimistic. Chile, like more and more countries today, is already dealing with acute energy problems. With an increasing likelihood that energy shortages and their associated economic woes will deepen global crises, I can easily predict these poor people remaining in these camps indefinitely – unless they can find a way to take control of their own futures.

There’s more to the article after the following short tour of ‘the big neighbourhood’:

The Chilean military coordinates the relief effort…

… and the resulting construction looks incredibly like an army compound.

Urban planning, army style. The emergency housing are all facing
the wrong way – away from the sun.

The new residents are moving in.

The 3×6 metre room – ready to move into.
[This and the next two photos are taken with an ultra wide angle lens,
so they look much bigger than they really are.]

They’ve brought their appliances, but we’re not sure when or if they’ll receive
power to run them. Water will be dispensed from centralised collection points,
delivered by truck to the new township.

I observed the buildings having many holes in the already thin cladding,
particularly where there were knots in the wood. These people
are in for a particularly unpleasant winter.

Someone scored the big chemical toilet contract….

The mother of this child described how after the tsunami many of her friends
returned to find at least something of their house and belongings left,
but she couldn’t find even a trace.

Families live roadside, awaiting their invitation into ‘the big neighbourhood’.

Demonstrating alternatives

It is politically correct for authorities to promise only a brief stay to new camp occupants, although unrealistic expectations and false hopes can entrench a feeling of waiting, and a feeling of dependency, in these makeshift communities. Such ingrained thought can ultimately lead to bitterness and unrest. Most of these people have little in the way of money – they cannot just buy their way into a better situation.

Even in these strait circumstances, however, there are ways the people can improve their lot, and right now. To showcase this, two weeks ago Grifen, Javiera and team ‘Expostsismo’ (a play on the words ‘Expo’, and post-earthquake – ‘postsismo’) ran a highly successful emergency housing exposition in the city of Yumbel, where they took one of these generic emergency houses, donated by the local municipality, and modified it in different ways over the course of a weekend. This demonstration was observed by hundreds of people and was so well received that it resulted in several other towns from different parts of Chile hearing about it, and requesting the same demonstration to be shown to their citizens and officials.

These invitations are not surprising as team Expostsismo – around forty volunteers in total – had wowed people with some simple but effective options. One was to turn the walls inside out, so the ‘pretty’ side was on the inside, and the ’support beams’ (hard to call them support beams when they’re only 2×2"…) were on the outside, where they easily added some simple shelving before being filled with earthen mortar (straw, clay, a little sand and water) for significantly increased insulation. Other alternatives were to do the aforementioned, then separate the inner wall from the earth wall and utilise it as a ceiling panel, which can also be insulated above. (The generic emergency house has no ceiling panel and nothing but builder’s paper for insulation.) Other options shown were to re-shape one corner, utilising the material to construct a dry (composting) toilet. Officials and citizens were also taught about water harvesting potential, biological greywater cleaning systems, worm farms and their combined potential for both improved sanitation and rapid garden development.

Such simple techniques require almost nothing by way of investment – rather, it’s simply an educational process to show people healthier, low carbon alternatives that can improve their situation right now and which promise meaningful, skill-building activities that can help people to begin to take charge of their own lives and well-being.

The effect of the Expo was to inspire people with hope – they turned disaster into opportunity, hopelessness into enthusiasm. I wasn’t there, but from the volunteers I spoke to the spirit-lifting atmosphere emitted from observers was palpable.

Expo to run at Dichato

The mayor of Dichato would now like to see such an expo run in what’s left of his town. This has been roughly scheduled for May. The Expostsismo team have nothing less than a captive audience to showcase all kinds of permaculture goodness.

This is the kind of work permaculturists have a profound privelege to be involved in. The results can reach well beyond these disaster refugee camps, as such knowledge and the benefits thereof, once implemented, will ripple out to the wider community, and reach not only into subsequent disaster relief but into the very heart of mainstream thinking. This is particularly appropriate, even critical, as, in one way or another, increasing disaster frequency and intensity are likely expectations for all of us in the months and years ahead.

Continue on to read Part III: Who Gets the New House?

Please consider contributing to this worthy cause – you can do so via donation links on this page!

Additional images to follow:

The lopsided sign hanging outside a damaged and barricaded shop reads:
"Let’s go Dichato – Let’s get up! It’s time community!"

Chilean flags wave over an impromptu shack village erected post-tsunami

Even the livestock are roughing it

This large fishing boat was washed a kilometre inland from the coast. It has
since been hoisted up onto supports to protect the hull.

Most of the industries, including fishing, have collapsed. But, people start
to build again, start to live again, and we try to provide them with skills and
knowledge to increase their resiliency and optimism.

Dichato has seen better days, but now it’s up to the people to rebuild,
cooperatively and with intelligence.

But, that’s not the topic of this post. Here, instead, we offer the suggestion of taking well worn tyres not capable of such extreme feats, and putting them to other worthwhile purposes – like feeding your garden with nutrient rich worm casts.

At Zaytuna Farm we use a couple of old bathtubs for this purpose, but if you don’t have a bathtub at your disposal, this simple car tyre system (700kb PDF) looks like a great alternative.

This simple setup is the kind of thing that could be utilised pretty much anywhere. Even in extreme poverty scenarios you can normally find some worn out old tyres and a few bits of wood.

Vermicomposting is an excellent way to turn kitchen and other scraps and cycle them back into nutrient dense food. Scientists still struggle to explain the processes, but the soil that goes into a worm, and that which comes out the other end, is strikingly different and brings multiple benefits to the soil (structure, microbial activity and water retention capacity) and plants (germination, root and plant structure growth and yield). Amongst other things, the worm mucus bound up with the castings help hold nutrients and moisture.

Give it a try!

P.S.: If you have a worm farm, why not write us a short post for publishing so our readers can benefit from your experience and observations and get inspired to do similar. Write to editor (at) permaculture.org.au with some text and pictures.

Hat Tip: Thanks to Ringo for the PDF.

A conventional cemetery

When I was little I was terrified of death. I often cried myself to sleep as I thought of the end of life. It seemed so bleak, pointless, and severe.

Mom tried to comfort me with the concept of going to heaven. This did not reassure me at all. “How do you know there is a heaven?” I’d ask. “Have you been there?”

Eventually, I just numbed myself to the fear by burying it in the recesses of my mind and body.

Years later the fear evaporated with an incredible discovery – composting. Yes! Here was tangible proof that there was life after death, that everything did not just end/stop/vanish with death. Instead, things transformed. In the compost pile I saw kitchen scraps, weeds, and a dead chicken decompose into beautiful, rich, fertile soil in which earthworms, mycelia, chiles, and all kinds of new life grew.

Death no longer scared me, now it excited me. My composting dead body could generate myriad life! Don’t get me wrong: I’m in no rush to experience this. But when it eventually does happen – no problem.

Maybe.

My dead body could generate life, or more death depending on how it is disposed of.

The conventional death industry embalms bodies with a toxic brew of formaldehyde, phenol, and menthol, which can contaminate groundwater and generate cancer and other disease in those doing the embalming.(1) According to the book Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial, today the U.S. funeral industry buries over 3 pounds of the formaldehyde-based “formalin” with every embalmed body (totaling 800,000 gallons [3,028,000 liters] of formaldehyde a year)(2), while from the Civil War era to 1910, arsenic, zinc, and lead where the preferred toxic embalming compounds.(3)

Then there are the caskets, turning cemeteries into landfills. Grave Matters states, “Over time the typical ten-acre [4 ha] swath of cemetery ground contains enough coffin wood to construct more than forty houses, nine hundred-plus tons [816,000 kg] of casket steel, and another twenty thousand tons [18,143,000 kg] of vault concrete.”(4)

Cremation avoids embalming toxins, and the body can be burned in a shroud or cardboard container instead of a standard casket to consume less fuel and release fewer pollutants. But the fuel needed to incinerate the body is still substantial. Carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide are typical emissions along with toxic trace metals such as mercury – which comes from dental fillings (a good reason to ask for mercury-free fillings while alive).

All crematories in the U.S. may emit 5,000 pounds [2,267 kg] of mercury a year, while in the United Kingdom four times that amount is emitted due to a higher percent of the population choosing cremation.(5)

Depressing.

Deadening.

Friend and mentor Tim Murphy gave me a different vision. He wants to be buried toxin-free and naked, ass up, in the fetal position, with an acorn up his butt. “Plant me, and plant a tree. Years later you and others can come sit under my shade, harvest some acorns, and celebrate what is possible.”

I sometimes think of Tim as a radical traditionalist, and a small, but growing segment of the death industry is enabling others to take a similar path that encourages the natural decomposition of the dead and regeneration of other life from the process rather than trying to halt or slow what will eventually happen anyway. The website www.GreenBurialCouncil.org is one conduit to this path. And the book Caring for the Dead: A Complete Guide for Those Making Funeral Arrangements with or without a Funeral Director by Lisa Carlson is another conduit if you want to reduce or eliminate your participation in a death industry.

A green burial does not allow toxic embalming, concrete vaults, or elaborate caskets, which can reduce the cost of a burial by $8,000 to $12,000, according to memorial ecologist Joe Whittaker. Young trees or an engraved fieldstone are recommended over tombstones.

I experienced a new green or conservation burial ground for all faiths first hand at Honey Creek Woodlands just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. It is a beautiful place with very caring and dedicated staff, including Joe Whittaker. And it is erupting with new life.

It is located on and beside a section of once-grazed and clear-cut forest in the heart of the 2,100-acre [849-ha] grounds of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit. The monastery grounds are bordered by and connected to a state park and the network of footpaths, creeks, and wildlife corridors of the park and encompassing 8,000-acre [2,327-ha] Arabia Mountain Heritage Area. This is a huge strength for a final resting place, since many people already feel connected to this land.

First and foremost, the burial grounds are a nature preserve, with the goal of enhancing a 50-year succession back to a mixed hardwood forest, through such practices as selective weeding of invasive exotics, seeding and planting native plant stock, and adding organic matter to the soil.

Bodies are planted just 3 to 3.5 feet [0.9 to 1.06 m] deep because microbial activity and soil life drops tremendously at depths greater than 4 feet [1.21 m]. Above the body the excavated soil is placed in a mound with the topsoil placed back on top for a total initial “depth” of about 5 feet [1.5 m]. This is then covered with a light pine needle mulch and native wildflower seed. The Georgia Native Plant Society ensures only natives are used. Flowers and butterflies soon cover the 2-foot [0.6-m] tall burial mound – over 64 species of butterflies were counted in one day in 2008. The mound settles completely after a few years.

The process is so visible! So beautiful! I visited a day-old burial; fresh flowers still atop the grave. 10 feet [3 m] away, dried and shriveled flowers rested atop a week-old burial. And as I looked about I saw I was surrounded by burials, all in various stages of settling and regeneration. The older they were, the greater the density of vegetation atop them, and the more level the soil.

I saw a family cremation plot circle of field stones surrounding a tree. All were again reunited and rooted around their family’s tree.

I felt revived just being in this regenerating forest. I felt… alive!

For more information about the legalities of green burials in your region, see the book Caring for the Dead: A Complete Guide for Those Making Funeral Arrangements with or without a Funeral Director by Lisa Carlson, mentioned above.

References:

1. Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. Scribner, 2007. pp. 40, 41.
2. ibid pp. 40, 56.
3. ibid pp. 30, 39.
4. ibid p. 38.
5. ibid p. 61.