Permaculture 101 – Lessons from the novel Dune

Frank Herbert, author of Dune, used his writings to spread a spiritual vision in his stories of the desert planet Arrakis.

Part of this was foundated on the concept of permaculture. Dune, the first of a series of books was written in 1965 even before the word ‘permaculture’ was made popular by Bill Mollision and David Holmgren in the 70’s.

One of Dune’s characters, Liet Kynes was a planetologist who was devoted to reviving the desert. He served as both the planetary ecologist of Dune and leader of the Fremen the simple, desert dwellers.

He continued his father, Pardot Kynes’s, vision of gradually terraforming the planet from a harsh desert into a temperate world with precipitation, greenery, and open water.

An entire permaculture plan for the desert planet, Arrakis

In the Appendix to the first Dune, Herbert lays out Pardot Kynes’ entire imaginary, but sound, ecological plan for this transformation. “There’s an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man-healthy planet. You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. Its aim is simple to maintain and produce co-ordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity’

‘Life and all life is in the service of Life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases’

‘The entire landscape comes alive filled with relationships within relationships within relationships’

‘The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an eco-system’ Kynes said, “is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a mis-step in just one niche. A system has order, flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late.

That’s why the highest functioning of ecology is the understanding of consequences’.

He goes on to talk about the revivification of the desert in a total permaculture way using the Fremen, desert-dwelling simple-living warriors to undertake this grand plan 

“When will we solve it [the water problem]?” the Fremen ask.  Kynes told them ‘in three to five hundred years’.

A lesser folk might have howled in dismay but the Fremen had learned patience from the men with whips…. somehow the disappointment made the prospect of paradise more real.

The concern on Arrakis was not with water, but with moisture. Pets were almost unknown, stock animals rare. Some smugglers employed the domesticated desert ass, but the water price was high even when the beasts were fitted with modified still suites

Kynes thought of installing reduction plants to recover water from the hydrogen and oxygen locked in native rock, but the energy-cost factor was far too high.

There was a native root plant that grew above the 2,500-meter level in the northern temperate zone. A tuber, two metres long yielded half a liter of water.  And there were the terraform desert plants, the tougher of which showed signs of thriving if planted in depressions lined with dew precipitators.

He began the re-examining of the evidence of dry wells were trickles of water had appeared and vanished, never to return… and through a series of relationships with the sandworm and other creatures he set up a system to irrigate the land..

Then they went to work on the climate. The sand surface often reached temperatures of 344 – 355 degrees. A foot below the ground it might be 55 cooler, a foot above 25 cooler. Leaves or black shade could provide another 18 degrees of cooling.

Next the nutrients.  The sand of Arrakis, a product of worm digestion. Dust is produced by constant surface creep. Course grains are found on the downward side of the dunes. The windward side is packed smooth and hard. Old dunes are yellow, young dunes are the color of the parent rock – usually grey. Downwind sides of old dunes provided the first plantation areas.

The Fremen aimed first for a cycle of poverty grass with peat-like hair cilia to intertwine, mat and fix the dunes by depriving the wind of its biggest weapon; movable grains. Adaptive zones were laid out in the deep south..the mutated poverty grasses were planted first along the downwind slipface] of the chosen dunes that stood across the path of the prevailing westerlies.

With the downwind face anchored the windward face grew higher and higher and the garss was moved to keep pace. Giant sifs along dunes with sinuous crests more than 1,500 meters high were produced this way.

When the barrier dunes reached sufficient height, the windward faces were planted with tougher sword grasses. Each structure on a base of about six times as thick as its height was ‘fixed’.

Now they came in with deeper plantings – ephemerals, then scotch broom, low lupine vine, eucalyptus [the type adapted for Caladan's northern reaches], dwarf tamarisk, shore pine, then the true desert growths, candellilla, saguaro and the barrel cactus.

Where it would grow they introduced camel sage, onion grass, gobi-feather grass, wild alfalfa, burrow bush, sand verbens, evening primrose, incense bush, smoke tree, creosote bush.

They turned them to the necessary animal life – burrowing creatures to open the soil and aerate it: kit fox, kangaroo mouse, desert hare, sand terrapin… and the predators to keep them in check, desert hawk, dwarf owl, eagle and desert own, and insects to  fill the niches these couldn’t reach : scorpion, centipede, trapdoor spider, the biting wasp and the wormfly..and the desert bat to keep watch on these..

Now came the crucial test: date palms, cotton, melons coffee, medicinals, more than 200 selected food plant types to test and adapt. Kynes and his people watched and waited.

The Fremen now knew what he meant by an open-end prediction to five hundred years.

Constant Monitoring and Re-Assesment

A report came from the palmaries. At the desert edge of the plantings, sand plankton was being poisoned through interaction with the new forms of life. The reason, protein incompatibility. Poisonous water was forming there which Arrakis life would not touch. A barren zone surrounded the plantings and even shi-hulud would not invade it. Kynes went down to the palmaries..he tested the barren zone and came up with a bonus, a gift from Arrakis.

The addition of sulfur and fixed nitrogen converted the barren zone to a rich plant bed for terraform life. …

Nor could the Fremen be ignored with their windtraps and irregular landholdings organized around water supply – the Fremen with their new ecological literacy and their dream of cycling vast areas of Arrakis through a prairie phase into forest cover.

So it was true as this umma had said in the beginning: the thing would not come in the lifetime of any man now living, nor in the lifetime of their grandchildren eight times removed, but it would come. The work continued: building, planting, digging, training the children….

 You can buy the first Dune book here
Dune, 40th Anniversary Edition (Dune Chronicles, Book 1)

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