Oooh as a revolutionary activist at heart, that got me good and proper.  This morning was filled with profound statements and stories about permaculture, what it is and what it means to us…

Ask most people who aren’t overly familiar with it, they’ll probably tell you it’s about ‘gardening’ and it is. BUT that’s just the surface of this design for life on earth.

Permaculture is a spiritual practice. And I don’t mean that we sit and meditate underneath the canopy trees or worship at the altar of richly mulched soil.   

Permaculture is a design for ethical living and perhaps the only thing that will save this earth from the crap we’ve inflicted on it.   Patricia, one of our lead teachers, suggested we start to call her ‘Earth’ leaving out the ‘the’.  As she pointed out Earth is a living being and deserves to be recognized as such.   

Chuck, our lead teacher with Patricia, and a 35 year-long permaculture activist and passionata, described it as

“An ecological design system for creating regenerative human habitats’.  He said that when he heard politicians using the world ‘sustainability’ he knew it was time to find a new word. Regenerative kind of works for me too.

One by one the teachers stood up and shared their definitions of this thing called permaculture. Each of them were obviously moved deeply by their passion.   I use the word passion a lot.  Passion for the earth, for the sanctity of human life drives these people and I can feel it welling in me as I sit there immersed in it.

Bob told us that yesterday he saw a tree on this land that he could hardly put his arms around. It was a tree that he planted here 20 years ago.    He’d tried living in different communities and somehow found himself back here in Georgia, homesteading 40 acres with his partner Isabel, because, as he put it, his mission was to ‘bring Permaculture to Georgia’.  I’m with you Bob…

Penryn talked of the land she’d inherited in Kentucky and how she’d realized that her mission was to bring this work to Kentucky….

A theme was developing that touched me deeply… we all have a duty to spread the word, at local level, no matter how tough the resistance.  That is what pioneers do… and in their own way, these people are all pioneers.  Again, I feel humbled to be part of this growing movement…

Another description that moved me was the idea of permaculture as a ‘design dance between people and the natural world’ an interaction of flow and motion rhythm, give and take.

Patricia described Permaculture as an ‘umbrella for all her spiritual beliefs’ and that echoed what my husband has been saying for years in reference to his love for the earth first manifest in the woeful cry of a twelve year old writing a poem about his beloved… His warcry is ‘It’s my religion’.   

That about sums it up.  Permaculture is the new religion.  Now I know that some people might consider this ‘sacreligious’ but it makes sense to me.  Eons ago when the principle energy of the world was feminine, Gaia or mother earth was worshipped, adored and taken care of… and then the male energy came in and we entered a long period of earth rape.

I’m not getting at men… it’s just a way of describing the difference between softly treading and harshly marching… And now,I sense that this female energy is emerging again in both men AND women and we are finding a new way to honor Earth.

The big difference now is that we don’t have time to waste dancing naked in the woods and adoring the earth in ceremony, sweet as that may be.  This lady is dying and we gotta get down dirty and give her CPR.  

Which was exactly what we did today in the mulching exercise.  I knew I was in love when I got down on the ground and dug my hands eagerly into the pig manure to spread it on the garden.   There’s something so alive about touching her body… this lady we know as Earth.   She’s so responsive…

We were presented with two young peach trees which had grass growing a little around them.  Various heaps of material were piled up, in the same way professional chefs on TV have those little white bowls of ready chopped ingredients that they just pop into the mix.

First off we learned that turning the earth with tractors or even spades was an absolute no no. It compacts the earth…So all Bob did was stick a pitchfork in here and there to aerate it. 

After that we shovelled on a heap of pig and chicken poop mixed with a bit of straw and other dirt which we spread in a 10ft diameter circle around the little peach tree.  Then we stuck in some blueberries.  And I literally mean, stuck in.  Someone dug a spade into the ground, pulled back the sod and in went the yummy antioxidant cuttings…

After that we covered the entire circle with cardboard [all tape removed] and a discussion ensured about pure cardboard, chinese cardboard, soy printed paper and more… Bottom line is if people are starving a bit of chinese cardboard is better than none!  But we were going for the full on organic thing here so we used pure cardboard.   Every single gap was covered and double covered. This Bermuda Grass is a greedy blighter and will peek it’s head up through even the teeniest gap.

I realized that my rather half hearted effort to ‘mulch’ our bit of growing land was pretty inadequate.. sheets of cardboard and a scattering of yard mowings won’t cut the mustard here.  And our gratitude to the Deputy Sherrif [our neighbor] who cut and turned the land with his huge tractor is somewhat diminished.. but as they say ‘bless them for they know not what they do’ and the generous intention is well appreciated].

The cardboard was watered down and then some..

After that we shoved on heaps of straw, fully covering the cardboard.   Then we planted some irises around the circle of the tree, after Brendan, the lead gardener of the community, had placed some plastic pots around the base of the tree to protect it. 

We used knives, trowlels and whatever was on hand that would cut the cardboard.  Bob showed us how to make a slit in it and just laid the iris with its root on top.. after that, we just shovelled a little bit of soil starter to give it a booster. and tucked it up in a bed of straw.  

Bob reminded us to plant the annual foody stuff where we could reach it. Irises don’t have to be picked but taters and onions do! 

So here we have this little permaculture plot with a peach tree, blueberries and annual such as potatoes and onions.   Seed potatoes grown up North were used.  And we’re doing this in the beginning of February… Tthe temperature outside here in Southern Georgia was up in the late fifties and delightfully warm so God blessed our planting today.

A hole cut in the cardboard, the potato was simply laid on top and covered in straw. Bob assured us that it would be enjoying a period of growth while the cold was still with us and would give around 6 – 10 potatoes per one planted.   

The onions were planted in triangular form… we used green onions… and again a little hole dug, in the cardboard, pop in the onion, shove on some soil starter and spread the straw around it and finally we heaped piles of pecan shells onto the top. Because people come to visit here and like it to look nice, we also placed circles of bricks around the garden.  

A little part of me and all my fellow permaculturists in waiting will be left in this wonderful place.  Perhaps like Bob, we’ll return in twenty years and with tears in our eyes look at the little bit of garden that we were responsible for starting.  

I loved every moment of it, from picking up handfuls of piggy poop to spreading straw..digging holes in cardboard and putting in blueberries.   And as I remarked to one of our group… these things are like weeds down here yet we still pay $3.99 for a pathetic punnet that’s probably travelled a few hundred miles.  Not for long. 

Somehow everyone just mucked in and did their bit… There’s something so satisfying about getting down in the dirt.. and even more exciting for me was that I’d actually done something practical and that for many years down the line,  people will be eating luscious berries from those little shoots that we stuck in ground today.

After that we engaged in the planting of a number of yummy foodstuffs in our stomachs.. including the hog that was slaughtered this week.  Quinoa pilaff, broccoli and cheese, I can’t even remember what we ate only that it was downright divine…Of course Earthy Girl is pretty versed in giving her lovers a great time!!!

The afternoon was taken up with patterns, led by Zev who talked earlier about how nature’s cuisine is different everywhere populated by species that want to be there.   I thought about my husband and his affinity with patterns and wished he could have been there to see it..

I studied something called NLP for many years. NLP is about modelling what works and adopting strategies for success. Permaculture is Nature’s NLP… It takes what works, uses patterning and reapplies it to create edible gardens using strategies tried and tested by nature herself.. But as we learned earlier, this stuff goes way beyond gardening… It truly is a design for living…More of that later.

We in the West are well aware that we won’t be able to live the way we do for much longer.. The Cubans didn’t have a choice. When we embargoed them and Russia collapsed they were left with nothing.   Our bedtime movie was all about how, through dire need, they learned to permaculture the entire country…

But it truly is bedtime now and I’m ready to hit the sack.. and despite the sunshine today it’s pretty cold right now… and tomorrow is another day….

And I leave you with the thought that, as we were told today…

It’s time to put the ‘nature’ back into ‘human nature’.

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

While the rich go green at great cost, the rest of us can jump on this bandwagon

In the next few weeks, we will be featuring a series of blogs called ‘Going Brown’  inspired by an article by the cheap-ass curmudgeon.

By MICHAEL VAN HALL with additions by Pierre Soleil and pictures from Tony Wrench’s earth house

Michael Van Hall [the cheap-ass curmudgeon] is looking for people who live in low-cost to no-cost housing, by choice, to feature in his next book, titled Shacking Up. When he asked blog readers to send him leads,  he was disappointed with their responses.

He didn’t get examples of housing as featured in the picture above.  He got ‘green’ ‘sterile’ ‘fancy’ houses.

Mainstream fancy eco-housing

Van Hall realized that people’s definitions of eco-living did not correlate with his own.

“Why not ? you ask. It’s green, smallish and built with all the latest sustainable building materials. It probably even has a dual-flush toilet or two. So what’s wrong with that?

You’re right, there is nothing wrong with that—as an example of the mainstream’s definition of eco-friendly housing. And yes, it’s probably even LEED certified.

I understand the thinking out there in the “green community.” There are benefits to using all these new building materials. Even though they cost a fortune, they are mostly sustainable.

So go ahead, install a $olar voltaic system to help reduce your carbon footprint. Use all the new technologies available to reduce your damage to the environment and our dependence on fossil fuels. I will applaud you.

By all means, go green. If you’ve got the money and want to live cooped up in a sterile box, go for it. Living in an expensive non-toxic box may be better than living in a cheaper toxic one. I’ll give you that.

Many companies have made it possible to go green and remain pristine. You no longer have to sacrifice luxury to relieve your guilty conscience.

But these companies and all this newfangled stuff they’re selling isn’t what I mean when I talk about low-cost and no-cost housing.

The word green has always stood for money. These days, if you want to go truly green it costs a LOT of money. If you want to make money, just tap into the green market. If you can label it green or natural, people will buy it—at almost any price.

But nobody seems to want to look at the environmental cost of going green. What environmental price are we willing to pay for the manufacture and disposal of those energy-saving solar panels and those big power inverters? How come nobody talks about that? And what about the manufacture and disposal of all those batteries, which are a huge biohazard?

And the hybrid revolution? Have we all forgotten that in the ’80s and early ’90s, we had more than a few cars getting over 40 miles per gallon and some over 50—all without hybrid electric power plants using all those batteries that we are going to have to dispose of. (The Honda Civic even had an EPA rating of over 50 m.p.g.—and it got it.)

Hybrid cars rely on electricity for manufacture, and whilst they might save oil, they wont be of much use when there’s no electricity.

Real eco transport is using a bicycle or a horse and cart which can also be used for ploughing. When the oil runs out even hybrid cars will sit rotting on the metalpile.

I could go on and on. But why? Is there a better way?

Yes, there is a better way. Go brown!

Come on, fellow greenies. It’s time we changed our colors. You don’t have to spend a lot of green to go brown, and going brown is about as green as you can get.

What is going BROWN?

It’s a hand-built house made of thick earthen or stone walls that never need paint. Why use those new, expensive, NO VOC paints when you don’t have to use any!

How to build a Low Impact Roundhouse An amazing book by one of the early pioneers of brown housing, Tony Wrench

It’s south facing windows with the right amount of overhang to let in the sun in the winter and keep it out in the summer.

It’s a rocket stove or box stove for cooking and heating and water piped from a stream to the makeshift kitchen

It’s living on wood from the forest for building, heating and cooking.  Gathering wood takes up time, but so does working at a sh***y job that you hate in order to buy electricity. Gathering wood provides good honest fresh-air exercise

It’s an outdoor shower in the garden—the plants will love it.

It’s creating your own food forest wherever you can, even on the eaves of the house

It’s a composting toilet—not the plastic ones you buy that hook up to electricity, but the hole in the plank with the straw or sawdust in the bucket nearby so you can turn your poo into fertilizer.

Brown housing is earthen floors, handmade windows, doors and … well, you get the idea.

I just can’t call these things green anymore. No one knows what I mean when I use that word. So I’m going to start calling them brown. Maybe it will catch on, and those of us who love this kind of thing will start referring to it that way.

Now, back to what I have been asking for. I want some examples of brown! Brown houses, brown people—people who have chosen to go brown because they believe in brown living and brown being.

Brown leads wanted by the cheap-ass curmudgeon

I want the real stuff, like Tony Wrench’s Low-impact roundhouse [featured in most of the pics in this postiing]

Now there’s a solar voltaic system I can get behind. They will never have to re-paint this house.

Look at those beautiful, natural, uncut timbers.

Compost Toilet – The compost toilet decomposes the humanure over two years to produce compost for the fruit trees and bushes

See how un-smelly and earthy a compost toilet is

There is no food in the world that will taste better than that which is cooked over an outdoor flame or on a woodstove that also supplies ample heating

If you want more detail on the design and building of this house, please check out ‘Building a Low Impact Roundhouse’ by Tony Wrench, available from Amazon.

How to build  a Low Impact Roundhouse

Look at this gorgeous winter light bottle wall insert

The low-impact roundhouse is a great example of going brown. I need to know about more houses like this one. If you run across any Web sites, have pictures of your own or, better yet, you are living the brown lifestyle, I want to hear from you. E-mail Michael Van Hall cheapasscurmudgeon@gmail.com.

Spread the word—go brown!

Michael Van Hall has been making magic out of dirt and whatever happens to be lying around since 1998. He is the author of The Cheap-Ass Curmudgeon’s Guide to Dirt

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes

A community forest garden is a vital cog in the wheel of transition, that we must inevitably spin into. It is a transition from oil based consumption and materialistic lifestyles and emerge into simple satisfaction, self-sufficiency, self-reliance, local sustainability and smaller group inter-dependence. 

There’s no doubt that big changes are pushing their heads above ground and that we must begin now to prepare.  If we do we WILL ride this wave and emerge refreshed and renewed.. landing on new shores of potential. 

To us, as long time observers of the social shifts, it does seem that we, today, are present to a crumbling of ‘what was’ and an emergence into a new way. 

As information spreads and things seem to happen much much more quickly [people can connect, share ideas, start groups, research through the internet] more people are aware.   Ideas are beginning to synchronize like women who live together experiencing their menstrual cycles synching with each other.  

We are being pushed towards finding creative alternatives for our basic needs which are safety, shelter, food, wellness and connection to other from intimate, family, friends, neighbors into the community and beyond.

And it seems that the place to begin is really at grass roots, one or two people, adding more as the idea spreads, neighbor to neighbor, neighbor to community, community to other communities…and our role exists within our individual community yet as part of the entire whole…ain’t that cool!

 Forest Food Gardens are one part of the great web of emergence.  It is one [jolly good]  way of ensuring abundant, localized community  food and wellness.

Natural Building methods and all the variants thereof offer effective, localized, low cost and resource friendly solutions to providing shelter for all

Shared Land in the form of people offering parts of their land for community shelter/food growing spaces knowing that they will be supported and helped by the community as their generosity melts the divide between have’s and have not’s..

Shared Labor in the form of people working on projects and knowing that they will be fed and sheltered as they help create an abundant world for future generations not just for themselves.

Free energy solutions from those who are fascinated by experimenting with solar/wind, magnetic, water and whatever power.  Like this we can step over the  spirallingly expensive grid electricity and gas-fuelled transportation.

Connection to Other and Community  is the spirit that fuels us to come together and pool our resources, ideas and skills. It is also the spirit that connects one community to another and thus springs the spider network of local communities, trading, bartering, sharing, caring helping….

Living v Working to Live.  In living we bypass the ’middle man’.   Instead of going to work for someone to earn ‘money’ to pay for heat, light, food, entertainment, transport and keeping up with ‘them’, we will expend our energy on living.  

We forsee that there will be a shift towards people using their ‘time’ to dig, plant and tend food forests, collect herbs and concoct tinctures, preserve and prepare food, collect wood, tend the fires, build homes, care for the livestock, school the children…..

This alone would consitute a good enough ‘work’ day. The fruit of your labor is the home, the eggs,the warmth, the nutrition, the healing and the children delighting in playing in ‘secret’ hidey hole under the large fruit bushes. 

We are going to have to learn to make do with less, be more independent and self-sustaining, become more hardy and resiliant and come up with creative ways to utilize what we do have in abundance.

And thankfully, something we humans have in abundance is the ability to transcend through adversity via creativity and soar to heights of magnificence and when we pull together.   The evidence is there.

Past Evidence of the Great Human Spirit

A friend’s mother who grew up in the Great Depression of the 30′s said to us the other day ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about the ‘great depression’ and how people had to live – that’s the way we’d always lived.    Rural folk know how to survive, how to adapt, make-do and use the natural resources. And they know how to pull together as a community from taking food to bereaved neighbors to sharing the surplus of their gardens with those less well off.   They had no other choice.  It was live off the land or die!  And they had a sense of caring for their community.

Anyone in the UK who knows someone who is in their 80′s will have heard tales of how they managed in the 40′s WW2.   Food shortages, nightly bombings in big cities, people being made homeless in an instant were all part of their everyday reality.  A woman recalls how living rurally they had lots of orchards. During WW2 her father dug up the orchards, by himself with the help of a neighbor’s son and planted vegetables that he gave away to locals so that they would have fresh food to eat.

Riding the Wave of Transition Together

So how do we begin to energize a transition wave in our community.   And before you get all scared about official stuff, there is none.   One of the pleasures of living in the rural South is that people just do things… they aren’t too fussed about what the officials think.    They don’t get all bogged down in ‘what about the codes’ or ‘you can’t do that’.  

Here are some initial guidelines…

1.  We have to find our bliss, the thing we love doing that fit into this new kind of living

2.  We may need to develop new skills or link together with others to pool our skills

3.  We have to work with the greater good in mind, knowing that we will be taken care of as long as we are genuine and doing the right thing

4.  We can’t just sit around talking, we have to start doing NOW.  We’ve talked a lot over the last year about how it is and what’s going on and now we are acting.  We went out into the world and connected and followed the leads and found the like-minded energies and we asked for connections, help, guidance…and it comes in

5. We have to be prepared for a bumpy ride as we shift gears, but we must also allow ourselves to experience the vision of living a more natural, earth-based, community centred life… and all the joys that it brings.   There really is nothing like good honest labor to have that feeling of being in the moment and alive. 

 The increasing research and talk around global warming, carbon footprints, oil running out aka post-peak oil combined with evident economic challenges [to use a mildly inoffensive word] and price-hikes everywhere is making a pretty LOUD statement.They are the result of people waking up and getting that we can’t go on living the way we do.

Across the globe people are preparing for transition. There’s even official transition sites and examples of what people in communities are doing to create a more earth-based less oil dependent life.

Forest Food Gardens are part of a transition initiative that is designed to help communities become less reliant on oil derivatives which includes all manufactured items, electrical goods, grid lighting and heating, truck/plane/rail transported food and more reliant on producing what they need for themselves within the community.

THIS is NOT THAT

Please don’t start to label this and compare it to any political movement.  It is not that way.  This is NOT that other ‘c’ word.  It is about human challenges, emergence, freedom and working together and finding creative solutions.

We don’t just need to create food, we need to find ways to harness free energy, build affordable or even free shelter, utilize our land for the community, share our labor and the fruits of that collective labor.  And NO this is NOT anything like the com****** word.    That was awful.   That system was heirarchical and worse still hypocritical. This is something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

This can and will become a global initiative.  The global initiative will not be orchestrated at global level.  It will consist of each individual playing the instrument they play best and all coming together in harmony with others to allow community initiatives to unfold.  We like to think of this transition as a harmonic emergence of humans, a return to earth.  H.E.R.E.

More on the topic of Community Transition

Transition 2 – The just do it’s 12 steps to creating a self-organizing community initiative coming soon

How to set an initiative in motion and avoid energy sapping bureaucracy whilst surprizing and then  inspiring the authorities with what you all achieve.

© 2010, Sunny Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes