About 30 years ago, a crusty Tasmanian scientist, Dr. Bill Mollison, gave birth to a design discipline he called Permaculture. Concerned about the environmental and human impacts of the industrial and technological revolutions’ waste streams, Mollison concluded that sustainability has to be at the heart of society and its economic engines if we are to endure and prosper.
The good doctor’s prescription for our modern ills is Permaculture, the study and applied science of sustainability. Over the decades since Mollison first planted the seed, Permaculture has spread to every continent and nearly every country on earth. In at least one nation it has become the official national agriculture and in another, a Permaculture department has been added to their National Academy of Science. Though some heads of state have endorsed Permaculture as a key element for a sustainable global effort toward environmental quality, it is still relatively unknown in the United States, home of the largest waste stream of all. Still, Permaculture is offered in the curriculum of various American universities and colleges, and Permaculture institutes and projects can be found across the country.
A unique synergy of science, traditional low-tech wisdom and modern innovation, Permaculture is in a perpetual state of creative evolution as we refine and expand its collection of sustainable techniques and strategies. It might aptly be described as a system of deep design drawn from nature’s own image of patterns and energy exchanges. Care for the earth and for people is its core value and its intention is whole system design.
When applied to a landscape design, Permaculture requires a more complex set of standards than the conventional approach. For example, a spatial aggregate of trees, shrubs, vines, flowers and grasses should work together functionally as well as aesthetically. Plants should provide each other (and us) services as they do in nature. Some plants process and serve up foods like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to other plants which otherwise can’t consume them. When sited and selected skillfully, plants can provide habitat for beneficial birds and insects that will keep pest outbreaks in line. They can also give wind protection and shade, act as visual barriers, control dust, mitigate noise, produce oxygen, yield food and medicine, and more.
Consider the potential energy savings of a carefully crafted planting. Annual heating and cooling bills can be significantly reduced. Carefully sited evergreens can add insulation value to a home and, since they are extremely efficient solar collectors, can give off heat on winter nights. A well-designed windbreak can reduce heating bills by 30%. A skillfully designed landscape can block summer heat entering a building by as much as 70%. A single mature tree in a proper location has a cooling influence on a building equal to 20 room-sized air conditioners running all at once.
More savings come from water conservation. Like Xeriscape, Permaculture designs may use low water plants and low-pressure or drip irrigation systems. It might also include various means to efficiently use precipitation, both by infiltrating it directly into the ground or impounding it for future use. Imagine that with just 14 inches of annual precipitation falling on an impermeable surface such as a roof or driveway you can collect 12,000 to 18,000 gallons of water per year from a 2000 square foot area. Even gray water can be recycled in the landscape where the law allows.
In general, Colorado has a high evaporation and runoff rate, with most precipitation lost before plants can use it. Watering a Kentucky bluegrass lawn to a depth of one inch consumes 600 gallons of water per each 1000 square feet of lawn. This is an amount equal to what six people in the U.S. consume on average for all daily water needs. It is commonplace in Colorado for over 50% of high-pressure irrigation water (most sprinklers) to be lost to evaporation or runoff, and in some places the percentage is much higher. Such inefficiency is alarming since indicators point to severe water shortages in the not too distant future, particularly in the most heavily populated areas of Colorado.
Perhaps we should be asking ourselves about the far-reaching effects on our water resources of having several thousand acres of blue grass lawns with high-pressure irrigation systems. Empires have collapsed under just such inefficient resource management. Worldwide it is predicted that three billion people will be faced with severe water resource depletion over the next 25 years. The price of water is traveling in one direction and that’s up.
In addition to its ecological functions, Permaculture design is also a strictly organic method. This is important if you consider the health and environmental costs that use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides can have, not to mention their purchase price. A study published in the February 1995 issue of the American Journal of Public Health states that children living in homes with yards treated with herbicides and pesticides were four times more likely to develop cancer of the soft tissues than children with untreated yards. Between 1945 and 1993 the use of chemical pesticides increased 3,300%, yet by 1993 crop loss from pests had increased 20% from the days before the chemical revolution.
Permaculture encourages people to grow their own food since, with careful planning, even an average yard can supply a sizeable proportion of a family’s food - all fresh, nutritious, non genetically engineered food with no toxic residues.
Despite our increasing population, farms and farmland in the U.S. are diminishing. With the value of land, the amount of chemicals applied (the more chemicals you use, the more you need), and transportation costs all rising, the cost of food can only spiral upward.
On the other hand, a Permaculture "food forest" pays for itself many times over and the greatest labor required is in the harvest. About the only hazard might be the danger of falling fruit.
Most of us aren’t aware of the great number of useful and ornamental native plants that grow here because so many have been plowed under, paved or grazed over. Permaculture makes liberal use of these natives, many of which are not only beautiful but also edible. The native Saskatoon or serviceberry (Amelianchier alnifolia) is used here in landscaping for its lovely, fragrant flowers and bright fall color, but in Canada the Saskatoon is grown for commercial fruit production and cultivars have been developed for larger, sweeter fruit and high yields. Our very own purple coneflower (Echinacea angustifolia), native to Colorado’s eastern plains and usually sold as a bedding plant and cut flower, is one of the most celebrated and popular herbal remedies in the world. Some Native American tribes even ate its sweet roots for food.
There are scores of other attractive garden plants that are edible, medicinal or both. The Cornelian dogwood, daylilies, peonies, bluebells, yellow horns, primrose, violets, vinca, and some viburnums are a few which can delight the eye and the nose, and also serve up a large crop of delicious food or an effective home remedy.
