Permaculture Reflections

2011-12-20T14:29:00.000-05:00

The Mycology of Santa Claus:
An ethnomycological journey into Christmas
by Douglas Barnes

Would Christmas be what it is without mushrooms? I'd like to put forward to you that Santa Claus himself owes at least part of his existence to the mushroom Amanita muscaria.

From Wikipedia

First, let's have a look at Santa Claus. Santa is based on the Dutch figure Sinterklaas. Sinterklaas owes some of his legend to the patron saint of children, Saint Nicholas. Nicholas had a fondness for gift-giving, making him a popular figure in life and death.

But Sinterklaas also owes some of his essence to Odin, ruler of the Norse gods. Sinterklaas is known for riding his white horse, whereas Odin rides his flying gray horse. Sinterklaas has his mischievous black-faced helpers. Odin has his ravens. Children would leave carrots, hay or sugar in their shoes for Odin's horse. In return, Odin would leave candy or gifts in exchange. Dutch children leave carrots, apples or hay in their shoes for Sinterklaas who, in exchange, leaves behind gifts.

From mycoweb.com

Unlike Sinterklaas, Odin has one eye, having given up the other as payment for a drink from the well of knowledge. What one sees when one cuts the stem off an Amanita muscaria and looks at its underside resembles an eye, much like the one Odin would have left in the well as payment. And our mushroom hero in this story is revered by many cultures as a giver of wisdom due to its psychotropic properties.

Odin's chariot is visible in the night sky as the Big Dipper, which contains the North Star, which in turn shows the way to the North Pole. The North Pole, as we know, happens to be the home of Santa Claus.

I think I've made a decent case for connecting Santa to Odin, but not Amanita muscaria to Norse culture, or Santa. Not yet, anyway.

From public-domain-photos.com

Amanita is a mycorrhizal fungi, meaning that it forms symbiotic partnerships with plants, helping to supply the plant with water and essential nutrients, and helping it to share resources and information (such as warnings about impending pest attacks) with other plants. In return, it gets sugars from the plant.

Amanita muscaria is a striking red mushroom with white spots. This colour scheme is obviously relevant to the argument. It has a number of psychotropic properties owing to the muscimol and muscimol's precursor ibotenic acid contained in the mushroom (mainly in the universal veil). Among its effects are visual and auditory distortions, impared balance, mild muscle spasms, and the sensation of floating or flying. Some clinical subjects have reported simultaneous states of wakeful consciousness and lucid dreaming. Another common report is a deeply moving spiritual experience. Considering this, it is not surprising that the mushroom is revered in many cultures around the world. It has a tradition of use among the Norse, some of whom took it in very large quantities to become fierce berserks or berserkers. Odin was said to have a berserkergang of his own to follow him in battle. No doubt it was a relief to Norwegians when the berserk practice was outlawed in 1123 AD.

From Wikipedia

Across Siberia it was highly sought, and its rarity there saw it traded sometimes at a rate of one reindeer to one mushroom. This is a daring exchange to make, considering the fact that reindeer go crazy for this mushroom and will scramble to get at it. One might imagine that someone ingesting the mushroom and watching reindeer might just possibly see them fly.

The Athabaskans also have a tradition of using the mushroom as do the Afghans. In researching this, I came across a 1979 article in Afghanistan Journal in which one elder of the Shutul Valley in Afghanistan fittingly described his experience of the mushroom as thus: “Once, I thought I was a tree.” The Shutul people also use it as a treatment for frostbite and psychotic conditions. Considering that muscimol acts on the GABA-A receptor, it's likely that this “psychotic condition” mentioned by the Shutulis is depression.

The late eminent ethnomycologist, Gordon Wasson, put forward the theory that “soma,” the sacramental substance mentioned in the Hindu holy book Rig Veda, was, in fact, Amanita muscaria. This is certainly plausible, though the exact composition of soma was kept a secret to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

From Tom Volk's Fungus of the Month

There is another curious connection between Christmas and Amanita muscaria. In Europe, it is very common to see Christmas trees decorated with Amanita muscaria ornaments. While the colour scheme matches, it think there is a deeper cultural connection to the mushroom and makes it show up for Yule celebrations.

So let's recap. We have this Santa Clause chap who happens to be dressed in Amanita muscaria camouflage. Santa is based on Sinterklaas, who is based on Odin. Odin, with his flying horse, his acquisition of wisdom, and his berserkers, comes from a culture steeped in the mushroom. Santa travels via flying reindeer - the very same beast that itself has a remarkable affinity for the mushroom, as well as historically being swapped for it. Finally, we've got people making replicas of the mushroom and using it as a decoration to celebrate the most wonderful time of the year.

Believe what you want to believe. Me? I'm going to nod my head in respect for this mighty mycological miracle.

Compromise in Design

2011-08-08T11:09:00.009-04:00

Compromise in Design
By Douglas Barnes

[The following is a writeup of a presentation given at the spring PermaCon in Toronto.]

My focus today is to look at a framework for design and the need for compromise within design. Projects that get abandoned due to inflexibility or unrealistic expectations are all too common.

To understand compromise in design we should be clear about the design process. The first step is creating a goal to work from. This goal should be put in as simple and as broad of terms as possible to get at the core of what you are trying to do. Think of this as the Twitter version of what it is you are going to do. Fleshing out comes later.

When dealing with permaculture, we are looking at creating some sort of sustainable system. A sustainable system is one that captures and stores more energy over its lifetime than is used in its creation and maintenance.

Consider an example that we will examine later in more detail: building a house. Faced with the need for housing and the desire to set up a permaculture research farm, I needed to design a home. Since it is in Ontario, I knew that it had to be a passive solar home. (Incidentally, this knowledge also led to my choice in property and location on that property for the home.) So my goal then became “Design a passive solar home for my wife and me with room for guests.” The goal was not “Design a passive solar tirewall home,” or “Design a passive solar straw bale home,” as those to provide specifics that are not important to achieving the primary goal of sustainability.

Putting on the guise of a 4-year-old and repeatedly asking why can help in this instance. Take, for example, the desire for a straw bale home. Why straw bale? If the answer is “sustainability,” then why are other types of sustainable building unacceptable? Is it aesthetics? Why? These questions can help to get at the kernel of what it is you really want.

This step is the core of any planning and subsequent action you will take, so it is vital to get it right. Without this clear statement of intent, you are leaving more room for misunderstanding and potential for the disappointment of not getting what you really want, or something that simply does not work.

A hint to finding if you have articulated your goal is to ask yourself if it actually sounds like a plan. Saying “My goal is to build a 2000 ft² straw bale home with a root cellar and 3 bedrooms” is too specific and has already moved into the planning stage.

With your goal in place, you are still not ready for planning. You are ready for the observation stage. Your task now is to gather data. You’ll need to find out all you can about the proposed site: temperature trends, maximum rainfall, length of drought periods, soil type, site aspect and slope, drainage, local vegetation, notable elements of neighbouring properties, etc. Ideally, you would want to observe a property for a long time, perhaps a year of more. But this is one stage where compromise creeps in. It might be that you don’t have a long time to observe a property before you need to act. In fact, it’s not uncommon. In such instances, even more careful observation is necessary.

To give an example, I was asked to do a water-harvesting project on semi-arid land in India. I was on site for 3 weeks, so long term observation was not possible. I made up for this and carried out a successful project through careful examination of the site, an understanding of the native, lateritic soils, and interviews with locals familiar with the property and climate conditions there.

The next stage is research. With the data you need, what sort of action could you take? Check to see if someone has done something similar and can advise you – even if you spend some money on this, you may wind up saving a bundle by not setting yourself up for further problems later. Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to.

This period of observation takes a considerable amount of time to do correctly. One of my teachers, Geoff Lawton, is fond of saying that you need one hundred hours of thinking to one hour of labour. This is a nice saying that gets you thinking the right way, but with about 3000 work hours invested in my house so far, I promise you that I did not spend 300,000 hours or 34 years worth of thinking time designing house.

Now you are ready to move onto the planning stage. It is likely that during planning, you will find yourself needing to jump back into observation and research. With your goal in mind, you’ll look at the dictates of the local conditions to see what fits the site. You will identify and available resources you have to work with (A native tree stand might be translated into lumber, but in Canada, that means you will need to mill it yourself, when have an engineer inspect and stamp each piece of wood. Buying lumber and leaving your trees in place is going to be cheaper. It will also save that existing stand of trees, though at the expense of another.) Available funding will also determine what it is you are going to do. Local regulations may put a halt to certain plans as well.

Such constraints may seem like a hindrance, but working with constraints within a design actually makes design easier. Being presented with a blank canvas with which to work is more daunting than being faced with limitations on a site – which is something that always occurs in the real world.

As your plan takes shape, you will need to keep in mind Rule 1 in planning: Assume the plan is wrong.

Assume that the plan is flawed and requires observation of feedback and redesign. More problems are caused by neglecting this rule than anything else. The single greatest flaw you can make is falling in love with your idea.

I’ll give you a few examples to scare you off of falling in love with your own ideas.

There is a retired couple I heard of in Eastern Ontario who spent their savings setting up an apple orchard. Right at this point, they might have been saved from financial ruin had the question “Why?” been rigorously asked. Why set up a pest-prone monoculture for a product that has had its market thoroughly eroded by imports? But the story doesn’t end there. They established the orchard on land prone to flooding in heavy rain events. Flooding and fruit trees don’t mix. The end result was unfortunately financial ruin.

Does this mean the couple were stupid? Not at all. Or at least, considering the number of times I have fallen in love with my own bad ideas, I hope it doesn’t. They got stuck on an idea that they were sure they could pull off. Entire civilisations have done worse. More research and more observation might have pulled them out of their disaster before they were in neck deep. It at least would have stopped them from planning a monoculture and putting all their eggs in one basket.

Another example, roundly reviled, is the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal haphazardly scribbled on a napkin, then transferred to make poorly designed, grand old building into an even more poorly designed nightmare.

First, glass on the north side of a building – bad. Then sloped glass – bad. Then sloped glass that can result in snow and ice accumulation sloughing off and striking pedestrians – bad. I could go on in terms of functionality and lack of aesthetic quality, but we are here for permaculture and only here for one day, so I’ll stop at that.

The Sharp Centre for Design foolishly plopped onto the Ontario College of Art and Design is another example. First, it’s oriented north-south in a cold climate – foolish. Second, it is suspended on stilts, minimising thermal mass heat storage and maximising heat loss on a cold and windy location – foolish. Third, it has very little natural light inside and is reportedly unpleasant to work in – foolish. Fourth, it’s butt-ugly – unacceptable. Hardly surprising then that it won architectural awards for its design.

The phenomenon is not limited to people with too much cash on their hands. I’ve encountered a disturbing number of people who want to build “eco-homes” in cold climates that are round or have a rounded south-facing wall. I suspect it is because artist renditions of buildings of the future are very often round, but I’m not sure. Rounded on the shade-side of the building, where the shape doesn’t interfere with the building’s solar gain and where it minimises the surface area on the cold side, is fine. Round facing the sun just wastes potential solar gain and increases the need for additional heating.

Working with constraints within a design actually makes design easier. Being presented with a blank canvas with which to work is more daunting than being faced with limitations on a site – which is something that always occurs in the real world.

Working with compromise can allow you to complete beneficial action that would otherwise be abandoned in attempts to be a purist. Again, the metric is more energy captured and stored than used in the creation and maintenance of a system.

I have had to contend with compromise within my own site design. The target date to start construction was July, 2008, but technicalities interfered with the close of the sale of our old property, delaying the purchase of the new one. I did set to work designing a tirewall structure for the site, however. My aim was to make something very conventional looking but using tires as a building material. This was not to be an earthship. I paid a visit to the permitting office and was told “Not a chance.” The inspector then changed his mind and said I could do it if I had an engineer on site every day of construction. In other words, “Not a chance.” I could have fought this, but I was interested in building a home, not moving into a new community and getting embroiled in a legal battle. Someone else in nearby Prince Edward County felt differently and did get in a legal battle, winning and clearing the way for similar projects. Perhaps when it comes time to building a barn...

A friend who turned to straw bale consulting told me that the building code in Ontario had changed, requiring vapour barriers on straw bale homes, which is not only a bad idea, it could lead to the collapse of load-bearing straw bale structures. Then straw has the issues of extra footprint to accommodate the thick walls, the problem of acquiring quality straw, and that straw in an area that is naturally forested necessarily means that it comes at the expense of forest. Timber production is certainly open to criticism for its clear cutting and replacement of forest with tree plantations, however.

In the end, I chose Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs). They have the benefit of ease of construction and an excellent R-value. In the final equation of more energy captured and stored than consumed in creation and maintenance, I knew that SIPs could be put to use sustainably.

My first choice of locations for the home was about 500 feet back from the road. This site, however, would have meant that I would need to run primary cable from the road to the house for electricity. It would also increase the cost of driveway construction and the amount of work to plough the driveway. This would have added perhaps $10,000 to the cost of the home. Instead, I chose a spot just on the limit before primary cable is needed.

I will soon be insulating the roof of the building. Wet-blown cellulose was my first choice. But I was informed by a local insulator that he no longer does wet-blown because he can’t stand being so cruel to his customers. It turns out that it uses an adhesive which has a foul smell that lingers for several years. No thank you. Dry cellulose is not acceptable to me as it settles over time leaving uninsulated blank spots at the peaks of the roof where it is most needed. Blown in fibreglass looks to be the better option and more sustainable in the long run.

I designed the home myself to be passive solar – to heat itself as much as possible with the heat of the sun. My real-world backup heat source is a thermal mass stove, which doubles as a thermal mass for the passive solar aspect of the building. Code, however, requires a mechanical heat source – a provision put into the building code by the banks. The cheapest to install is electric baseboard. I’m never going to use it, but its benefits are that it’s cheap and code requires more insulation, meaning that I won’t skimp on that end. The drawback is that I have to listen to everyone tell me how inefficient the heat source I’m never going to use is.

The building is not yet complete, but I am sure there are other areas that I will be forced to compromise with before I am done.

In summary, the key steps are to create a brief but coherent goal that states what it is you are trying to achieve. From there, one can begin observation and research to be able to move onto the planning stage. In planning, remember not to fall in love with your ideas. If reality interferes, yield to it. That will give you a happier outcome, even if you don’t realise it. And remember to assume that your plan is flawed and in need of feedback.

Toronto PermaCon

2011-04-07T09:48:00.002-04:00

Come on out to the TPP-GTA PermaCon this weekend. I'll be giving a seminar on design strategy and compromise in design and one on earthworks.

Permaculture in Disaster Areas: Tsunami

2011-04-01T17:17:00.008-04:00

Permaculture in Disaster Areas: Tsunami
Approaches to lessening tsunami damage.

By Douglas Barnes
Special thanks to Steve Cran

The earthquake and devastating tsunami of March 11, 2011 shocked the world with images of widespread destruction. All during my13 years in Japan, I lived under the constant threat of “The Big One.” It never came while I was there, but when it finally did, its damage directly affected many of my family and friends living in Japan.

While no structure can be completely earthquake or tsunami proof, there are design elements that can be included that may reduce the damage caused by these events. I’ve already written on a simple design tweak to increase the strength of a building in an earthquake, now I’d like to look at strategies for dealing with tsunami.

After the 1998 tsunami that hit Papua New Guinea, permaculture aid worker Steve Cran toured the devastated areas to find out what strategies might be employed to deal with tsunami prone regions. One pattern that emerged was that areas with dense tree belts along the coast suffered less damage from the wave. Inland tree belts also assist in reducing the power of the wave and filtering our abrasive debris picked up by the wave that can lead to further damage of structures. Again, tree belts help, but as Steve Cran pointed out to me in a recent correspondence, “You can’t stop a tsunami but you can reduce its impact inland.”

Structures themselves can be designed to be more likely to survive tsunami. A boat-shaped wall at least 2 metres high with the “bow” and “stern” perpendicular to contour can help to deflect the wave. Additionally, buildings can be boat shaped and built on piers to better allow the wave to pass as it both comes in and goes out (both directions being destructive). Such a building shape could easily be achieved using concrete – a building material that is commonly used in Japan already. While concrete is an energy intensive material, it is durable and can be used sustainably. Existing earthquake dampening systems could be used in such a design as well.

For community design, Steve recommends compounds “laid out like bricks, offset, two over one so when the wave comes, the front compounds break the force of the wave as it moves inland.” In the case of Kessenuma and other ravaged communities in Japan, property is already marked out, making the brick-like pattern inapplicable. However, houses could still be built as described above to lessen the impact of the wave. Whether such a home would survive the over 10-metre waves that hit the coast is uncertain. They would, however, increase the likelihood of buildings surviving.

Personal Note:

Many kind readers have asked about the safety of my family. My mother and father-in-law live in the mountains of northern Ibaraki and had to endure many quakes over magnitude 6. Despite this, their 150 plus year-old farmhouse survived just fine – a testament to the traditional home design and construction in Japan. Some earthen plaster did fall off one of the out buildings on the farm, but a little sand, some clay and straw and it will be good as new. They are about 70 or 80 km from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, but so far the radiation has not presented a problem.

This blog's coauthor Scott Meister also safely but nervously road out many magnitude 6 quakes at his home 16 km from the summit of the slumbering Mt. Fuji. Expect an article on design for earthquakes from Scott when he is presented with some time.

We Can't Get There From Here

2011-02-17T12:09:00.033-05:00

The following is a transcript of a speech given to the Belleville chapter of the Canadian Federation of University Women in Belleville, Ontario on February 17th, 2011.

We Can't Get There From Here
by Douglas Barnes

Tonight, we’ll be looking at the state of the world through the lens of sustainability. Then we will examine what are claimed to be our societal goals to try to unravel how we got where we are today. Finally, we will look at a methodology to put ourselves on a sustainable path along with a few examples of this methodology put into action.

Well, to talk about sustainability, we really are going to have to understand what it is. Otherwise ongoing attempts to reduce it to a meaningless marketing term will succeed. For instance, one infamous agrichemical company has marketed its glyphosate herbicide as a means of “creating sustainable pastures.”

The surfactant in their product is highly toxic to amphibians.

Glyphosate kills Rhizobium bacteria, which are the bacteria that live symbiotically with legumes and fix atmospheric nitrogen, nourishing the soil.

It kills mycorrhizal fungi which help plants attain calcium, phosphorus, magnesium and other minerals. They also help supply plants with water in times of drought. They allow plants to communicate to fight off pest attacks and serve as a network to allow plants to share nutrients. They also help sequester carbon and build up soil humus. Killing them off is an exceedingly bad idea.

Glyphosate is toxic to fish.

While not directly toxic to birds, it has been observed to reduce local bird populations due to its overall detrimental effect on ecosystems.

In humans, it has been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as well as being linked to liver tumours and thyroid cancer in rats.

If the word “sustainable” is to hold any meaning, it must not be left up to the world of marketing to define it.

Here’s the definition: A system is sustainable if, over its lifetime, it captures and stores more energy than it consumes in its creation, operation and maintenance.

In traditional peasant agriculture systems, the energy required to plant and tend a squash plant is paid back many times over by the harvest. Think of a bank account as an analogy. If you continually spend more than you earn, sooner or later you will reach a point in which you are out of capital.

There have been societies that spent more natural capital than they produced. Sumer, Rapa Nui, Rome and the Anasazi are all examples of societies that did this and collapsed.

But that can’t happen to us, right? We’re exceptional! We have technology.

Consider our industrial agricultural system. It now costs 10 calories of energy on average to deliver one calorie of food energy and that is only counting exosomatic energy, not energy from human labour. This is really bad news considering that we are about half way through our global oil supply, discounting the difficult to extract oil sands. Natural gas production, important for synthesizing nitrogen, peaked in North America a decade ago.

And industrial agriculture has destroyed more soil more quickly than at any other time in human history. We lose 75 billion tons of topsoil globally every year. The Great Plains of North America have lost 6 to 10 feet of top soil since the arrival of farming there; and 38% of Canadian prairie farmland has become significantly salinated. It is worth noting that no civilisation has ever collapsed that did not have loss of soil fertility as a major contributing factor. Soil may not be a sexy topic, but it is premier in importance.

Directly connected to soil loss is deforestation. We lose an area of the Amazon the size of Kuwait every year to soy and cattle farming, which are wholly inappropriate to the climate. Globally, we lose the size of Lebanon in forests every year.

To this I will add that global fisheries are predicted to collapse by 2048; and that global climate change threatens the climate stability that makes agriculture possible while acidifying the oceans, threatening the base of marine food chains.

In this context, we can see that sustainability is another word for survivability.

How Did We Get Here?

A key point in finding our way out of this mess is to figure out how it is we got into it in the first place. To find that out, it’s helpful to examine what it is one has been trying to do.

So, what are we trying to do? What are we trying to achieve? Let’s look at the common answers offered up.

Is the goal to maximise individual and societal happiness?

Happiness is tracked by economists as “Subjective Well Being.” (They call it this because it’s more impressive than saying “happiness.”) In 1974, economist Richard Easterlin asked a novel question in the field of neo-classical economics: “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?” The answer was yes... to a point.

More recently, Lord Turner, former head of the Confederation of British Industry (that noted group of left wing radicals) admitted that “All the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness”

He was on the right track, but the material standard of living today in the West is much higher than the point at which is required to maximise happiness. A recent meta-analysis by Oxford economic historian Avner Offer confirms this, concluding that,

Since the Second World War, and especially since the 1970s, self-reported ‘happiness’ has languished at the same levels, or has even declined.... On any measure used, the rise of aggregate money incomes has done little or nothing to improve the sense of well being.

Indeed, it can be argued that the influence of monetary wealth on societal happiness has become detrimental. A 2009 study from the London and Harvard Schools of Business has shown that exposure to luxury goods increases self interested thought and decision making. This is counter-productive to a species that is social by nature.

Is the goal of our global society to maximise human potential?

Were this the case, we would expect to see literacy rates at 99%. We’d also expect the average reading grade level in adults to be higher.

The cost of a post-secondary education in the U.S. would not be outpacing the rate of inflation by over 4.5 times, were this true. (The case is similar for Canada with tuitions skyrocketing.)

We would have no national debate about the need to combat mental illness; we would be combating mental illness.

We would not be creating people incapable of relating to other people. The University of Michigan has been recording self-reported empathy among college students and has found it dropping since 1980 when the study started. Seventy-five percent of today’s students assess themselves less empathetic than their average counterpart from thirty years ago. Self-reported narcissism is at an all time high.

A study published in the February, 2007 Quarterly of Economics found that landless squatters randomly given title over land showed increased materialistic and individualistic beliefs, including – and I wish I were making this up – the belief that you can succeed on your own. It also made the newly entitled less trusting of the landless. Apparently, money creates a new paradigm that blinds one to irony.

Is the goal to meet the need for healthy food, clean air and water, and sensible housing?

In addition to costing more energy than it provides (not to mention costing more dollars than it charges – one investigation from the January 12, 1994 edition of the Financial Times found the cost of a hamburger in real dollars was $290 USD, not counting corporate subsidies), industrially produced food is lower in nutrition than traditionally grown produce.

For instance, pasture-raised hens produce eggs that are 7 times higher in beta carotene, 3 times higher in vitamin E, 2 times higher in omega 3 fatty acids, 2/3 higher in vitamin A, 1/3 lower in cholesterol, and ¼ lower in saturated fat than eggs from prison chickens. Sticking with chickens, dark meat has decreased 52% in vitamin A content and increase 54.4% in fat since 1963. Chemist Donald R. Davis has compared data spanning the past 70 years and found median declines of 5 to 40% or more in vitamins, minerals and protein in fruits and vegetables. There is less food in industrially produced food.

Deaths from air pollution worldwide are estimated at 2 million per year by the WHO. Were clean air a serious goal, the only air quality warnings would come during forest fires and volcanic eruptions.

Clean water? You can convince me this is a serious goal when you can safely and confidently brew a cup of coffee with water from every single major river on earth. Deaths from unsafe water are estimated at 3 million per year.

Sensible shelter? Well, shelter, at least, though not too sensible. It is available to most, but the misfits, the mentally ill and those hit by financial disaster fall through the cracks.

Is the goal long term survivability?

We know we are destroying the soil that human health is dependent upon, we know that we use far more energy to produce food than we get from the food and we know that energy is running out. Furthermore, we know that using that energy is threatening the climatic stability that agriculture is dependent upon.

And even if we discover some wondrous new source of energy, it is clear from what we have done with cheap, abundant energy that we would most likely destroy the ecology that makes our lives possible. While survival as a species is likely, if likely hellish, survival as a global civilisation is not in the cards.

No, if these were our goals then we as a species are either grossly incompetent or incredibly stupid.

Looking empirically at outcomes, it appears to me as though the goal of our current system is to accrue and secure financial power for those clever enough, educated enough, lucky enough and/or devious enough to get it and hold on to it. As the saying goes, “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

How Do We Get There?

If the global society is to survive, it needs to have a coherent and overt goal that encompasses sustainability. The good news is that there are precedents of societies that have successfully pulled themselves back from the brink and are surviving to this day. One example is Japan, which faced a serious crisis from deforestation. This was turned around by imperial decree during the Tokugawa era. More fascinating for me as an environmental designer is the example of the tiny Pacific island nation of Tikopia. At 4.7 km2, Tikopia has long been at risk of overpopulation. Environmental destruction has always been a risk, threatening starvation. Yet they have been able to overcome serious challenges that have arisen over the millennia and are still going strong 2900 years after first founding the nation.

To achieve what those nations did, we first need to establish a holistic goal that answers the question, “What are we trying to do?” Perhaps that goal will be the pursuit of happiness, or perhaps it will be to maximise human potential, but it must be clear and it must address human needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a pretty good model for determining human needs, and the diagram here is patterned in large part, though not exclusively, from it. I’ve put together some of the needs that I’ve seen have empirical evidence to back them and avoided the influence of spiritual, political or economic ideology as best as I could. For simplicity’s sake, this is not an exhaustive list of human needs, just a sampling of important needs.

The importance of a holistic goal is summed up in the following analogy. It is near impossible to arrive in Burbank, California from Belleville, Ontario if all you know is that you need to drive 33 hours to reach the destination. You have to know where you are going if you want to get there.

Once a goal is in place, the next step is to draft a plan to achieve that goal. A vital step that most planners fail to do is to assume that the plan you create is flawed. It is too easy to fall in love with one’s plan and near impossible to create a plan that will not need adjustment over time to achieve its goals.

At this point, it is vital to know the eight most important words in sustainable design: Design action around energy, not energy around action. In other words, don’t plan what it is you are trying to do then scramble at the end to get the required energy. Determine your actions based on locally available sustainable energy. It is typical for a single property design to place elements relative to their distance from the house and the frequency with which you must visit them.

With the plan based on the holistic goal, it can now be implemented. Then observe the feedback and make adjustments to the plan accordingly.

I’d be remiss if I did not caution against looking to technology as a panacea for our problems. In the words of 2004 Massey lecturer Ronald Wright,

Our technological culture measures human progress by technology: the club is better than the fist, the arrow better than the club, the bullet better than the arrow. We came to this belief for empirical reasons.

He points out, however, that “[o]ur practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology – a secular religion which… is blind to certain flaws in its credentials.”

Technology may solve a given problem, but it opens up new problems requiring ever more technology to solve. We’ve had all the technology we’ve needed to make global civilisation sustainable for decades.

Now I’ll give the promised examples of this approach in action.

In May of 2009, I visited the small farming village of Talupula in Andhra Pradesh, India and the invite of a local organisation, the Green Tree Foundation, which provides trees to the region at low or no cost. Historically a dry tropical region, biotic pressure and climate change has turned the region into a semi arid zone, with the threat of desertification very seriously looming (desert has sprung up 100 km to the west). The goal in my case was to design and implement a water harvesting system to revitalise a section of land to serve as a demonstration site.

My initial plan had been to establish a system involving a small earthen dam fed by swales (swales are water harvesting ditches dug on contour) along with patterned ripping with a subsoiler to assist in allowing easier infiltration of water and even irrigation of the land.

Well, remember that it is important to assume one’s plan is wrong. While building a dam was an exciting prospect for me, the lateritic soils there made it an unrealistic option. The soil, hard as concrete in the dry season and as squishy as a mattress in the wet season did not lend itself to the kind of dam I had in mind, nor the patterned ripping with the subsoiler. The plan changed.

We settled on a 7-acre patch of hillside that a local organic farmer had abandoned to pigeon pea farming and nothing else. I knew that swales were a good option for the site and could assist in establishing a more water-hungry and more valuable crop of mango trees.

Inspecting the site, I calculated the size and spacing of the water harvesting swales needed and had the site mapped out by a survey crew. With three levels of contour mapped out and with the aid of a backhoe and a labour crew, we dug out 4 swales spanning over 400 metres. These swales capture rainfall that would otherwise wash down the hillside, eroding it, and store the water in the ground, making it available to plants and recharging the water table. When completely filled, the swales hold over one million litres of water. The total cost of the work to make this happen was $650 CND.

The staff at the Green Tree Foundation includes ethnobotanists who grew up in the region, so I left tree and ground cover selection in their very capable hands. This image just six months after I left shows the top swale with nitrogen-fixing Cassia siamea, which helps stabilise the soil along with enriching it. C. siamea leaves and pods can also be cooked and eaten, and helps fight colorectal cancer. It can also be used as a good fuel source.

Here we see mango trees that have been established without the use of irrigation. I knew the swales would have a marked effect, but I never imagined mango trees without irrigation.

Directly below the second and largest swale, there was a large tamarind tree that I would frequently seek shelter under (and it no doubt saved my life on the 45oC+ days we had). The tamarind fruits during the monsoon season and typical crops are like this one on a tamarind very close to the site but on the opposite slope.

Here is an image of the crop from the tamarind directly beneath the swales. The difference is night and day. Considering the tree saved my live several times over, this is the least I could do for it.

I had predicted to the team that within 3 years, springs would appear at the bottom of the hill below the swales, if only during the rainy season. Well, slightly to the side below the site, the farmer had dug a well for irrigation. When I was there, the water level was 3 metres down and inaccessible without a hose. Here, six months later, the same well was full, they say as a direct result of the swales.

My confidence in the effectiveness of this technique came from learning of the experiences of one of my teachers, Geoff Lawton. In 2000, he was invited to Jordan by NICCOD, a Japanese NGO and the Hashemite Fund for Human Development.

On a ten acre site in the Jordan River valley, 10 km from the Dead Sea, he led a project to establish a demonstration site for sustainable design. Rainfall at the site comes in 2 or 3 large events and amounts to only 100 to 150 mm per year. Regular hot, desiccating winds contribute to severe evaporation on the site. The soil is very infertile with little organic matter and extremely high salinity. Soil to a depth of 30 cm was found to have 98.1 dS/m, and soil from 30 to 60 cm deep registered 101.7 dS/m, making it extremely salty. [A dS/m, or decisiemens per metre, is a measure of electrical conductivity which can be used to measure soil salinity. The United States Department of Agriculture considers soil over 4 dS/m to be “saline soil.” The soils at the Kafrin site are above this level by more than an order of magnitude!]

To capture every drop of rainfall possible, the site was surveyed to provide a detailed map of the site contours. Once the contour lines were identified, swales were planned for the site to capture as much of the runoff rain to allow it to sink into the ground where it is most easily stored for the benefit of soil life and vegetation. Nitrogen-fixing trees were planted and drip irrigation was used to help establish them, although the site used 1/5th the irrigation of the surrounding farms in the area.

Eighteen months later, the site looked like this.

Geoff’s wife Nadia Lawton used similar permaculture techniques to design her family’s garden in Jordan. At the start, the site was very dry. They dug in a swale to capture rainwater and shunted greywater from the sinks into the swale. Before the trees were planted, the site looked like this.

The next year, the site was unrecognisable.

It’s not just applicable to arid regions, either. Before I left for India, I designed a passive solar home for my wife and I and have been building it myself since the end of 2009. As opposed to active solar, which is used to generate an electrical current, passive solar is a means of utilizing heat from the sun.

At 45° latitude (north or south) there are 957 Watt hours per square metre available for heating on a winter day. We can use this energy to assist in heating rather than relying totally on external sources of heat.

Taking advantage of free solar heat will not only save money, it will also help in making a building sustainable over its lifetime.

South facing fenestration allows us to capture solar energy where it is stored in the concrete pad and the thermal mass of the masonry stove that also serves as a backup heat source.

Though I was busy during the summer with construction of the house, I did take some time to establish 160 square feet worth of garden to supply us with fresh vegetables. In just that little area, I was able to grow about $400 worth of produce. Finding people to give the surplus away to was the main challenge. I will admit that we did need to water the garden a few times during the summer, but when it came to weeding, I report in all honesty that I spent less than 30 seconds weeding the entire summer. Similarly, we had no problems with pests whatsoever, so my recipes for drinkable insecticides were unnecessary.

Design is not limited to individual properties, either. I have recently worked with Transition Toronto, which is part of the Transition Movement. The Transition Movement seeks to assist communities in dealing with the challenges faced by declining energy levels. This includes creating action plans to provide food and energy for people as well as developing commerce strategies for a world that will surely see cast economic changes.

A colleague and fellow student of mine who is from Colombia has taught an entire village design and assisted them in designing a sustainable village for themselves in the mountains of Colombia.

And another piece of good news before I wrap up. It has taken us a tremendous amount of effort and energy to do the damage we have to the Earth. As we can see, if we pattern our actions in harmony with nature and make nature a partner rather than an opponent, positive response is instantaneous.

Once we can establish a sensible goal for ourselves and create a sustainable plan that involves working with nature, we can turn our planet on a dime. So, don’t panic.

(References will be added soon.)

Designing a Livable Passive Solar Home

2010-11-17T21:29:00.014-05:00

The following is a writeup of a workshop given at the fall 2010 conference of The Permaculture Project - GTA.

This guide is aimed at helping you to design an energy efficient, passive solar home in a temperate environment. However, there is more to consider when designing a home than just energy efficiency. The interior of the home must also be functional and inviting. Fortunately, this can be done without compromising on the gains derived from passive solar design.

What is Passive Solar?

As opposed to active solar, which is used to generate an electrical current, passive solar is a means of utilizing heat from the sun.

At 45° latitude (north or south) there are 957 Watt hours per square metre available for heating on a winter day. We can use this energy to assist in heating rather than relying totally on external sources of heat.

Taking advantage of free solar heat will not only save money, it will also help in making a building sustainable over its lifetime.

Passive Solar Design

Firstly, good solar access is necessary for passive solar design. A suitable site will need good access to the winter sun from at least 10 AM to 3 PM to be effective. While deciduous trees minimize the amount of shadows compared to evergreens, they still reduce the amount of solar gain and really interfere with passive solar design.

Slopes that face the sun (southern slopes in Canada) are good candidates, though flat sites will works as well. North-facing slopes are poor sites for passive solar unless the slope is very gentle.

The building itself will be oriented perpendicular to the sun at midday so as to maximize the exposure to the sun. If the building is slightly off, the loss is negligible.

Solar energy is let into the building through its sun-facing windows (south windows in Canada). However, having too few windows will will lead to insufficient heating, whereas having to many will lead to overheating in the day and heal loss at night. The simple rule of thumb is to match the percentage of window coverage on the sun-side wall with the latitude. So, a home at 45o north latitude would have about 45% of it’s south wall covered in windows.

The energy gained from the direct sunlight will be lost after the sun goes down if it is not stored. We store it by means of a thermal mass. A thermal mass is simply a dense object such as rock or concrete that will store the sun’s energy.

The easiest was to do this is by making the building’s foundation a monolithic slab on grade. In other words, the foundation is an insulated cement pad that the building rests on. The good news in that a slab on grade foundation is simple to build and avoids the problems of a leaky basement by eliminating the basement altogether.

The slab is insulated to retain the heat within the building. It is also a good idea to put “frost protection,” or “frost wings” around the perimeter of the foundation to help reduce heat loss.

Here, “frost wings” have been added in addition to the perimeter insulation.

Additional thermal mass can come from structures such as a brick wall inside the house or a masonry heater.

This house in Melbourne, Australia interior brick walls in the kitchen to store solar heat.

A masonry heater such as this one can provide a backup heat source while also being a thermal mass to capture solar heat.

Additional gain can be achieved by using reflectors to direct sunlight into the house that would otherwise be lost. This approach is somewhat limited as the sun sits very low in the sky in Canada during the winter and the pitch of roofs is generally too steep.

Two additional approaches to capturing solar heat are the trombe wall and the thermal siphon. From the outside, a trombe wall looks like a window built over a wall, but it is a very effective passive solar technique. A thermal mass wall is built then covered with glass to trap the heat it stores.

Trombe wall

The thermal siphon is simply a window over an object that heats up (such as a piece of steel painted black) with vents to allow the heated air to escape into the house.

Thermal siphon.

Something to remember is that not everyday is sunny, and that a backup heat source is necessary. Masonry heaters (mentioned above) make excellent backup heat sources. Unfortunately, building codes in Canada require a mechanical backup heat source, meaning that, unless you are building a cottage, you are required to install a conventional heating system. Though electric baseboards are the most expensive way to heat, they are the cheapest to install and will not be needed in a well designed passive solar home anyway. Code will also force you to have a better insulated home, if you are using electric heat, and that never hurts.

Room Layout

The building will ideally be a long, thin structure with the long edge perpendicular to the sun. To maximize solar gain, keep the sun-facing edge of the building a flat wall. Angled or rounded shaped decrease solar gain.

Generally, you want to position the rooms so that their usage throughout the day follows the sun. So, the kitchen will be in the east, receiving the first sun of the day. Most people do not mind sleeping in cool rooms, so locating them on the shade side of the building (the north side in Canada) frees up sun space for other rooms used during the daytime. That said, an east-facing bedroom (perhaps on the northeast corner) is a glorious thing.

Setting the Roof Overhang

The maximum and minimum sun angles during the summer and winter solstices respectively are found with by the following formulas.

Winter sun angle “A”:
A = 90° - (your latitude + 23.5o)

Summer sun angle “A”:
A = 90° - (Your latitude - 23.5o)

Knowing this, you can use trigonometry to set your roof overhang so that you let sun in during the winter and keep it out during the summer.

There is good news if you don’t want to muck about with trigonometry, though. You can have your rafters cut at a suitable length by nailing two pieces of wood together at the angle of the winter sun. Then place this guide flush against the wall at the top of your window and mark the point on the rafter that the guide intersects it.

A guide set to the same angle as the winter sun can be used to determine where to cut the rafters to set the overhang.

With Canadian latitudes, this will mean that the eaves of the house are set rather large - on the order of two feet or even more. While this means more material cost in the roof, it also means the building will be better protected from the elements.

Making It Functional and Beautiful

While the techniques covered so far can help you to build an energy efficient, passive solar home, they won’t guarantee that it will be a home that you would want to spend any time in. There are architectural patterns that will assist in designing a livable home, however.

First, recognize that your home is both a place to meet people and a sanctuary to get away from the world - and it can be both simultaneously. Design your home with spheres of privacy from the public, where you can greet people stopping by, to the semi-private, where you can invite guests to sit down, to the private, where only the family goes.

Next, a good home has a flow to it. Movement through the home takes place through rooms rather than through hallways or passageways. This makes the rooms social and inviting.

There should be a central common area that the major flows of traffic through the house intersect.

That common area will be improved if it has its own semi-private areas where people can sit off to the side but still be apart of the common area itself.

A room will be much more pleasant to live in if it has natural light coming in from two sides.

Crenelate the edge of a building. This will create usable and inviting spaces both inside and outside the building, increase airflow in the summer, and help to create rooms with natural light coming from two sides.

Having different ceiling heights in different rooms creates varied atmospheres in a home ranging from lively to more intimate. Such effects are easy to achieve in a 1.5 story house, which also happens to be the most efficient home to build in terms of building material.

Finally, a large, sheltering roof that the home is built into is both functional and aesthetic. Make at least one slope of the roof visible from the ground; and, if possible, low enough to the ground in places to touch. If this is done on the north side (in Canada) it will help the building to deflect cold northern winds in the winter.

Interview with Douglas Barnes on Chic Galleria

2010-08-09T13:07:00.005-04:00

Click on over to Chic Galleria to see an interview of Douglas Barnes by Bryna Jones.

Workshop: Make Compost in 18 Days!

2010-07-04T22:03:00.010-04:00

Learn to make compost that is ready in just 18 days!

Fee: $10 per person or $12 for 2 (Refreshments and workshop notes provided.)

Time: July 10, 1 pm - 3 pm

Location: 231 Rusholme Rd., Toronto

Please register HERE: workshop@ecoedge.ca.

Please note that space is limited to 30 participants.

Selling Big Ag

2010-04-29T19:04:00.002-04:00

Selling Big Ag or: False Dichotomies Are Fun!
By Douglas Barnes

I just had the misfortune of reading Robert Paarlberg’s article Attention Whole Foods Shoppers in Foreign Policy in which he pooh-poohs what he thinks is “sustainable” agriculture. What is the prescription from this political scientist who sits on the Biotechnology Advisory Council to the CEO of Monsanto? Why, more industrial agriculture, of course! While I find many faults and outright falsehoods in the story, I shall reserve my critique to only the most egregious of errors in the piece to avoid making a book out of this.

First off, I suppose that I should praise Paarlberg for having the courage to so publicly demonstrate that he has no clue as to the meaning of sustainable. He makes the claim that

“[S]ustainable food” in the future must be organic, local, and slow. But guess what: Rural Africa already has such a system, and it doesn’t work. Few smallholder farmers in Africa use any synthetic chemicals, so their food is de facto organic.

For the benefit of the reader, I shall give that definition in a manner that is clear and concise and has a useable metric behind it: A system is sustainable if it can capture and store more energy over its lifetime than it consumes in its creation and maintenance. A system can be organic and still be unsustainable, and many are, especially when externalised costs are properly included in the calculations. As far as the modern farming he advocates goes, it is virtually always, if not always unsustainable.

Why is that important? It is important to realise that the word “sustainable” can also be traded for the word “survivable.” Modern conventional agriculture is wholly dependent on fossil fuels to exist. In fact, ten kilocalories of exosomatic energy – energy outside of human labour – are needed to provide a U.S. consumer with one kilocalorie of uncooked food energy.

Now, I fully admit that I am not an accountant, so take the following with a grain of salt. It seems to me that if a system relies on consuming over ten energy units of a finite energy resource to produce one energy unit of an item, that system is neither sustainable nor survivable in the long term. I say “over ten times” because when losses from cooking, soil and water degradation and the documented adverse health effects of the modern food system are factored in, the costs increase.

I have trouble with Paarlberg's the assertion that we have two choices for our future: The energy-intensive approach to farming in the so-called developed world, or traditional agricultural approaches. It is worth pointing out that many of these “traditional” approaches are the not-quite sustainable approaches developed in the temperate world and exported inappropriately to tropical, sub-tropical, arid and semi-arid regions of the world via colonialism.

While this does make arguing the case easier, it is a logical fallacy known as a false dichotomy. A false dichotomy is an argument that reduces an argument to just two options, ignoring all other options. In this case, it offers only labour-intensive approaches to farming or energy-intensive approaches. Totally ignored is a design-intensive approach to farming. More on this later.

Paarlberg writes of “bringing improved seeds and fertilizers to traditional farmers,” but what are these “improved seeds”? Many of them are genetically modified seeds that he has advocated elsewhere. These crops have never been tested for long term health effects on humans, although the amount of research finding harm to animals fed GMOs is increasing. This is to say nothing about the hubris of randomly jamming transgenes into crop DNA when the science of genetics is just reaching the point where we understand that we don’t really understand what a gene is. In other cases, it means promoting the spread genetically homogeneous seeds. Luckily, this project is not complete. If it were, we would not have the 100 or so varieties of wheat resistant to the strain of Puccinia graminis tritici that popped up in Uganda in 1999, more commonly known as Ug99 - a fungus that threatens world wheat supplies.

And then there are the synthetic fertilisers he wants to bring to “traditional farmers.” I’ve written about this before, so the question is, why does he want to destroy soil organic carbon content, particularly when that is so vital to soil fertility and the ability of soil to hold water?

Coming back to design-intensive approaches, let's look at Africa, since Paarlberg is so intent on focusing on it. No, agriculture there isn’t sustainable. There systems are bleeding energy on the whole. Consider the case of Striga hermonthica. S. hermonthica is a fascinating genus of plant that actually parasitizes other plants, tapping into their roots for nutrients and water. Now, the folks Paarlberg work for propose a solution: genetically modify your crop so that it resists herbicides that would kill Striga. But Striga is actually a useful plant, in that it is an indicator plant. When it starts to appear, it is saying, “Hey Bozo, stop farming the wrong way!” You see, Striga only survives in conditions with very low available nitrogen. So, if you are repeatedly farming corn, a nitrogen-demanding crop, and are in a region such as East Africa that is prone to Striga, you will have a problem if you don’t take soil health seriously.

So, the solution could be spend millions on research to develop a proprietary technology (i.e. GM crop) allowing plants to survive dousing with expensive and dangerous herbicides, ignoring the problem (neglect of soil health). Or the solution could be the one that has actually been put into practice: Treat soil fertility seriously by inter-cropping corn in an alley-cropping regime such as the Taungya system, inter-planting with nitrogen-fixing trees such as Leucaena that can also provide fodder, wood and fuel. The use of nitrogen-fixing plants, green manure and mulching are an effective way to address fertility without relying heavily or solely on animal manure, which Paarlberg asserts organic agriculture is dependent upon. Additionally, human wastes can be composted and returned to the land. This closes the fertility loop while tackling the water-borne disease problem so prevalent in Africa. Unfortunately, the latter, sustainable approach does not make money for industrial agribusiness.

Paarlberg also writes of “learning to appreciate the modern, science-intensive, and highly capitalized agricultural systems we’ve developed in the West.” Well, no one who knows me or has read my articles in this blog would accuse me of being unappreciative of science, but it is true that I do not appreciate Western agriculture. Why would I appreciate a system that has ruined more soil more quickly than at any time in history, reduced nutrition (more on this later), contaminated groundwater and riparian systems, ruined farming as a way of life, while subjecting an unwilling population to ongoing experimentation that may be making them infertile, among other things (i.e. GM crops)? All for a system that is so inefficient that it requires 10 units of external energy (not counting human labour) to produce one unit of food energy and cannot survive without massive public subsidy? No thanks. You can keep that system.

He also asserts that organic has been found to be no more nutritious than conventionally grown produce and provides two sources to back him. I’ll provide two of my own. The first is a study by chemist Donald R. Davis published last year in HortScience in which it was found that

Recent studies of historical nutrient content data for fruits and vegetables spanning 50 to 70 years show apparent median declines of 5% to 40% or more in minerals, vitamins, and protein in groups of foods, especially in vegetables.

The second study was also released last year by the UK’s Food Standards Agency. The study omitted numerous studies showing higher nutrition in organically grown food and made the claim that there are “no important differences in the nutrition content , or any additional health benefits, of organic food when compared with conventionally produced food.” So, why am I citing this as support for my argument? Because despite the FSA’s characterisation of the study, the study found that organic produce had 53.6% more beta-carotene, 38.4% flavonoids, 13.2% more phenolic compounds, 12.7% more protein, 11.3% more zinc, 10.5% more sulphur, 8.7% more sodium, 8.3% more copper, 7.1% more magnesium, 6% more phosphorus, and 2.5% more potassium. It sure would help us to form a reasonable opinion about the issue, if the people presenting the evidence were even remotely honest. But I digress.

Without a shred of evidence, he makes the claim that "Organic field crops also have lower yields per acre." Well, the Rodale trials don't square with that claim very wall. They found that

After a transition period of about four years, crops grown under organic systems yield as well as and sometimes better than crops grown under the conventional system. Moreover, organic systems can out-produce the conventional system in years of less-than-optimal growing conditions such as drought. [The Rodale Institute Farming Systems Trial: The First 15 Years, The Rodale Institute, Kutztown, 1999]

As mentioned, Paarlberg assumes that the only way to address soil fertility is through animal manure, which would require more forests to be cut down in order to provide for the animals, saying “Mass deforestation probably isn’t what organic advocates intend.” Actually, increased trees cover through agroforestry is what I intend, though I don’t speak for organic agriculture.

Our simple monoculture approach to production is a product of simple thinking. It’s time to stop burning those calories on either back-breaking labour or on producing synthetics and the machines to spread them around, and start spending it on brain power as outlined in the approach to Striga above.

The Winter That Was

2010-04-27T17:27:00.003-04:00

The Winter That Was
By Douglas Barnes

We had been bizarre winter here in Ontario, Canada. For most of Canada, the winter was rather anemic. While it did ease the home construction I did over the winter, it also threw us for a loop. So, imagine my surprise when renowned scholars such as real estate magnate Donald Trump made comments like this one: ""With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore."

The coldest winter ever recorded? Really? Well, the popular myth goes that the very wealthy are very wealthy because they are very intelligent and very knowledgeable. But let's have a look at what happened this winter nonetheless.

The combined global average of land and sea temperatures for December, 2009 made it the eight warmest winter on record; and the month came in 0.49°C above the average for the 20th century. The following image shows the temperature anomalies for December. The more an area was below the average, the larger a blue dot it has. The higher above the normal, the larger the red dot it has. The map is very red.What was really bizarre was the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic taking a detour and heading towards Western Greenland instead of Europe. I would suspect that this under-reported phenomenon contributed to the cooling from the arctic oscillation that kept Europe and the eastern seaboard of the U.S. so chilly this year.

This phenomenon continued more or less right through the winter as can be seen in the Mercator reports over the winter.

The story for January was a little different. Whereas 2009 had the eighth warmest December on record, 2010 had the fourth warmest January on record with temperatures 0.60°C above the 20th century average for combined land and sea temperatures. The picture for January looks like this:
Yes, yes. But what about February when it was so cold in the eastern U.S. and when Trump made his comments?

Well, I have to admit, there is a gotcha. It was only the sixth warmest February on record with the combined land and sea temperatures 0.60°C above the 20th century average. Incidentally, the sea temperatures for December, 2009 through February, 2010 were the second warmest on record at 0.54°C above the 20th century average. The picture for February looks like this:

As for March, this year was the 34th year in a row where March was above the 20th century average. The combined average of land and sea temperatures were 0.77°C above normal making it the warmest March on record ever. March looked like this:

So what happened? Donald Trump and too many pundits were wrong? How can that be? Simply put, they made the shockingly common error of assuming that where they happened to live was the entire world when, in fact, it is only a tiny corner of the world.

The figures for April aren't out yet, though I know that the region I live in is a full month ahead of where it was last year and will be showing up as a large red dot on the map when it is released. Stay tuned...

References

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global&year=2009&month=12&submitted=Get+Report

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global&year=2010&month=1&submitted=Get+Report

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global&year=2010&month=2&submitted=Get+Report

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global&year=2010&month=3&submitted=Get+Report

Introduction to Permaculture: Urban Areas

2010-04-03T23:34:00.048-04:00

The following is a write-up of a seminar in Toronto on April, 1st, 2010.

I am going to give you an outline of what permaculture is, how permaculture design is done and how it can be applied to urban environments. In order to explain the design process, I am going to be mentioning a number of things that might appear to have no relevance to the urban situation. I do this to explain the principles of permaculture design and hopefully give you a core understanding of how and why I make the suggestions I do.

Before I start jumping into things, I think it’s important to give some definitions. First and most importantly is defining permaculture. The name permaculture was coined by combining permanent and agriculture and permanent and culture. Sustainability was not a buzz word back in the 70s when permaculture was developed. Simply put, permaculture is system for designing sustainable human environments. That means meeting people’s needs for food, water, shelter, energy, waste control and less tangible needs such as community structure and services. It’s also environmentally specific, so the systems I have designed on my land are different from the ones I have designed in semi-arid India, temperate Japan or temperate and sub-tropical Australia or the proposals for a project in tropical Uganda later this year.

This definition of permaculture requires another definition and that is the meaning of sustainable. The word has very seldom been given a clear definition and, as a result, has increasingly been co-opted as a marketing term. Looking to see how the word is misused, I discovered a few years back that a large and infamous agro-chemical company was selling its glyphosate herbicide as a way of “creating sustainable pastures.”

Here’s the thing about their product:

It’s toxic to amphibians.

It kills Rhizobium bacteria, which are the bacteria living symbiotically with legumes that are responsible for fixing atmospheric nitrogen. So, if you plant GM soy in the hopes of boosting soil nitrogen and cutting weeds with the glyphosate, you are unknowingly reducing the nitrogen-fixing capacity of the soy.

It kills mycorrhizal fungi, which are important for soil health. Mycorrhizal fungi help plants attain vital minerals like calcium, phosphorus and magnesium. They help supply water to plants in drought periods. They allow different plants of different species connect together to exchange nutrients and help fight disease and pest attack. Killing them off is very detrimental to soil fertility.

It is claimed by advocates of the chemical that it cannot leach into water systems because it bonds with soil particles. It does, however get into water systems and, when it does, it is toxic to fish.

While not directly toxic to birds, the ecosystem as a whole is affected, reducing local bird populations. This isn’t speculation, this has been observed. (Mention passenger pigeon – 3 billion kg phosphorus a year, 57 billion kg of guano.)

In humans, it has been found to cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Clearly, it is not “sustainable” if the word “sustainable” is to have any real meaning. And without a clear definition, the only time we will ever truly know the answer to whether something is sustainable or not is when it isn’t sustainable.

Here’s the definition: A system is sustainable if over its lifetime it produces or stores more energy than it consumers in its creation, operation and maintenance. Think of a bank account as an analogy. How long can you continue your lifestyle if you are continually spending more money than you earn? Sooner or later, that lifestyle will come to an end.

If you run your civilisation this way – spending energy than you store – it will most definitely collapse eventually. The example in this slide is Rapa Nui, but there have been numerous other examples throughout history. Were Easter Island in its original state, it would be covered by subtropical forests.

I would like to point out a little snag with this definition, however. Consider the embodied energy in an artist’s canvas. Finding figures for embodied energy is difficult, but let us say for the of argument that the embodied energy in the canvas – the energy involved in growing the hemp, processing it, weaving it, and its transportation costs, energy costs in the wood, in the metal staples holding the splined canvas together, the energy in the paint, and the energy costs of the artist painting a picture comes out to the equivalent of 10 litres of gasoline. Is the Mona Lisa worth just 10 litres of gasoline? How about 100 litres? Could you imagine any situation where you might trade the Mona Lisa for 100 litres of petrol? For 10 litres? Perhaps.

As you might imagine, accounting for the energy costs of something like a home or a dam could become very complex. What if it is a great design that requires virgin forest to be cleared to create it? What if it will wipe out the habitat of an endangered species? I think there is a way out of this problem.

Consider as an analogy the example of the Greek Korous purchased by the Getty Museum when the directors there wanted to establish it as a world-class museum. All the scientific tests said the remarkably intact korous was genuine. Yet immediately upon seeing the piece, experts proclaimed it a fake and advised the Getty not to purchase it. Stating exactly why it was a fake was difficult. It seems little things like incorrect hand size were registering on the unconscious mind of the experts, but they spotted the fake nonetheless.

I believe that with a little practice, we can all do with sustainability what the art experts did with the korous, if we keep a conservation mindset and apply rigorous honesty.

Now, I’d like to spend just a few minutes on what’s happening in the world and where we are going. I am sure everyone is well aware of where our climate is headed and the accompanying acidification and pollution that go along with it. The climate is an incredibly complex thing and exact prediction is very difficult. One thing to realise is that scientists are, on the whole, very careful about what they say and certainly about what they predict. As such, IPCC predictions sound somewhat manageable. These predictions, however, do not take into account knock-on effects like methane releases from arctic thawing, methane being 22 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. This would lead to a feedback of increased warming causing more melting of ice, meaning less albedo, in turn meaning more warming, meaning plant die-off, meaning more carbon dioxide being released, meaning more warming, meaning ocean die off, meaning more CO₂ released, meaning more warming, and along the way, more erratic weather meaning more crop failures.

In the unlikely event that climate change should turn out to be no big deal, we nevertheless face an extremely serious problem due to soil erosion and degradation. Soil erosion is off most people’s radar because it is not a very sexy threat. Roland Emmerich has not and will not make a movie about the world going to pot because of top soil washing away. Yet, not single civilisation that has collapsed has not had loss of soil as a major contributing factor in their collapse. The difference between soil loss today and historical losses that have led to collapse is that we are now doing in the space of a few years what used to take many centuries to achieve. Pivot irrigation in arid and semi-arid regions can make land unusable in just 3 years time, after which they just more on to a new patch of land. This is one of the costs of the technological advancement of the mechanization of agriculture.

Hand-in-hand with soil loss is deforestation. One of the things that forests do is build and maintain fertile soils. For reasons that I don’t have time to go into, they might also be thought of as rain makers.

Pollution, which is really an issue of either unused excess resources or using the kind of resources that degrade other resources, is also a major issue. Climate change is one example of this, but there are other issues such as long term damage of soil and aquatic systems from persistent pollutants such as dioxins. Damage from environmental estrogens is another issue; and even more serious is the death toll in the millions worldwide from air pollution – particulate matter (deaths mainly from cardiovascular disease and lung diseases).

Now this sounds really horrible, and while it is, there is reason to take heart. Nature is very resilient. It takes tremendous effort and a fair bit of time on the whole to damage it. But it you pattern your actions in harmony with nature, the response is immediate and positive.

I could mention the decline of fossil fuels. While this does present a challenge considering that we have designed our food systems to be totally reliant on fossil fuels, it is ultimately more of a solution than a problem. Yes, right now we rely on natural gas to synthesize nitrogenous fertilisers; and we rely on diesel and gasoline to produce and transport that food, and to some extent we rely on the energy from coal to process that food. But there is nothing I can think of that would be more disastrous to human civilisation than the discovery of some inexpensive, plentiful replacement for fossil fuels, be it renewable or not. The issue is the overabundance of energy, not its non-renewability, which will become apparent in a few minutes when we look at design. Look at the damage we have already caused due to easy access to energy. Having a fresh supply in a new form is not going to end this destruction.

For a mega city like Toronto, this leaves a significant challenge. In terms of primary production, cities consume and contribute next to nothing. In some cases, like Tokyo where I lived for over a decade, there is simply no future. The nation of Japan did have a sustainable population at 30 million people but they now have that many in an area a little larger than the size of Algonquin Park. Quite simply, that is a temporary arrangement. They can have a go at growing on every rooftop and balcony in the city, but in the end, the population density is too high to support sustainably. Already the majority of the calories the Japanese consume come from imports and the percentage of calories from food actually produced from within Tokyo itself is negligible.

Toronto has enough unused land within the city to meet a large proportion of its needs. Not all this land is immediately usable, mind you. Lead contamination, for example, is a serious problem in many areas of the city and all soil needs to be tested before being used. Rehabilitation is possible, however.

Meeting energy requirements for heating is another challenge; and, due to Toronto’s odd layout, this will be difficult. More on this later.

There are three approaches that we open to take:

The first is to do nothing. Continue to operate with the energy-intensive regime to meet our material and immaterial needs. But with 10 calories on average being spent to produce one calorie of food, this regime will come to an end sooner or later.

The second approach is a return to labour-intensive traditional approaches. Some approaches were more laborious than others. Rice growing, for instance, is nearly nonstop work when done the traditional way. Other approaches to meeting needs were not always that bad, but still pretty hard work for what usually amounted to a nutritionally meagre diet.

The third approach is the design-intensive approach. Whereas the first relies on letting machinery carry out the brute work, energy in other words; and the second involved using human and animal labour to meet human needs, the design-intensive approach is knowledge and creativity intensive.

Permaculture is a design intensive approach. And different from other systems of design, it is guided by an ethical code, namely

Care of the Earth

Care of its people

And return of the surplus to meet the needs of the Earth and the people.

We may be trying to become sustainable, but even following the ethics, I feel there is a serious piece of the puzzle missing.

What are we trying to do here? This is a serious question. In fact, it is the most serious question one can ask. I believe that we face all the problems I mentioned earlier because we are stumbling along, half-conscious without a real understanding of what it is we are doing. Just what is the goal of our society, or of the global society as a whole?

Is the goal long term survivability, otherwise known as sustainability? Not by any stretch of the imagination. We are living well beyond our means with the dream that some wondrous technology will come and solve this problem for us. There is no better recipe for collapse of civilization than that. Looking empirically, if survivability is our goal, we as a species are either grossly incompetent or incredibly stupid.

Is the aim of our society personal or community happiness? Again, no. We have data consistently showing that while personal wealth has, on the whole, increased, happiness has decreased. As Lord Turner, former head of the Confederation of British Industry recently pointed out, “All the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness.” Communities, too, are becoming less integrated and interdependent than they once were. This is not a good outcome for a tribal species.

Is the aim to maximize human potential? No. The concern of our society is not to get as many people as possible to experience the maximum personal growth possible. National funding on mental health and education are enough to indicate that this is not a serious aim.

Is the aim simply to meet material needs for clean, healthy food, clean water, clean air, shelter and energy for warmth and cooking? The food we eat holds less nutritional value now that we’ve industrialized food production. Furthermore, biocide use contaminates not only the food, but more importantly and more severely the farmers and environment that produced it. There is no clean air unpolluted by man-made chemicals anywhere on Earth. There is no clean, uncontaminated water left, save for what is available in glaciers. Shelter is available, to some at least. Looking at homeless populations, it appears that shelter is available, provided you are both mentally fit and gainfully employed or with sufficient financial reserves to provide you with a roof over your head. And energy to stay warm and cook food? The same conditions seem to apply as for shelter. So, no, this is not the aim of the current system. If it were a serious concern, it would meet these needs better, assuming again that we are not all outlandishly incompetent.

Looking at the outcomes, it appears as though the aim of the current system is to accrue and secure financial power to those clever enough, educated enough, lucky enough and/or devious enough to get it and hold on to it. Again, I base this on observation, not ideology. I am not making an argument for or against markets here, I am only looking at outcomes. I know of situations where markets work brilliantly and others where they fail miserably. I am only interested in reality, not ideology, because reality always gets the last punch.

So now that we consciously know what it is we are actually doing on the whole – not trying to be happy, not trying to improve ourselves, not trying to be healthy, not trying to survive as a species, but rather trying to have power over others – we can ask if we want to do this or do something different.

I can’t stress enough how important this is. I can list a whole bunch of tricks and techniques to capture energy or produce food; but without having a coherent goal, it’s not going to change much of anything.

I mentioned at the start that permaculture is about meeting human needs, both tangible and intangible. Looking at this slide which I have based heavily on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we can go through point by point and ask how well the status quo system is doing at meeting those needs. Some are met, others are not. Almost none are met sustainably, which is where permaculture comes in.

Let’s now look at the design process.

The kernel of sustainable design is designing action around energy, not energy around action. Most action today is planned and executed with the energy it requires being just an afterthought. A person builds a new house, for instance, and then figures on heating it after they have settled on a design. The usual option is a gas furnace thrown in to keep things warm in the winter and an air conditioning system to keep the home cool in the summer. Energy is an afterthought here. The source of that energy is almost never considered.

Contrast that with my home. It has a passive solar design – windows facing the sun to let the 957 Watt hours per m² available to us from sunlight into our home where it is stored in the concrete floor to slowly radiate into the home throughout the day. A masonry stove is the backup heat source. This very efficient stove channels the hot flue gases though a large brick mass that stores the heat and lets it out slowly. The windows are designed to allow heat to escape in summer. There is no air conditioning; and after over ten years in stifling Tokyo and working in 45°C+ heat on a permaculture project in India last year, I really can’t imagine me needing air conditioning. This is Canada after all.

Another strategy permaculture uses to apply this approach of designing action around available energy is in the creation of zones of activity. It is basically placing elements of the system that are frequently used closer to the home (or centre of activity) and ones less frequently used farther away. As straightforward as this sounds, it is not often applied. Nearly every single garden I have seen in Canada is placed not only far from the kitchen where the food it produces will be used, but in the farthest end of the yard as though a garden is some undesirable thing that you want as far away from you as possible.

On a given site, there are a number of resources and energies that flow through the site that are available to us until they ultimately are lost off site. They arrive to us from a source and are lost to us in a sink.

We want to slow down the path of these resources from the source to the sink, making them available to us for as long as possible.

As one example, here is a system in Australia I helped consult on with a company there called Permaculture Solutions:

In this case, not only is the flow of water slowed as it moves from the top of the system to the bottom, nutrient flow is slowed as well. The fertility from the animals flows from the top, helps to fertilize trees, and helps grow reeds at the bottom of the site which are then cut and physically transported to the top of the site.

We can look at this as assigning each element in the system multiple duties. This builds redundancy into the system, making it more resilient. For nonliving systems, it conserves resources to assign multiple duties to each element. For example, the more duties we give water, the more effectively we can use water. (Don’t include grease filters in your greywater systems.)

Elements in the system do not act in isolation, they are linked together. The goal is to make the total system as self-regulating as possible. This will save human or mechanical labour.

In the chicken-heated greenhouse, chickens are given shelter and heat from the greenhouse and nutrients from the plants. The plants supplement the chickens’ diet and are fed by the chicken manure. The greenhouse provides both of them with water with its water catchment system. Putting complimentary systems together saves energy.

Now, you will notice in these examples that what might otherwise be considered a waste product is cycled into another process. What would happen, though, if the product from one process went unused? Well, then it would be a form of pollution. A cattle farm on a holistic management system can produce high quality meat, improve pastures and be carbon neutral or even sequester carbon. But what of the case of shed-raised animals? Industrially produced feed, usually in the form of grains, which is not part of the natural diet of cattle, makes them farty, meaning more methane produced. The dung then collects, releasing both carbon and nitrogen into the air, contributing to a global climate problem and a local stench problem. It can also contaminate water systems, putting lives at risk. The problem here is an excellent resource, cattle manure, is in excess supply. This gives us a definition: pollution, then, is the situation in which an unused resource is in excess supply.

We have this problem now with energy, as I alluded to earlier. Supply a system with too little energy and it will struggle and possibly die. Supply it with too much and chaos will ensue. Industrial production systems have too much energy and are thus leading to demented results. I also assert that the same holds true for monetary wealth. It may be a little bit of a philosophical journey, but consider what happens to the individual who suffers from wealth pollution.

Heating

Now that we have an understanding of what permaculture is and how the design process works, let’s look at addressing some specific problems, starting with heating. In a cold climate, up to 20% of the economy can be devoted to keeping warm. Conservation is the first issue to address.

For home owners, a home energy audit is a good place to start. The Ontario Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure will help pay for an energy audit. If you get one and follow the recommendations and can demonstrate that you lowered your energy consumption, the Ontario government will reimburse you up to $150 towards the cost of the audit. The Ministry’s website explains the program and how you can receive up to $10,000 in rebates for improvements to energy efficiency (perhaps unavailable now after the recent announcement from the fed). The improvements boil down to bringing insulation up to par, fixing drafts and putting in a more efficient heat source, that kind of thing. But there are other approaches to take that are effective as well.

All my life I have been cursed with energy efficient homes. During my wife’s first winter in Canada, we rented an insulated cottage in Muskoka. With temperatures dropping down to -27°C, the insulation didn’t really suffice. One problem was, and I am not making this up, the homemade double pane windows it had, not to mention the glass-on-glass sliding windows. I knew it would be well worth it to create window plugs the help hold the heat in during the day. These were simply 1-inch sheets of Styrofoam cut to fit the window sill and surrounded with foam weather stripping tape to make a good seal. Good windows, such as the ones pictured only have an R-value of around R-4. Putting the plugs in moves you to about R-8 or 9, and if you use the denser R-10 foam, you would get closer to around R-12. I would put them at sunset each day and I knew they worked because when I took them out in the morning, the inside pane of glass would always be covered in frost – something that would not happen without the plugs. This was a temporary set up, but I will be using a decorated version of the same thing in the home I am currently building.

If these plugs are not suitable, you can make windows a little more efficient with floor-length drapes. A fablic “sausage can be placed on either side of the drapes and a piece of cardboard over the top of the rail to fill in the space between the drapes and the wall. Better still is a piece of foam rubber. It works best if the curtains are sealed to the wall at the sides – either tacked or velcroed.

A crash course in passive solar retrofitting

There are 3 types of heat available to us for heating: Convective Heat; Conductive Heat, and Radiant Heat.

Conductive heat is the sort of heat that comes from a hair drier or a forced-air furnace. It feels nice but is the least efficient way to heat. Conductive heat is the kind of heat that one gets from direct contact with a hot object, such as a fry pan or sitting right against a masonry stove. This is the most efficient form of heating but it is not always too practical. Radiant heat is the sort of heat that you feel coming from a fire or warm object at a distance. It is radiant heat that we utilise in passive solar design.

As I mentioned earlier, on a clear day, there are 957 Watt hours per m² available from the sun. Since this amount of heat is so significant and is free, we should take full advantage of it. Passive solar works by allowing light into a building where it heats up objects inside.

To make passive solar effective, one needs a large, dense mass to store the heat and slowly radiate that heat out. Otherwise the heating effect only lasts while the sun is directly shining into the home. This is usually done by either having the home built on an insulated concrete pad or having a brick wall inside the home. If you don’t have either of those, such as is usually the case for people living in apartments or condos, you can build a variation of the trombe wall.

A trombe wall is simple a dense wall (usually concrete or brick) with a window over it. I realise that it is not very likely that people are going to go home and build a brick wall over their windows. Consider this retrofit instead:

If you build a frame to hold stacked bottles, the bottles can be filled with water, which will act as a thermal mass to hold the heat. As dark colours heat up better, purple wine bottles work well, plus you get to drink a lot of wine to make the wall.

Another approach is a thermal siphon. There are companies that make these ready to install, though I recall that they are a little pricey. I know someone who has one and they work very well while the sun is striking them.

If you are comfortable building yourself, you could make a thermal siphon rather cheaply. If you built it like a box, it would be installed on a roof and have a fan to force air through it. There is a product in Australia that is a version of this called the Sun Lizard.

Now here I should mention a real problem facing Toronto. This image shows with greatest challenge for passive solar retrofitting: dense housing on streets laid out north to south. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the city founders chose to design their city to minimise solar gain as one would in a desert community, but they did. Needless to say, this makes design very difficult.

The use of reflectors can maximise the amount to solar gain by harvesting sunlight that would otherwise be lost. Using stainless steel, mirror or Mylar, sunlight can be directed into either an east or west window and, if the architecture allows, a north window. The gain is significant enough that it is well worth it to take advantage of if possible.

Here is an example of a system I designed for a west-end home. It was the north-end of a duplex and the only scrap of sunlight I had to work with was off of the northeast corner facing the backyard. There was a grape trellis already, so the reflector could easily be mounted on it.

Energy

If you are a home owner and your site is suitable, you can take advantage of Ontario’s Green Energy Act. With it, the Ontario government will give you a 20-year contract to buy power you generate, with the best price paid being 80.2 cents per kWh, which is for solar power. Switch is a third party non-profit that will consult with those interested in taking advantage of this program. Their site is www.switchontario.ca.

As I mentioned earlier, the end of fossil fuels is in sight. A permaculture classmate of mine in Australia, Darren Doherty, thinks we are headed for a charcoal economy. This may be the case, though we would not be able to and should not consume energy at the rate we currently do. Biomass through coppice crop is a possibility, but if it is done in an industrial way, it is would just be yet another harmful activity. The Swedes have coppice cants of willow that they use to mop up excess nitrogen in sewage treatment plants and harvest them with modified combines. While it is a step in the right direction, it has its problems.

Green roofs and green walls are all the rage. They are very effective at reducing rooftop temperatures in summer and contribute to insulation, helping to reduce heating costs in winter. Aesthetically, I find them much nicer than looking at concrete. The federal government used to have a very good incentive program to encourage the retrofitting buildings, but I am not sure if this program is still in effect. As far as green walls go, there are numerous approaches one can take as you see here. It’s also possible to build a trellis and send climbing vines across them.

Food

If you are going to be doing any gardening other than growing in containers with potting soil, you should have the soil tested first as heavy metal contamination can be a serious problem in some parts of the city. Here are some labs that can do testing:

A&L Canada Laboratories http://www.alcanada.com/

Agri-Food Laboratories http://www.agtest.com/

Soil and Nutrient Laboratory and the UoG http://www.uoguelph.ca/labserv/units/soil-nutrient/

Tests will be in the neighbourhood of $10 to $20.

When it comes to gardening, the first step is assessing the site. As I already mentioned, sunlight is a problem in Toronto and it is the first thing to consider. If you get 6 or more hours of sun, you can grow plants requiring “full sun.” If you get a minimum of 3 hours sun, you have “partial sun.” Remember that reflectors can help to increase access to sunlight and can be used in a garden.

The next difficulty to consider is wind. This can be a real problem for people growing on balconies or on rooftops. If may be necessary to provide a windbreak to protect plants.

Space is at a premium, so gardening needs to make the best use of space. If you have lawn space, you can densely plant as shown. There is no reason to grow things in rows. Rows are designed to facilitate machinery and tools. You don’t need to limit your growing area by making rows.

Make sure your site has easy access and workable pathways that are at least 40 cm wide.

You can make use of vertical space and even balcony ceilings.

Whether growing in containers or on reclaimed lawn space, the following images give an idea of mulching and soil-building:

See Creating the Permaculture Balcony Garden for more information on growing in small spaces.

If you have about 40 square feet of indoor or greenhouse space to work with, aquaponics might be an option. Simply put, aquaponics are a mix of hydroponic plant production and aquaculture to produce fish. Hydroponics on its own can be somewhat tricky, but adding fish makes the system function more like an ecosystem. This results in a more self-regulating system. Systems that are smaller than 1000 litres are prone to sudden fluctuations in nitrogen levels that can lead to dead fish. Better to stick with larger systems.

Greywater and Rainwater

It is odd that the approach cities take to rain – a vital resource – is to shunt it as quickly as possible to a disposal site. Cities are full of hard, impervious surfaces; and water is carried out in storm drains as quickly as possible. If one were designing a city from scratch, the smart thing to do would be to apply the principle of slowing the flow of resources through a site by catching as much as possible.

You might have access to water off of hard surfaces such as roofs or pavement that can be captured and used for irrigation.

Greywater is another option for irrigation. In the time we have I can only scrape the surface, however. Greywater is any source of used household water, excluding that which comes toilets. Water from wash basins, kitchen sinks, baths and washing machines are all greywater. They can assist in growing trees or vegetable crops, but not root crops.

Intangible Structures

Cooperative action can help facilitate sustainable projects. Things like co-housing require a well-mapped, shared vision among the group – one of the reasons they so often fail. Establishing communities garden space, however, is a simpler matter. Then there are actions like Permablitzes. The permablitz is something started by my friend and colleague Dam Palmer and his company Permaculture Solutions in Melbourne. A permablitz is an event whereby a designer gets together with a large group of people and implements a permaculture garden in one day. Of course the planning takes more time than that, but the physical work is done all in one shot.

For a complete permaculture reworking of society, alternative structures need to be set up. This may seem like a pipe dream in Toronto, but the Australians are making headway in some places towards making this a reality. In the third world, taking this sort of approach can make a huge difference as there is no government structure serving the people to speak of.

Getting the Gist of Permaculture

2010-03-31T15:20:00.002-04:00

If you are just running into permaculture or are attending my upcoming seminar (fully booked, sorry) and are wondering just what this permaculture thing is anyway, the following links might help out:

What is permaculture?

What does "sustainable" mean?

What are the ethics of permaculture?

What are you trying to achieve with permaculture?

Show me what you mean.

Show me another example.

Be sure to check out some of the links in the right hand menu to see some of our friend's takes on permaculture, too!

Composting Workshop in Toronto, Feb. 15

2010-02-09T10:36:00.004-05:00

On Monday, February 15th, 2010, I will be running a composting workshop in Toronto, Ontario. To find out about 18-day composting and vermicomposting (using worms to compost), come out the the 3rd annual La Famille festival. Tickets for the event are only $12 or $30 for a 3-adult family pass. For more infomation see Tovaco Productions.

These guides may help if you cannot attend:
18-Day Compost
Worm Composting

2010-01-25T17:33:00.002-05:00

Please see my recent article in Interesting Times Magazine, page 8.

Cheers all!

Kafrin Site Video

2009-11-18T19:31:00.003-05:00

I have posted a few articles on Geoff Lawton's work in Jordon. Here is a new video, updating the status of the site.

Greening the Desert II: Greening the Middle East from Craig Mackintosh on Vimeo.

Interview

2009-08-30T10:54:00.005-04:00

I was interviewed by Bob Ewing of Digital Journal. The interview can be found here.

Compost in 18 Days

2009-08-04T17:29:00.015-04:00

Compost in 18 Days: The Berkley Method
By Douglas Barnes

We all know that compost is an excellent fertilizer for plants. It is also a sensible way to deal with organic wastes. In my climate, one can construct compost bins and dump his or her organic material in and, after two years time, finished compost is ready to go. Seriously, two years? I don’t need compost in two years, I need compost this year – this month! And if I keep throwing crud onto my compost pile for two years, it will be huge! Furthermore, I have to start new piles to let the old piles mature so that I am not digging through garbage to get down to my compost at the bottom. There has to be a better way. There is. When in doubt, let nature help out.

Image by Scott A. Meister

Lovely things bacteria. Different species of them have adapted to survive in almost any environment on earth. Some can even exist in temperatures that would burn your skin in seconds. In fact, some can generate that heat themselves. Enter into our story thermophilic bacteria. These little darlings seem to be ubiquitous, waiting for the right environment to present itself so that they can have their own little barbeque. If enough of their food is served to them in the right proportions with the right amount of water and just a touch of heat to start them off, they will hold their own little party and really get things cooking, literally.

So you’ve guessed by now that we are going to partner with these little bacteria to create our compost. Well they need to eat, so here’s the composting rule: If it has lived, it can live again. Forget what other composting guides have told you about no weeds and no meat, both those are fine. We are just concerned with carbon to nitrogen ratios. Thermophilic bacteria like a diet that has 25 to 30 parts of carbon for one part nitrogen (i.e. ratios of 25:1 to 30:1 carbon to nitrogen). Now, I don’t want you to get the impression that you need to go out and buy scales and weigh your garbage. It’s not like bacteria are as fussy eaters as cats. As long as you know basically what is carbon-rich and what is nitrogen-rich, you can make composting more of an art than a science. But here are some carbon-to-nitrogen ratios to get you started:

Again, you don’t need a scale. What you should take out of this is dry, brown things are high in carbon. Wet things (that get stinky easily) are high in nitrogen. Things that come out of your kitchen are going to be high in nitrogen. Dry plant scraps are going to be high in carbon. For most people, the hard part is going to be supplying the carbon, not the nitrogen. You might even need to hunt for someone else’s carbon-rich waste to get it. Your pile will basically be 2/3 carbon-rich material and 1/3 nitrogen rich material. A word of caution, though: If you use sawdust, make sure it is not from pressure treated lumber. Pressure treated lumber is impregnated with chromated copper arsenate, and unless your goal is cancer and cadmium poisoning leading to osteomalacia, you must avoid it at all costs. It is dangerous stuff.

When I was a boy, I was not too good at cutting meat, particularly steak. I would pin the steak down and pry on it with my fork. The result all too often was that the steak would fly across the table and hit my older brother who frowned on that sort of thing. To avoid this, I would pick up the edge of the steak with my fork, bend down to my plate and chew on it. My mother frowned on this. She put a stop to this by cutting my steaks into small pieces for me. Problem solved. Well, you need to do the same thing for your thermophilic bacteria. No, chucks of compost will not fly out of the compost pile and hit someone’s older brother if you don’t, but your pile will compost much better if you do. By chopping things up finely – ideally to pieces 1 cm long or less – you will be creating more surface area. More surface area means more area for more bacteria to munch away on the material in the compost pile. A small garden shredder can help you here. I have seen hand-powered choppers (a crank with a circular blade attached) in developing countries, but sadly I have not found such useful, human-powered choppers in Canada. If you like, you can throw in some larger, nitrogen-rich items once the pile has warmed up. The largest I’ve heard of was a roadkill rock wallaby. I was told that it melted away into nothingness inside the pile in about 6 days with only a shoulder blade remaining.

Mix up your material – a pitchfork can really help you here. Add water it as you go until you can just squeeze a single drop from a handful of material. This is just the right amount of water for the bacteria to do their thing. Also, to get the thermophilic reaction going, there needs to be enough material for a sort of “critical mass” to occur. This will occur when piles are 1 cubic metre or larger. What this means in practice is a pile that is about shoulder height.

With the mixing done and the watering right, set a tarp over the pile and leave it 4 days. (The tarp is so that neither rain nor evaporation messes up your water content.) On the 4th day, turn the pile with a pitchfork. Just put the top and sides in a pile next to the current pile and put what’s left of the old pile on top, checking to make sure the water content is right (by squeezing the material) as you go. Now the pile will essentially be inside-out. Once you rake the last bits of the old pile onto the new pile, it’s ready to cover up with the tarp. Have a beer if you like.

A pile near completion. Image by Scott A. Meister.

On the sixth day, take the tarp off and stick your arm in the pile. If everything is going correctly, you will instantly pull your arm out, cursing my name. If the pile is composting properly, it should be around 70^oC inside – literally hot enough to cook with. This is why it is ok to put weeds in. Any weed seeds will be cooked to the point that they are not viable (if they aren’t just melted away in the compost). Turn the pile again checking the water content as you go. Sorry about burning your arm. Have a beer, you deserve it.

After day 6, turn the pile every 2 days, checking the water content as you go and putting the tarp back over the top each time. After about 18 days, you will have finished compost. If things are a little cooler where you are, it may take longer. If they are hot, you might match the best time I’ve heard, which is 11 days.

Troubleshooting

Things don’t always go according to plan. Here’s what to do if they don’t:

On day 6, you grit your teeth, stick your arm in the pile and find it is not hot. Is the pile big enough? One cubic metre is really big. If it’s not really big, make it bigger. If it is big enough, is it too wet? If it is, spread the material out and let it dry a bit. Is it big enough and not too wet and not too dry? Then there is not enough nitrogen.

Inside the pile is there a white powdery substance? If so, there is too much nitrogen, Add carbon, check the water content and cover the pile with a tarp.

Does it smell bad? Good compost piles don’t smell bad. If it smells foul, add more carbon.

Adding compost into design

If you live in frosty climates like I do, composting like this is limited to the warm seasons. However, if you have a greenhouse and are willing to sacrifice some space for a pile, you can compost inside the greenhouse. A nice little feedback effect occurs where the heat of the greenhouse allows the thermophilic bacteria to take hold, which, in turn, help to heat the greenhouse. There are people who heat their greenhouses with compost every winter. Similarly, larger piles that are not turned can heat water by running plastic plumbing pipe inside the tube. French innovator Jean Pain used to heat water to 60^oC in 40-tonne piles that would cook for 18 months.

Happy composting

To see composting in action, watch this video by Permaculture Reflections contributor Scott Meister. Scott and his wife run a permaculture bed & breakfast near Mt. Fuji, Japan and they've turned into a compost masters by composting the B&B’s kitchen waste over the years.

India: The Talupula Site, Part III

2009-07-27T19:54:00.015-04:00

India: The Talupula Site, Part III
By Douglas Barnes

Click here for Part I
Click here for Part II

At the invitation of the Green Tree Foundation, I visited the town of Talupula in the drought-stricken Anantapur District in Andhra Pradesh. Once a dry tropical region, biotic pressures have changed the region into an arid landscape. Because of this, the Green Tree Foundation had me come in to design and implement water harvesting systems suitable for their area in an effort to assist with their regreening activities.

Having selected a site for our project, I mapped the boundaries of the site with a GPS unit, and assessed the site’s features and vegetation. Being ferrosols, the soil structure was generally pretty uniform from the surface down to as much as 8 metres deep. And being gravelly, it was not appropriate for dam construction. This meant we would stick to swales for this site. The cost of digging the swales was well within the total allotted budget for the project, so we next looked into choosing the best machine for the job.

While digging out swales with a bulldozer with a tilting blade can be a convenient way of making them, the soils were so hard that they would have created a near impossible situation for the dozer to handle. Add to that the fact that the nearest dozer would be 6 to 8 hours away, requiring a transport fee, and that they would only come out for more than 100 hours work, bulldozers were not an option anyway. We were left with the choice of a backhoe or a small excavator. The excavator had speed going for it, but availability was a problem (we would have access to it only one day a week). It also required transport to the site (increasing its cost) and was 35% more expensive than the backhoe. The backhoe looked to be the best choice by far.

Designing the water-harvesting system, I did not want the site to be plagued by undersized swales. For one thing, I wanted them to be able to hold a lot of water before excess would go over their spillways. Also, if they did not have gradual enough walls, they would be more prone to erosion. Over time, swales gradually fill in, too. With larger swales, they would be around longer.

The designer enjoying a fresh mango under a tamarind tree that saved him from heat stroke many times. Photo by Gangi Setty of the Green Tree Foundation.

As I wanted the swales to be around 1 metre from the bottom of the trench to the top of the mound, I designed the trench to be about 4 metres across (a little smaller on two of the swales) and about 4 metres across on the mound. The site was nearly devoid of vegetation, so to be on the safe side, I assumed 55% runoff, meaning a coefficient of runoff of 0.55. To determine the spacing of the swales, I used the formula

Spacing = Holding capacity per m ÷ (Runoff coefficient X Maximum rainfall in one event)

The volume of the swales per metre was to be around 1.7 cubic metres. The maximum rain in one large event in the area is 10 cm. From this, I calculated the approximate spacing for the spaces at 30 metres. Using the GPS, I was able to find the level for the second swale, 30m down from the top, then the 3rd level, 30 m down from there.

We needed to map out the contour sites, so we tracked down some local engineers with a dumpy level. It turns out that the engineers owed a friend of the landowner a favour, so they came out to the site for free and mapped out the contour points for 4 swales on 3 different contours. While I planned on mapping the site myself, their proficiency had them finishing the mapping in half the time it would have taken me. They put us ahead of schedule by one day.

The map of the site showing the swales in red and the level-sill spillways in yellow.

The swales were excavated without too much incident with the total excavation taking about 3 and a half days to move 600 cubic metres of earth. We didn’t have the backhoe do everything. We simply had it dig trenches 3 metres wide and 50 cm deep, placing the excavated earth on the downhill side of the trench. The rest we were leaving to be groomed by hand. At one point, we hit rock that would have taken hours for the backhoe to chip through. In such cases, it is simplest to try to go around either uphill or downhill around the rock. We opted to go uphill. Apart from that one little snag, the rest of the excavation went as quickly as one could expect considering the soil was nearly as hard as concrete.

We hired a team of ten labourers to groom the site. Because the soils were so hard, however, we had the backhoe come back and chip off the uphill edge of the trenches it dug to make the process faster. The first day of grooming was gruelling work for the work team. They had to rely on picks to be able to chip through the earth to smooth out the edges of the swale. Grooming the mound was much easier as the soil there was already broken up. In the end, I had hoped to get the mounds groomed to a more gentle slope while the workers were there, but time ran out before we could get everything as perfect as the ideal I held in mind. Still, the edges are not steep and erosion should not be a problem.

On the night before the final day of work, the heavens opened up and released a torrent on the site. Excited to see the swales in action, the landowner rushed out in the middle of the night to see them fill up with water that would otherwise have washed down the hill in an erosive flood. When I arrived on site the last day, the top swale and one of the lower swales were full of water due to the slower infiltration from their slightly higher clay contents. Already they were a home to some very happy frogs that, with the rains, had come out of hibernation.

The rains transformed the earth from a concrete-like surface to a soft and yielding one. This made the final grooming much, much easier. In order to help make the swales more durable, I had the work team put in compacted, level-sill spillways set at 90 cm from the bottom of the swales. With them in place, water can spill gently over the top in very heavy rains, greatly reducing the chance of erosion damaging the swales. The workers seemed to get a kick out of me inspecting the spillway with a site level and having them fix spots that were a few millimetres out. While it may seem fanatical, if the spillway is not dead-level, flowing water will concentrate in the lower spots. When it is concentrated, it moves faster, and when it moves faster, it has more erosive potential.

Workers compacting the soil to create a level-sill spillway to allow overflow without eroding the swale.

Since the monsoon season hit just as the project was completed, it started collecting water right away. Within three weeks of the completion of the swales, they had already captured and saved over half a million litres of water. The land owner was initially worried about the amount of land that the swales took up – land that would otherwise have been dedicated to the mango tree crop that is to go in later. But upon seeing the results of the swales in action, he knew they were the right thing to do.

I was very fortunate to have the agroforestry expertise of the Green Tree Foundation to assist in the selection of tree species from the site. The plan was to plant a windbreak crop and living fence consisting of Gliricidia sepium, Caesalpinia crista and Sapindus trifoliate. G. sepium is a fast-growing nitrogen fixer with medicinal properties. C. crista makes a good windbreak and has anti-malarial properties. Sapindus trifoliate, as the name suggests, is rich in saponins, meaning it makes a great soap. Its fruit, which resembles a date, is a valuable crop that fetches a good price on the local market. I have received word from the Green Tree Foundation that these windbreak trees have already been planted on site and are doing well. When the mango crops go in, the Green Tree Foundation will provide nitrogen-fixing support trees to assist in the growth of the mango trees.

Given the swales and the addition of the trees, I suspect that within 3-years time, springs will appear at the bottom of the hill below the site. With the site’s exposure next to the national highway and the growing notoriety of the farmer we worked with, it is hoped that our project will be replicated by others throughout the area. I have been invited back by my friends at the Green Tree Foundation to do more work in the area, and I look forward to the day when funding permits me to go there again and carry out more projects.

The work team and the designer celebrate the project's completion.

Species of the Month: Morus alba (White Mulberry)

2009-07-22T16:01:00.015-04:00

Species of the Month: Morus alba
By Douglas Barnes

This month, we’ll take a look at the white mulberry, Morus alba. In the Species of the Month series, we’ve looked at some truly amazing plants and fungi. I thought I would make it easy on myself by doing a "simple" tree. Well, I thought wrong. I knew some of the uses of this tree, but as it turns out Morus alba offers many benefits and carries out many different tasks.

First off, this fast-growing tree is useful for controlling erosion. It also provides shade and can act as a windbreak. The leaf litter improves the soil. White mulberry has been adapted to many climates from tropical USDA zone 11 to chilly zone 4. The tree is coppiceable and survives short-rotation coppicing very well - I have seen M. alba thrive on a 2-month coppicing cycle, which is an amazingly short rotation. Mind you, this was in the tropics. Mulberry would not last very long on such a short cycle in temperate climates.

Mulberry can be propagated through coppicing or through seeds. Coppice shoots can be cut and treated with rooting compound or the coppice stool can be covered with soil after the shoots are around 30 cm tall. Left under the soil, the buried part of the shoots will grow roots. The shoot can then be carefully dug out and cut for transplanting. When propagating from seeds, soak the seeds in cold water for 1 week before planting. Mulberries grow best in dry to well-drained soils.

The wood is useful for both construction and woodworking. As a fuel, it will produce from 4370 to 4770 kilocalories of energy per kilogram or around 25.8 million BTUs per cord, making it an excellent fuel tree. In coppice production, it would make a goode fuel tree, provided it were grown in a small-scale operation. The bark from mulberry has its uses. It is used to make high quality paper and can be made into textile.

The leaves can be used for fodder. Ruminants can be fed up to 60% of diet with mulberry fodder. Mulberry also increases milk yields in cows. The leaves are also famously used in sericulture – raising silkworms. For this, mulberry is grown on short rotation; the leaves are chopped and then fed to silkworms.

Mulberry leaves being chopped for silkworms.

Silkworms fed on white mulberry leaves.

Mulberry can also be used as human food. While the young leaves can be eaten, it is the fruit that is sought after. High in vitamin C, iron, calcium and potassium, the berries are very tasty. Unfortunately, the only way to enjoy fresh mulberries is to pick them. Being quite fragile, they do not pack or transport well. Mulberries are used to make jellies, pies, juice and wine.

There are plenty of medicinal uses for mulberry as well. It has antibacterial properties, is used to treat rheumatism, reduces fevers, and helps induce sweating.

The leaves are used to treat insect bites and the cineole content in the leaves makes them useful as an expectorant. The limone in the leaves has antitumor properties. Some research suggests that the leaves could be used to help prevent type II diabetes. The fruit is used to treat upset stomachs and sore throats. And the bark is used to treat stomach aches, neuralgia pain and edema.
If you have the right conditions and the room, a mulberry tree would make an excellent addition to your permaculture garden.

Permaculture versus Conventional: Corn

2009-07-19T13:36:00.015-04:00

Permaculture versus Conventional: Corn
By Douglas Barnes

Note: While this piece is rather hard on the practices of conventional agricultural science, it is not to be taken as an indictment of science or the scientific method. Indeed, I greatly encourage more science. What motivated me to write this is the alarming positions and attitudes of followers of the religion of scientism, which I feel is one of the more harmful fundamentalisms in the world today.

Imagine two different people of two different mindsets want to grow corn: one a permaculturist, the other a conventional agricultural scientist. Imagine both have unlimited resources. One sees corn as being a part of an interconnected system that interacts with everything around it. The other sees corn as a combination of inputs. One view looks at corn as an organism that affects and is affected by its environment. The other view looks at corn as a machine.

The Conventional Approach

The agricultural scientist knows that corn is a demanding crop, so after plowing the land and applying glyphosate herbicide on upstart weeds, he or she fertilizes the soil with a commercial synthetic fertiliser. After all, plants grow better when they have a good nutrient supply. Unfortunately for the scientist, plowing kills beneficial worms and fungi and damages soil structure, increasing erosion. Plowing also oxidizes some of the carbon in the soil, releasing it to the atmosphere as CO2. Apart from being a significant contributor to green house gas emissions, this also reduces the carbon content. Reducing the carbon content reduces the cation exchange capacity of the soil, which is the ability of the soil to transfer essential minerals to plants. In other words, it makes the soil less fertile.

The glyphosate applied might be a brand that has a surfactant which is highly toxic to amphibians. In any event, glyphosate increases the risk of fusarium, a toxic fungus. Glyphosate is also linked to acute health risks including but not limited to headaches, skin and eye irritation, nausea, numbness, increased blood pressure, and heart palpitations and longer term health risks including lesions in salivary glands, inflamed stomach linings, genetic damage in human blood cells, reduced sperm counts (in testing on rats) and abnormal sperm (in testing on rabbits), and cancer (non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in humans and liver tumors and thyroid cancer in rats). So, let’s hope the scientist is careful and has good health coverage.

Hopefully, the fertiliser is not one that holds the nutrients in a cadmium salt as cadmium will further kill off fungi. On its own, the synthetic fertiliser will shift the soil in a bacteria-dominant direction and reduce fungal content with or without cadmium. The synthetic fertiliser also reduces the carbon content of the soil making it less hospitable to life and less fertile, reducing its capacity to retain water, and degrading soil structure thus increasing erosion.

As the corn starts coming up, weeds start popping up again, so a second run with glyphosate is made. This time, the agricultural scientist experienced some tingling skin and burning sensation in the throat.

The corn came up, but the field was full solely of corn, proving to be a smorgasbord for corn borers. Even spraying could not control them all. Clearly there is a problem.

Being clever, the scientist goes into the genetics lab and isolates the cry 1Ab gene from Bacillus thuringiensis ssp. kurstaki, the nptII gene, an intron (a non-coding section of a gene) from the heat shock protein hsp 70, the CaMV 35S promoter gene from the cauliflower mosaic virus and the NOS terminator sequence from Agrobacterium tumefaciens and sets them on the plasmid vector pV-ZMBK07. Plasmid vector pV-ZMGT10 carries the CP4 EPSPS gene from Agrobacterium tumefaciens and the gox gene from Achromobacter strain LBAA and the nptII gene. These are coated on microscopic BBs and fired into corn cells to transfer the DNA. Simple enough, right?

Wow. Millions of dollars later, the copy of the gene cry 1Ab gene was incomplete. If you don’t know what this means, don’t feel bad. No one does. No one knows exactly how this affects the functioning of the genetically modified corn. There was another problem, unfortunately. The terminator sequence to turn off the promoter gene was absent but made it to market anyway. Promoters can affect the DNA 40,000 base pairs down from them. So what is the CaMV 35S promoter promoting besides the inserted transgenes? What are the health implications, if any, of this? What are the environmental effects? Is the incomplete cry 1Ab gene coding for something slightly unique rather than the predicted insecticidal toxin? If so, is this unique attribute helpful or harmful to human health? Independent research has suggested that there were some deletions or rearrangements in the host corn DNA. What affect, if any, is this having on the corn’s nutritional content, human health and environmental safety? Is glycosylation (an enzymatic process attaching carbohydrates to other molecules in cells) causing unpredicted effects when this GMO is ingested? This has been seen with other GMOs. Has the disruption in gene order (something known to be important) had any harmful side effects? And if the only changes made are those that theory designed and predicted, why does this corn have higher lignin content than conventional corn? What about the recent finding of decreased fertility in rats fed the corn?

And it turns out that the pollen and detritus from the plant are toxic to caddisflies and preliminary research done in Russia suggests that the corn is toxic to mice. Further research is not done, however, as industry-lead science is not interested in funding a project that might show that one of its controversial cash cows may be dangerous. The current approach to finding the long-term effects on human health, if any, is to avoid looking at the long-term effects on human health. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. If this were not enough, the corn still has to be sprayed, albeit not as much as it had before.

With millions spent, the agricultural scientist has increased greenhouse gas emissions, decreased soil fertility, increased erosion, increased pest losses, decreased yield, killed off local amphibians, decreased biodiversity, consumed more energy than the crop yielded, and compromised human and environmental health in a number of different ways. If that were not enough, 10 calories of energy were consumed to produce one calorie of corn.

The Permaculture Approach

It must first be noted that the permaculturist uses sustainability as a measuring stick. That means the energy created by his or her system to grow corn must capture and store more energy than goes into creating and maintaining that system. In other words, the net energy balance must be positive without fudging the accounting.

The permaculturist knows that corn is a demanding crop and will require healthy soils. As such, he or she has set aside a patch and has allowed it to overgrow with weeds and has chopped and mulched those weeds in place to build up soil fertility. Perhaps the permaculturist has added some kelp meal for trace elements. He or she has seeded the site with mycorrhizal fungi spores and/or transplants (probably Glomus species) to increase plant health. King stropharia mushroom spawn (Stropharia rugoso annulata) is added to the mulch to benefit the corn and provide an extra yield as is done in Eastern Europe.

Climate permitting, the permaculturist might adopt the Central American technique called frijol tapado. This method involves allowing the land to fallow for 2 or 3 years until woody weeds are dominant. Grasses will be competitive with the crop, but the woodier weeds will not be. Beans and corn are scattered directly into the weeds. Then the weeds are chopped and dropped to create mulch for the crop. (This system works well enough to produce 60 to 70% of the beans grown in Costa Rica.)

If this technique is not possible, the site needs to be cleared for planting. But the idea of tearing up the soil is unthinkable as it destroys fungal life in the soil, decreases fertility, and breaks down soil structure, contributing to erosion. Furthermore, the act of plowing creates an ideal niche for a raft of weeds that thrive in disturbed soils. The clearing could be done by hand, but doing the work yourself when it could be done by another and could benefit another is foolish. So, the permaculturist sends in the chickens. Penned in the desired area and kept on the hungry side, they tear through the weeds and contribute phosphorus-rich, natural fertiliser at the same time. Their droppings will also increase the number of worms on site, further benefitting the soil.

The corn is planted, but to help meet nitrogen needs, it is intercropped with clover and beans to fix nitrogen. Beans have also been shown to decrease outbreaks of leafhoppers and fall armyworm when intercropped with corn. Clover and soybeans have been found to decrease losses from the European cornborer. Weeds want to be avoided, so to back up clover as a ground cover, squash is planted. The added benefit to this groundcover is the food it yields. Squash also reduces losses in corn to spider mites and aphids. Bee balm is thrown in as a beneficial attractor, encouraging predatory insects and attracting pollinators. Over-concentrating corn is avoided as this would be too attractive to pests. Dr. Jane Mt. Pleasant of Cornell University has run trials of 3-sisters plots (3 sisters being a corn, bean and squash mix) against conventionally grown monocultural corn plots and found the calories produced in the 3-sisters system were 17% higher per unit area.

Wildflower strips along the perimeter of the patch are intentionally grown. These provide a haven for predatory insects, allowing them to overwinter and providing summer habitat for them. The flowers act as attractors for beneficial parasitoids, which help control pests such as cornborers. These parasitoids seek out caterpillars like the cornborer and lay eggs on them. The eggs hatch and burrow into the caterpillar, eating it from the inside out. The sugars from the flowers increase the adult parasitoids’ fertility, lifespan, and host-searching activities. The permaculturist is confident in this approach because field studies have shown this technique to be effective in controlling pest insects.

The permaculturist also plants silverleaf desmodium (Desmodium uncinatum) and molasses grass (Melinis minutiflora) in patches amongst the corn, which has been shown to repel stem-borers. Sudan grass (Sorghum vulgare) and napier grass (Pennisetum purpureum) are planted on the margins as this has been shown to lure away stem borers. Furthermore, all four of these grasses are useful as animal fodder. In Kenya where this method was developed, stem borers were shown to be cut by 80% over control plots.

As the soil has been built up, it grows healthier food. Recent research by chemist Dr. Donald R. Davis of the University of Texas shows significant declines in nutrition in conventional agricultural produce over the past 90 years. And this falls in line with other studies as well.

So, the soil in the permaculturist’s plot has been fed and the use of plowing and biocides avoided, increasing soil life. In other words, the soil is in a healthier condition than it previously had been. So compared to the agricultural scientist’s approach, the soil is healthier, the food is healthier, biodiversity is greater, the watershed has not been contaminated, pest losses are lower, more calories have been produced, less money has been spent, and human health has benefited from the practice rather than been compromised.

References available upon request.

Nature's Mosquito Control

2009-07-17T04:49:00.042-04:00

Nature's Mosquito Control:
Designing Against Mosquitoes, Malaria and the West Nile Virus

By Scott A. Meister

One thing that can always dampen a good summer day is an itchy bite from a mosquito. In some places, a bite from a mosquito can transmit diseases and even end your life. Recent outbreaks of mosquitoes in Texas have caused concern about West Nile Virus. However, Malaria is a global concern. Malaria is the leading cause of death and illness in Rwanda (fightingmalaria.org). According to the Roll Back Malaria website, There are at least 300 million acute cases of malaria each year globally, resulting in more than a million deaths. Around 90% of these deaths occur in Africa alone, and mostly in young children
http://www.rbm.who.int/cmc_upload/0/000/015/370/RBMInfosheet_3.htm

In fact, the vast Majority of Malaria deaths occur in Africa where it has been estimated to cost more than US　$12 billion every year in lost GDP. It’s interesting to note, that Malaria could be controlled for just a small part of that sum.

There are two basic approaches to fixing natural problems such as this. The first (and most costly) is the Capitalistic/Industrial approach and the second (more reasonable) is to use a more holistic and natural approach.

The usual capitalistic and industrial approach to fighting this illness is to spend lots of money and other valuable resources on things that can be manufactured and sold to treat the problem. If humans can capitalise on a problem by making money, that is usually considered the most obvious course of action. In the over-developed world, this is almost always the first course of action. PR firms are the first to broadcast man-made chemical solutions to problems. Commercials posing as news, scream, “…only DEET will do.” Fortunately the logical fallacy of T.I.N.A. (There Is No Alternative)…is just that…a fallacy, and there are numerous other, more ecological approaches to mosquito management. Furthermore, the energy intensive nature of this process and the resource consumption involved makes this an un-sustainable option.

The first, commercial/industrial approach mentioned above, involves using potentially harmful insecticides that kill indiscriminately and destroy the web of life without regard to long-term consequences to health and the ecosystem. Interestingly, pesticides are now known to contribute further down the line to other more costly, and difficult to treat, illnesses such as cancer. Secondly, millions of dollars and resources are spent researching, developing, testing and manufacturing drugs to cure ill patients (again, with largely unknown consequences). Thirdly, chemical repellents are manufactured, shipped and sold. The repellents are often lotions or sprays which are put into contact with the skin. Putting these chemicals on the skin puts people at risk of CSS (Chemical Sensitivity Syndrome) a.k.a. TI (Toxic Injury) which has become a growing and serious problem in the industrial era. Exposure to chemicals has been shown to play a significant role in problems such as “premature birth; male genital defects; learning, attention, and emotional disturbances; early puberty; obesity; and low sperm quality.” (-quoted from (www.environmentcalifornia.org)

To make matters worse large amounts of fossil fuels (limited and disappearing resources) are being used to manufacture and ship these items across the globe. Unfortunately for most, especially in the communities that suffer from malaria such as in Africa…money is not available to pay for the manufacture and shipment of pesticides, medicine and potentially harmful chemical repellents. The Texan “newly rich” from the oil and chemical business, can afford to pay for DEET (in the short term while resources last) but the earth, and the rest of the world can’t.

Fortunately, for the lesser fortunate people on earth, there is a cheaper, simpler, sustainable and eco-friendly approach to managing and controlling both mosquito’s, Malaria and West Nile Virus. It can be practiced anywhere...even in your own back yard, regardless of whether malaria or West Nile Virus is an immediate threat to you or not. It is a natural answer to a natural problem, costs very little, and once implemented...continues to produce long-term results requiring very little energy or money to maintain. It’s a gift that keeps on giving...a gift of nature.

Nature has evolved over millions of years to produce the checks and balances necessary to keep each of its element in control. Humans, with their “free-will” have been able to mess a bit of that up. We are the “loose-cannons” in the eco-system, so to speak. When humans run into a threat from nature, they often believe they have a right to “pull rank” and come up with some man-made piece of technology to address the threat. This technology usually wreaks more havoc, causing more, newer threats requiring further technological fixes that wreak even more havoc…and on and on.

The smarter solution is to observe nature, answer natural problems with nature’s own solutions whenever and wherever possible. It shows more intelligence in man if we can cooperate with nature, and help manage what it has already given us. We’re a part of nature, but our technology isn’t.

In a healthy, ecosystem, pests and diseases don’t run amok. This is because nature’s design uses biodiversity and various tricks such as plants with a certain scent, aroma or color and predators, natural barriers and limits, etc to keep everything in check. There are no mono-cultures in nature, there are no “lawns.”

By mimicking nature’s bio-diverse design in our own landscape, we can come up with a way to protect ourselves from the pesky mosquito and the viruses they carry. Sustainable solutions to natural problems such as malaria follow the following formula. Natural Repellent/Barrier, Predator (and predator attractant/habitat), Natural Herbal Antidote. Let's examine each.

Natural Mosquito Repellents/Barriers　(Plant it…and they will NOT come):

Mosquitoes are often repelled by scent. The scent that has proven most effective in repelling mosquitoes comes from Citronella macronata, which is a tree that can be planted as a hedge. This serves two purposes, first by exuding the scent which repels mosquitoes, and by providing a habitat and food for birds that eat mosquitoes. The Citronella plant attracts birds with berries, while also providing both nesting for them and cover from it’s own predators. Mosquito repellent and predator attractant and habitat are provided all in one tree. Two hits for the price of one..and once planted, they continue growing, and can give free cuttings/seed to be spread to other areas to grow. Did I say free? Yes, and I’d say that’s a rather cheap solution.

The citronella compound has also been bred into the “lemon geranium” which exudes the same scent, and is being used to repel mosquitoes at the herb layer. Lemon geraniums can be planted under or around windows, or can flank the sides of doorways to repel mosquitoes while providing beautiful flowers and a pleasant lemon scent to any shelter where humans spend time and sleep.

Catnip is another common herb that contains an oil that is supposedly 10 times better at repelling mosquitoes than using the expensive, resource-consumptive chemical DEET. Catnip can also be used as a (mildly stimulating) tea for human consumption.

The popular culinary herb, Rosemary, also has an oil that is effective in repelling mosquitoes. Because it’s a tropical plant, and thus not very cold-hardy, it should be planted in pots in cold climates and taken inside for winter. However, if you’re in Africa, it can be planted in window boxes, hung in pots around windows, or planted with lemon geraniums around doorways. It could even be planted and kept indoors near windows that have a lot of light as an interior repellent.

Citronella grass is a tropical grass that grows to be 6-feet tall, and happens to be where companies get the citronella oil that they put in candles and lanterns that can be burned to repel mosquitoes. While not very practical for the dreaded suburban lawn due to it’s height, it could be planted as a decorative grass to flank windows and doors to help repel mosquitoes.

Another grass that has potential in fighting mosquitoes and malaria is the Vetiver grass, which is a clumping grass helpful in fighting erosion and soil stabilization. Vetiver grass roots are aromatic and have been used to weave screens that can be used on windows and ventilation areas for homes. Spraying these screens with a mist of water, helps to cool air flowing through them while simultaneously enhancing the aroma, and thus repellent power of the screens.

-Mosquito Predators, Attractant and Habitat -
“Can’t beat ‘em? Then build it or plant it, and they will come and eat’m’”

photo by Richard Seaman

If we wish to get malaria under control, we need to focus on controlling the mosquito population. We can do this most efficiently and effectively not by using ever-repeating applications of poison (which can backfire on us and our immune systems), but by attracting and providing habitat for the mosquitoes natural predators. Some of the more famous of these predators are Bats, Birds, Dragonfly and a fish so adept to eating mosquitoes that it’s taken on the suiting name Mosquito Fish (Gambusia affins).

By providing the proper habitat for these creatures, we can have them manage the mosquito population for us.

To invite the dragonfly in to help, we can plant Bullrush and Cattail, two plants that attract this mosquito devouring insect that can eat thousands of mosquitoes. Bullrush and Cattail should be planted around ponds, and these ponds can be used to control mosquito larvae by stocking them with the Mosquito Fish (Gambusia affins) and guppies. These fish can eat thousands of mosquito larvae, helping to reduce the adult mosquito population. If stocking ponds with these fish, care should be taken to also stock the ponds with water plants, as Gambusia also require plants to eat, and to provide breeding cover. The population of larvae that survives to become adult, can be eaten by dragonflies and birds nearby.

Last, but certainly NOT the least, when it comes to mosquito population management, is our champion mosquio predator, the bat. A healthy bat population can devour millions of mosquitos in an evening. To insure that they help clear our surrounding areas of malaria carrying pests…we can build and install bat-houses in a nearby area. Perhaps, a bat-house could be placed on a high post between the pond and living abodes. An extra added benefit to building and installing bat-houses…is that bats also provide a valuable fertilizer in the form of guano. This guano can be harvested from below bat-houses and be used in the garden.

Proven Home-Grown Antidote Herbal Remedies:
“Nature’s doorstep pharmacy”

The Chinese have been using Artemisia annua (a.k.a. sweet wormwood) to cure fevers for centuries. Recent scientific studies have found that the substance artemisinin is high enough in the blood after ingesting Artemisia tea to cure malaria. Thousands of plants can be grown from a single cutting, and the leaves can be harvested, dried and stored without too much intensive labor…making for a cheap and easy to produce remedy on the doorstep of any home, village or hospital.

“The daily adult dose of anti-malaria tea requires mixing just 5g of dried A-3 [Artemisia annua-ed.] leaves in 1L of water. This tincture is split into four parts and taken once every six hours. This is repeated for seven days. Given that each plant yields 200g dry weight, 1000 shrubs can cure malaria in 5700 adults…. Even after three years, dried leaves retain practically 100 percent of their artemisinin content, suggesting that under proper conditions Artemisia medicines can be stored for a long time.”
- http://www.newsfromafrica.org/newsfromafrica/articles/art_10249.html

Douglas Barnes pointed out to me recently that if there is an area in need of a medicinal security hedge, the plant Latakaranja (Caesalpinia crista) is considered to be one of the best medicines to cure malaria. However, care should be taken when handling the plant due to the prickliness of it’s branches and fruit, but this makes it a potentially valuable species to use as a security barrier or hedge for a property. Also, compared to Artemisia, this plant requires more processing time, energy and knowledge to successfully make a form of ingestible medicine. Taking that into consideration, it is also worthy to note that this plant is a common mangrove tree climber, and could be made use of in salt-water marsh areas where some plant species might be difficult to cultivate.
To use this plant (famed for use in Ayurvedic medicine all over India for centuries) the website http://www.herbalcureindia.com/herbs/caesalpinia-crista.html suggests...
…“The combination of its roasted seeds powder, pippali (1:1) is given with honey, approximately 0.5 gm., three times a day for 3-4 days duration. Another combination recommended for malaria is the powders of marica and latakaranja (Sakra vati). The splenic enlargement due to malaria, responds well to latakarnja. The leaves fried in ghee, eliminate vata and relieve constipation, hence valuable in piles.”

THE FINAL DESIGN:

Diagram by Douglas Barnes of EcoEdge Design Ltd.

To fit this all into a design is relatively simple. Structures for human use should be built with screens on windows, doors and vents made from vetiver grass (which can be grown and hand-woven on site), herbs such as lemon (citronella) geraniums, rosemary and catnip should be planted below windows (ideally in window boxes) flanked by 6-foot citronella grass on both sides and by doorways. Walking paths can be lined with these same herbs and grasses. Around the structure, a wind-break (if necessary), or security hedge can be planted with the aromatic bird habitat of Citronella Macronata…as an understory to the Citronella tree, we should plant Artemisia annua. By getting into the habit of planting these species together, people can be educated to know that an antidote for malaria is nearby whenever they smell the fragrance of the Citronella tree.

Beyond the hedge on the opposite side from the structure we can construct ponds stocked with guppies, Gambusia affins, cattail, bullrush and other aquatic plants. Between the pond and the mosquito barrier hedge, we can place high posts with bat-houses on top.

With all these things working in concert, we can make a huge dent in the mosquito and malaria problem. By designing our human habitats wisely by mimicking nature’s bio-diverse system of checks and balances, we can also avoid waste of valuable resources (financial and otherwise). The long term benefits of managing nature to our advantage can save us time, money resources and lives.

Sources:

http://www.rbm.who.int/cmc_upload/0/000/015/370/RBMInfosheet_3.htm

http://www.aafp.org/afp/980901ap/magill.html

www.environmentcalifornia.org

http://www.environmentcalifornia.org/center/improving-environmental-health/growing-up-toxic

http://www.newsfromafrica.org/newsfromafrica/articles/art_10249.html

http://www.herbalcureindia.com/herbs/caesalpinia-crista.html

http://tidechaser.blogspot.com/2009/01/woodlands-mangrove.html

http://www.richard-seaman.com/

http://greensborogardens.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/rosemary21.jpg

India: The Talupula Site, Part II

2009-07-11T22:09:00.008-04:00

India: The Talupula Site, Part II

By Douglas Barnes

Click here for Part I

First impressions

This May, I visited the town of Talupula in the drought-stricken Anantapur District in Andhra Pradesh, India at the invitation of the Green Tree Foundation. Although I had seen photographs and general climate data for the region, I was struck but how dry Andhra Pradesh is. The province generally receives 350 to 700 mm of rainfall a year, and though I would like to report more specific rainfall for the District where the project was carried out, repeated requests to the government meteorological office by the Green Tree Foundation over the years have gone ignored.

When I first arrived, I met an engineer from Talupula who is living and working in Hyderabad. I went over what I was planning to do in terms of earthworks, which included swales and possibly a dam. When I mentioned that swales can be built with the aid of a bulldozer with a tilting blade or a grater with a tilting blade, he said that the soils were very hard and would require an excavator.

Upon arriving in Talupula, I found the lateritic soils to be slightly more yielding than asphalt. The soils are ferralsols, which are an iron-rich lateritic soil that becomes hard after the land is stripped then subjected to repeated wetting and drying – just the conditions that occur in the dry tropics. When wet, they are very workable and may even bog down machinery working on it. When dry, they are are hard as pavement. In these soils, calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium are weathered out, and there is next to no humus content in the soil. As a result, the cation exchange capacity is low, meaning that plant health suffers. While these soils do tend to lose potassium easily (another argument against the common practice there of burning pasture land as a management strategy), they do hold onto phosphorus well. They also respond well to amendments of lime and gypsum, though this was beyond the scope of our project.

The Indian government is in the process of building a large irrigation channel to divert the flow of the nearest major river to the drier regions of the south. While I am personally skeptical of the ecological viability of this project, visiting the excavation site for the channel did give me the opportunity to examine the typical soil strata of the area. Lateritic soils are deep – sometimes running down to 20 metres in depth. I could see from the channel excavation that the gravelly soil continued down at least 8 metres to the bottom of the channel. All that gravel meant that I would not be designing and constructing an earthen dam as the gravelly conditions require considerable engineering for dam construction. The focus then became on swales and possibly gabions.

Obula Swami

Before I left Canada, a site in Talupula on public land on a small mountain outside of town was suggested. It is said that the deity Obula Swami lives at the summit of that hill. Our potential site there was the highest practical site to work on. On firsthand inspection, however, I found that the access to the site was difficult and there was very limited space to work in. There also were a number of rock walls already build on the site to combat erosion. And as it was public land, would it be subject to neglect, or destruction? A further problem was that shepherds regularly burn the land there, so establishing trees would be difficult at best.

We looked at a second site at the foot of the same mountain on private land. There was a good catchment and plenty of room to work on. After contacting the farmer, though, the restrictions he set made working there not worthwhile.

Gangahadr

For a few days, we were stuck without a site to work on. Then we got the approval of an organic farmer outside of town to do whatever we liked on a 7-acre hillside patch of his land. The farmer, Gangahadr, had already greatly benefited from the agroforestry advice of the Green Tree Foundation and was eager to see what we could do. The land was not too steep, and the nick point on the land (the point at which the hillside goes from convex to concave) was high enough that we could get up near the top of the hill and put in a series of swales. Being private, the land would be well cared for and access to it controlled. Gangahadr had a growing reputation in the area for excellent results, and the site was visible from the national highway, giving the project more exposure. As an added bonus, the site was adjacent to and would thus compliment a rock check dam built in 2005 by the Rural Development Trust. The effect of that dam has been to change the land downstream from desert-like conditions to a rich oasis. This was the site. I met with the Ganghadr and got his permission to build swales on his land.

In Part III, we will look at site planning, implementation, and the results so far.

Species of the Month: Neem

2009-06-22T23:35:00.017-04:00

Species of the Month: Neem
By Douglas Barnes

Azadirachta indica, neem, the village dispensary. This amazing tree has so many uses that it’s hard to imagine a tropical garden being complete without it.

First, the tree has a deep tap root, making it drought hardly. It is not, however, tolerant of seasonal flooding or of frost. It helps rejuvenate damaged soils. In the hot climates it grows in, its shade is very welcome. It also makes a good windbreak. Timber from neem trees is termite resistant – a good feature in the tropics - and its calorie-rich wood makes good fuel. The flowers of neem also make good bee fodder.

Neem leaves are sometimes used in curries and chutneys in India. Extended consumption over long periods has the potential to damage the liver, so consumption should be occasional. Also, neem should NOT be consumed by pregnant women, women trying to conceive, or by small children.

The dried leaves are used as a moth repellent to protect clothes, in grain and dried fruit stores to protect from insects, and as a general insect repellent. Fresh leaves are sometimes eaten to rid the body of parasites. Twigs from the tree are chewed on one end, then used as a tooth brush.

Azadirachtin, the active ingredient in neem, is a very effective pesticide. It repels insects and disrupts their growth and reproduction. A neem solution can be sprayed directly on plants to deal with existing insects and to help repel further insect attack. To make a solution, simply bring a bucket of water to boil, add 2 handfuls of crushed seeds or 6 handfuls of minced leaves, and steep for 1 hour. Add a small amount of soap as a surfactant, strain and spray directly on plants. If only neem oil is available, mix 10 ml of neem oil with 1% azadirachtin content (get certified aflatoxin-free neem oil) with 500 ml of water and a touch of soap and spray the mixture on plants. Neem can also be used on animals to kill fleas, ticks, intestinal parasites, and repel blowflies. For a topical solution for animals, mix 1 ml of neem oil to 30 ml of water and spray it on the animal’s coat.

Looking at the medicinal uses of neem, it is easy to see why it is called the village dispensary. It is an emollient (soothes the skin), a purgative (a laxative), a vermifuge (rids internal and external parasites), a digestive agent, an anti-inflammatory, a sedative, a carminative (prevents gas), an anti-fungal agent, an antiviral, an antiseptic, and a diuretic. The list of ailments it is used to treat includes but is not limited to:

Gastritis
Fever
Poor circulation
Bronchitis
Candida (yeast infection)
Gingivitis
Kidney problems
Duodenal and peptic ulcers
Liver problems
Diabetes
High blood pressure
High cholesterol
Hemorrhoids
Conjunctivitis (pink eye)
Tuberculosis
AIDS
Asthma
Rheumatism
Venereal disease
Skin ulcers
Urinary tract infections
Athlete’s foot
Ringworm
Head lice
Scabies

Neem also has commercial value with popular products made from neem including soap, toothpaste, shampoo, candles, mouthwash, tea, and on and on.

If you are in the dry tropics and are looking for useful trees for your site, be sure to include this amazing tree to you list. With so many uses from neem, you'll be glad you have it nearby, and your pests will hate you for it.

India: The Talupula Site, Part I

2009-06-20T11:33:00.013-04:00

India: The Talupula Site, Part I

By Douglas Barnes

During the month of May, I was in the semi-arid region of Andhra Pradesh, India at the invitation of the Green Tree Foundation. The spread of desertification is something that I have written about here in the past, but to see the environmental degradation of a region that had formerly been a dry-tropical region of forest and savannah is always a real jolt. If nothing is done to halt the biotic pressures of deforestation and uncontrolled grazing and to repair the damage that has been done, this region will become a desert in the not too distant future.

Some forest is lost by people cutting trees for fuel wood but, as many species in the tropics coppice vigorously and firewood cutting tends to coppice the trees cut, this is not the major cause of deforestation there. The major causes of deforestation are land clearing for agriculture and land destroyed by grazing animals or by shepherds setting fire to the land as a management strategy. Also, grazing is communal by default. If land can be accessed by shepherds, both private and public land will be grazed.

The quickest means of repairing the land might arguably be by the controlled grazing techniques of Holistic Management®. This method would involve using one of the current degraders of the environment – grazing animals – to regenerate the land. I gave the practicalities of this approach some thought. To do just one District of the province would involve a large scale educational program to teach Holistic Management® to thousands and thousands of shepherds. It would also require each shepherd to have portable electric fencing to contain their herds in a controlled area for a controlled amount of time. Additionally, a sophisticated database, easily accessible by cell phone (the only communication tool at a shepherd’s disposal) would be needed to track grazed land and grazing schedules of different plots of land. The alternative, if Holistic Management® were to be employed, would be to have land owners fence their land into small plots and control animal access themselves. One problem here would be to convince the land owner that there would be benefit to him were he to shoulder the expense of fencing and managing the grazing on the land. The alternative is to only allow grazing on one’s own land. The problem here being that this approach would ruin the livelihoods of thousands of families, throwing them into poverty.

Were a land owner looking to raise animals on his or her own land, Holistic Management® would be the ideal approach to take. But as a large-scale solution to the problems of the region, it strikes me as being not very practical given the current system of de facto communal grazing. It would require massive coordinated effort, billions of rupees in training and billions in material costs to make it a reality. And then, it relies on everyone following the rules. While not impossible, it would be extremely difficult to carry out this approach successfully, I think.

The approach that my associates at the Green Tree Foundation are taking is a tree-based approach. The problems are well defined: poverty from a degraded environment; the environment degraded by biotic pressures – mostly from grazing animals. The solution they are using is to try to replace the forests that once stood and to shift agriculture in the region to an agroforestry-based system.

They are surveying local villages, finding the material needs of the villagers, selecting appropriate tree species based on local conditions and local needs, and supplying trees at low or no cost to the farmers and citizens of the village. To address the problem of grazing animals specifically, they often seek out productive tree species that are non-browsable or use non-browsable species as a living fence to exclude grazing animals from a site. They are planting agave as a firebreak to protect their planted areas from the fires set by shepherds. They are also encouraging the use of fodder trees for animal feed. Penned animals cause no damage to surrounding lands and feed can be cut and carried from fodder trees to the animals.

The main goal of my visit was to establish water harvesting earthworks and to demonstrate to the Green Tree Foundation staff the proper design and implementation of those earthworks. In Part II, we’ll look at site selection for our water-harvesting project there.

We are flooded!

2009-05-01T09:14:00.002-04:00

My apologies the the readers of this site for missing the Species of the Month for April. It has been a hectic month. I've been finalizing a house design and prepping for a project in India. Scott Meister has had his hands full, too.

Scott will be publishing a piece here in about a week's time and I will give some updates from India. Please bear with us.

2009 Sustainable Living Symposium

2009-03-23T13:00:00.008-04:00

I will be giving a presentation on Designed Landscapes for Food, Fibre & Energy at the Sustainable Living Symposium at 10:30 am at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario. Click the banner below for more information.

The event is selling out fast, so click now to ensure entry!

Sustainable Living Symposium

Species of the Month: Trametes versicolor

2009-03-19T11:22:00.006-04:00

Species of the Month: Trametes versicolor
By Douglas Barnes

Being a mushroom nut, it has taken all the discipline I can muster not to have a fungal species as Species of the Month yet. I can wait no longer. This month’s species is Trametes versicolor, the turkey tail or yun zhi mushroom. This saprophytic, polypore mushroom is a white rot mushroom, meaning that it breaks down lignin (the organic polymer that gives trees their strength). This mushroom is found in boreal, temperate, sub-tropical and tropical regions.

It has multiple uses. In the field of health, it has been shown to combat cancer. The cancer drug Krestin, also known as polysaccharide K or PSK, is derived from T. versicolor. It has anti-tumour properties, inhibiting cancer cell growth. It inhibits leukemia cell growth. Alcoholic extracts of T. versicolor are used to help fight prostate cancer. It stimulates the immune response. It helps the spleen recover from gamma radiation. PSK has antibiotic properties against E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Candida albicans, Cryptococcus neoformans, Listeria monocytogenes, and Streptococcus pneumoniae. In-vitro studies show it inhibiting HIV replication.

It has many uses for bioremediation. It can be grown on woodchips in burlap bags. The bags can then be stacked in runoff channels below animal paddocks to filter E. coli, Listeria, Candida and Aspergillus, protecting watersheds from contamination.

The research of mycologist and permaculturist Paul Stamets suggests T. versicolor might be effective in out-competing pathogenic fungi like Armillaria spp., Sparassis crispa and Hypholoma capnoides.

Heat-killed mycelium of T. versicolor has been used to absorb up to 97% of mercury ions from water, suggesting its value to clean water systems.

It is also very valuable in either breaking down or bioaccumulating some of the worst manmade pollutants in our environment, among them antracenes (used in dyes, wood preservative, naphthalene and other products), chromated copper arsenate (used in pressure-treated lumber), dimethyl methylphosphonates (used in VX, sarin and soman chemical war agents), dioxins, persistent organophosphates (used in pesticides), pentachlorophenols (used in pesticides and preservatives), and TNT.

This fungi grows well on hardwood, including apple and cherry (unlike other fungi), as well as on fir, pine, spruce, larch, cypress and juniper. It can be harvested in the wild (in which case, only pick 25% of a patch of turkey tails), or cultivated on logs raised off the ground or in pots filled with sand. Tree stumps can also be used to cultivate turkey tails. It produces mushrooms annually from spring to late fall, though mushrooms usually appear most in the late summer.

The mushroom itself is very tough and leathery, and you will need a knife to harvest it. It can be boiled and used in soups or drunk as tea. The flavour is a little bitter, but compared with many other polypore mushrooms, the bitterness is mild. In a soup with other flavours, the bitterness will go unnoticed.

Creating The Permaculture Balcony Garden

2009-03-10T08:08:00.012-04:00

The Permaculture Balcony Garden
By Douglas Barnes

Gardening offers many benefits. Compared with buying fresh produce at a market, properly managed gardens can provide fresh, healthy produce in a fraction of the time and at much lower cost than purchasing food. A single trip to the market can easily take 20 minutes to several hours out of your day and cost over $100 per visit. Gardening by contrast requires an initial investment to set it up and a few minutes a week to maintain and use. And with seed saving, you can continue to save money and enjoy organic produce year after year.

For apartment and condominium dwellers, however, the lack of space stops most from pursuing their own garden. But with careful design and planning, even a small terrace can yield a surprising amount of food.

While conventional gardening can be a lot of work, the permaculture approach will be to mimic a natural ecosystem to make your garden as self-sustaining and robust as possible. The first step to developing such a system is observation.

Site Assessment

To design a good garden space, you will first need to assess the space you have available. The single biggest limiting factor is climate. If you are in a temperate area, you will need to know your local growing season. How long is your frost-free season? This will determine how much time you will have for outdoor growing. If you are in a sub-tropical area, you would probably benefit from growing tropical foods during the hot season and temperate plants during the cool season.

Not every apartment or condo unit faces the sun, so you will need to determine if you have full sun, partial sun or shade at your particular site. If you have partial sun, would you be able to increase the exposure to sunlight with the aid of reflectors strategically placed on the balcony? If you have full shade, you will have to avoid growing plants that require full sun as they will grow poorly in such conditions.

For high rise buildings, wind is a limiting factor. Strong wind stresses plants, stunting growth, and it reduces soil moisture. The difference on a windy terrace growing avocado, for example, versus a sheltered site can be a 100% greater yield for the sheltered site. If there is too much wind, you will need to block it with some sort of barrier such as a trellis. In any event, make a note of the direction and strength of the prevailing winds.

You may be lucky enough to have a fair amount of rainfall on the terrace or, if permitted, be able to tap into a downspout from the roof. If not, you will need to take on more of the watering yourself.

How much floor space do you have on the terrace or by windows? We will see shortly how to maximise the space you do have, but for now, you will need to know the area you have to work with.

Finally, you will have to know what sort of artificial restrictions there are such as local ordinances and/or restrictions from the landlord or the condominium’s management.

Planning and Layout

First, create a map of the site. It needn’t be anything too fancy, just something you can use for planning purposes. Freehand maps will do fine.

Plan your access routes. Without easy access to everything in your garden, you are more likely to neglect hard to reach areas. You may stuff your site with growing space, but be sure to give yourself 40-cm-wide (16-inch) paths to walk on.

After laying out the paths, you will know what floor space is available to you. Now you need to consider sun exposure and wind direction. You’ll generally be placing taller plants so that they do not obstruct the sunlight of other plants. You may need to break this guideline if you need either the taller plants such as bamboo or a trellis to act as a windbreak to prevent wind damage to other plants. In arid conditions, the additional shade from taller plants or trellises can be beneficial by helping to retain soil moisture.

Hanging plants are a great way to make use of window space for growing, so you need not be limited be floor space.

To make maximum usage of the outdoor growing space available to you, you are going to have to design in 3 dimensions. It will be much easier to access the space if you set up the planters in a terraced fashion with the highest ones in the back and the lowest ones in the front.

The installation of trellises will also help us to grow plants up walls and across ceilings. A trellis with a mesh pattern is good for plants that climb using tendrils such as grapes and bitter melon (Momordica charantia). Poles or lengths of string can be used for plants like beans or hops (Humulus lupulus) that twist around objects as they grow. In addition to natural climbers, plants such as squash and kiwis (which have a variety of species suited to climates from sub-tropical to cold temperate) can be tied to trellises to grow where you want them to. An added benefit of climbing plants is that they shade buildings in the summer, helping them to stay cooler.

There are many techniques people have devised to grow in vertical spaces. For example, PVC tubing can be used to create planters that maximise growing space with the minimal usage of floor space. These tubes can even be hung if necessary, though they may need to be anchored at the bottom if winds are strong on your site.

Planters can be ready-made units, or constructed out of bricks, wood, or other available materials. They can be fancy or simple depending on your taste. Just make sure that your planter gives you at least a 30 cm (one foot) of depth for the soil. If you plan on having root crops, you will need a planter that is deep enough for at least 60 cm (2 feet) of soil for plants like daikon, carrots, potatoes, etc.

Preparing the Soil

Proper soil preparation is what distinguishes easy, low-maintenance gardens from gardens requiring lots of effort spend on weeding, watering and tending. If you look at a natural system, you will see that it is able to survive without the constant input that most gardens need to survive. If you mimic this natural system, you will save yourself a lot of work.

In your planter, you can use potting soil if you wish, but starting with sand is cheaper and does the trick. But you are also going to need compost and mulch, preferably woodchips as they are less likely to blow around in the wind. It will also be helpful if you can go to a natural place such as a healthy woodlot with minimal foot traffic and grab a few handfuls of soil to put in your planters. This will serve to “seed” the soil in your planters with beneficial microorganisms.

First, put in a base layer of soil – either sand or potting soil – about 15 cm (6 inches) thick or more, depending on how deep the planter is. Place some of the natural soil you collected outside in the planter. Water the soil. The deeper the planter, the more you can put in. Next, add a dusting of compost on top of the soil followed by 10 cm (4 inches) of mulch and water it. Next add about 5 cm (2 inches) of compost and water it. Finally, add on about 5 cm of mulch and water it.

The mulch serves several purposes: it suppresses the growth of weeds, it helps retain moisture in the soil, it breaks down over time to feed the soil, and it creates a niche for spiders, which will help control any unwanted pests that show up. This mulch is a key element, and without it your garden will be less likely to be successful and will surely take more effort from you to maintain.

It will be helpful if you sow white clover seeds (Trifolium repens) in the mulch. Just sprinkling it on top will do. As the clover grows, it will create a weed-suppressing groundcover and it will fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil, helping to fertilise your garden naturally. Groundcover also reduces soil moisture loss due to evaporation.

Planting and Harvesting

Now you are ready to plant seedlings into the planter. To do this, dig aside the mulch in a small area of mulch until you reach the soil layer. Throw in a handful of compost them place the seedling into the hole. The mulch will settle over time, so place the plant so that the seedling sits down in the mulch about 5 cm (2 inches). Make sure that the mulch is not touching the stem of the plant. Water the seedling.

If you sowed white clover into the surface layer of mulch, you will be on your way to maintaining the soil fertility that your plants need. You can also plant nitrogen-fixing vegetables to help your garden. You can plant beans with other plants and the nitrogen they provide will help the other plants grow. You will, however, need to purchase inoculants for the beans at a garden supply store. This inoculant is simply a type of bacteria that joins with the roots of the beans to fix nitrogen from the air into the soil. The exception to plants that are benefited by beans and peas are members of the onion family. Beans and peas do not grow well together with onions, garlic or chives. If you grow these together in the same planter, make sure that you have at least one other kind of plant between the beans and the onions.

When using your garden, you may just need to harvest parts of the plant but any time you harvest the entire top of a plant, leave the roots in the soil where they can decompose and feed the soil. If, on the other hand, you harvest a root crop, bury the top of the plant just under the mulch where it can breakdown. Additionally, vegetable and fruit waste from your kitchen can help to feed the soil when buried under the mulch. This is a more energy efficient means to go about composting, particularly in the limited space available to apartment dwellers.

Avoiding Artificial Inputs

You may be tempted to add synthetic fertiliser, just in the beginning to get things started. Although this may seem like a good idea at first thought, it will lead to less soil life and less fertile soil over time. In a natural, healthy soil, most of the biomass is in the ground. In fact, there is twice the biomass below the ground compared to above the ground. Plant roots account for only a fraction of this biomass. The majority is in the form of soil micro and macro-organisms. These are so important to plant health that plants release up to 40% of the photosynthates they produce through their roots to feed them.

Adding synthetic fertiliser will reduce the amount of soil carbon, which reduces the productivity of your plants. Synthetic fertiliser is sometimes bound in a cadmium salt, which kills off soil fungi. And the addition of artificial fertiliser increases the plants’ uptake of water, bloating them. This causes the root hairs to shut down, starving the soil life. The bloated plants are now more attractive to insect pests and more likely to suffer a parasitic fungal attack. In this way, the end result of adding artificial fertiliser is going to be to kill of most of the beneficial soil life, which would otherwise have done most of the work of fertilising the soil for you. In other words, adding synthetic fertiliser means you are setting yourself up to do more work and spend more money than you would have to do otherwise.

Life in the soil is the key to healthy plants, which are, in turn the key to human health. The bacteria in your soil will be regulating soil gases that plants need for growth and reproduction. They are also mobile storages of nitrogen and other nutrients essential for plants; and at up to 80 kg (176 pounds) per square metre of soil (compared with 500 to 600 grams per m2 in ploughed soils), they are significant stores of these nutrients.

The mycorrhizal fungi in soil physically enters the roots of most plants and provides them with nutrients from the surrounding soil and even allows plants to swap nutrients and send chemical signals among themselves. Saprophytic fungi break down dead plant material making the nutrients from the detritus available for plants to absorb. The samples of wild soil that you ‘”seeded” your planters with will hopefully contain both types of fungi, but you can purchase these fungi, if you wish. (See resources below.)

Compost worms (Eisenia fetida or Lumbricus rubellus) will produce 1 kg of worm castings (the best fertiliser available) per m2 per year. If you can get some of these in your planters, they will self-regulate their numbers and provide you with much healthier soil.

Dealing with Pests and Disease

If you plant a variety of plants and mix them in together, you are unlikely to suffer from a huge loss of plants as you might with just or two species of plants planted together. However, when establishing a new ecosystem (i.e. your garden) the first year is likely to be the most turbulent as the system establishes a relative equilibrium. Pests may show up and, with the lack of predators, their numbers are free to expand. If you are having too much problem with pests, the simplest, safest and cheapest means of control for you is to spray milk on the bugs. It does not matter what sort of insect pest this is, spraying them with milk will get rid of them. Another common problem is powdery mildew (it looks like a white dusting on the leaves of roses, cucurbits and other plants). This can be dealt with naturally using a 0.5% solution of baking soda. Mix one teaspoon of baking soda with one litre of warm water. Add one teaspoon of liquid dish soap and spray this on the leaves of the affected plants, making sure to spray the underside of the leaves as well.

Planting different flowers that flower at different times of the year will create a habitat for predatory insects that will help control the numbers of pests. If you have the space, this can be very beneficial. If you plant flowers that you yourself can use (like chamomile and marigolds, for example), you will not be sacrificing space for predator habitat.

Some plants are good at repelling certain pests. Aphids are a common menace, but you can help chase them away with nasturtiums, garlic, onions, spearmint, basil and oranges.

When you “seeded” your planters with wild, healthy soil, you probably imported some saprophytic fungi with you. These fungi now have a head start and can out-compete potentially harmful parasitic fungi that might show up.

Plant Propagation

Many of the foods that you pick up at your local supermarket can be propagated and grown in your garden:

Onions or garlic cloves placed in a 10-cm-deep bowl of potting soil with the top third of the bulb emerging should grow if left in a bright window.

Chickpeas (Cicer arietinum) and other dry beans can be started in a 10-cm-deep pot. Cover the seeds with 5 mm of soil, water and put in a sunny place.

Potatoes with eyes growing out of them can be placed on soil a 15-cm-deep pot and covered with 3 cm of soil and left in a sunny place.

Avocado pits can be placed in a one-litre plastic bag with sphagnum moss that is just a little bit moist. Seal the top of the bag and place it is a warm, dark place for a few weeks. After two weeks, punch some holes in the bag to allow air circulation. When the avacodo has roots that are 8 or 10 cm long, you can transplant it to a pot, leaving the top half of the pit above the soil.

Lemon grass (Cymbopogon citratus) that has some grass blades left on it can be placed in a glass with enough water to cover the wide portion of the base of the stalk. Add about a tablespoon of activated charcoal to the water. When the roots are about 6 or 7 cm long, cut the top half of the stalk off and carefully transplant it (the roots will be delicate) to a pot and keep the soil moist.

Fresh ginger root can be placed on top of moist soil and kept in a warm place that is bright but not in direct sunlight. It should sprout and grow very rapidly.

Jujube pits (Ziziphus jujuba)can be placed in a pot with moist peat moss, covered with plastic wrap and placed in the refrigerator for 2 to 3 months to stratify the seeds. Once removed from the refrigerator, the pits should germinate within 3 weeks. When the roots are about 10 cm long, the seedlings can be transplanted.

Chinese Yams (Dioscorea batatas) can be placed in a plastic bag with slightly moist sphagnum moss. The closed bag is then placed in a warm, dark place until it has roots that are 5 to 10 cm. Watch out for soft spots on the yam and cut out any that appear. Place the yam in a pot and just cover it with soil.

Keep the soil for these plants moist and make sure they are in a sunny place or they will grow weak and spindly. Once these plants start growing, they can be transplanted into your garden as described above.

For seeds, they generally germinate best in soil that is twice as deep as the seed is high as it rests on the ground; so, a 5 mm high seed would be covered with 1 cm of soil. They can be set in seed trays or any small containers that you may have. Once sown and watered with a mister, cover the tray with plastic wrap. Once the seeds germinate, make sure they get enough light to avoid weak and spindly plants.

Resources

Beneficial Fungi:
Fungi Perfecti LLC
Box 7634
Olympia, WA 98507
www.fungi.com

The Arunyik Mushroom Center
Box 1
Bankok, Thailand 10162

Mycelia
Jean Bethunestraat 9
9040 Gent, Belgium
www.mycelia.be

Appendix

Worm Farms

Another simple and useful way to deal with kitchen waste is with a worm farm. A worm farm is just a watertight container with compost worms (Eisenia fetida or Lumbricus rubellus) in it. Every square foot (30 cm X 30 cm) of worm farm surface area is able process about 200 grams of kitchen vegetable scraps per week. Once established, you can use the worm farm to dispose of not only vegetable waste, but also tea bags, coffee grindings and used filters, the occasional crushed eggshell and shredded newspaper (but not glossy colour paper). A properly run worm farm produces no smell and can be kept indoors without any problems.

The tailings from worm farms are the best plant fertiliser available. When the worms are ready, you can take the compost from the worm farm and sprinkle it onto the soil in your planters to feed the soil. Capturing some worms to put directly into the planters will help with the plant life as well – a dozen per planter would be fine. They regulate their own numbers and will be fine left to help out in the garden. If you have very cold winters, however, the worms might not survive over the winter. If this is the case, their eggs are very likely to survive over the winter and repopulate the planters in springtime.

To construct a worm farm, take any watertight container that is 30 cm X 30 cm or bigger and add 10 cm of compost and shredded paper. Water it just enough that the mixture is moist. If it is too wet, you will drown your worms. Add vegetable scraps just under the surface where the worms can get at them. Finely chopping the scraps will help the worms to break them down faster. If you wish, you can put a lid on the container; just make sure to cut air holes in the lid. Covering the holes with screen of cloth will prevent any fruit flies from entering the container.

Actively Aerated Compost Tea

A great natural fertiliser and pest-repellent for plants is compost tea. To make it, put a handful of compost into a ten litre bucket of rain water (or any water that is free of chlorine). Add a tablespoon of sugar, put in an aerator, and leave the mixture to bubble for 24 hours. When finished, the tea can be put in a watering can and used to water the garden. The mixture will be rich in beneficial bacteria, which, when poured over the leaves of the plant, helps to prevent parasitic attack.

Keith Johnson Interview

2009-02-27T14:48:00.006-05:00

In September, 2007, I had the wonderful opportunity to work with Keith Johnson and a team of other designers on a 25-acre property near Hamilton, Ontario. Keith and I, together with one other designer, walked a section of property designated to us to design. It was a tremendous learning experience for me. Working with Keith is extremely easy to do – he finds the humor in any situation, making everything more enjoyable. After our preliminary designing was finished, Keith graciously agreed to the following interview.

Douglas: Who are you and what do you do?

Keith: I’m Keith Johnson. I teach permaculture design with Peter Bane. I help him on the Activist mostly as the web guy but occasionally, if I ever get enough energy, I do a little bit of writing maybe a little bit of reviewing. But it’s been a while since I’ve done that now. (Laughs) But I love doing the web-work. And we also design and consult together with our company Patterns for Abundance. And I am the gardener at home. I’ve now got about a half acre garden almost and we’re putting in a forest garden. So we are slowly developing our base in Bloomington where we’ve been for about a year and a half now.

Douglas: You also mentioned some other places earlier as well. California was one.

Keith: Well yeah. Prior to Bloomington, I was 10 years in North Carolina outside of Ashville at Earthhaven Ecovillage where Peter and I lived for six years in a clay straw home we built for ourselves. And prior to that, I was in California teaching permaculture and I had started Sonoma County Permaculture. And I was landscaping for about 10 years all together all through the Bay Area. I had to get away from that. It was too crazy. Although, when I left I cried because I have so many dear friends there. And it was my friends I missed rather than the place itself, although, it’s pretty lovely despite eight months a year of no rain.

Douglas: How did you get your start in permaculture?

Keith: I discovered Permaculture One in about 1978 or 79 when I read about it in the Whole Earth Review which was also known as Co-evolution Quarterly. And also I am pretty hip to gardening and natural things because when I was about five years old I learned via my grandmother, who was doing lots of genealogical research, that I’m related to Johnny Appleseed.

Douglas: Oh wow! (Laughing)

Keith: So, I thought that was cool. And he was always an early inspiration to me.

Douglas: You aren’t dropping seeds out of your pocket as you go around are you?

Keith: I do! Sometimes I drop them into people’s hands but it’s very common for me to have seeds in my pocket. Very, very common. I don’t specialize in Apple’s, by any means. I’ve been a big seed saver for the 34 years I’ve been gardening. I guess I got started gardening really when I was about 25. My first gardening books were Organic Gardening Magazine and Ruth Stout’s book How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back and Gardening Without Work - all about mulch gardening. I am also a big fan of medicinal and edible plants. My dad is one of the last of the hunter gatherers. He grew up in Northern Michigan, where I also grew up for my first nine years. Wild foods were always high on the list of things that got us excited - collecting mushrooms and wild fruit and so on. Any time I go and see my folks my dad always a few places he wants to take me for wild food – get grapes or raspberries or juneberries, or take me fishing on the beaver ponds.

Douglas: It sounds like you didn’t find Permaculture, it found you. It was the thing to come waiting to happen.

Keith: Yeah.

Douglas: Maybe about four years ago on the Australian scene, permaculture "tipped" as Malcolm Gladwell would say. It’s basically a mainstream now. How would you say it’s doing in North America?

Keith: It’s coming on a little slower. But in just the last half a decade, there’s been a big shift. More people are tuning into it. More people are writing about it. I have read at least five different science fiction novels in which the word "permaculture" showed up.

Douglas: Really?

Keith: In one case, it was permaculture in an artificial environment in orbit around the earth. Kim Stanley Robinson recently wrote a trilogy of books about climate change. In one of the books, he used the word permaculture at least a dozen times. So, word is getting out.

Douglas: I hadn’t heard anything about that!

Keith: Read Kim Stanley Robinson, anything he’s written is very, very good.

Douglas: I’d love to but there’s so many things I need to know, and I guess I’ve always been like this, but I always read nonfiction almost exclusively. People always ask me why, and I always say “It’s not real.”

Keith: Well, you watch television don’t you?

Douglas: (Awkward, guilty silence.)

Keith: No?

Douglas: (laughing) No. (laughing)

Keith: I’ve never owned a television. My parents have television, people I visit have television. When I meet them in front of one, it’s sort of like an anthropological study, really. (Laughs) Cause I’m just kind of curious because seeing what people are watching is interesting feedback about the culture. And so, that’s always intriguing to me.

Douglas: I’m having flashbacks of Japan now and the culture of there. Anyway, that’s another story.

So, what we’ve been working on this site, Ian Graham’s property – designing it up with a whole bunch of people together – I’ve found it to be extremely productive to bring people together. It’s a great learning experience. There’s so many things I’ve learned, and I hope other people maybe picked up something from me as well. What advice do you have for people who are getting their feet wet with permaculture?

Keith: Read a lot. Start collecting the seed and plant catalogues. Study them. They are an enormous source of data. Get yourself a good library. Shop at the Permaculture Activist catalogue online.

Douglas: Of course. (laughs)

Keith: (Laughs) Permaculture Activist dot net. You’ve gotta put in a plug there.

Douglas: (Laughing) Of course!

Keith: And don’t waste any time is the next thing I’d say. And get help. Don’t try to do this by yourself. Start small, gain some mastery. Take care of zone 1 - that area 50 feet from your kitchen door all around the house. Get some greens and herbs going and start seeing what it takes to take care of oneself and family. Learn to live on things that don’t travel a great distance. Find your entertainment nearby so you don’t have to travel all around. And then when you do travel, it’s all the more valuable. You’ll make much more out of it. And when you do travel, go to people who are doing something intelligent – people who have gained some kind of mastery –and learn from those people. And they are all over the place, you just have to start looking for them. Start connecting yourself up to them and help them connect with others. Basically, we just have to let each other know we are there. This is one of the reasons why for the last 10 years, I have emphasized the Planetary Permaculture Directory where I try to keep track of all the permaculture contacts that I can, so that others can be found.

Douglas: Excellent advice. Thank you very much!

Keith: You are very welcome!

Rhizobium Symbiosis with Woody Plants: Leguminous Nitrogen-Fixing Trees

2009-02-26T14:39:00.008-05:00

Rhizobium Symbiosis with Woody Plants: Leguminous Nitrogen-Fixing Trees
By Douglas Barnes

As mentioned in the previous article in this series, beneficial partnerships are the way of nature. In particular, some microbes (Frankia and Rhizobium) form associations with certain plants allowing them to fix atmospheric nitrogen into a form that plants can use. These symbiotic partners can help us to rehabilitate damaged landscapes, preparing the soil for a succession of more long-term plants.

This piece focuses on woody plants that associate with the bacteria of the genus Rhizobium. We can see from the diagram below that there are 3 subfamilies of the family Fabaceae (AKA Leguminosae). These families are Faboideae (AKA Papilionoideae), Mimosoideae, and Caesalpinoideae. Note that not all the trees in these subfamilies are nitrogen-fixers. Among the Caesalpinioideae, 23% are nitrogen fixers. For Mimosoideae, the figure is 90%, and for Faboideae, 97% are nitrogen-fixers.

As the diagram shows, Mimosoideae contains the nitrogen-fixers Acacia, Albizia, Calliandra, Enterolobium, Leucaena, Mimosa, Paraserianthes, and Pithecellobium. Caesalpinoideae's nitrogen-fixers are Chamaecrista, Cordeauxia; and Faboideae has Cajanus, Dalbergia, Erythrina, Flemingia, Gliricidia, Pterocarpus, Robinia, Sesbania, and Tephrosia.

To rapidly revegetate a damaged landscape, be sure to include plenty of these species to help quickly build up the soils. In areas of very problematic soil, such as arid, tropical and subtropical regions, make 90% of your initial planting of trees nitrogen fixing, pioneer species (associating with either Frankia or Rhizobium), and 10% of species your long-term canopy overstory species. When the system reaches maturity, the proportions will be reversed with 10% nitrogen-fixing, support species and 90% canopy species. The same formula could be followed for humid temperate regions, but the soils in these area are not so fragile and can stand a lower percentage of nitrogen fixers. A 70/30 or even lower may suffice in these areas, as the seasonal cycles of death and regrowth feed these soils well.

As the diagram below shows, the nitrogen-fixing support trees can be pruned (coppiced, pollarded, shredded or sacrificed) to provide mulch, fodder, fuel or fibre. As this is done, the roots of the tree self-prune, releasing nitrogen into the soil.

The highest concentrations of nitrogen are to be found in descending order in the seeds, the seed pods, the flowers, the leaves and then the woody parts of the tree. Inter-planting with fruit or nut trees naturally provides more soil nitrogen. But interplanting also makes the job of chop-and-drop mulching that much easier.

Species of the Month: Comfrey

2009-02-15T18:45:00.008-05:00

Species of the Month: Comfrey
by Douglas Barnes

Comfrey (Symphytum officinale). What better plant to feature as Species of the Month than this herbaceous member of the Boraginaceae family?Description

It grows up to 150 cm tall and 60 cm in diameter in warm climates. The optimum growth is in climates where day and night are equal (i.e. the tropics). There, production of 100 to 200 tons per acre (roughly 250 to 500 metric tons per hectare) is possible! However, it will grow in temperate regions. It prefers full sun and soils rich in nitrogen and humus, so interplanting with nitrogen fixers and mulching is a good idea. You can expect to get at least 10 years out of one plant, and a well-attended plant might outlive you!

Animal Fodder

It is protein rich with reportedly 20 times the protein content of soy beans. It is used as a pig fodder successfully in amounts up to 80 to 90% of the diet! For poultry, it can reduce the need for other feed (be that your concoction or processed feed) by 50%. Egg quality will improve with yolks being brighter. Cows don’t bloat when eating comfrey like they do with clover. And too much clover can taint the milk – not a problem with comfrey. Also, mastitis is reduced in cows fed comfrey. Wilted comfrey mixed with straw fed to sheep at a ratio of one part comfrey to one and a half parts straw increases the digestion of the straw. The flowers make it useful as bee fodder. It is used in zoos as fodder for many (expensive) animals. Its tremendous production rates make it a great elephant feed.

Soil Improvement

Comfrey has deep roots that help it to draw up nutrients from subsoils. This characteristic makes it a valuable nutrient cycler. It accumulates nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, calcium, zinc, manganese, magnesium, copper, sodium, sulfur, chromium, molybdenum and lead (the latter might make it useful in cleaning roadside soils contaminated by the use of leaded gasoline). It can be used as a green manure, and its ability to be cut right down to the ground a few times a year helps in this respect. It can be used as a compost activator.

It can be made into a liquid plant feed:

Place harvested comfrey in a sealable bucket
Weigh down the comfrey with a stone
Wait 1 or 2 weeks
Drain out the juice and dilute it 10 to 1 with water and water your plants with it

You can also use it to fill niches to suppress weeds.

As Food

Traditionally the whole plant has been used. Young leaves can be added to salads in small quantities to boost nutrient uptake. The stems can be blanched and eaten like asparagus. It is the only known plant source of vitamin B12.

As Medicine

Contains allantoin, which assists in the repair of damaged tissues. It is used as a poultice for cuts, scrapes, burns, skin conditions, ulcers, broken bones, strains and aches. It can help with digestive problems. The juice from leaves can be rubbed into the coats of dogs with mange.

The full catalogue of uses is:

Vulnerary (wound healer)
Astringent (contracts tissue making it useful to treat bleeding, peptic ulcers, diarrhoea, shrink mucus membranes, etc.)
Expectorant (dissolves mucus making it useful in treating phlegm)
Emollient (smoothes and softens skin)
Demulcent (treats inflamed, irritated tissue by coating it – e.g. treating a dry cough)
Antiseptic (helps treat or prevent infection in wounds)
Nutritive (along with its protein and minerals, it contains vitamin B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B12, C, E and 28,000 IU of vitamin A per 100g)
Tonic
Styptic (helps stop bleeding)
Antioxidant (from the rosmarinic acid it contains)

Pest Control

Slugs go for comfrey, so you could use it to attract slugs away from plants. If you really want to go all out against slugs, grow a ring of comfrey around your garden, separating the garden with an electric fence. The comfrey will attract the slugs from the garden. Then run pigs in the comfrey. The pigs will love both the comfrey and the slugs. And the pig urine and manure will attract in even more slugs, hopefully depleting your local population for a while. In place of the pigs, poultry could be run as well.

Caution Needed?

Comfrey does contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids which have the potential for liver damage. There have been warnings put out against the use of the herb, but evidence of incontrovertible documented toxicity is lacking. In the book “The Safety of Comfrey,” J.A. Pembery found no reported cases of pyrrolizidine poisoning from comfrey. He did find one case of pigs in Germany being poisoned by nitrates in comfrey, but not by pyrrolizidine. Lab tests on rats suggest that to cause harm to humans, one would have to eat about 20,000 leaves. Certainly from anecdotal evidence, many people have eaten comfrey without reservations for decades and been very healthy. Still, to err on the side of caution, limit consumption. Also, drying the comfrey reduces the amounts of alkaloids.

The Goals of Permaculture

2009-02-02T00:19:00.008-05:00

The Goals of Permaculture Design
by Douglas Barnes

What are the goals of permaculture design? What are we trying to do? The goal of any design is to provide a solution to a problem. The problem permaculture addresses is the maximization of human welfare achieved in a sustainable way. To put it another way, we are trying to ensure long-term survival in a way that does not make us all miserable.

When the term “sustainable” is used, we are really talking about energy budgeting. In a closed system like the Earth (or even in our finite galaxy) there is a maximum amount of energy available. To be able to survive long term means not spending more than you save. A designed human environment is sustainable if, over its lifetime, it captures more energy than was required for its manufacture, implementation and maintenance and provides a surplus for human use. Considering the current industrial model for food production, in which one calorie of food energy is created at the expense of 10 calories of input energy, this definition shows us that our food systems are not sustainable. Similar accounting for other human activities shows that sustainable activity is actually the exception these days.

Solution?

With the problem defined, we can work out a solution. Keeping sustainability in mind, we can set a guideline for design: Design action around energy, not the other way around. A given bioregion has a limit to how much energy it can capture and store for our activities. To go beyond this limit is to push the costs of those activities off onto others and future generations. We are not interested in a sociopathic approach to design, so we want to avoid doing this outcome.

One way to design around energy is through the permaculture technique of setting up zones for activities. Activities that require regular, daily attention should be located in a place close to where the people are. While I am always pleased to see people producing their own food in gardens, those gardens are unfortunately usually located at the farthest point in the backyard from the backdoor. Incentive to trudge all the way out there is reduced by its relative distance and it requires more human energy to get out there. How likely are you to go out to the garden to pick fresh herbs for your breakfast if it’s raining and the garden is 10 metres or more from the door? Not very likely. As the attention required by the elements in the design decreases, their distance from the most trafficked areas increases. Animals, if they are incorporated into the design, are a little farther out, perhaps with fruiting perennials. Nut and timber trees are farther out still. With elements placed geographically according to frequency of use, the energy required to tend to them is minimized.
To maximize energy efficiency, we can also mimic nature. Living and nonliving elements in ecosystems are interconnected, so should the elements in our design be. While the approach of compartmentalizing each element makes for simplicity in the minds of men, it is unnatural and creates more work than is necessary. One could set up an area for one set of crops, then another set of crops, another for trees, another for poultry, and so on. It looks simple – everything in its place. But to do this is to simultaneously ignore beneficial interactions between elements and to create more work for ourselves. If crops such as onions and others from the lily family are planted with apple trees, for example, they would provide a non-competing groundcover (unlike grasses) and flowers to attract pollinators and a host of other beneficial insects that show up with them. Compartmentalized, however, this mutually beneficial arrangement is lost. Poultry let into the garden in a controlled manner provide pest control, weeding and fertilization with minimal losses of garden vegetables. Poultry under perennial fruits clean up fallen fruit, breaking pest cycles. Separated and compartmentalized, these elements cannot mutually interact and start to generate waste. This means more work is left up to the people on site. We can match up these elements by noting their characteristics and matching them with other needs. Chickens love scratching, for example. Pigs love rooting. If you have either animal, why damage soil life by cultivating the ground with an expensive and unsustainable machine in preparation for a garden when you can pen these animals in to the future garden site to do a better job without hurting the soil life and fertilize the soil at the same time?

We can also make note of harmful interactions as well. For example, some plants, like sunflowers, are allelopathic, meaning they put out a chemical that suppresses the growth of most other plants. While they might not make a beneficial companion for your other plants, they could be used as living barriers to prevent the spread of plants you are growing but don’t want to invade other parts of the garden. Ignoring this use of the characteristics of allelopathic plants means that the gardener must now expend energy to put in some sort of artificial barrier – one that has its own embodied energy cost.

Inorganic elements on site are also a consideration. A sun-facing rock will store heat, for instance, making it sometimes possible to grow plants in the microclimate around it that would otherwise not survive or thrive in that climate.

Returning to the goal of permaculture design - creating sustainable environments to meet human needs – we need to look at just what human needs are. Fortunately, we are the most studied species on the planet. There is plenty of information available on the physiological, social and psychological needs of the species to make a very detailed set of species characteristics. Furthermore, the area of happiness has also been studied showing us what makes us genuinely happy and what does not.

Our physiological needs include clean food, clean water, clean air, warmth, and shelter. The physiological does not stand alone, however. The social and psychological are also a part of the requirements for physical health, though they themselves are intangible.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a pretty good model for determining human needs, and the diagram below is patterned in large part, though not exclusively, from it. I’ve put together some of the needs that I’ve seen have empirical evidence to back them and avoided the influence of spiritual, political or economic ideology as best as I could. For simplicity’s sake, the needs here are not meant to be an exhaustive list of human needs, just a sampling of important needs.

Next, we can ask what the aim of the current status quo system is.

Is the aim of our society long term sustainability/survivability? Not by any stretch of the imagination. We are living well beyond our needs with the dream that some wondrous technology will come and solve this problem for us. There is no better recipe for collapse of civilization than that.

Is the aim of our society personal or community happiness? Again, no. We have data consistently showing that while personal wealth has, on the whole, increased, happiness has decreased. Communities, too, are becoming less integrated and interdependent than they once were. This is not a good outcome for a tribal species.

Is the aim to maximize human potential? No. The concern of our society is not to get as many people as possible to experience the maximum personal growth possible. National funding on mental health is enough to indicate that this is not a serious aim.

Is the aim simply to meet material needs for clean, healthy food, clean water, clean air, shelter and energy for warmth and cooking? The food we eat holds less nutritional value now that we’ve industrialized food production. Furthermore, biocide use contaminates not only the food, but more importantly and more severely the farmers and environment that produced it. There is no clean air unpolluted by man-made chemicals anywhere on Earth. There is no clean, uncontaminated water left, save for what is available in glaciers. Shelter is available, to some at least. Looking at homeless populations, it appears that over-priced shelter is available, provided you are both mentally fit and gainfully employed or with sufficient financial reserves to provide you with a roof over your head. And energy to stay warm and cook food? The same conditions seem to apply as for shelter. So, no, this is not the aim of the current system. If it were a serious concern, it would meet these needs better, assuming we are not all outlandishly incompetent.

Looking at the outcomes, it appears as though the aim of the current system is to accrue and secure financial power to those clever enough, educated enough, lucky enough and/or devious enough to get it and hold on to it. Again, I base this on observation, not ideology. I am not making an argument for or against markets here, I am only looking at outcomes. I know of situations where markets work brilliantly and others where they fail miserably. I am only interested in reality, not ideology, because reality always gets the last punch.

Knowing this, we can ask how well the current system works at delivering our identified human needs. Well, some are met, others are not; and those that are met are almost never done in a sustainable way. Our physical needs are not fully met and to the extent they are, the process of meeting them is eroding our capacity for survival in the long term. Our social needs are not met. The consumption of ever more gadgets is not strengthening families or communities, nor is it cementing real friendships. Too many home buyers are looking to move into a good marketplace as opposed to a good community – one with real bonds between people. Connection to a geological site is not an important factor anymore with many or perhaps most people. Our needs for connection and spiritual and personal growth are not met.

In fact, you can go through the needs in the diagram point by point and find that the current system does a poor job of delivering them and completely overlooks some needs altogether. So there exists a gap between what the system can deliver and what humans need. Filling in this gap is the task of design: identifying the needs and meeting them sustainably in the most efficient way.

Interestingly, the people who are doing this now and living in these designed systems are usually reporting increased happiness as well (happiness that can’t all be solely attributed to Mycobacterium vaccae, the soil bacteria that has been found to boost mood when in contact with human skin). And why wouldn’t they be happy? Their physical needs are getting met. They require less time to acquire food when compared with the need to work for money to then walk or drive to a market to pick out food to then carry home and unpack and load into the refrigerator. They require less energy and money to stay warm or cool in their homes. Their homes are designed around function and not architectural fashion. They are usually folks who are involved with establishing connections in their community. So, many of their intangible human needs are addressed by their systems.

That said, the work we are doing is not reweaving the threads of the tapestry of society. We are just tying up the first lengthwise wrap threads of the tapestry to be woven in the future. We have yet to find all the answers, and the real work is ahead of us. But the choice is sustainability/survival or adherence to a system that we know doesn’t meet our needs. Which path to take seems clear enough.

Woody Actinorhizal Plants

2009-01-28T14:08:00.008-05:00

Woody Actinorhizal Plants
By Douglas Barnes

Dogs don’t eat dogs. At least normal, healthy dogs don’t eat dogs. So, if anyone tells you “It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” smile submissively and slowly back away – you are dealing with a sociopath. The world is, on the whole, a symbiotic dog-help-dog world. Why, even dogs help dogs! Nitrogen-fixing plants are one example of the general pattern of symbiosis.

Plants release an average of 40% of their photosynthates (the products of photosynthesis) out their roots. They don’t do this out of inherent inefficiency. These chemical compounds are doing tasks such as sending signals to call in mycorrhizal fungi and feed those fungi, to share with beneficial nitrogen-fixing and other bacteria, or to make soil nutrients more soluble and available for uptake by the roots.

Among woody nitrogen-fixing plants, there are two varieties: those associating with the bacteria Rhizobia; and those associating with the topic of this article, the actinomycetes Frankia. Actinomycetes are a type of bacteria that grow in long chains of filaments resembling the hyphae, or hair-like roots, of fungi.

Among the woody nitrogen-fixers in temperate regions, actinorhizal plants are an important group. These pioneering plants are able to grow in poor soils, enriching them with nitrogen and organic matter. This makes them very valuable in repairing disturbed or damaged soils.

The diagram below shows the 7 families of woody actinorhizal plants and their 23 genera (I left out the one herbaceous family, the Datiscaceae). A higher, 1 MB resolution image is available on request.
To rapidly revegetate a damaged landscape, be sure to include plenty of these species to help quickly build up the soils. In areas of very problematic soil, such as arid, tropical and subtropical regions, make 90% of your initial planting of trees nitrogen fixing, pioneer species (associating with either Frankia or Rhizobium), and 10% of species your long-term canopy overstory species. When the system reaches maturity, the proportions will be reversed with 10% nitrogen-fixing, support species and 90% canopy species. The same formula could be followed for temperate regions, but the soils in these area are not so fragile and can stand a lower percentage of nitrogen fixers. A 70/30 or even lower may suffice in these areas, as the seasonal cycles of death and regrowth feed these soils well.

Family	Genera
Betulaceae	Alnus
Casuarinaceae	Allocasuarina, Casuarina, Ceuthostoma, Gymnostoma
Coriariaceae	Coriaria
Elaeagnaceae	Elaeagnus, Hippopae, Shepherdia
Myricaceae	Myricaceae
Rhamnaceae	Ceanothus, Colletia, Discaria, Kenthrothamnus, Retanilla, Talguenea, Trevoa
Rosaceae	Cercocarpus, Chamaebatia, Cowania, Dryas, Purshia

Stay tuned for the gripping conclusion: Woody Rhizobium-Plant Symbiosis!

Species of the Month: Euphorbia tirucalli

2009-01-17T16:37:00.009-05:00

This post marks the first in a new series. Each month, we will feature a new species from one of the six biological kingdoms. We will, look at their characteristics and possible duties they can perform for us.

Species of the Month: Euphorbia tirucalli
by Douglas Barnes

Other names that E. tirucalli has gone by include Arthrothamnus tirucalli, Euphorbia media var. Bagshawei, Euphorbia scoparia, Euphorbia media, Euphorbia rhipsaloides, and Euphorbia rhipsalioides.

Euphorbia tirucalli is an African tree that grows in semi-arid, savannah conditions. It is very drought resistant, withstanding long dry seasons. It is salt tolerant and can withstand to just under 5000 ppm arsenic. It will grow from 4 to 15 m tall and at altitudes to 2000 m elevation in hot savannah climates.

It is a coppiceable tree. When coppicing it, cut it at 20 to 30 cm from the ground. It makes good fuel wood with 17,600 kilojoules per kilogram of dry wood; and through pyrolysis, it makes not only charcoal, but also a high octane gasoline substitute. (One to two tonnes of fuel per hectare is what you can expect.) It can also be used as a diesel source.

The timber is useful. And it can be used as a living fence as it is not grazed by animals. Caution must be applied when planting this tree near any human settlement. It must not be in a location where it can contaminate wells or water collection sites as the tree contains co-carcinogens. Latex from the tree can be used as an insecticide and as a fish poison. As an insecticide, it is effective against Colletotrichum capsici, Fusarium pallidoroseum, Botryodiplodia theobromae, Alternaria alternata, Penicillium citrinum, Phomopsis caricae-papayae and Aspergillus niger and against the nematodes Hoplolaimus indicus, Helicotylenchus indicus and Tylenchus filiformis. The latex can also be used as a glue.

It has medicinal properties, though one would use caution obviously. The young twigs from the tree are roasted (presumably breaking down the poisons) and chewed to sooth sore throats. A poultice made from the greenwood is used to treat broken bones. Despite the toxins and co-carcinogens it contains, some of its compounds have been used to treat cancers.

The Instant Wadi Well for Arid Climates

2009-01-07T15:48:00.046-05:00

The Instant Wadi Well
by Douglas Barnes

Rainfall in arid regions occurs in large and infrequent events throughout the year. Because the desert environment is a brittle one and because there is so much rain at one time, tremendous erosion occurs. This leads to the creation of scarps and wadis.

Wadi is simply the Arabic word for a riverbed. In an arid region, its water flow is likely to be ephemeral, particularly in headwaters (where permaculturists are most likely to be working). They are also places where a lot of erosion takes place. Looked at from another perspective, wadis are places where a lot of erosion can be stopped.

After teaching a permaculture course in Jordan, designer Geoff Lawton returned to the area a year later and found that someone had built a gabion (an uncemented rock wall, usually held inside a steel cage) across a particular wadi. Although the 8-foot-high gabion was less than a year old, it was already full of settlement and still had water trickling out of the base, despite the fact that there had not been any recent rains.

This natural tendency for gabions in wadis to quickly fill with water-retaining sediment provides us the opportunity to create what I am dubbing the Instant Wadi-Well (for lack of a better name). After determining where the gabion is to be placed, start with a shallow hole about 2 feet (60 cm) deep in a teardrop shape with the tapered end downstream. Place the first row of stones for the well inside the hole and cement them together, leaving the ground unmortared to allow water to seep in. Keep adding and cementing stones until you reach ground level. Once at ground level, continue up but add an extra 2 layers of mortared stone at the tapering end to allow stability in the face of the rushing torrent and sediment that is to come with the first rainfall. Continue this right up the entire height of the well shaft, making the top row at least 3 feet (90 cm) above the height the gabion will be. After all the sediment moves in, it is likely the well casing will only be 2 feet (60 cm) above the sediment.

All that is left is to build the gabion. Wire cages are not absolutely necessary for the gabion to perform, but they are recommended as they make it far less likely that the rock wall will blow out in the face of the torrent of water, sand and silt.

If the well casing is built strong enough, then there will likely be a well within a few major rain event is. The water will have to be tested as deserts tend to have salty soil. Baring salinity problems, this would be a quick and easy way to establish clean wells and combat erosion at the same time!

This technique compliments other systems as well. For example, if there are storage tanks or cisterns at the top of the scarp, a windmill can be employed to pump water from the Instant Wadi Well to this higher storage. From there, it can be gravity fed down to where it is needed.

The HA-HA Fence Alternative

2008-11-21T18:08:00.010-05:00

The HA-HA Fence Alternative
by Douglas Barnes

In the interests of saving people's crops from raiding elephants, and to save the elephants themselves, one popular technique, widely taught and promoted in permaculture circles is the “Ha-Ha!” fence. The “fence” is actually a trench about 1.5 to 2 metres deep with steep edges to create a barrier that elephants cannot cross (so people with the fence can watch the elephants and say "Ha-ha!" as their crops are safe). In this way, farmers’ crops can be protected without having to harm or kill elephants.

The drawback to this method, however, is that people have to put in considerable effort to dig these trenches out to protect their crops. Now, thanks to the ingenuity of a Thai villager, adopted by the Elephant Conservation Network (ECN) and the Zoological Society of London, there appears to be a simpler, less energy intensive method to deter elephants. The villager had strung old CDs along his fence in an effort to scare off the elephants. It was observed that, particularly during a full moon, “the CDs twisted and shone, mimicking a person with a torch.” It would be a simple matter to rig up a few throwie-type, battery-powered LED lights so that nights without the full moon would also have protection.

This discovery is promising, but a follow up of the success needs to be seen. Elephants are very intelligent animals and could potentially figure out that the threat is merely a trick. But if it does work over the long term, it means a simple and cheap solution to crop-raiding elephants; and that is good news for people and pachyderms.

Greywater Guidelines

2008-11-18T14:30:00.033-05:00

Greywater Guidelines
by Douglas Barnes

The guidelines in this article are based on Art Ludwig’s industry-leading work.For further information on greywater systems, please refer to Ludwig’s Create an Oasis with Greywater, Branched Drain Greywater Systems, and Builder’s Greywater Guide. These are the best publications available regarding the construction of greywater systems.

Conservation of water is rightfully a growing concern throughout the world. Less than 2.6% of the water on the planet is freshwater. Of that, about 69.6% is locked away in ice and another 30.1% in groundwater, including 13.5% in deep groundwater reserves over 800 metres underground. Only 0.6% of the world’s freshwater is immediately available on the surface via lakes and rivers; and only 0.037% is in the atmosphere at any one time.

Industrial activity and industrial agriculture consume large amounts of the water that is available. And predictions for continental inlands forecast that global warming will bring drier conditions than those that currently exist. Of the total land mass of the Earth, 47.2% is arid, much of that converted to desert by human activity with a further 25% of the land at risk of desertification. And this problem is not limited to poor nations. While 66% of African lands suffer from desertification, 40% of the pastureland in Texas is now too arid for use. And pivot irrigation is turning patches of land on the Great Plains of North America into salted desert in 3 to 4 years. Even former patches of the Amazon rainforest are very close to becoming desert. Global water consumption is rising so fast that by 2025 demand will surpass availability by 56%. We need to shift to sustainable water usage, or we risk creating a planet largely comprised of desert.

One way to use water more efficiently, and return it to the environment clean is by greywater systems. Greywater is waste water from homes from sources excluding toilets. It is water from sinks and drains containing small amounts of nutrient-rich organic matter. Household waste water typically consists of 50 to 80% greywater. To flush this into a sewage system is a waste of life’s most precious resource.

Irrigation by spraying is very inefficient with up to 80% of the water evaporating. This has lead to severe salinisation and desertification in some areas. Greywater drained into mulch or leach pits, on the other hand, has almost no evaporation and results in about 40% of the water being taken up directly by plants (the remainder is filtered by soil microbes before tickling down to recharge groundwater systems).

Advantages:

Urban households can save the energy used to purify municipal water by not using tap water for watering plants. Rural households using pumps can reduce their energy and material needs by using greywater over well water for watering.

Utilising greywater also extends the life of septic systems or reduces the load on municipal sewage treatment plants. And in areas where septic tanks are less practical, such as clayey soils and rocky areas where septic fluids cannot trickle into the ground, greywater can help tackle waste water issues.

The use of greywater helps to recharge groundwater.

Good systems are cheap to build. (More expensive systems usually perform poorly.)

Potential Problems:

Greywater systems need a certain amount of space. Not every site has enough land for the water generated from the home. Partial sites from only one part (one sink, for example) may be all that can be tapped for a greywater site.

Very wet areas may become saturated with water. Such situations may be impractical or may require a different approach, such as greywater wetlands.

Cold climates make outdoor greywater systems possible through the warm season only.

Reduced water flow from a household can create a problem in urban areas with a municipal sewage system. It may be that the reduction in water flow through the pipes means that there is not enough flow to move toilet solids into the sewage main line.

Many building codes have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to greywater. A system can be built with a diverter to the currently approved (i.e. unsustainable) system. The diverter can then be used to flow water into the greywater system once the code changes. This system can also be used to deal with freezing conditions mentioned above.

Arid regions need carefully managed systems due to their inherent problems with salinity. Proper choice of detergents is important for every system but becomes vital in arid regions. It is a good idea to incorporate rainwater harvesting systems with greywater, particularly laundry greywater. First-flush and/or tank overflow can be connected to greywater drains to wash away excess salts.

Design Considerations:

An effective, safe greywater system slowly filters water through the soil so that microbes can devour the organic material in the water. The system should be designed such that people never come in contact with the greywater. The systems can be used to assist food production, provided that the plants are not root crops. Don’t spray grey water on plants (or anything else). The water could contaminate the plant and contaminated water droplets could be inhaled.

As a safety precaution, purple pipes are used in the construction of greywater systems, if possible. This colour standard is to avoid any accidental consumption.

Don’t store greywater. It will fester dangerously. Also, design the system to keep water flowing. Systems that allow stagnation will convert relatively clean waste water into a health hazard.

It is a good idea to design the system with a 3-way diverter valve so that greywater can be either directed into the greywater system or to the sewage system. In cold climates, this feature is a necessity.

Make the system so that water sinks into the ground. Don’t allow greywater systems to flow into lakes or rivers, or you risk (illegally) contaminating them. A good rule of thumb is to keep systems at least 50 feet from open water. Local codes may require more than this. (To be fair to greywater systems, it should be noted that about 20% of sewage systems in the U.S. discharge sewage with only solids removed directly into natural open water; and all systems flush into water systems during heavy rains.)

Greywater systems require a change in behaviour. Harsh household chemical cleansers will have to be substituted for greener alternatives.

Consider the bedrock on the site. On a site with limestone, it is theoretically possible, however unlikely, to contaminate groundwater with a grey water system. Greywater systems are still possible, but the potential danger must be addressed in the design.

Avoid perforated pipes for water distribution. First, they clog with sediments from the greywater. Second, even water distribution from the holes is next to impossible. Third, roots will surely clog the system. Dumping directly into a gravel bed system or mulch pit is much better, is simpler to design, cheaper to build, and cheaper and easier to maintain.

Also avoid grease filters and other filtration systems. They will clog and they will clog quickly. If regular cleaning of messy and potentially toxic filters is a necessity of the system, it is likely that the user will stop using the system.

Greywater Volumes by Source:

Washers	115 to 190 litres per day.	Good water quality.
Bath tubs	150 litres per use.	Good water quality.
Kitchen sink	20 to 60 litres per person per day.	Nutrient rich, but high in grease, soap and solids. Use drain screen.
Shower	40 litres per person per day.	Good quality. Use drain screen.
Dishwasher	20 to 40 litres per day.	Poor quality due to salt in dishwashing detergent.
Bathroom sinks	4 to 20 litres per person per day.	Good quality.

Systems:

Perhaps the simplest, cheapest, most reliable, best performing greywater system is the branched drain system emptying to mulch pits or leach fields, created by greywater master designer Art Ludwig. In this system, “double-elbow” pipe fittings are used to spread the flow of greywater to different areas of the garden. The branched drain system allows greywater to split into two paths up to 4 times. In other words, 16 drains to mulch pits or leach fields are possible in one branched system. Valves can be placed on each branch to allow that section’s flow to be cut off. The ideal place to do this is on the level section after each double elbow. This will prevent water from backing up and stagnating in the pipes.

The elbow will effectively halve the flow, but you will need to ensure that the pipe leading up to the elbow has at least 50 cm (about 20”) of straight section. Also, the slope of the pipes should be kept at a fall of 1:48 or steeper to keep the water flowing.

Whether a system is branched or not the ends can be hoses (flexible PVC is advisable as it does not look like a garden hose, thus people are unlikely to drink from it mistakenly), making them movable. This allows different areas to be watered. The advantage here is if one area becomes saturated, it can be shut off.

The “gravity drum” system is ideal for draining washing machines evenly without surges in flow. This system will either have to be branched as above to deliver to a number of sites, or its drainage hose will have to be moved to avoid one location from becoming saturated. Greywater flows from the washing machine’s drainage hose into the top of a 55 gallon plastic drum. At the bottom of the drum, a hole is drilled and a coupling is added to fit a hose to drain the drum as shown. It will be necessary to put a small hole in the top of the barrel, or water will siphon out preventing the machine from refilling (wasting water and making the machine inoperable until the siphon is broken).
Big-brand detergents can be very high in sodium, so it is best to choose a brand that has a low environmental impact. Only in tropical highlands would this extra sodium be beneficial, but only in small amounts. To address the sodium accumulation, it is best to combine the system with rainwater collection from the roof (or other surface as the case may be) to flush out the excess.

Greywater can simply be delivered into a mulch pit by placing the end of the pipe in the mulch. The diagrams below show a slightly more elaborate system that drain into a swale (a water-harvesting ditch on contour).
Leach fields are another simple and safe way to distribute greywater. The diagrams below demonstrate one method to construct a simple leach field. This design delivers simplicity and construction savings at the expense of a somewhat imprecise distribution of greywater.

A trench 1 to 2 meters long and 40 to 50 cm deep is dug and partially filled with gravel or mulch. A hole is cut in the bottom of a clay or plastic flower pot and the greywater hose fitted to it. It is best to push to hose through into the pot and place a coupler on the hose larger in diameter than the hole in the pot. This will prevent the hose from pulling out. Place the pot on the gravel, or if you use mulch, rest the pot on some bricks to keep the pot from sinking into the mulch. Then cover the rest with mulch. The diagram show the tops exposed, but they can be buried in mulch.

Straight greywater cannot be stored for long before it will stagnate and become a smelly health hazard. Once it is treated, however, the water can be held in tanks for later non-potable use. The design below illustrates a simple system using the technique just described to treat water that can be used downstream in the system. The entire unit can be built into a water proofed plywood box or a constructed ferro-cement box.
These leach fields are a convenient solution for cold climates. Outdoor greywater systems need to be shut down in winter as they would freeze up. Leach fields, however, can be incorporated into a greenhouse. Furthermore, any warmth from the use of hot water can be transferred to a greenhouse rather than wasted in the septic or sewage system.

Another option for the treatment of greywater that lends itself well to greenhouses is the constructed wetland. This system is also an option for very wet areas where the ground is too saturated to accept additions of greywater. The water exiting the constructed wetland could be used for irrigation purposes or could go into an aquaculture system. One square foot of wetland surface area will be enough to treat one gallon of water. So, if you produce 50 gallons from one source, you will need 50 square feet of wetland surface area. The fine tuning of these systems can be a bit tricky as nutrient supply determines how many plants can survive. If the system is in a greenhouse, it will be simpler as you do not need to consider the amount of rainfall you can expect to receive. And if the system is too big for the nutrient supply, this can be remedied by controlled additions of actively aerated compost tea.

The diagrams below help to illustrate how a wetland is constructed:
Building specifics:

If your system is to drain outdoors, you will need to check if your soil is capable of handling the load. Dig a 30 cm (12”) deep hole about 10 or 15 cm in diameter. Fill the hole with water 2 or 3 times to saturate the soil. Then place a stake with marks denoting distance (in inches or centimetres) in the hole. Fill the hole with water and time how long it takes for the water to drain down. It will give you the inches or centimetres per minute that the soil is capable of handling.

If you are building a new home, do not mix greywater pipes with blackwater (from the toilet) pipes, including the vents. This makes implementing a greywater system easier. Also, implementation will be easier if you design your greywater pipes to conserve vertical drop as the system will be gravity fed.

Use between 2 inch and 1 ½ inch pipes. Any smaller and clogs are more likely. Any larger and solids might stick on the bottom of the pipe.

Be careful to keep the slope of all the pipes in the system at least 1:48 (1 cm drop over 48 cm, or ¼” drop over one foot) or steeper. And less and you risk clogs forming in the system. Also design the final outlet to empty the water with a fall of several inches. This will prevent solids from backing up at the end of the pipe and clogging.

Map out the system for future maintenance, and be sure to incorporate easily accessible cleanouts.

Remembering a great man: Masanobu Fukuoka

2008-08-17T09:16:00.009-04:00

Sadly, natural farming innovator Masanobu Fukuoka passed away yesterday, Saturday, August 16, 2008, at his home in Iyo, Ehime Prefecture, Japan of old age. He was 95.

Fukuoka authored a number of books including One Straw Revolution: The Natural Way of Farming and The Natural Way of farming: The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy, both of which are available in English. Fukuoka taught us to observe nature and work with it rather than trying to impose our desires on the land. He also popularized the use of seed balls, which has been used in agriculture and in re-greening projects.

The father of the permaculture movement, Bill Mollison, spoke very highly of Mr. Fukuoka and said that, before hearing of Fukuoka's work, he could not see a way to produce grains sustainably, and had not thought they could be incorporated into permaculture.

Around the world, Fukuoka's work resonated with people and it continues to be adopted and applied to different conditions around the world. His work and his teachings remain a great inspiration to us and we will miss him.

Killing me softly with his investments

2008-06-12T18:03:00.007-04:00

On Thursday, June 12, 2008, CBC's The Current did a report called Buying Farmland about the trend of financial investment firms to buy up farms worldwide (after they devastated all the other markets available to them). One of the guests was Gary Blumenthal, president and CEO of World Perspectives, an agricultural investment consulting firm. Among other things, Blumenthal claimed that large farms are more productive (any agricultural census will demonstrate that this is false) and that peasant subsistence farming was not conductive to maximising human potential (not that this is the business that World Perspectives engages in, mind you). The following is my response sent to The Current:

Listening to your report on investors buying farmland, I was deeply impressed by Gary Blumenthal's willingness to demonstrate his ignorance of both agriculture and the economy.

He tells us that "half of all production in the U.S. comes from just 34,000 farms." This says nothing about the relative efficiency of farms with respect to size, it only tells us the status quo, as though mere existence is an indicator of efficiency.

Looking at the data from the USDA census, we find that the most productive farms are small farms with production rapidly falling off as acreage increases. And any positive production on large farms is based on fudging the numbers. If you consider that on these farms it takes an average nine calories of energy to produce one calorie of food crop, you quickly realise that the energy intensive, poorly yielding large farm does not have a future.

Furthermore, traditional peasant systems, elements of which I use in the systems I design, normally require little input in terms of time and energy. Assuming there is a tradition of sustainable agriculture in the region, peasant agriculture is not arduous. What is genuinely disastrous is the repeat of England's Enclosure which is currently being played out across the Third World. It does not "maximise human potential" to force people off the land and into shanty towns to become $4-a-day sweatshop workers.

Considering that people like Gary Blumenthal are going to have increasing say over farm administration, my advice to listeners as a designer of sustainable agriculture systems is to start to forgo your flowerbeds and grow as much of your own food as possible.

Douglas Barnes
President
EcoEdge Design Ltd.

Permaculture in Disaster Areas: Earthquakes

2008-06-02T01:44:00.005-04:00

Permaculture in Disaster Areas: Earthquakes
A look at designing structures for earthquake-prone regions.
by Douglas Barnes

The recent devastating earthquakes in China point to the need for a simple and inexpensive means of dealing with earthquakes. In my region of Canada, earthquakes are few and far between. Yet when I lived in Tokyo, the threat of serious earthquakes was always lingering in the back of my mind - especially after the Kobe earthquake of 1995.

Japan has developed different systems for dealing with earthquakes: shock absorber-like rubber pads to allow the ground to shift under the building, or a ball in an over-sized socket that can slide when an earthquake hits. These systems work fine for those who can afford the significant extra expense they incur for the homeowner. But what of those who cannot afford this high-tech approach? Fortunately, there is a proven, centuries-old technique for building earthquake-resistant structures.

In the Himalayans along the Chinese border, there are stone towers up to 60 metres tall that have been standing for nearly 1000 years.It is amazing for any stone structure, particularly ones so tall, to survive so long - but these ones have done it in a region plagued with earthquakes! The key seems to be a heuristic approach as all of the early models of the towers collapsed in temblors. After repeated tries, success was found by adding triangular ridges running up the middle of each wall. These ridges were able to lend extra support to the walls in the event of an earthquake.

A regular wall like the one pictured is stable when the earth shakes in the direction of the length of the wall. When the earth moves more perpendicular to the wall, however, it is prone to collapse.

When the wall includes a ridge as pictured below, it becomes more stable when the earth shakes perpendicular to the wall. The ridge feature acts like a tripod leg to give extra strength.

Seen from the foundation up, the centre of each wall has a ridge running up its length.

With minor adjustments, this feature can be built into the design of a standard home, providing a more earthquake resistance than a regular building would.

Having allowed huge stone structures to remain standing for a millennium, this method has proven itself to be very effective. By incorporating this feature into new structures, designers can add an excellent level of protection and peace of mind to the inhabitants.

Bats: Useful Permaculture Animals

2008-05-17T18:34:00.007-04:00

Bats: Useful Permaculture Animals

In North American culture, bats are portrayed as scary creatures. Fortunately for me, I learned at a very young age that bats eat mosquitoes; and since learning this, I have always viewed bats as friends. Most of my permaculture designs call for bat houses, but this element of the design is usually ignored by those implementing the design or is met with strange looks when I suggest the idea. I hope this piece will explain my desire to incorporate bats into designs.

Insect Control

About 70% of the more than 1,000 species of bats in the world are insectivorous.¹ They assist us in controlling biting insects, but their use in insect control is much broader than this.

Recent research from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama shows that bats are vital in controlling plant-eating insects. In control plots with free access for birds and bats, only 4.3% of leaf area was lost to insects. Plots with birds excluded (i.e. relying solely on bats) lost 7.2% of their leaf area. But plots with bats excluded, relying just on birds for insect control, lost 13.3% of their leaf area.² Furthermore, plots with birds excluded had 65% more insects on the plants compared to the control plot, whereas plots with bats excluded had 153% more insects. Feeding by insects on bat-excluded plots was 209% greater than the control plot, with bird-excluded plots being only 67% greater!³ In other words, in tropical forests at least, bats are more important for insect control than birds. Surely bats play a significant role in insect control in other climates within their range as well. For this reason, I feel they should be a part of permaculture design whenever possible.

Forest Expansion and Maintenance

In the tropics of the Americas, bats can assist in reafforestation. Research by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research carried out in Costa Rica found that between 5 and 20 times more seeds are dropped around man-made bat roosting boxes than in areas without the boxes.⁴ The bats of the Neotropics tend to disperse many seeds of pioneering species, making them potential partners in reafforestation work.

The fruit bats of India tend to maintain forests. They eat the fruits of many canopy species such as guava, thus helping to disperse climax forest species. Unfortunately for the 12 species of India fruit bats, they are all mistakenly classified as pests by the government (though they favour overripe fruit and thus don’t compete with man).⁵

It is also worth mentioning here that many bats are pollinators, with some plants even evolving flowers suitable to bat pollination.⁶

Attracting Bats

While some may indeed have bats in their belfry, it is perhaps more useful to build homes for them in locations that are beneficial to your aims. Bats seem to have an easier time locating bat roosts located on poles or on the sides of buildings, and tend to occupy them more readily. They like the interior temperature to be from 26 to 38oC.⁷ [See below for links to roost designs.]

Locating bat houses over gardens takes advantage not only of their insectivorous activities, but also of bat guano, a rich source of nitrogen and phosphorus.

A Few Words of Caution

The one drawback of bats is their tendency to be a reservoir species for many viruses (a species that carries a virus without showing signs of infection). They have been found to be carriers of 60 viral species, including lyssaviruses (including rabies), Henipavirus (including Hendra virus, which causes lung haemorrhaging or meningitis, Nipah virus causing neurological and respiratory damage or death), filoviruses (including Ebola and Marburg virus) and possibly the SARS coronavirus. Also, eating bats that have in turn eaten cycad seeds, which contain the neurotoxin β-methylamino L-alanine, can cause serious neurological disease.⁸

Despite this, there is no need to go running in terror at the site of a bat. Bat roosts can be located accordingly (i.e. not next to homes); and any suspected bat bite should be seen to by a physician. Additionally, their tendency to control the populations of mosquitoes and other biting insects can make them agents of disease reduction rather than vectors of disease.

Useful Bat Links:
Bats in Australia http://www.amonline.au/bats/
Some bats of India http://www.batcon.org/batsmag/v13n2-5.html
Bats of Britain http://batsandtrees.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=38
Single chamber bat house plans http://www.batcon.org/bhra/economyhouse.html
Attracting Bats http://batcon.org/pdfs/AttractingBats.pdf
Small bat house http://www.dccl.org/information/houses/bat_house_plans.htm
Successful bat houses http://www.batcon.org/pdfs/BatHouseCriteria.pdf

Footnotes

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bats
2. Smithsonian researchers show major role of bats in plant protection
3. Bats Limit Arthropods and Herbivory in a Tropical Forest
4. Fake concrete bat roosts reclaim rainforest; The Bats of India; Effects of Artificial Roosts for Frugivorous Bats on Seed Dispersal in a Neotropical Forest Pasture Mosaic
5. The Bats of India
6. How to Share a Bat
7. Attracting Bats
8. Bats as a continuing source of emerging infections in humans; The reservoir of Marburg virus identified in a species of fruit bat; Scientists detect presence of marburg virus in African fruit bats; Human rabies often caused by undetected, tiny bat bites; Eating bats linked to neurological disease

More Evidence of Mycorrhizal Fungi as Arsenic Beater

2008-04-02T18:06:00.005-04:00

More Evidence of Mycorrhizal Fungi as Arsenic Beater

By Douglas Barnes

As has been mentioned on this site before (See Beating Arsenic in Bengal and Bangladesh¹), arsenic is a serious problem in many parts of the world killing hundreds of thousands of people each year. It can cause cancers in skin, bladder, kidney and lungs, cause gangrene by damaging blood vessels in the legs and feet, is suspected of aggravating or contributing to diabetes, high blood pressure and to fertility problems.

Research by the University of Aberdeen² had discovered that Glomus mosseae reduced arsenic uptake in lentils irrigated with arsenic-contaminated water.

Now new research done in China³ using different species of mycorrhizal fungi finds that the fungi can also protect corn from arsenic contamination. Using Glomus species and Acaulospora species, the team found that the fungi reduced plant uptake of arsenic:

A pot experiment was conducted to examine the roles of indigenous and non-indigenous arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi in As uptake by maize (Zea mays L.) from original As-polluteded [sic] soil, and their effects on As and P fractions in the rhizosphere. The As-polluted soils with three As levels, were collected from As-polluted arable soil near an As mine. Indigenous AM fungi (M2: including Glomus spp., Acaulospora spp.) isolated from these soils were compared with a non-indigenous AM fungus (M1: Glomus caledonium 90036). The plants were harvested after 10 weeks of growth. Mycorrhizal colonization rate, dry weight (DW) and P, As concentrations in plants, as well as As and P fractions, were determined. Compared to the non-mycorrhizal treatment, at the high soil As level, maize inoculated with AM fungi had higher shoot and root DW and P contents, both M1 and M2 inoculations increased As accumulation in root, though M1 reduced shoot As content, and M2 transported more As from roots to shoots. M1 decreased root and shoot As contents at the low and medium soil As levels. Plants mainly took up non-specifically sorbed As at the high soil As level, but As was taken up from hydrous oxides of Fe and Al at the low and medium soil As levels. All results indicate that indigenous consortia M2 could protect their host plants from the toxicity of excessive As through P nutrition by activating P, though non-indigenous M1 could alleviate As toxicity through stabilizing As and P in the soil.

It is reasonable to expect that other plants that form mycorrhizal associations would also have reduced arsenic uptakes from Glomus species and likely Acaulospora species as well. In arsenic-contaminated regions, it would be a good idea to inoculate soils with Glomus species⁴ and avoid practices that hinder mycorrhizal growth (ploughing, adding synthetic nitrogenous fertilisers, addition of too much phosphorus).

1. http://permaculturetokyo.blogspot.com/2006/10/beating-arsenic-in-bengal-and.html

2. http://mycorrhiza.ag.utk.edu/latest/latest06/06_8ahmed1.htm

3. http://mycorrhiza.ag.utk.edu/latest/latest08/08_2bai1.htm

4. Available through http://www.fungi.com in North America. In Europe, try http://www.mycelia.be, in Asia, The Arunyik Mushroom Center, Bangkok, Thailand.

Killing Soil With Synthetic Nitrogen

2008-03-25T13:57:00.016-04:00

Killing Soil With Synthetic Nitrogen
by Douglas Barnes

Updated April 3, 2008

Soil is like air. It is a simple thing that gets overlooked and it gets a bum rap: it’s “just dirt.” But “just dirt” is where the nutrients that keep plants healthy come from. And even for people who refuse to eat vegetables, plants are ultimately the source of nutrients in human nutrition. In other words, without healthy soil, there is not healthy food. And without healthy food, there are no healthy people. This often overlooked fact has been a factor in the collapse of many a civilisation and no civilisation that ruined its soil has survived, so we ignore it at our peril.

Permaculturists know that the use of synthetic fertilisers are a great way to damage soil life, but new research shows that the overall effect is actually very dramatic.

Saeed Khan, Richard Mulvaney, Tim Ellsworth, and Charlie Boast, soil scientists from the University of Illinois, found that in one of the University’s Morrow Plots the growth and yields of corn were 20% lower than in another plot.¹ Conventional theory would predict the poorly performing plot would have been the better performing one as it received greater inputs of nitrogenous fertilisers and crop residues.

According to Saeed Khan, “What we learned is that after five decades of massive inputs of residue carbon ranging from 90 to 124 tons per acre, all of the residue carbon had disappeared, and there had been a net decrease in soil organic carbon that averaged 4.9 tons per acre. Regardless of the crop rotation, the decline became much greater with the higher nitrogen rate.”

The effect is not limited to this one case, either. Charlie Boast points out that "In numerous publications spanning more than 100 years and a wide variety of cropping and tillage practices we found consistent evidence of an organic carbon decline for fertilized soils throughout the world and including much of the Corn Belt besides Illinois."

Adding soluble nitrogenous fertilisers pushes soil away from a fungal-based soil to a bacterial-based soil (mycorrhizal, saprophytic and epiphytic fungi can greatly boast plant health and yield). But it appears that, in the long run, the addition of synthetic nitrogenous fertilisers makes the soil less hospitable to bacteria as well.

Furthermore, the addition of too much phosphorus kills off fungi; and fungi produce glomalin, which makes up 27% of carbon in soils.² Glomalin is also very stable in soil, lasting from an estimated 7 to 42 years. And as CO2 levels increase, mycorrhizal fungi respond by increasing the amount of glomalin produced (responding in accordance with the predictions of the Gaia hypothesis). We cannot afford to kill off this natural climate regulator simply for the convenience of running our agricultural systems like a factory.

This loss of carbon not only hinders soil life, it also reduces the water storage capacity of soil as well. The loss of life in the soil will damage the soil structure leading to increased erosion. The loss of carbon in the soil also means more nitrate pollution from runoff as the excess fertiliser not taken up by the plant (i.e. most of the fertiliser) washes away with rainfall and irrigation, polluting aquatic systems. And if that were not enough, the carbon is lost to the atmosphere in the form of CO₂, increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Imagine the effects of a holistic approach to soils. It is reasonable to expect that more than 4.9 tons per acre could be sequestered in soils rehabilitated to maximize soil life.³ But taking 4.9 tons as a conservative figure, the U.S.’s 434 million acres of cultivated land could sequester 2.1 billion tons of carbon, were it to be shifted to ecological farming methods.⁴

Organic soils have higher numbers of Trichoderma and Piriformospora species of mycorrhizal fungi which help protect against the parasitic Fusarium fungi.⁵ Fusarium produces vomitoxin, which is not destroyed in the cooking process. Its associated risks include cancer and birth defects. Fusarium also contains the chemical warfare agent fusariotoxin. Infected crops are unfit for human food or animal feed. Losses can be significant, as well. In 2002 for example, farmers in Manitoba, Canada suffered $100 million in losses due to fusarium. ⁶ It is worth noting that the addition of glyphosate has been found to stimulate the growth of fusarium,⁷so following conventional practices greater risks on human health and introduces the possibility of increased losses for the farmer. [Good luck to conventional farmers. The latest news is that the most popular brand of glyphosate, which also happens to have a surfactant that is deadly to amphibians,⁸ has now doubled in price from last year.⁹]

Once upon a time, farmers needed to respect soil life. Since the Second World War, however, agriculture has been incorrectly reduced to an industrial process with the belief that simply supplying the right parts (mixes of crop nutrients) is all there is to manufacturing the agricultural product. What we have actually managed, though, is to damage more land in a shorter period of time than any other period in history. And we are doing it on a scale that is global. We can live without oil (believe it or not). We can live without silicon chips. We can even live without industrial manufacturing. We simply cannot live without healthy soil.

The solution is, luckily, simple. Stop wasting money by giving it to chemical manufacturers for products (biocides, etc.) that reduce yield. Stop relying on chemical manufacturers for fertility. Stop wasting energy by ploughing. Instead, recognise that life is interconnected. Build a healthy soil ecosystem and you will be rewarded with healthy plants. But if you approach nature with the ill-conceived metaphor of the machine, you can expect that “machine” to perform poorly.

1. Study reveals that nitrogen fertilizers deplete soil organic carbon http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-10/uoia-srt102907.php

2. Glomalin: Hiding Place for a Third of the World's Stored Soil Carbon http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/sep02/soil0902.htm

3. The mass of bacteria per acre of healthy soil is around 70,000 pounds with only 4500 lb to 5400 lb in ploughed soils (80,000 kg per hectare and only 5 to 6,000 kg per hectare of ploughed land). The figure for actinomycetes would conservatively be around 8,000 kg per Ha (about 7140 lb per acre) but could reach as high as 80,000 kg/Ha (about 70,000 lbs per acre). And after adding the mass of the fungi, protozoa, algae, nematodes, earthworms (one to 1.5 million per acre of healthy soil, not including their castings), and arthropods in the soil, the figure of 4.9 tons per acre more for healthy soils is not a radical estimate at all.

4. Based on figures from the 2002 USDA Census of Agriculture.

5. Bulluck, III, L.R., Brosius, M., Evanylo, G. K. and Ristaino, J. B. 2002. Organic and synthetic fertility amendments influence soil microbial, physical and chemical properties on organic and conventional farms. Applied Soil Ecology 19:147-160 cited in Ho, Mae-Wan and Ching, Lim Li. 2004. GMO Free: Exposing the Hazards of Biotechnology to Ensure the Integrity of Our Food Supply. Vital Health Publishing, Ridgefield, CT; Deshmukh, SD; Kogel, KH. 2007. Piriformospora indica protects barley from root rot caused by Fusarium graminearum. JOURNAL OF PLANT DISEASES AND PROTECTION. 114(6):263-268.

6. Suzuki, D. Dressel, H. 2004. Naked Ape to Superspecies: A Global Perspective on Humanity and The Global Eco-Crisis. Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, Australia; Boswell, Randy. 19 August, 2003. Roundup May Harm Wheat: Researcher’s Say Monsanto’s Popular Weedkiller Might Boost Blight. The Leader-Post. Regina, p. A1

7. Coghlan, Andy. August 14, 2003. Weedkiller May Boost Toxic Fungi. New Scientist; Suzuki, D. Dressel, H. 2004. Naked Ape to Superspecies: A Global Perspective on Humanity and The Global Eco-Crisis. Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, Australia; Boswell, Randy. 19 August, 2003. Roundup May Harm Wheat: Researcher’s Say Monsanto’s Popular Weedkiller Might Boost Blight. The Leader-Post. Regina, p. A1; Bigwood, Jeremy. August 20, 2003. Scientists Link GM Crop Weed Killer to Powerful Fungus. IPS; Rahe, J. Can. J. Bot. 33 (1987): 354-360., Appl. Soil Ecol. 8 (1998): 25-33 cited in Scientists Expose Myths that Organic Farming Produces Dangerous E-coli and Plant Diseases http://www.organicconsumers.org

8. Roundup®highly lethal to amphibians, finds University of Pittsburgh researcher http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-04/uopm-rhl040105.php

9. Farmers Feeling Roundup Spike http://www.agbios.com/main.php?action=ShowNewsItem&id=9425

Home Design in Cold Climates

2008-03-22T16:15:00.011-04:00

Home Design in Cold Climates
by Douglas Barnes

I am currently in the process of designing a home for myself and my wife. Living in Canada, the number one priority is warmth. To solve that problem, we must focus on energy capture and energy storage.

To capture energy, the house will be oriented with the long side facing the sun. This side will be fenestrated to allow the entry of solar energy from the sun (which, strikes the Earth with over 950 Watts per hour per square metre before any loses come into play). The energy needs to be stored once it has entered the home or the house will heat up nicely in the daytime but become quite cold in the evening. In this case, the main storage will be a monolithic concrete slab floor.[1] In addition to this storage, there will be a masonry fireplace, whose massive brick structure will hold energy, and earthen or lime rendering of the walls will also help.

Windows are good. Too many windows are bad. So, fenestration will be reasonable. We will match percentage of window area with our latitude. We’ll be building in Southern Ontario at about 45o north latitude, so we’ll have around 45% window area on the southern wall.[2] Too many passive solar homes in Ontario have nervously designed what amount to glass walls on the south side thinking that if a little is good, a lot is better. The result is over-heated homes. While there are some who might not mind 30oC temperatures inside in January, they certainly don’t like the over-heating that will occur at other times of the year.

The Canadian Housing and Mortgage Corporation recommends making thermal mass (the dense material that serves as heat storage – concrete, brick, and mud in this case) be around ten times greater in area than the area of sun-side fenestration.

General layout of the rooms recognizes at what times the rooms are used during the day. The first place people go in the morning is the kitchen. It therefore makes sense to place the kitchen on the southeast side of the building (northeast if you are in the southern hemisphere). In this way, light and solar heat is available first thing in the morning. From there, other rooms follow the sun according to the usage of the room. The exception is the dining room which is placed next to the kitchen for practical reasons.

With this information, it is possible to design a building that performs brilliantly from an energy perspective. However, there is no guarantee that the house will be even remotely livable inside.[3] To make the home a place that I actually want to live in and keep for the rest of my life, I am using Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language to design the home.

Another advantage to the passive solar layout is that it creates a nice pattern in the home. A long, thin home has a series of rooms one after another. This helps create privacy in the home and avoids giving the house an overcrowded feeling.

In too many modern homes these days, visitors immediately have full view of the private areas of the home as soon as they enter, and sometimes as they approach the main entrance. There needs to be a gradient of intimacy from public to private areas of the house.

The interior space must have a natural flow that takes into account the uses of the space inside. Hallways and corridors have been avoided as much as possible. Rather, movement flows through rooms making some areas very social and inviting to people moving through the building.

The common area of the home is at the heart of the building that intersects with all the major traffic flows throughout the home.

There is a sequence of seating spaces in the home that offer different levels of intimacy. The living room has a main seating area that is very social. It’s on the main path through the home, in a sunny place, and centrally located. Just off this main space are two other seating options ranging from semi-private to private. There is also a sunny nook off the kitchen. An additional seating space will be available on the second floor (which is currently being revised).

While this does not include every pattern I used in the design, it highlights the main ones that had the most influence in guiding the layout of the interior spaces.

1. The optimal thickness for thermal mass storage is 4 inches thick. Any thicker and diminishing returns start. If it is too thin, it will heat up and cool down too readily rendering the mass less effective. (For example, tile on subflooring heats up and cools down so fast as to have no appreciable effect in storing energy.)

2. This is Bill Mollison’s rule of thumb, and I have checked it out with a local architect and friend, Steve Hilditch (hilditch-architect.com), who has designed passive solar homes. Steve agrees that Mollison’s ratio is appropriate for this area.

3. I have a number of friends that have built many homes for themselves in the same area. After each one is build, they find that the house was not what they really wanted, so they sell and build a new place, hoping that it will be the right one. The error is that the layout of the home was not approached with a recognition of what problems one faces in designing a space. For example, when designing the entrance, it needs to be readily apparent what the entrance is; there needs to be a transition from the inside to the outside; and there needs to be some sort of an entrance room that creates a public space for visitors that is separate from the private areas of the home. This is just one example of many problems in design that must be addressed in the layout of the house.

For more design information, please see Designing a Livable Passive Solar Home