Category Archives: Permaculture

By lambert strether of Corrente.

Sepp Holzer is a high-altitude permaculturalist; his farm is on a mountaintop in the Province of Salzburg, Austria:

Holzer states his path to success began when he realised he had to discard what he’d learned in agricultural college. He set out on a path of observing and emulating natural systems, rather then attempting to control (and, in the process, undermining and destroying) nature. His knowledge rebellion also put him at odds with the Austrian authorities, who fined him several times — and even threatened him with imprisonment — for ignoring regulations on what plants can and cannot be grown in specific regions.

In an interesting examnple of “the test of independent invention,” Holzer devised a practice of permaculture over a couple of decades before encountering the work of Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who coined the term. Check out the aerial shot of Holzer’s farm starting at 1:09: It’s like a fantasy realm. Except it’s real.

It’s starting to feel like the ’30s in Spain:

Outmaneuvering the police, hundreds of jobless farmworkers charged through a hole in a fence and turned the manicured gardens of a vacant estate here in Spain’s agricultural heartland into a lively fairground of protest this week. … “We’re here to denounce a social class who leaves such places to waste,” said Diego Cañamero, the leader of the Andalusian Union of Workers, addressing the demonstrators who had occupied the property, the Palacio de Moratalla. …. [T]he owner, the Duke [!!] of Segorbe, lives in Andalusia’s capital, Seville, about 60 miles away. … Agricultural subsidies are criticized by many here as favoring landed interests, paying them not to grow crops when nearly a third of the work force in Andalusia is unemployed. … “Nobody lives here now, but the sprinklers are functioning and keeping the lawns beautifully green,” [a 50-year-old jobless farm laborer] observed. “Just imagine how many farming wages you could pay instead of using the money to water empty gardens.”

Or cut out the “job creator,” wages, and just… grow food. But after the farmworkers have seized the land, euthanized the rentier Duke, and put an end to an artificial scarcity of work and food — hey, kidding! — how should they cultivate it?

By lambert strether

I should have put this up yesterday, but I was outside gardening, instead of inside, meta-gardening. So herewith, the famous “Greening the Desert” permaculture video with some discussion and links. (The video is from Geoff Lawton, who you may remember from a beautiful video about edible forests here a few months ago.)

Yes, this is something completely different, but I wanted to get away, just for a little while, from “who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out”, and consider a subject that’s beautiful and long-lasting and useful and tasty; and something that’s maybe in the political economy of all our futures, if we’re lucky: Edible forests (also called food forests).

The Beacon Food Forest project will be breaking ground in Seattle this summer. Here’s one example of a food forest, maybe something like what they hope to achieve:

Reader comments on this previous post on heating issues encourage me to post this interesting interview with Portland, ME permaculturalist Lisa Fernandes on gardening, resilience, and abundance. (Portland has the largest permacultural meetup in the world.) You might not agree with everything Fernandes says, but man, is her garden awesome. So I hope you enjoy the segment.