Tag Archives: earth

earth as schooner ~ a permaculture analogy

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in my personal unschooling adventure, as in, my own studies on what is most salient to me right now, i have been absolutely smitten with permaculture. i’m immersed in the literature currently, have joined a permie internet forum, and have been networking with people locally who have used the p word within earshot of me. completely geeking out. and although i haven’t even finished the basic textbooks and still feel kind of fuzzy on just exactly how to define permaculture, i’m ready to start to formulate what i think it is, and put the pieces together into a working definition for myself. since this concept/discipline/thing has been so hard for me to wrap my mind around, in spite of my delving head first into it, i’m guessing there are a lot of people who have no clue what the p word is all about, which is one reason i’m sharing it here.

here are the basics: permaculture is care for the earth, care for people, sharing of the surplus, and an emphasis on cooperation and optimism.

designing with nature means observing what nature does and following suit. i planted the iris, but not the strawberries or baby spruce tree...

it’s interdisciplinary, it is aimed at designing sustainable human habitats. i think it started out as “permanent agriculture”, but quickly expanded to “permanent culture” due to the realization that sustainable human environments are about much more than food production. some of the things permaculture design focuses on are: sustainable food production (organic/local/perennial food forest guilds using no-till cultivation methods vs monoculture machine-intensive row crop agrobusiness using subsidized fossil fuels to distribute, um, the “product”); energy efficient building/living- capturing and storing renewable sources of energy, reducing energy consumption via smart design as well as mindfulness of what our needs really are; recycling, reusing, gleaning, making use of the waste outputs as inputs for other elements in the design; wastewater treatment, greywater recycling, dealing with humanure (blackwater) sustainably; taking care of the land- the earth is our home and our mother and we are in the role of stewards; and the people part of the system- we need social justice and a decent economy as part of the design, too.

(psst. it’s not just us. i just had to educate my spell check that permaculture, greywater, and humanure are all legitimate words…)

input? output? all depends on how you look at it.

each of these elements has needs, and each of them performs its role, providing its gifts to the rest of the system. looking at these outputs as resources helps close the loops that are currently leaking like crazy. one chicken’s poop is another vegetable’s treasure, in other words. vegetable scraps make chickens happy, by their turn, and the cycle becomes a cycle again, instead of linear and unsustainable (buy fertilizer from “somewhere else” to grow veggies; throw veggie scraps in the garbage and send them “away”). designing the system to balance out the inputs and outputs both reduces the waste going out of the system, and increases the abundance of the good, tasty outputs.

why have closed loops? here’s where the schooner comes in. the first time i ever heard the words “greywater” and “blackwater”, i was 19 years old on a semester at sea. it was the first time it really entered my awareness, just exactly what it means to have finite resources in a closed system. (for a piece of knowledge so essential for survival, i would propose that people ought to be aware of it at a much earlier age!) when you drive your schooner out into the deep blue sea, you only have what you’ve brought with you (that’s what it means to have a closed system- nothing coming into or going out of it). you can only pack what the ship can hold. our 500 gallons of freshwater, several hundred gallons of diesel fuel, storage tanks (whatever their finite capacity was) for grey and blackwater, storage space for garbage and “recycling”, food that we could carry and that wouldn’t spoil before we could eat it- that all had to last us (all 34 of us) for the duration of whatever leg of the voyage we were on. (when the voyage ended and we were on or close to land, we ceased being a closed system again, could pump out our wastes, and refuel with new inputs, if they were within reach). it really hit home on one leg when we thought we were going to be able to fill up our nearly empty freshwater tanks at our last stop in the bahamas, only to find out we were headed out for a 6 day trip back to the mainland u.s. with faintly brackish (3 ppm salt) water. in which case, whatever tang we had on hand (and that didn’t even mask the saltiness) was all we had on hand to attempt to make it palatable!

as big as the earth may seem, we can think of her as a schooner. a big one, with lots and lots of capacity, but a closed system nonetheless, and without the option of coming into port. once we run out of our finite resources, there is not going to be a way for us to swing by the moon or mars and pick up some more, nor can we feasibly send our garbage “away”. what to do? i am starting at home, treating my home as a place where all the needs, inputs and outputs are going to have to be handled from within that closed system, and i am working on creating a space where that is the reality. outward from there to the neighborhood and community level. apparently what i’ve been attempting to do is permaculture design! it’s nice to have some terminology.

it’s a discipline with amazing amounts of uncharted territory. it’s a super big picture mind bender, and perfect for an unschooler. it covers just about everything that matters for me. it feels like a new home sweet home for my brain, where even my wacky law of attraction approach to life is part of the program. earth, people, abundance, interconnectedness, sustainability…

does any of this ring true for you? are you hip to the p?

zero landfill christmas

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handmade fabric-and-ribbon reusable giftwrap from grammy’s house ~ reused a dozen times so far and will reuse again to infinity!

reused last-year’s-christmas-card-gift tags, also via grammy’s genius ~ reused and recyclable

random scraps and trappings ~ will get reused again and again by a certain boy (“it’s a net for catching fish!”)

thrifted gifts ~ reused, reclaimed, rescued from the landfill…

…like used books from amazon ~ packaging stashed for reuse ~ green buying tip: on amazon, you can choose the nearest bookseller to you, i buy lots from green earth books out of portland since they often have a great deal and are in our state! conserve fossil fuels….

new gifts without lots of packaging, especially homemade goodness like grammy’s plum jam! ~ in a reusable canning jar!

a small amount of packaging that will go in the plastic bag recycling ~ recycled*

*this is the one bit of our christmas celebration that i will continue to try to eradicate! the sheer amount of packaging disturbs me. i’ve got a letter to write to melissa and doug about it, in particular. the fact that so little of what we “send” to recycling actually GETS recycled bothers me, as does the fact that recycling uses up resources just to reprocess the resource, so even if it all actually got recycled, recycling will never be as good as REUSE!!!

reusing the very same giftwrap the next day to wrap his dada’s christmas presents ~ twice in one season, double points!

upcycled beach trash, collected last christmas when the pacific gyre coughed up a lung ~ buoys from all over the world painted up and strung up for fancy new decorations!

reused christmas tree, in a pot ~ will reuse as many years as we manage to keep it alive in a pot! plant it in the ground when we find some land… and repeat process as needed!

~~~

i have held this “zero landfill” intention in my heart for a while now, for our household, my business, and yes, holidays, too. and it is always going to be a goal i strive for. in fact, i don’t want to stop there. i hear so much talk of carbon banking and balancing the carbon budget and honestly? i don’t want to zero things out and stop there ~ i want to give back! i want to be generating so little un-reusable garbage, ideally none, and instead using my own energy to help put more trees into the earth and more oxygen into the air… i’d love to be planting more trees than i take trips in my car, not just an even score, where i’m making as much oxygen as the carbon emissions i’m creating. i see enough complacency around me, with not even coming to a zero balance, that i realize that some of us must take on more than a zero balance goal, to help save our mother. even then it is going to be tough. i am sharing my intention here not to brag or preach, but to let others know that it is ok to be this outlandish in the intentions you create- and you may even find yourself actually pulling it off, impossible as it may seem at first! it starts with baby steps, but they add up. they really truly do. i don’t know, something about this holiday season has me feeling hopeful and optimistic, in spite of having tightened our belts and toned down our holidays, it seems to me that this is an amazing opportunity for us to really live our “back to the earth” mentality and see how easily we really can thrive with so little, only taking from the earth what we really need, and making every effort to give back as much or more. i am yet again setting my intention for the coming year, to tread even more lightly on this earth, to continue to strive for true sustainability, for there are always more ways i can reduce my consumption and increase the health of the planet right in my back yard.