Permaculture: The Growing Edge

A Documentary by Starhawk and Donna Read

Transcript

David Holmgren

Perhaps the first thought about what permaculture is, it's to do with land use: gardening, agriculture

and other ways we work with natural resources to provide our needs.

But it's also about the way we redesign our own ways of living, and for that matter, our own

thinking.

Paul Stamets

Humans have a very peculiar egocentric point of view: that humans are intelligent, but nature is not.

Dr. Elaine Ingham

We got to go back to the natural system and see how nature does it, and try to mimic those same

situations in our agricultural system.

Penny Livingston-Stark

We can give back to the earth what we take, we can create abundant rich environments that are

clean and healthy, and we can go into completely trashed areas and regenerate those areas.

Mark Lakeman

I see things turning, I see things going right.

I travel a lot and I get to see things changing all over the place.

Maddy Harland

Permaculture's power is this real ethical centre that determines and changes actually how people see

the world.

Narrator

When we see the earth is alive, a living body with her own rhythms and flows, when we work with

her patterns, we can meet our human needs in ways that preserve and regenerate the environment

around us. That is permaculture's promise.

New Orleans, 2005. The devastation left in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina is a preview of

what will come if we don't change our ways.

Volunteers from all over the country came to New Orleans in 2005 and 2006 to clean up after the

storms.

But how do we clean the invisible toxins?

Woman

“... and the third is that we take things into our skin. We are most vulnerable to the things that we

take in through our breath.”

Narrator

Common Ground Relief, a grassroots organization, helped with clean up and rebuilding, gave out

supplies, fed and housed thousands of volunteers.

Common Ground's tested soil for pollution, left from oil spills and flood waters and started a project

in bioremediation, which means cleansing soil and water of toxins using nature's methods.

Brewing teas of beneficial microorganisms and fungi, and growing special plants to uptake heavy

metals.

Making lots of organic food to feed volunteers.

By working with nature, permaculture offers the hope that we can heal the destruction we've

caused.

David Holmgren

The forests of Tasmania were one of the models that we saw for developing permacultural ideas.

I think that nature is like a huge design encyclopedia.

Even though permaculture doesn't obviously start from any political premises, but the idea that the

more self-reliant people are as individuals, as families and households and as communities, then the

more they're in position to actually take control of their own circumstances and also to negotiate

with other forms of centralized power on …

Not an equal footing obviously, that's not possible, but at least in a position of not total dependence.

Narrator

In his homestead, near Melbourne, Australia, Holmgren has carefully placed every element to use

minimal energy: from garden beds close to the house, to windows that capture the sun's heat.

Permaculture principles favour small scale, diverse systems and teach us to use lots of observation

and creativity, so we can use less muscle, less money and less fossil fuels.

Holmgren and co-founder Bill Mollison began formulating these principles in the 1970s.

David Holmgren

The work of my co-originator Bill Mollison with his permaculture design course, which has gone

all around the world and in a lot of ways has been the primary mechanism by which permaculture

has spread.

Narrator

Bill Mollison laid the foundation, and the many teachers who've come up behind him all over the

world share skills that lead to self-reliance.

From organic gardening to alternative energy, fostering visionary solutions that are practical, down

to earth, and within the reach of ordinary people.

But permaculture is not any single technique or solution, it's about how the solutions fit together,

the relationships between all the parts and the people that put them into place.

One hub of the global permaculture community is here in southern England at the sustainability

centre, the home of permaculture magazine and a whole range of diverse projects.

Maddy Harland

We started this whole publishing adventure, by we I mean Tim my husband and myself, with

virtually no resources and very few skills, but with passion and vision.

We have readers in 77 countries of the world on every continent and we had no capital investors or

funders, we became, I suppose enchanted by the prospect that ordinary people could empower

themselves and change their lives and also live happier, more fulfilled, more simple lives.

And it's basically an educational charity which is set up for all sectors of the community: from

children to young offenders, to any volunteer that wants to come.

A key note of permaculture is optimism, the ability to do things for yourself, and if you can't do

something yourself, you've got a network and someone else can help you.

There's a lot of misery in this world, and that's why I think it's such a powerful force for change.

So permaculture to me is a complete key really to a post-carbon future.

For me, when I did my first permaculture design course, it was very much a way of completely

opening my eyes to how nature impacted itself within woodland systems, forest systems,

landscapes.

Suddenly there was a pattern that I could understand and see.

Narrator

The web of life is woven of patterns that repeat.

The forces that shape the galaxies or fuel a hurricane guide the growth of a shell.

The stars radiate light like the flower's petals radiate out to attract the bees.

A star explodes and a flower disperses seed.

Seen from space, the veins of rivers and estuaries branch like the veins of a leaf, the limbs of a tree.

And our own designs are informed by our deep understanding of nature's geometry and harmony.

When we begin by observing nature's patterns, when we learn to work as part of nature herself

working, we find allies and helpers are everywhere, even in the most humble creatures.

In the rainforest of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, Paul Stamets researches mushrooms and

fungi, and his discoveries have brought a whole new repertoire of techniques into permaculture's

practise.

Paul Statmets

Fungi were the first organisms to come onto land.

1.6 billion years ago, it's the fungi that first came onto landmasses from the ocean.

Plants followed 600 million years ago, so fungi were on land for a billion years longer than plants.

Narrator

Paul maintains extensive laboratories and growing rooms at the headquarter of his company, Fungi

Perfecti.

Paul Statmets

“These are really, really gorgeous. And uhm ... teas are made of this mushroom, that's very anti-

arthritic.

These are Maitake, these are cloudbursts.

We are also involved in breaking down toxic waste.

A number of our strains have been very effective at breaking down PCB, besides diesel and diesel-

based type of contamination.”

Narrator

On November 7th 2007 the freighter Cosco Busan ran into the San Francisco Bay bridge, spilling

58.000 gallons of oil into the bay.

A group of volunteers demonstrates a permaculture approach to clean it.

Mia Rose Maltz

So we have here our hair mats.

All these mats have been made from human hair and dog hair that's been diverted from hair salons

to harvest the oil from the oil spill, because the hair absorbs oil, the oil sticks to the hair.

These hair mats were used to absorb, clean up the oil and then now what we are doing is growing

mushrooms on it.

We have the oyster mushroom that's growing on this as it has absorbed the oil.

It's a pretty exciting process.

Paul Statmets

The fungi can actually eat the petroleum and then generate fungal sugars in the process.

Narrator

The hair mats cleaned up the oil, the fungi broke down the fuel, turning toxic waste to fertile

compost.

The mushrooms we see above ground are the fruiting bodies, the organism itself is an underground

web of thread-like hyphae that together are called mycelium.

Paul Statmets

What we have here, looking at the ground, you see ground but in fact there's a mycelial lens right

underneath the very surface here, and if you dig down and you uncover it you can see there's

mycelium everywhere.

These exist in the first 4 or 5 inches of soil, and this white stuff is all infused with mycelium.

What I'm so excited about is that it's a solution to many of the issues that we face today, both related

to pollution and disease, and sustainability.

The answers are literally underfoot.

The mycelium break down wood tissue and they generate soil.

These are the soil magicians in nature.

We can build matter, but it won't resemble any of the organic matter that we associate with healthy

soil, so without fungi there is no soil.

Narrator

It takes nature a thousand years to build an inch of top soil.

We can do it much more quickly using permaculture techniques.

Paul Statmets

I love compost.

What we have here are blocks of mycelium, mushroom mycelium on sawdust and then we have

some of these pond plants that we pulled of.

We mix it all up, but what's amazing is that the worms are extremely attracted to mycelium, they're

mycophagous, mycophagous means love to eat mycelium, and the worms then started consuming

the mycelium and they make this into dirt.

And literally in about 4 months, we can take this myceliated sawdust, that's what it is, just wood

chips with mycelium on it, and we can turn it into this really, really beautiful soil that is usable for

organic farms.

I think mushrooms are magical for lots of reasons, but this really blows me away, that this can come

from wood in about 4 months.

It's pretty astonishing isn't it? It's magical, it's absolutely magic.

There is much talk about global warming, and one way of offsetting global warming is increasing

the amount of outgassing, oxygen producing plants.

Narrator

Plants and fungi build soil, and healthy soil is full of humus and living things, which store carbon in

stable forms for long periods of time.

When we use permaculture methods to build soil, we can actually take some of the excess carbon

out of the atmosphere and impact climate change.

No one knows more about the life in soil than microbiologist Elaine Ingham.

Dr. Elaine Ingham

So we are experimenting with and working with different ways for backyard home owners to make

really good compost, and know that it's good compost.

What are the recipes, what are the mixes that you have to put together?

Every single pesticide people use are killing beneficial organisms in the soil.

Narrator

It's dr. Ingham's work that Common Ground bioremediation project drew upon in New Orleans to

brew teas to restore life to damaged and toxic soil.

Dr. Elaine Ingham

With this tea, we will probably be putting this out on several different lawns, and there's some farms

that we work with, there's a couple golf courses …

The nutrients are in your soil, stop putting the inorganic fertilizers out, get the biology to do that

work for you and you have literally hundreds of years of fertility in your soil.

You can get things back to a condition of health, where basically mother nature is working the way

she is supposed to work, the way she always as worked.

Nobody's out there in that [16:22?] forest putting inorganic fertilizers or pesticides on any of this,

the most productive ecosystems on this planet.

I think mother nature's had the time to work this out properly, maybe human beings have been

trying to mess with this for the last 50 years, we've been really trying to mess with this, maybe we

don't know what we're doing, and that's why we've got the problems that we do.

Narrator

The web of connections in the natural world is a model for how we can meet our own vital needs.

Today, the average piece of food travels 1.500 miles before it gets to our plate.

On living, healthy soil, we can grow beauty in great abundance on even a small backyard in the

middle of the city.

Rebuilding our local food system is another important strategy in reducing our carbon footprint.

Connie Van Dyke

My daily practice, my meditation is just working with nature and feeding myself.

Narrator

Tabor Tilth farm in Portland, Oregon is an urban permaculture homestead that provides Connie Van

Dyke and her interns with about 60% of their food, on just a fifth of an acre.

Connie Van Dyke

In Portland alone there's a lot of people that are really into permaculture but there isn't as many

actually physically practising it.

The movement is a lot of young people that don't own their own properties, so I have an internship

that comes through here and stays and lives in my basement and helps learn this urban setting

because this is really an important part.

We can't, you know, all live in the country.

Narrator

Connie's garden integrates food, flowers, fruit .and medicinals.

Connie Van Dyke

So this is an asparagus bed, 3 plum trees here, 2 chestnuts …this is lamb's quarter, this is purslane,

black-eyed Susan for insect beneficial … this is potatoes, feverfew, there's some wheat growing in

here …I do a lot of oat straw and so I harvest that.

On the north side we have more shade loving food, like currants are growing back here, nagumi is

over there.

These mason bees will come out in April, that's how we fill up the area with pollinators again.

And Jay is right here and sometimes he'll take it right out of my hand.

This tub right here is a nice cycle, because the tub has a fish in it called Lucky, he eats all the

mosquitoes and he poops in there and the water comes down and it feeds the bamboo.

Now the bamboo needs water, it also needs nitrogen, so we place the bamboo in between its two

needs: it gets nitrogen from the manures and water from the pond.

No, I don't eat my pets, I only eat their babies.

Penny Livingston-Stark

So here in this culture, in America, you know, a lot of it is for short term.

We want it now, we want it convenient, we want it to be cheap and as a result we're robbing from

our future generations.

The good news is, we don't have to do that.

We can clean water using biology, we can grow food without chemicals, we can build structures

without harming the environment.

So when we talk about permaculture, even though it was coined to begin to think about permanent

agriculture, what really ended up happening is that we started seeing that culture and agriculture

reflect each other.

How a society treats the land, you can get kind of a clue into what the heart of that society is about,

and what the culture of that society is about.

The indigenous people here had food, enough food to feed a village for two years.

That's national security!

Because in the cities right now we don't have enough food to feed people for three days, if there's a

trucking crisis or a shipping crisis, or a delivery crisis or any kind of crisis.

Narrator

Every aspect of Penny and James' home site is designed to stack functions and serve multiple

purposes.

James Stark

… they hang out in the garden all year long, and eat bugs and bathe and hang out in the pond and

have little ducklings and provide us with eggs in the springtime.

That's our worm bed.

This is where all the material that come out of our kitchen, our scraps, and they end up in here.

And I just want to show you this. What they do is eat all the scrap material from the kitchen and

turn it into worm castings which … this is a little bit of worm casting here, it looks just like soil,

this is like gold in our garden.

And that's in permaculture … what we are doing is closing the ecological loop.

So that the waste products that are coming out of the way we live are turned into resources and it

just goes in a spiral back and forth like that.

And that's what we are trying to do to every element of our life, to have no waste, waste equals

food, we're just going in a circle like that.

And the beauty of it is, whenever you close one of those loops, your quality of life gets enhanced.”

Penny Livingston-Stark

One of the things we say is we are on the cutting edge of a ten thousand year old technology, that a

lot of these things aren't new.

It's really about how do we observe natural systems and learn from them, and then reintegrate our

lives, individually, in our families and as a culture back into the natural world again.

<chatter>

Jon Young

Best would be to say that I am a naturalist, a tracker with over 30 years experience in the field

mentoring people and helping them build stronger connections with place.

My speciality is to bring people into a much deeper relationship, understanding the patterns of

nature.

I've always felt that the core, the root of what we do is both supported and supports the vision and

the work of permaculture.

I felt that in a way I wasn't training trackers, I was training future advocates, leaders, visionaries for

their work.

I think our instructions in our DNA is to love and to be grateful for what creation has provided for

us, and provides for us every day, and that we need to return that favour by raising our children with

understanding so that they can regenerate the natural world.

I think we are living in a world of diminishing biological diversity, which I think everybody knows,

not only do we have what I call the receding tide of life, from my own observation, species that I

grew up with that don't return in the spring as much as they used to, or you don't hear their voices

singing through the forest anymore.

My experience with mentoring lots and lots of people in nature is that, once they get past a certain

threshold of awareness, they have a sudden intrinsic revolution that makes them realise the

importance of that bird song, they value it as much as they would value anything beautiful and

wonderful.

<chatter>

Jon Young

So we talk about the need to, while watching in the distance, use your wide angle vision to see

everything at the same time but letting your eyes go way out into the distance to watch a distant hill

or a tree, and while you're doing that, to watch the movement of the grasses while you're sitting still.

And at the same time using your ears and pick up the subtle sounds of nature around you.

And then feeling the wind on your cheek and little by little activating all five senses.

There is something so deeply programmed in our blueprint as human beings, that when we connect

with nature again, we awaken our senses, we awaken our relationships, not just knowledge, so we're

not just saying I know that's a live oak tree.

You can't put it into words.

So when we develop that relationship where you come home from being away a few weeks and you

just look at the trees and you're like … it's so good to see you my friends.

When that feeling really returns to people, we could awaken that sense of curiosity of nature and

that relationship again, we would have a grass roots movement that would make history.

The grass roots would be replaced by roots that are more edible.

Penny Livingston-Stark

More and more people who had never really thought about a lot of these things are being exposed

now to these ideas and they get excited.

I feel like it's starting to shift and there is more and more people out there holding a very powerful

vision that they share with their families and their friends.

Once you connect even a few dots you start to realise that this is our home and we are completely

reliant on this environment, we are completely reliant on the earth.

When you think of the word permaculture, you are also thinking about this brilliant curriculum, a

brilliant set of principles that can be applied anywhere, it can be applied in tropical, temperate,

urban [areas].”

Narrator

Bayview-Hunters Point in San Francisco, like many inner city neighbourhoods it has plenty of

places to buy liquor, but fresh food is harder to find.

Permaculture sees needs as opportunities, 'Something Fresh', a business run by young single moms

collects donated fruit from a packing company and delivers it to homes and businesses.

Access to good food is a key to addressing health issues, poverty, even crime.

In this community garden, in the Double Rock housing projects, Hunters Point families hire at risk

youth to produce food and learn vital skills.

I just want to ask why you think it's important for kids to work in the garden?

Jaqueline Williams

Well, I think they need to learn so that they can feed themselves for one thing.

Really I would like to start a farmers' market if I can get vegetables from one end to the other.

Kids are excited about things that they produce.

I just love it, I don't know what else to say, but I just enjoy it.

Narrator

In a garden of forest, there is no waste, every leaf that falls is recycled back into fertility and that

principle can also be applied to building.

Man 1

It was the first of its kind, it achieved most of its goals, in the long run will they make money on

this building, I believe so.

Man 2

Our major role here in the building was the rain water recycling system, so we're gonna head in and

take a look.

This is the system we got set up for them, basically what we're doing is we're taking the water from

the roof, the rain water here on top of this building and bring it into the system, cleaning it, stripping

it, purifying it and making it acceptable for drinking water.

Man 1

Everyone liked the idea, wanted to do it, noone wanted to step up and sign off on the permit saying

we couldn't go do it.

If you pay for something, if it's filtered or it goes through a public line, it's safer, whereas in my

opinion this water is probably the cleanest water to drink in the city of Salem.

So it's a continual education to get people to change how they think.

Woman

95% of our construction waste was recycled and so actually you're educating the whole community.

Narrator

Community, it's a thread that runs through all the permaculture principles and practices.

Art, music and celebration bring people together in ways that create healthy human ecologies.

Woman

Here we just exchange clothes or things, we love it and everyone comes and brings family and

people outside, trying to keep it neat.

<Chatter>

Man

If you want to pull the neighbours together you gotta do something.

Narrator

City repair in Portland, Oregon transforms intersections into gathering places.

Mark Lakeman

Ultimately the answer to the question of why we need community is simply because it's in our

nature, we're communal beings.

We really are individual only in a few, different small ways and we find fulfilment in each other, we

find growth in our interactions.

Someone had just been describing these gathering places that were going to be created in the future,

and I can remember saying “ok, I don't understand, I'm willing to do anything to help the world, but

I don't understand how this will happen.”

So that conversation lead to just talking about how what was needed now were actions and not

words, the time for words was long past and the only way that the world was gonna be changed

would be through directly demonstrating what you are talking about, but through actions.

City Repair was founded in 1996, City Repair began through modelling things directly, not waiting,

not even asking permission of anyone, but just directly creating.

Then people were able to walk in, I mean people would just immediately say what can I do, what

can I give ...

Narrator

Permaculture empowers people to take positive action, to create using low cost, local and renewable

materials, to reduce our use of energy by increasing our use of imagination, and to always keep

learning.

Mark Lakeman

The great problem of every city is the disinvolvement of the population, relegating people to just a

workforce, and the repair of the city in which we right the wrongs, and we transcend the issues and

we go into opportunities and we actually enjoy an aesthetic experience together, begins with

bringing people together to convert problems into opportunities.

Narrator

Each year, City Repair's village building conversions uses sculpture, natural building, hardened

mosaics to bring people together, to transform the city and leave lasting monuments to creativity.

Man

This is my first year being involved in City Repair and doing the workshops.

Today there is an amazing workshop, I think it's called Permaculture as a Revolution.

<chatter>

Mark Lakeman

And as we've seen in City Repair, it's growing, it's twice as big as last year and it's happening in

other cities and that's because people respond to this, it feels right.

Narrator

Clay, sand and straw, a mixture called cob, an ancient technique that builders in the permaculture

movement have revived.

Becky Bee

It's just magic, I can not say enough about it, I am a cob addict. I have been cobbing for at least ten

years, very consistently, one angle of it is the ability to build your own home, build your own space,

but another one is the process.

The people, the relationships and the conversations … just life ... happens around it, nourishes me.

Narrator

Permaculture has been called the art of building beneficial relationships, and that includes our

human relationships.

We are important, our human creativity is needed, we have a vital role to play in healing the earth.

Mark Lakeman

Personally I am hopeful, because I am constantly engaged in community … I'm in a constant flow

of creative community throughout the course of every day throughout the year.

There is no time to be hopeless.

Undertaking this work gives you a chance to be a part of making things right.

<Chatter>

Mark Lakeman

Our greatest tools are thing like beauty and patience, if we can manifest all of the highest human

qualities through what we create … I actually go through those feelings myself all the time.

I see something beautiful like I just saw at Awakenings, and I almost ...

I'm overwhelmed by all the beauty and love that I see expressed.

<Chatter>

Mark Lakeman

We need to have the faith that what we are on to is powerful enough in and of itself to be

persuasive, ultimately it has to work like that.

Narrator

Permaculture says yes we can, we can create a permanent culture.

David Holmgren

In the beginning, working on the permaculture concept, I certainly had no grasp of that turning into

a social movement.

I think another aspect is the recognition that at least in affluent countries where people are in many

ways unfitted or uneducated for this more self reliant way of living which will be necessary in the

future, that permaculture has become like a life change process or a self education process.

Maddy Harland

Permaculture fundamentally makes you happy, and because the technologies, the techniques and the

ideas behind it are common sense and a part of what is fundamentally humanity's natural heritage.

Bekcy Bee

I also try to expose myself to things that are beautiful, because I think it's a really beautiful world

and this is my life and I want to feel joy.

That's partly my own selfish way, but I also see that having that love of life is the example I would

like to set of my life here.

Jon Young

If you can provide the slightest bit of hope for people, they light up like a christmas tree, people are

looking for something, they really are, I just know, you can feel it.

You can feel it in the air.

I want to help, anywhere I look, if there is something I can do that can sow more hope, that's what I

want to do.

Penny Livingston-Stark

The earth wants to heal, the earth wants to go in that direction, and if left alone, that's where it will

go.

We are an important part of the equation, I think humans have the capacity to do incredible good on

the earth.

Paul Stamets

We are all evolutionary successes, we should cheer, we've made it this far.

From billions of years ago when the earth first formed, 4.5 billion years ago, to this day, we

represent the best of evolutionary successes, whether it's a microbe, or it's a millipede or it's

mycelium, or whether it's us.

But we are here today because of a cooperation of millions of organisms that come together

symbiotically, and we have succeeded because of partnering with nature, and partnering with the

complexity of nature.

Narrator

Edges, where the river meets the forest, where one system meets another, are the most diverse and

creative of places.

Permaculture, where the human meets the natural, may be that creative edge where we renew the

world.