It Takes a Village … Find Yours!

 

By Steven Saint Thomas

The proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child,” is widely attributed to Africans but it reflects the experience of most humans around the world (and through the centuries) who have lived in villages.

The late permaculturist Toby Hemenway noted that cities, too, have been around for eons and have served people greatly in our needs for community, security and commerce. Hemenway wrote The Permaculture City in 2015 after having lived both in the off-grid countryside of southern Oregon and the city of Portland.

Now David Holmgren, the co-founder of permaculture, has published his blueprint for the sustainable suburb, RetroSuburbia: The Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future.

Holmgren writes that suburbs are potentially the best of both worlds, a “sweet spot” between rural and urban living.

I think he’s right. Visiting Holmgren at his 2-1/2 acre homestead in central Victoria changed my life. I caught a vision of what you might call “Permie Paradise” – a family producing most of their own food and sharing the surplus with friends and neighbors doing likewise in the small Australian town of Hepburn Springs.

Now, one big difference between Australia and America is scale – only 24 million Australians have to share their continent and resources.

Hepburn Springs (population around 1,000) is what we Yanks would call a “village.” It is not part of sprawling, back-to-back suburbs with which city-dwelling Americans are familiar.

So I think it is crucial for urban and suburban permaculturists to break our high-density regions into, well, villages. Whether these villages have 400 people or 1,000, the point is they are neighborhoods where people can focus their efforts on localizing their food system and economy.

In the Zone
If you only read one section of The Permaculture City, read Chapter 5, “Strategies for Gardening in Community.” Hemenway applies permaculture’s “zone analysis” to the question of local food systems.

Zones reflect the frequency of use, the amount of time and energy, spent in various parts of a property. Zones are usually depicted as concentric circles moving out like ripples in a pond.

Zone 0 is where you live – usually a house – and Zone 1 are the grounds immediately surrounding it. Zone 5 is farthest away and often left alone as “wilderness” in permaculture design.

Hemenway asks us to map our foodsheds. Zone 1 would be food that we grow in our own gardens. Zone 2 would be community gardens or neighbors within walking/cycling distance where you could obtain food.

Food you can buy from a farmer’s market or CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) schemes falls into Zone 3. The next zone represents grocery stores or other retailers that sell locally produced food.

Finally, Zone 5 includes corporate chains and big-box retailers selling food from all over the world. Hemenway advises, “Get as much of your food as possible from zones 1 to 3. The leap into a nation- or planet-sized foodshed occurs at zones 4 and 5, with industrial-processed and out-of-season foods bought at retail stores.”

Most of us find our eyes glazing over! Our food systems are completely upside-down, with very little coming from the inner zones and most of it from global, corporate sources.

Holmgren’s new book doesn’t use the word “foodshed,” but makes the central argument about survival in the near future: “Suburban food production capacity is a key factor in the adaptation of cities to challenging futures.”

Village Shift

In the past 20 years, I have lived in San Diego (3.4 million people), Colorado Springs (500,000) and now Humboldt Bay (88,000). All these areas are dependent on large, centralized systems to provide water, energy, food and transportation infrastructure.

They all can be broken down into villages. We launched our first “Village Shift Project” in Colorado Springs in 2015. The first step was mapping all the elementary schools.

Elementary school attendance areas are roughly the same in population and have already been drawn by a school district – a locally controlled governmental entity that gives intense attention to demographics.

The average city map will have elementary schools identified. A map of the Colorado Springs region (El Paso County, Colorado) revealed about 125 schools – approximately 125 villages. We highlighted them and put the map on a large piece of poster board.

Next, we recruited “Local Food Ambassadors.” We brought the map to farmer’s markets, environmental events and community fairs. People passionate about local food, gardening and building community were invited to plot their locations on the map with colored dots. Soon we had about 100 people plotted.

The dots on the map only had numbers, but we kept track of all the names and email addresses. As the weeks progressed, clusters of dots began to form. Some parts of town had many Local Food Ambassadors (LFAs), others had few or none.

Our team connected the dots – we invited people in clusters to meet for potlucks and form Village Food Councils for their neighborhoods. Soon we had like-minded folks sharing food, conducting gardening classes and trying to integrate backyard produce into the local farmer’s market.

Find Your Village
We are in the Humboldt Bay region now, trying to bring Village Shift to the communities of Eureka, Arcata, McKinleyville and Trinidad. This work includes helping edit the 2018 edition of the Local Food Guide, published by a small nonprofit called Locally Delicious.

A catalog of local food assets will help LFAs and other food leaders in assessing and improving the foodshed. No studies have been conducted to determine what percentage of the food on Humboldt tables is locally produced, but the potential is much greater than in Colorado Springs, where the list of farms, farmer’s markets, CSAs and locally made products barely fills two pages.

One great food asset in Humboldt is the North Coast Co-op, which boasts 13,000 members in the bay communities and operates two grocery stores (Eureka and Arcata). Almost every product made in the region can be found on the shelves and the stores even track local sales on the customer’s receipt.

We have proposed a “Co-op Neighbors” project, in which members would be invited to self-organize village groups. Like Village Food Councils, Co-op Neighbors would gather for potlucks, share cooking and gardening, even arrange carpooling to stores.

Our goal is to increase the access of local food in the inner zones. It’s all part of preparing for the impending impacts of climate change, food and energy shortages, and financial collapse.

“It’s incumbent on everyone to begin taking personal and household responsibility for reorganizing their lives to adapt,” writes Holmgren. “My proposals remain valid if you’re looking for better ways to live now, rather than working for a version of the future sold by corporations, media and political parties.”

The New Normal: We Are All Farmers

By Steven Saint Thomas & Trudy Thomas

The whole neighborhood is now sheltering in place. Everyone’s looking for something to do or catching up on their existing to-do lists, while we wait for the world to get back to normal. 

We’re using lots of post-layoff time to work on our permaculture homestead in Humboldt County, Calif. We’re wrapping up the sheet-mulch on about a quarter-acre and building garden beds – even planting! Our neighbors, all unseen on the other sides of the fences, are out filling the air with the sound of power mowers and the smell of new-mown grass.

Ironic – they’re out farming the grass that we’re trying to kill. It’s not that we hate grass, but we can’t eat it. We need to transform my grass-dominated yard into a place where fruit, berries, vegetables, garlic, herbs and pollinators can grow without the competition. Permaculturists often use sheet-mulching to create a fresh palette of topsoil on which to design self-reliant food systems.

A greenhouse, mini-orchard and keyhole beds of various designs now occupy land once given over to grass.

We are all farmers, it’s just that we’ve spent most of our lives up to now farming dollars. The New Normal will be farming our own food! 

I’m guessing my neighbors are expecting the Old Normal – back to fully stocked grocery stores, plenty of gasoline and mowing the lawn every other Sunday. The current coronavirus pandemic has brought home what permaculturists have been saying for 40 years. The normal we grew up with, powered by fossil fuels and other non-renewable natural resources, is coming to an end. The future will be different and we need to be ready for that. 

The coronavirus has put the entire world on pause –  an unprecedented opportunity to make a course correction!

As permaculture co-founder Bill Mollison put it: “The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10 percent of us do this, there is enough for everyone.” 

Our family is seven years into a 10-year plan to get ready for the future. We’re not ready yet, but if we keep our hands to the plow, we just might get there. We’d like to offer the following New Normal steps based on our recent adventures in permaculture.

1. Start growing food now. If you are currently farming grass, stop and let it die. Grow food – some is better than complete dependence on grocery store chains. If you have land, start planting something you will actually eat – potatoes, onions, lettuce, zucchini. If you don’t have land, grow something in containers on the porch or in a window sill. Don’t let another spring go by without planting new food sources somewhere within your reach!

If you REALLY want some grass, just sheet mulch a section for your garden.

2. Look for ways to grow more food. Already growing? Need more space for gardens? Get rid of your lawn and plant – edible landscapes are gorgeous and have far greater value than grass. How about a greenhouse for starts and extending the growing season? Maybe you have a neighbor with land but no skills for gardening – offer to help out. Find a school, church or community garden that needs some tender loving care. Aim to grow 10 percent more food this year than you did last year.

3. Start storing water. Rainwater can be stored in the topsoil as well as in containers. Mulch helps catch rain and minimize evaporation. Swales (Australian for “ditches”) can also capture runoff, spread and sink water, and prevent erosion. Here’s a swale we dug that moves water running down the street into our yard to irrigate trees and hedges. Rainbarrels can store water from rooftops for times when it doesn’t rain. 

Swales can boost water storage anywhere without picked barrels or gutter diverters.

4. If you can, move to a place where you can grow more food and store more water. If it doesn’t rain much where you live, it’s probably time to move! Big cities in the Western U.S. are sucking the life out of the Colorado River. Ideally, find a piece of land and devote most of it to food production (more land, less house). Own it without a mortgage if at all possible – liquidate any Wall Street assets (401ks, IRAs, mutual funds) you have and pay off your mortgage. Move in with other family members. Buy or build a tiny home on family property. Pool your resources with family members and buy land, or pay off mortgaged property (Sorry, but working with family will be part of the New Normal. Swallow your pride and do it for your kids.)

5. Connect with neighbors and find ways to work together for sustainability. Explore sharing rides – complete with face coverings! – or get/share a bike (and drop that gym membership). Share tools, seeds, labor and the harvest. 

It’s easy to organize a sheet-mulch gathering while maintaining social distance!

6. Get ready for the long emergency. The New Normal means the Old Normal won’t be coming back. The endless-growth economic model won’t be coming back. The consumer will need to become a producer. It might be the next pandemic (yes, there will be more) or utilities going bankrupt, trucking companies folding or collapse of ecosystems… imagine a sheltering in place that doesn’t end in our lifetimes. Build diverse revenue streams: Evaluate your skills and sell or trade those skills with the local community. Reduce grid-use: Transition to alternative sources for lights, water and heat.  Get rid of your power-sucking clothes dryer and put up a clothesline. These are changes we can make while there is still time.

7. It is easier to stay positive when you connect with nature. The New Normal needs to be a world where humans are a part of nature, not above and beyond it. This is why indigenous people survived for eons while empires rose and fell. Back to Bill Mollison: “Sitting at our back doorsteps, all we need to live a good life lies about us. Sun, wind, people, buildings, stones, sea, birds and plants surround us. Cooperation with all these things brings harmony; opposition to them brings disaster and chaos.”

We are all farmers – of something. We will reap what we sow. Happy growing!

If you’ve read this far, you might be interested in a relatively new documentary on (mostly) East Coast permaculture – from rooftop gardens to suburban lots to farms. It’s called “Inhabit” – beautifully done!

We’re also an organizing “Adventures in Permaculture: Saturday Night Thrive” check-in via Zoom. Hope we can connect soon!