Nicole Faires - The Ultimate Guide to Permaculture

Copyright 2012 by Nicole Faires

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-61608-644-2

Printed in China

Dedicated to my husband John,
who still doesnt let me quit,
and my three crazy girls. I hope someday
they look back
at our bus years with love.

Special thanks to:

Renato Faustini, for the amazing solar house models;
Skyhorse Publishing, for making all my dreams come true;
my editor, Jenn McCartney, for being awesome.

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Introduction

The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once youve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once youve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once youve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?

~ Chuang Tzu

First, a disclaimer: Does the label Ultimate Guide mean that this book will contain all of the knowledge about permaculture that exists or could exist in the world? Will it answer every question that could ever be asked? No, of course not. It was written by one person in less than one lifetime and cannot possibly contain everything.

This book contains all of the core fundamentals. It whittles down all of the information and theory and experience into a tool that you can use in a practical way.

ULTIMATE

adjective

basic or fundamental: the ultimate constituents of anything that exists are atoms

Permaculture is a vast field. There are countless courses available to help you increase your knowledgefrom introductory weekend classes to full certificate and diploma programs at respected institutions. If you are interested in pursuing permaculture as a career, or if you simply want to dive head first into a bottomless lake of sustainability knowledge, take a course. There you will learn all of the philosophy and theory behind the strategies and skills outlined here. This book, however, was written for everyone else. It is for those who want to begin applying permaculture principles in their own life right away. It is for those who want to become self-reliant, self-sufficient, sustainable, and possibly even develop a community of like-minded people.

I wrote this book while living in a 37-foot bus, traveling from place to place with my husband and three children. However, I am not the proverbial hippie bus mother. I am a geek who likes to experiment with sociological questions, and permaculture is the ideal way to do this. This kind of curiosity spilled over into my own life in the form of our custom-built nomadic home, to which we applied permaculture principles. When you have five or six people living in a 350-square-foot home, inefficiencies and open loops of unsustainability are thrown up into your face as the chaos grows. Chaos from the waste of human living must be managed on a daily basis, and there are no services to truck it away for you. Through this learning process, every square inch of space was analyzed for functionality and impact. There was also the question of making a living while we were nomadic. How does a family survive without anyone having a regular job? This question is eventually asked by all who are interested in sustainability, whether their motivation is to grow food for a living or comes from a desire to simply escape from the race. Permaculture taught us to think critically, outside the box. Rather than increasing our income to improve our lifestyle, we dramatically decreased our expensesand our footprint.

At its essence, permaculture is a series of questions. We not only ask where the water comes from, but also where it will go when we are done with it. We ask how to cool our house without electricity and without work. We ask how to grow food abundantly without backbreaking labor or waste. On a greater scale, we ask how we can live as biological organisms within the context of an ecological system, and as humans in a community, without the need to rationalize away guilt caused by knowing our own cost to the environment and to other, less fortunate people.

Not only does permaculture ask the right questions, it has all the answers, encased in a package of design and lifestyle strategies. Up until recent years, permaculture has been heroically promoted and taught by a few groups of ecologically minded people. Many of these people are dedicated legacies of the hippie era, and some are youngsters who are tired of our consumerist society. This anti-establishment culture has had both a positive and a negative impact on the movement as a whole. These hippies and hipsters have protected permaculture and promoted it, albeit within a relatively small minority. They have built up a community that is deeply passionate about the principles behind it. On the other hand, this exclusiveness and protection has slowed the spread of permaculture to the rest of society. If these answers are to be implemented by everyone, the culture surrounding a subculture will inevitably change.

If I have been able to impartially teach the basic principles and how-to aspects of permaculture, I will feel as though I have succeeded. I hope to dust away the cobwebs of preconceived assumptions and ideologies and in so doing further my goal of creating a better, more sustainable world that I can be proud to hand over to my grandchildren.

Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, while both equal co-creators of permaculture, disagreed on the spiritual side of things. Mollison, ever the scientist, wanted to distance the official practice of permaculture from any religious features that the community introduced. Holmgren, on the other hand, grew to believe that the spiritual aspects could not be ignored. If you participate in any permaculture design course (PDC), you are likely to be introduced to a variety of quasi-pagan and earth-centric faith practices, which many would argue are essential to a true understanding of permaculture. This book has purposely ignored this element in the quest for practicality and inclusiveness.