Juliana Birnbaum - Sustainable Revolution: Permaculture in Ecovillages, Urban Farms, and Communities Worldwide

This book is dedicated to our daughters, Lla and Serenne. May theyand their generationhavethe hope, wisdom, strength, and love needed to face the challenges theyve inherited and to bring regeneration and healing to our world.

Photo: Erika Rand

Photo: Jenny Pickerill

T he beauty of this bookindeed, the blessing of permacultureis that it responds so elegantly to impermanence. If one sails out to sea in a small boat, its good to know the timeworn principles that guide behavior, navigation, and safety. Imagine that we are all in that small boat, sailing into an unknown future, because we truly are. Just as the ocean teaches sailors, the earth teaches its denizens. The lessons are grounded in the realization that nature is the antithesis of everything static, that unceasing change defines life. Over the ages, the dynamics of life have been passed on in language, songs, stories, and practices, what Stewart Brand calls local science. These principles are now distilled into a body of knowledge that has spread around the world: permaculture. This book is about how permaculture is pollinating the creation of farms, cities, and communitiesthe crafting of a new earth.

We are leaving a period of history in which cultures have been able to maintain a measure of stability for many centuries. That resiliency has been eroded by an industrial system based on force. Without gainsaying the benefits of modernity, it is glaringly true that its price has been exorbitant to people, places, and the future. The technologies of the internal combustion engine, synthetic chemistry, agribusiness, industrial forestry, driftnet fishing, nuclear power, modern education, allopathic medicine, and finance all have at their root a type of molecular or systemic violence toward living systemstaking, overtaking, exploitation, toxicity, concentration of power, eradication, deracination, and explosions (a four-cylinder engine creates four thousand explosions per minute at 2,000 rpm, and its emissions double-glaze the planet). It is a long list. It is ours; it is the world we were born to. It is the world that brought us wonders and a world that poses the greatest peril ever encountered in the history of humankind.

In the multivariant, dynamic, and infinitely complex system called life, which approach will survive? Force or flow? Resistance or harmony? Hoarding or sharing? I wish the answers were obvious, but apparently they are not as yet. What we see in Juliana and Louis articulate booka work that documents their pilgrimage to some of the most imaginative and healing communities on earthare templates for the future that will become increasingly evident and important. If you have a disease, you turn to those who know the cure. We have developed a type of progress that is more a disease than a boon. If we are to heal, it is to those who have created a new form of progress that we will turn for counsel, learning, and connection. We are so human. When darkness falls, we seek light.

What you hold in your hands is light, understanding, and insight. The question I pondered after reading this book is simple, how will each reader change who he or she is? What will readers do after reading Louis and Julianas work? It makes me smile, because it is impossible not to want to rethink, reimagine, and renew our purpose after hearing about those who deeply understand the plight we are in, those who have chosen to mimic natures exquisite nutrient and energetic pathways in their existing or newfound communities.

The farmers and craftspeople you meet herein are not mere artisans, not simply yeowoman and yeoman horticulturists, builders, or organizers generously giving their vastly underpaid labor to these ideas. They are, in fact, the vanguard of a movement that is reclaiming our land, our place, and our culture. How we let our communities, our financesour very futureend up in the hands of General Foods, General Motors, and General Electric I will leave to cultural historians to decide. But we now know that if we are to take back ownership and responsibility for the biological integrity of our only home and its numberless, interdependent life-forms, we have to take back our bodies and minds from those who would use them to accumulate financial capital. We have to return the gift of lifeour existence, for which we are so gratefulto those who create