[PDF]Permaculture: From Agriculture to Permaculture

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STATE OF THE WORLD

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Advance Praise for State of the World 2010:

"If we continue to think of ourselves mostly as
consumers, it's going to be very hard to bring our
environmental troubles under control. But it's also
going to be very hard to live the rounded and joyful
lives that could be ours. This is a subversive volume
in all the best ways!"

— Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy and
The End of Nature

"Worldwatch has taken on an ambitious agenda in
this volume. No generation in history has achieved a
cultural transformation as sweeping as the one called
for here...it is hard not to be impressed with the
book's boldness."

— Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Crameen Bank

"This year's State of the World report is a cultural
mindbomb exploding with devastating force. I hope
it wakes a few people up."

— Kalle Lasn, Editor of Ad busters magazine

Like a tsunami, consumerism has engulfed human
cultures and Earth's ecosystems. Left unaddressed, we
risk global disaster. But if we channel this wave, intention-
ally transforming our cultures to center on sustainability,
we will not only prevent catastrophe but may usher in an
era of sustainability — one that allows all people to thrive
while protecting, even restoring, Earth.

In this year's State of the World report, 50+ renowned
researchers and practitioners describe how we can
harness the world's leading institutions — education, the
media, business, governments, traditions, and social
movements — to reorient cultures toward sustainability.




extreme close-up

Several million pounds of plastic
enter the world's oceans every hour,
portrayed on the cover by the 2.4
million bits of plastic that make up
Gyre, Chris Jordan's 8- by 11-foot
reincarnation of the famous 1820s
woodblock print, The Great Wave
Off Kanagawa, by the Japanese artist
Katsushika Hokusai.

For discussion questions,
additional essays,
video presentations,
and event calendar, visit
blogs.worldwatch.org/
transformingcultures.

Cover image: Gyre by Chris Jordan
Cover design: Lyle Rosbotham



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YORK • LONDON



ORLDWATCH
N S T I T U T E

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Vfsit the
TRANSFORMING
CULTURES
Blog



From Agriculture to Permaculture



Albert Bates and Toby Hemenway



Above the door lintels of the cultural museum
of Tlaxcala, Mexico's oldest state capital, are
murals depicting the rise of civilization. First
there appear the hunters, clad in furs, with
bows and spears. A woman discovers a small
grassy plant and begins to cultivate it. After a
time, everyone is planting it, and the newly
domesticated plants grow as tall as a person.
Special tools appear to prepare the ground,
plant, harvest, and process the grain. In the
wall panels that follow, civilization arrives, in
all its complexity.

Something similar to this story is told in
most, if not all, cultures. In the Fertile Cres-
cent of the upper Tigris and Euphrates Rivers
there are ancient coins bearing images of a
plow drawn by oxen. Images of planters and
plows appear on pottery from Egypt and Ana-
tolia and on rice paper from Japan and China,
some of it more than 14,000 years old. 1

As the ice retreated and the climate warmed
20,000 years ago, the area of fertile soil and
suitable growing seasons expanded, even as
wild game retreated and mammoths and other
large animals went extinct. About 8,000 years
ago, animal husbandry began to be augmented



by the domestication of emmer wheat, einkorn,
barley, flax, chick pea, pea, lentil, and bitter
vetch. Humans had begun to alter their land-
scapes in profound ways, clearing forests for
fields, building larger villages and cities, and
redirecting rivers for irrigation and flood con-
trol. By 7,000 years ago, many, if not most,
people in the world were farmers. 2

This might have continued until humanity
entered the next Ice Age — a world of cold
deserts, land bridges, and massive mountains
of ice. But civilization changed that trajectory
by harnessing the coal, gas, and oil that fueled
the Industrial Revolution. Once more, people
altered the planet's rhythms in ways they could
not fully grasp.

In the span of a single century — the present
one — Earth's climate may warm more rapidly
and to a greater degree than in the previous
20,000 years. Agricultural systems will be pro-
foundly challenged, beset by a perfect storm of
diminishing fuel supply for tractors, fertilizer,
and transportation; by crop -destroying heat
waves, expanding pestilences, and declining
water supplies for irrigation; by growing and
migrating populations clamoring for food,



Albert Bates is the director of the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology and the Ecovillage
Training Center at The Farm. Toby Hemenway is Scholar-in-Residence at Pacific University and a biol-
ogist consultant for the Biomimicry Guild.



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From Agriculture to Permaculture



STATE OF THE WORLD 2010



especially for meat and processed foods (see Box
5); and by the financial instability borne of
exceeding Earth's limits and having to retrench
to an earlier stage of industrial development. 3

Before the mid-twentieth century, most
crops were produced largely without the use
of chemicals. Insect pests and weeds were
controlled by crop rotations, destruction of
crop refuse, timing of planting to avoid high
pest population periods, mechanical weed
control, and other time -tested and regionally
specific farming practices. While these are
still in use, changes in technology, prices,
cultural norms, and government policies have
led to today's industrially intensive agriculture.
The dominant system of agriculture now
practiced throughout the world, referred to
as "conventional agriculture," is character-
ized by mechanization, monocultures, the
use of synthetic chemical fertilizers and pes-
ticides, and an emphasis on maximizing pro-
ductivity and profitability.

This type of agriculture is unsustainable
because it destroys the resources it depends
on. Soil fertility is declining due to erosion,
compaction, and destruction of organic matter;
water supplies are being depleted and polluted;
finite fossil energy supplies are being exhausted;
and the economies of rural communities are left
in shambles as agricultural outputs are shipped
to distant markets. The shortage of productive
cropland, decreasing soil fertility, and the enor-
mous waste and imprecise management asso-
ciated with industrial-scale food economics are
responsible for the world's recurrent and accel-
erating food and water shortages, malnutri-
tion, mass starvation, and loss of biodiversity.
In addition, agriculture accounts for about 14
percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and from
1990 to 2005 global agricultural emissions
increased by 14 percent. 4

Humanity now confronts a critical challenge:
to develop methods of agriculture that sequester
carbon, enhance soil fertility, preserve ecosystem
services, use less water, and hold more water in



the landscape — all while productively using a
steadily compounding supply of human labor.
In short, a sustainable agriculture.

Defining Sustainable Agriculture

Fortunately, for the past half- century some
pioneers have been preparing the agriculture
of the future, and their ideas are now moving
to center stage. Organic no-till, permaculture,
agroforestry, perennial polycultures, aquapon-
ics, and biointensive and biodynamic farm-
ing — long considered fringe ideas — are now
converging as serious components of a sus-
tainable agriculture. 5

One of the foundation stones was laid early
in the twentieth century, when Franklin Hiram
King journeyed to China, Korea, and Japan to
learn how farms there had been worked for
thousands of years without destroying fertility
or applying artificial fertilizer. In 1911 King
published Farmers of Forty Centuries: or Per-
manent Agriculture in China, Korea and
Japan, which described composting, crop rota-
tion, green manuring, intertillage, irrigation,
drought-resistant crops, aquaculture and wet-
lands farming, and the transport of human
manure from cities to rural farms. 6

King's work was inspiration for many,
including Sir Albert Howard. In 1943 he
published An Agricultural Testament, which
described building compost piles, recycling
waste materials, and creating soil humus as a
"living bridge" between soil life, such as myc-
orrhizae and bacteria, and healthy crops, live-
stock, and people. At the heart of Howard's
work was the idea that soils, nutritious crops,
and organisms in general are not just arrays of
minerals but are parts of a complex ecology of
cycling organic matter, and that these life-
supporting cycles are critical for a self-regen-
erative agriculture. 7

Howard became embroiled in a mid- twen-
tieth century conflict. On one side were disci-
ples of chemists such as Carl Sprengel and



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From Agriculture to Permaculture



Box 5. Dietary Norms That Heal People and the Planet



While many different combinations of foods
will meet a person's dietary needs, dietary
norms are for the most part shaped by the
individual's culture, typically very early in life.
Traditionally, these preferences were in large
part shaped by the foods that were available to
people in their bioregion.

In today's globalized world, however, more
people can choose from a wide array of foods.
While increased choice is theoretically a good
thing — giving people variety and the opportu-
nity to choose diets that are healthy and have
little ecological impact — dietary norms have
been reshaped in an increasingly unhealthy
and unsustainable manner. Easy access to
high-fat, high-sugar foods combined with bil-
lions of dollars spent annually on marketing
have dramatically shifted what is considered a
"normal" diet — from the number of calories
per meal to the amount of meat, sugar, and
refined flour consumed. All of these in turn
have contributed to rising obesity levels and
have had significant ecological impacts.

Today 1.6 billion people are either over-
weight or obese, and 18 percent of green-
house gases are produced by livestock that
are raised to feed humanity's growing demand
for meat. In 2007, people ate 275 million tons
of meat, about 42 kilograms per person world-
wide and 82 kilograms in industrial countries
(2.7 servings every day).

By cultivating new dietary norms, food can
contribute to good health and possibly even
help heal the planet. A study of several of the
longest-lived peoples in the world found that
they ate just 1,800-1,900 calories a day, no
processed foods, and minimal amounts of
animal products. By comparison, the average
American consumes 3,830 calories a day.

Food writer Michael Pollan explains suc-
cinctly what a healthy, restorative diet could
look like: "Eat food, not too much, mostly
plants." By food, Pollan means that people



should avoid food-like products with so many
additives, preservatives, flavors, and fillers that
their nutritional value may be compromised.

And by eating fewer calories (while ensur-
ing those calories are high in nutrients), over-
all health and longevity can be increased — a
finding that has been borne out in several dif-
ferent animal species, including humans.
Moreover, eating fewer calories means having
a smaller ecological impact. For example, if a
person starts adhering to an 1,800-calorie-a-
day diet at age 30, he could live to the age of
81 before consuming the same amount of
calories as a person who follows the typically
recommended 2,600-calorie diet would by the
age of 65.

Eating "mostly plants" — not necessarily
completely vegetarian but, as in many cultures
throughout history, eating meat infrequently or
perhaps even just ritually — will have significant
ecological benefits. According to agricultural
researcher David Pimentel, a vegetarian diet
needs one third fewer fossil fuels than a meat-
based diet. Another study found that produc-
ing just 1 kilogram of beef involves as much
carbon dioxide emissions as the average Euro-
pean car being driven 250 kilometers.

Unfortunately, today the dietary norm that
is spreading around much of the world — dri-
ven by the media, government subsidies,
advertising, and even by parents — is the con-
sumer diet of high quantities of meat,
processed foods, refined flours, and sugar.

What is needed is the intentional cultivation
of sustainable dietary norms — an effort that is
getting started, thanks to books like In Defense
of Food, documentaries like Food Inc., govern-
ment programs that promote healthier eating,
social enterprises selling healthier food, and
movements like "Slow Food" that enourage
people to consider carefully what they eat.

— Erik Assadourian and Eddie Kasner
Source: See endnote 3.



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Justus von Liebig, who advocated fertilizing
principally with nitrogen, phosphorus, and
potassium minerals and promoted a mechan-
ical approach, arguing that plant growth is
boosted by adding the scarcest, or limiting,
mineral. This soon became a widely accepted
agronomic principle and the basis for the Green
Revolution. On the other side were the organic
advocates, adhering to Howard's view that
crop health depends on maintaining soil ecol-
ogy by returning to the soil not just the min-
erals lost in farming but also the organic matter
that supports the nutrient cycles of soil life.
Howard's position was, in the words of biol-
ogist Janine Benyus, that it is life that best
creates the conditions conducive to life. 8




The face of agroforestry at the Maya Mountain
Research Farm, Belize.

Howard lost that battle but may yet have
won the war, as it becomes apparent that many
aspects of industrial agriculture are unsustain-
able, from the topsoil loss that approaches 75
billion tons annually to the looming deple-
tion of the critical fertilizer phosphorus and the
negative returns typified by crops that use 10
calories of fuel energy to produce one calorie
of food energy. 9

Twentieth- century agriculture has badly
degraded nearly every ecosystem it has encoun-
tered while consuming roughly 20 percent of



world energy production. The style called
"conventional" depends for nearly all of its
workings on a dwindling and increasingly
expensive supply of fossil fuels. 10

Sustainable agriculture, in contrast, can be
pursued indefinitely because it does not
degrade or deplete the resources that it needs
to continue. Since most of Earth's arable land
is already under cultivation and human popu-
lations are continuing to expand, an even bet-
ter goal would be to actually improve the
capacity of the land to produce.

Some net gain approaches are coming into
view, but they are not magic elixirs. While
optimized farming practices can increase the
capacity of the land to produce over the long
term, they cannot be considered in isolation;
a robust solution to humanity's continued
existence on this planet must include adopting
sustainable lifestyles and maintaining human
population at sustainable numbers.

Organic Agriculture: An Overview

Key features of organic agriculture are the use
of biologically produced fertilizers such as car-
bon-enhanced manures instead of manufac-
tured inorganic nitrates and phosphates,
infrequent use of biologically derived pesti-
cides rather than routine application of synthetic
and systemically toxic compounds, and — most
critically — maintenance of soil ecology and
organic matter through cover crops, green
manures, crop rotation, and composting. 11

A long-term comparison done by the
Rodale Institute from 1981 to 2002 found that
organic systems provided crop yields equivalent
to those of conventional methods. The trials
showed that when rainfall was 30 percent less
than normal — typical drought levels — organic
methods yielded 24-34 percent more than
standard methods. The researchers attribute
the increased yields to better water retention
due to higher soil carbon levels. 12

Data gathered from the trial have revealed



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that soil under organic agriculture manage-
ment can accumulate about 1,000 pounds of
carbon per acre -foot each year. This is equal to
about 3,667 pounds of carbon dioxide per
acre (4,118 kilograms per hectare per year)
taken from the air and sequestered into soil
organic matter. Also, organic methods used
>>>