This is my home
This is my only home
This is the only sacred ground that I have ever known
And should I stray in the dark night alone
Rock me, goddess, in the gentle arms of Eden
--Dave Carter, "Gentle Arms of Eden"
Some readers may notice that this issue's theme has changed from what was originally announced. We solicited submissions about "War, Peace, and Ecology," but we ended up with something a bit different. This issue does include a few articles that discuss war, but it focuses far more on peace--including deep ecology, Permaculture, and other peaceful ways of approaching life. I am happy about this change. The world really does have enough war without our contributing to it and reinforcing it in the pages of Talking Leaves. Any informed person knows the story already, is already saddened, outraged, and probably as educated as much as really necessary in what is going wrong in the world. In this issue, we suggest ways of approaching life-as individuals, as communities, as societies--that provide hopeful alternatives, fresh perspectives, larger contexts in which cooperation, rather than warfare, is the only solution that makes sense for any of us.
Long-time deep ecologist and activist John Seed shared his dynamic "Earth, Spirit, Action" workshop with us in June, and from that workshop springs much of this issue. I interviewed him by phone shortly following the workshop, and also received permission to except four articles from his website, outlining some of the workshop's major components. My phone interview with permaculturalist and forest garden pioneer Dave Jacke anticipates his visit to Lost Valley in October. I asked both of my interviewees about war and peace, and the answers they gave were remarkably similar: peace starts with ourselves, in how we see the world and in the lives we lead. War, which seems to grip many of the power structures of our society, is in fact a much less durable phenomenon than cooperation and peace. If we can reclaim our world-starting in our own lives and in our communities-we will help create the world we have been dreaming about. When the holistic perspectives and cooperative approaches to be found in deep ecology and Permaculture radiate outwards, war becomes obsolete. Will these things prevail? We don't know. As John told me, neither "hope" nor "hopelessness" will really serve us. We can't control the outcome, but we can put our energy into what we find true and beautiful, listening to and acting from our hearts, embracing our connections, rediscovering and expressing our ecological selves. To do anything else is to live only partially. Nothing on the physical plane is truly sustainable anyway-we have at most only a few more billion years of habitable planet left. We can't stop change, impermanence, our individual deaths, or the eventual extinction of every form of life we know-but we may be able to influence whether our species' remaining time on earth is short and fraught with discord and suffering, or long and much more harmonious and joyful. At the very least, we can influence those things in our own lives and in the lives of those around us. Ultimately, as John said, "It's the only game in town" anyway.
As alluded to on the previous page, print-magazine publishing is not the only game in town. Although I am experiencing some inner conflict about this--and finding it a little difficult to let go of what is familiar and comfortable--I am for the most part excited about trying something new. I can't help but notice the irony in the fact that it has sometimes seemed necessary to throw my own life out of balance (by working too much, especially on a computer) in order to create a magazine that is supposedly about balanced, healthy, ecological culture. Nor have I always felt good about all the paper, ink, and embodied energy that has gone into creating boxes and boxes full of magazines, many of them not really spoken for at the time of printing. Our more modest printing approach, and the streamlining of both time and resource use that will hopefully accompany our switch to more online publishing, should help restore that balance in my own life. It will allow me to do less technical and business work and more writing (both for our own website/journal and for magazines like Communities--see their latest issue)--and also to say "enough is enough" at the end of a full day or week in the garden, where my connections to the living world are often far more direct than they are when attempting to lay out a magazine. It will allow me to pursue even more fully what brings me peace, which is often music, not the written word at all. And maybe it will allow me to finally get a firmer grasp on those bird songs I'm trying to learn to recognize.
In any case, I believe my layout editor should be happy now--I've filled this last remaining empty page with words. Thankfully, online journals don't work like that. Need I say more? (No comes the chorus.)
Thank you, goodnight, and peace...
(c)2005 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2005
Volume 15, Numbers 2 & 3
Deep Ecology, Permaculture, & Peace
He has created numerous projects protecting rainforests in South America, Asia, and the Pacific through providing benign and sustainable development projects for their indigenous inhabitants tied to the protection of their forests. These projects have been funded by the Australian Government aid agency AusAID, The Australian Council of Churches, and various foundations. He has written and lectured extensively on deep ecology and has been conducting Councils of All Beings and other re-Earthing workshops in Australia, North America, Japan, India, Thailand, and Eastern and Western Europe for fifteen years. He also regularly lectures at universities in Australia, US, UK, and in Asia. In the US, his workshops have been hosted by Esalen, Omega, Naropa, California Institute of Integral Studies, and, most recently, Lost Valley Educational Center, where he offered his "Earth, Spirit, Action" workshop from June 24-26, 2005.
With Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, and Professor Arne Naess, he wrote Thinking Like a Mountain - Towards a Council of All Beings (New Society Publishers), which has now been translated into ten languages. He founded World Rainforest Report in 1984 and currently remains one of the editors (www.rainforestinfo.org.au). He is also an accomplished bard and songwriter and since 1981 has produced five albums of environmental songs. In 1995 he was awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) by the Australian Government for services to conservation and the environment. In the last few years he has scripted and produced several videos, the latest of which is called Work in Progress.
I interviewed him over the phone on the first and fifth of July this year, following his workshop at Lost Valley. I had enjoyed the workshop immensely, and found much of it quite profound. The couple-dozen other participants seemed to share my enthusiasm and gratitude for the experience. The articles following this interview synopsize some of the exercies that made that weekend workshop so powerful. (Also included was a Council of All Beings.)
Contact him at: John Seed, Rainforest Information Centre, Box 368, Lismore, NSW 2480, Australia, [email protected].
CR: What are you doing right now?
JS: For about twenty years now, I've been doing road shows around different parts of the world, but mainly North America, giving presentations about deep ecology and the preservation of nature, which are the things I'm most interested in. These presentations include music and poetry as well as experiential processes and the spoken word. I do these partly as an educational thing, and partly as a fundraiser for different projects that the Rainforest Information Centre is supporting in India, Africa, and South America. Most weekends, I do an experiential deep ecology workshop which likewise benefits those causes. I started in British Columbia this year, and I've got nine weeks, a pretty packed schedule, supporting in particular the reforestation of the sacred Mount Arunachala in the south of India.
CR: What do you learn from these workshops; what do you get out of them?
JS: It's not so much that I learn anything new. But these workshops are based in part on Joanna Macy's work with despair and empowerment. These experiential processes give all the participants, including me, a sense of rootedness, interconnection with and participation in nature. This is actually my own spiritual practice, and my own psychological practice, to make sure that I remain fresh and don't get burnt out, so that I'm available to vision and being called by the earth to act on her behalf.
CR: You mentioned that most people who come to workshops like this already belong to a certain group that's sympathetic to this perspective. Do you try to do things that reach out to other kinds of people?
JS: I do a lot of interviews for magazines and radio as a way of sharing the intellectual content of deep ecology and mother nature and things like that. Often when people read these things, even though they haven't been part of any movement, they're interested; it strikes a chord within them, and they move in that direction.
But the workshops I do are usually attractive only to people who are already on that path, and who are looking for help in grounding their lives and their love of the earth. They don't usually attract people who are CEOs of oil companies or anything like that, and I'm not sure how to go about that.
CR: I know you've been involved in a lot of political activism as well. In relation to those people, it seems that that's the kind of work that you do.
JS: Yes, that's right. Joanna Macy says that there are basically three different classes of activity that are required for what she calls the Great Turning--the great turning away from the industrial growth society and the military-industrial complex rule of the world into a sustainable future. One of those is resistance, and one of those is creating the models of the future in the present: permaculture and intentional community and things like that--and the third one is working directly on changing consciousness. I tend to find myself drawn to each of these things. The experiential deep ecology processes, rituals, and ceremonies are working on change of consciousness, but resistance is needed at the same time.
CR: Do you believe that modern society has brought more conflict among people, more devastating kinds of wars? Or do you think there's something inherent in human nature, that humans are just always going to be having wars and conflicts?
JS: I can't make up my mind about that. There's lots and lots of conflict in the primate world, but human beings appear to have brought it to new levels of scale and in the technologies with which we wage it. Then there's the work of the women anthropologists and archaeologists who claim that there was a time when there was no conflict, and so I'm a little bemused, I'm not sure what to make of that.
CR: They talk about a time when the power was more equally distributed among the genders, and when women were more in charge.
JS: That's exactly so, and I'd love to believe that that was the case. But that research is contested, and I don't know what to believe.
CR: The ideal that Rianne Eisler has written about is the "partnership way," a more egalitarian kind of society.
JS: Well, obviously, I'm for that.
CR: Human beings are certainly part of nature, but sometimes they also seem different. Is there something that makes humans different in a moral sense? Is there a scale of right and wrong that other animals don't need to conform to, because they just are the way they are, but that makes humans bad or good? Is there any kind of division you see between humans and the rest of the world?
JS: I haven't really thought about that, Chris. I guess I would have to say that human beings grew out of nature, out of the biological fabric, the same as everything else. I agree with Aldo Leopold that human beings are a plain member of the biota. As a plain member, I think that of course we are particularly observant about human things and we don't notice other species in the same way. We think that the things that set humans apart, the things that are different about human beings from other species, are very important and special things. But of course any other species would do the same thing. Ants would probably think that antennae are the really important and special things; they would just see us as examples of poor lost souls that don't have antennae. I know that we prize this kind of consciousness that we've got as being something that really sets us apart. But the thing about a species is, a species is exactly something that has characteristics that nothing else has--that's what makes it a species. I'm sure the decomposing bacteria might feel that, whereas humans could disappear and the world would go on forever, if they, the decomposing bacteria, disappeared, things would very quickly grind to a halt. They would think that their specific qualities were far more important than ours. So there's a tremendous arrogance in humanism and in the whole anthropocentric world view. When we correct for that, then human beings are miraculously special because everything is miraculously special.
CR: It seems that the idea of right and wrong gets associated with environmental issues, but if you just look at in terms of survival and sustainability, different species will do different things that aren't sustainable for them, and they will have a population crash, or they'll spoil their habitat. So it seems as if maybe that is more of the issue for human beings, that it's a question of survival, which means coming back into balance somehow. I guess that's part of what your work is about: helping people become aware that they're part of a larger system.
JS: Yes.
CR: At least five or six major extinction episodes have happened on earth, and we seem to be in the midst of a new one right now. What role should we take in trying to stop this, or mitigate it, if it is part of what naturally happens as part of earth's cycles? Should we be playing some role now to make it less?
JS: I guess it depends on whether we think that human beings are worth persevering with or not. There's a group in Oregon that's started the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement because they believe that we're a failed experiment and our extinction is the best thing that could happen to the planet. I personally don't agree with that. I feel that perfecting human beings is a more worthwhile thing to shoot for than expecting them to disappear quietly. A study of the previous extinction events that have occurred on earth gives us a context where we see that what's taking place now is not unnatural in any sense. It's something that happens for one reason or another from time to time in the history of this world.
But the question is, if we fully grasp what we have initiated, whether we may be in a position to change our minds about it and to steer it in another direction. I'm not convinced that we are in a position to do that, but I personally don't have anything more important to do than to try for that. I actually like human beings and I certainly like all of the other primates and mammals and all the other fellow travelers on this great titanic of a Cenozoic era. So I'm all in favor of steering away from the iceberg that's looming dead ahead, and will argue for that. It's not that I think that the world's going to come to an end when the Cenozoic eventually does disappear into oblivion and the next epoch emerges out of the ashes; I'm sure that that will be just as miraculous and beautiful and awe-inspiring as the present. But I just feel that, if I get a vote, I vote for another million years or another hundred million years.
CR: I've heard that previous extinction episodes generally took place over much longer periods of time; the rate of extinction was less than what's happening right now. It seems as if we have facilitated this extinction episode, sped it up quite a bit.
JS: I compare us to the photosynthesizing bacteria that in their clever sort of solution to their own hunger problems developed mechanisms for catching photons of light from the sun. This gave them the energy to split complex molecules into what they needed. They could split CO2 and utilize the carbon and they could split H20 and utilize the hydrogen, and thus they could make the hydrocarbons that they needed for their bodies, for their food. But in doing so they inadvertently produced oxygen, which eventually, after hundreds of millions of years, began to pile up and caused the world's first extinction crisis that we know about. We are very like those bacteria. It's not that we are doing this in order to extinguish ourselves and all of the other species, but it's just a kind of a byproduct of our other activities. At the time, no doubt, the anaerobic bacteria were all carrying placards and were up in arms about it, because they didn't think that it was a great idea at all to pollute the world with oxygen. But of course we know how the story proceeded, and so the anaerobic age was over, and a new age began of the breathers, including our own ancestors. So the sense of tragedy depends upon one's perspective. I feel that human beings are just as natural as photosynthesizers and that whatever we do is just a very natural thing, but I sometimes think that we may have a choice. And if we have a choice, then I suggest that we choose more life, and that we choose not to bring the Cenozoic period to a close so early in the game.
CR: Your answers have been pointing out that when we're talking about extinctions, we're not just talking about obscure species on a checklist that keep going extinct, with no effect on human beings. When we're talking about an era of extinction, we're talking about our own extinction as well. It's all tied together.
JS: That's right.
CR: How do we each deal with the inherent internal conflicts in being a modern human being? We all are making compromises with the modern age, and with technologies that have downsides that are destructive. How do you personally come to peace with some of the choices that you have to make in order to just do your work?
JS: Well, I don't feel like I am particularly at peace with them. I'm just as much in conflict as anyone. What I try to do is minimize the impact that I have, while at the same time recognizing that there's a chance that vigorous activity by people like myself, who are speaking up about what's happening to the world and resisting the destruction of the world, may help improve things. Although that vigorous activity itself consumes resources, I judge that the potential benefit of my actions outweighs those costs. Of course, I may be wrong about that, but that's how I do it.
CR: When we were talking about the universe story, the 13.7 billion year story that science has allowed us to figure out recently, we were talking about that in contrast to the 6000 year old story that some people interpret literally from the Bible. That 6000 year old story often seems to go along with a lack of environmental consciousness, or with a lot of anthropocentrism. But I know there are many other stories about the creation and evolution of the universe from indigenous cultures that seem to be more ecologically conscious. Many of them lead to the same conclusions that this 13.7 billion year story would lead to about the best ways for human beings to relate to the rest of the world. At one point in the workshop you said that if there is "The" story, this 13. 7 billion year story would be "The" story with a capital T. I'm wondering whether you think that this does have more validity than, say, the Hopi story, or other indigenous stories, or are they all just different ways of looking at the same thing?
JS: I've got no desire to convert Hopis to another story. Their story is obviously serving them. I don't see people from that culture behaving destructively towards the earth or engaging in aggressive conflict with other cultures with a different story. I feel that the universe story is really important for the people who are actively engaged in the modern project. We need to have a creation myth that realigns us with the earth and with the biological fabric out of which we've emerged. We need a story that will help us to recognize that our social identity has no independent existence, that we can't survive without an intact biology. I don't think there's anything wrong with an indigenous people's story; I don't think they need to change their story necessarily. But I do think that most human beings need a new story.
CR: Do you have thoughts about raising children in modern age? How does one instill ecological and community values in children without creating an equal and opposite reaction or rebellion against whatever those values are? Is there a way to gently lead children? What was your approach?
JS: I just lived in a community with people, lived lightly on the land, grew organically, and tried to live in loving harmony.
CR: It sounds as if you were creating an environment that reinforced your values for them.
JS: Yeah, that was 25 years ago, but that's what I did.
CR: Were your parents and other family members supportive of your values and life choices as you were going in an ecological and community direction?
JS: It took them a while to catch on really, as to what I was on about. It wasn't straightforward, and it wasn't immediate, but eventually they did come to appreciate the work that I was doing.
CR: You weren't carrying forward things that you had learned from them?
JS: No, not at all.
CR: But your son has apparently very much embraced that way of life.
JS: Well, you know, yeah, he's living in a community, and growing organic food, and he's a musician, and he's environmentally aware.
CR: You are living in a land-based community, and also traveling around the world doing activist work. Do you find it is challenging to keep a balance between being "local" and "global"? What challenges have you had in balancing personal or community relationships with those larger issues?
JS: I find that that particular combination works really well for me. I spend eight or nine months of the year at home, living in this community and putting down my roots, doing Permaculture, organic gardening, tree planting, all kinds of community activities, as well as continuing with my activism, especially campaigns and fundraising and all kinds of things. Then three or four months of the year I find myself on the road, either monitoring projects in countries like India, or else doing workshops and fundraising and raising awareness and giving lectures and going to conferences and just spreading the gospel of deep ecology all over the world.
What I find more challenging is justifying all the fossil fuels, the big ecological footprint that I have from traveling every year like that. I guess everybody thinks that their reasons for traveling are important enough to justify squandering the earth's resources, and I certainly feel that a lot of important changes take place, and consciousness is raised, and so on, but nonetheless I feel in a lot of conflict about it, and hope that I'm doing the right thing.
CR: When you do travel, is it during the slower season there?
JS: That's right, I tend to travel during the Australian winter, which happens to be the summer in America and Europe.
CR: Is there a single most important thing that you'd like to help instill in those who see your roadshow or take part in your workshops?
JS: Well, I guess for me it's the balance and synergy between engaging in a positive and active and empowered way in protecting the life support systems, the biosphere, the environment, the plants and the animals of this age--and doing the necessary spiritual and psychological work to make sure that we don't become burnt out and depressed and despondent. Most people try to avoid looking at the issues that matter, and are in denial, because they're afraid of the psychological impact that taking in the news is going to have. I think that if we're going to engage, and if we're going to stare over the abyss at what's going on and what's coming toward us, then it behooves us to find psychological and spiritual practices such as the experiential deep ecology work and the work that used to be called despair and empowerment but that Joanna Macy now calls honoring our pain for the world.
So it's finding the balance between working in the world and working on ourselves that I feel is the key to being effective and useful in times such as these.
CR: You use music and poetry in your presentations and workshops. Have you always done this? What led you to start doing it? What effects have you seen from it?
JS: I just think that if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a song's worth a thousand pictures. I've always used music and poetry. I'm especially encouraged by Thomas Berry, who calls on the poets and the musicians and the artists to come to join the move to spread a new story about our role in the earth. Merely having a dry scientific version of things isn't going to be sufficient.
CR: You've talked elsewhere about "cellular memories" of our evolutionary past, which show us being related to everything else in the web of life. Can you give some examples?
JS: What I can say is that there are many stories about our origins. Some people believe that we were created by an old man with a white beard 6000 years ago, and that we are here to subdue and dominate nature and nature is here to be in fear and trembling of us. There are other stories that we've evolved here, that we're part of this planet, that we've been evolving here since the first cell 4,500,000,000 years ago. There's a lot of evidence for the latter story. We can look at the composition of our blood, the way its saltiness relates to the salt of sea water; we can look at the vestigial tail and gills when we're in the womb. And so I feel that every cell in our bodies is descended in an unbroken chain through all the different forms of life.
Through certain kinds of experiential exercises, through meditation, through certain drugs perhaps, we can actually begin to tune in on that larger identity. Yes, we are just this biographical person that was born fifty-nine years ago or whatever it was, but also this much larger being that is the same DNA that's passed from generation to generation. We can contact that and be informed by that. We're not restricted to this very narrow, shallow, one-dimensional sense of self.
CR: To change focus: what is your impression of how Americans are seen around the world? Do people understand that much of the American population does not support the current US government and its policies?
JS: Yeah, I'm sure people do see that. But at the same time, I saw somewhere that in the rest of the world the US is slightly less popular than China at the moment. Of course people understand that it's not all Americans, but nonetheless I think America's reputation is at a particularly low ebb at this time.
CR: What do you think we as Americans can do to redeem ourselves in the eyes of the world?
JS: Take back your democracy.
CR: Take back our democracy...
JS: It's been stolen. Get it back.
CR: Do you have suggestions specifically how to do that?
JS: Yeah, I was afraid you'd ask me that. No, not really. I guess just don't mope about your losses...what's the saying? Don't mourn, organize.
CR: Do you think some changes can happen through electoral politics, if people take charge?
JS: Well, yes, as long as you don't have electric voting machines that are being manipulated by Republicans, and as long as you don't have a government that can create crisis and emergency before an election to scare people into voting conservative. I mean there are many ways of manipulating people, and somehow we have to take it back and make the system work.
CR: Let's just say that we have these voting machines that aren't registering our votes correctly, and that we have a government that's in control of the media and that's manufacturing crises to distract everyone right before the elections...what's the next step? Not that you have to know...
JS: No, well, I don't know. But I guess, take courage, move in a positive direction, get together with your neighbors and your friends and like-minded people to discuss these issues. Ask deeper questions--that's Arne Naess's definition of deep ecology: asking deeper questions. And spend time in nature, remember who we really are underneath the façade of our human personality, remember our interconnected-ness with earth and air and fire and water, and root ourselves deeply in the biology of this planet out of which our lives are woven.
CR: What would you say to young people who feel overwhelmed by the problems they discover when they start educating themselves about the state of the world?
JS: I'd suggest that they need to do some of the work that reconnects. They can find out about that on our website, www.rainforestinfo.org.au, under Deep Ecology, and especially on Joanna Macy's website, www.joannamacy.net . That's what I do; that's my best answer to the question. It's not necessarily going to be easy for a young person to figure out how to do that. I'd say get together with other young people who are like-minded, who care about these things, and work together to support each other psychologically and in studying the situation so that we can find some way to address the difficulties.
CR: Realistically, do you feel that we have any chance to avert disaster in the coming century? Do you see us making the transition to a more ecologically sensitive, humane, sustainable world without major hardship and mass suffering?
JS: To me, it's impossible to know whether there's a chance of that or not. Obviously, the chance gets less and less the more time that goes on. There does seem to be this moment that we're in before Peak Oil really kicks in, where either the remaining oil can be used to pave our way to a relatively smooth transition to a new sustainable world, or else it's going to be used on Cheney's war. But in any case, whatever the answer to that question, it's still the only game in town. There's nothing that we can do except do our best and try. I feel that both hope and hopelessness get in the way, you know? We don't need hope or hopelessness, we don't need to know what's going to happen, we just need to know that in any case we should do things that are true and right and beautiful. You can never know beforehand--like there was no way to know that the Berlin wall was going to come down; all of the intelligence agents in the world were caught by surprise. Events have a way of happening...hundredth monkey, all of that kind of stuff...so I think we've just got to work as if there was a chance.
CR: Well, if we do, then maybe there will be.
JS: Yes.
Find John Seed's writings and workshop schedules, as well as other deep ecology resources and information on current conservation projects, at www.rainforestinfo.org.au.
(c)2005 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2005
Volume 15, Numbers 2 & 3
Deep Ecology, Permaculture, & Peace
During the last ice age, glacial lobes crept south from the Arctic and leveled much of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa. However, they spared an area of about 15,000 square miles, which includes parts of each of those states. This is the Driftless Region. It is characterized by rolling hills and river valleys and sports some very special geological features. About 19,000 years ago, when the ice age temperatures hit their lowest, spring and summer water seeped into small cracks in the limestone or dolomite bedrock, causing it to crack when the water froze and expanded upon winter's return. When the glaciers receded thousands of years later, great flows of glacial meltwater exacerbated these fissures simply by running through them. Limestone is easily erodable by the very slight acid in water. This process created various caverns and crevices and sinkholes that are widespread in the Driftless Region. It is upon this karst topography, as it is called, that algific slopes depend.
In the winter, cold air seeps into the limestone or dolomite bedrock of a slope via sinkholes in the upland ground surface. The air supercools the rocks and continues to flow downward until, met by an impenetrable layer of shale or slate, it is forced to move horizontally and exit the system by way of vents in the side of the slope. This cool air released onto what is most often a north-facing slope creates an unusually cold microclimate. In the spring, when snowmelt begins to seep into the ground through those same sinkholes, it is frozen by the rocks which are still much colder that the outer environment. This spring-forming sub-surface ice persists throughout the summer, sustaining the supply of cold air being released onto the slope.
The slope is covered by broken rock rubble called talus over which a thin soil is likely to support fewer trees than the surrounding area. What this ecosystem does support is a rare community of species suited for the cold temperatures. Some are normally found in boreal forest or tundra; others are glacial species that have survived in these scattered and isolated habitats for the past 12,000 years without changing very much. One of these is a snail formerly thought to have died out when the last glacier retreated. Geologists found fossil records of it but were beyond surprised to be told by a snail specialist in 1953 that it is still with us to this day.
These are acre lessons in ferns and mosses, their chilly respiration a paradox on skin in Iowan Augusts. In a quick stroll from the soft-serve joint or on a walk with the dog, Decorah residents are confronted by the positively ancient nature of the land they live on. I first visited this particular slope with a high school biology class. There is no doubt that an ecologist of any sort can find great interest in this ecosystem. Researchers from all over the country have been drawn to our area to have a look. Yet I wonder if there is actually something more to an acquaintance with an algific slope than first meets the eye--or the researching probe.
In my conversations with people concerned about the questions of perception and worldview as they affect environmental degradation, I often come upon this question of time and our society's understanding of it. Some have said that our concept of time is too narrow, that it must expand to encompass the whole of our ancestry, the children of our children's children, and beyond. Many cite the Native American concept of always taking into consideration the well-being of the next seven generations when making a decision.
The algific slope, though not necessarily any older than the land around it, supports a community that is a unique and visible testament to the relative youth of our species--not to mention modern North American society. If it is true that regaining a sense of deep-time is essential in the transformation of our culture, what better place to start than the recognition of such local land histories as the amazing stories that they are? Here could begin a convergence of the environmental sciences with reverence of this aged earth. What a powerful duo they could make in the effort to support life on this planet. So we keep on. For now, we teach our children about the cold, cold air and the great grandfather rocks and the little snails that have been here for thousands of years, since before all of us were born, since before time as we know it.
Hannah McCargar wrote this piece before coming to Lost Valley to be an intern earlier this year. She can be reached at [email protected].
(c)2005 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2005
Volume 15, Numbers 2 & 3
Deep Ecology, Permaculture, & Peace
While i want to honor my feelings, i have a goal to be more peaceful in my life. I think this has the potential to make my environment calmer and facilitate connections with my family and community. To this end, i have seriously put some attention to my breath; remembering to breathe deeply in times of stress as well as just breathing in general. I literally practice breathing. I've asked my loved ones to remind me to breathe (and i remind them). Multiple times a day i spend time focusing on breathing throughout my whole body, filling my lungs up all the way. It feels good; it's a self reinforcing practice.
I live my life with the idea that what i do personally affects the world. I don't feel there is a whole lot i can do to "stop war" but there's a lot i can do to make peace. I can make peace in my heart, with my breath, my body and in my home. I have noticed that when i am connected to myself, i can come from a place of compassion and calm even in the midst of the emotional storms that can arise in daily life with children and in community. I have known about the concept of being Present and in This Moment for a long time. More recently, i have drawn some attention to my connection with my core; with my power. Being Present is wonderful; this is truly the only moment i have. Being Present and being connected is what enables me to be be fully alive. There's so much that needs to be done in this world to bring things to a place of balance. To me, fostering peace with all i come into contact with seems like the most i can offer. I imagine a ripple effect of peace like a stone dropped into a still pond. Doing and Being are two essential aspects in maintaining peace. I am continually decreasing my impact on the planet as i learn to live more sustainably; i do what i can to make the world a better place. Living at Lost Valley and my involvement with the Heart of Now workshop feel like wonderful contributions to the world i want to help create. I am learning to Be in an energy of Peace. I trust that is contributing to what the world needs, too.
kaseja Wlder is a mom, priestess, temporary earthling and an exploring member at Lost Valley.
(Ed. note: all lower case names and "i"'s in this article are by kaseja's choice.)
(c)2005 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2005
Volume 15, Numbers 2 & 3
Deep Ecology, Permaculture, & Peace
Everyone agreed that I was an unlikely candidate for the disease. There was no family history of breast cancer, and I had eaten carefully and exercised vigorously all my life, had two pregnancies and had breast-fed my children. Cancer was an unbelievable and unwelcome surprise.
During the week which began with the announcement about Kilimanjaro's icecap and ended with my surgery, a sense began to grow within me that these were not disconnected events. Since 1912, the ice fields described by Ernest Hemingway as "wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun" have lost 82 percent of their ice, and it is predicted that these great glaciers may be gone entirely by 2020. Scientists attribute this both to climate change and to other human activities, such as the clearing of forests by farmers, and the setting of fires by honey collectors trying to smoke bees out of their hives.
Researchers are scrambling to collect core samples of Kilimanjaro's glaciers, to store in freezers until more sophisticated technology is available. It has been suggested that it might be possible to cover the mountain's ice cap with a kind of prosthesis: a bright white cover (inspired by those used in England to protect cricket fields from the elements) to serve as a membrane to seal the glaciers, prevent evaporation, and reflect solar radiation.
It has always puzzled me that the appeals I have received over the years from various cancer organizations emphasize "finding a cure." Although I am the last person who would suggest that researchers abandon that goal, I have always wondered why the wording isn't something else: "Help us find the cause of cancer," for example. I would like researchers to discover what toxins were in the food I ate or the water I drank, what poisons were in the air I breathed, what radiation bombarded me--so that a single healthy cell went haywire. Grateful as I am for the medical skill that has cured me, to neglect what scientists call the "etiology" of a disease sounds like a case of what my grandmother, who grew up in the days before automobiles and garages, called "locking the barn door after the horse is stolen."
The snow will never sculpt the top of Kilimanjaro again, nor will my missing few ounces of flesh be restored as good as new. I cannot claim that the change in my own profile will have nearly the impact that Kilimanjaro's will have. In the case of the mountain, it is predicted that visits by tourists and climbers will begin to dwindle, and that the local economy will be undermined, melted along with the snow.
But I have decided to claim Kilimanjaro as a partner in loss, and take some comfort in acknowledging my solidarity with her. We have been connected through our vulnerability. We are soul-sisters.
Writer Nancy Roth, whose surgeon has told her she is now "cured" (unlike Mount Kilimanjaro), intends to live a long and healthy life in Oberlin, Ohio. One of the goals of her work is to help people become aware of their impact on the web of nature that supports life on earth, including their own. She is working on her fourteenth book--a series of essays on ethics and the environment. Her website is www.revnancyroth.org.
(c)2005 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2005
Volume 15, Numbers 2 & 3
Deep Ecology, Permaculture, & Peace
Dave Jacke has been a student of ecology and design since the 1970s, and has run his own ecological design firm--Dynamics Ecological Design--since 1984. Dave teaches ecological design and permaculture, and has consulted on, designed, built, and planted landscapes, homes, farms, and communities in many parts of the United States, especially the Northeast, as well as overseas. A cofounder of Land Trust at Gap Mountain in Jaffrey, NH, he homesteaded there for a number of years.
He is the primary author of the two-volume magnum opus Edible Forest Gardens (Chelsea Green, 2005), about creating home-scale food gardens which mimic forest ecosystem structure and function. He will be teaching a Bioneers pre-session workshop at Lost Valley, Tuesday October 11 through Thursday October 13, entitled "Edible Forest Gardens: Integrating Ecology, Design and Agriculture." For more information and registration, email [email protected] or call 541-937-3351 ext. 112. Also check out Dave's website at www.edibleforestgardens.com; you can reach him at [email protected].
I interviewed him by phone on July 14, 2005.
CR: Do you want to talk about what you do?
DJ: I have been interested in ecology and the environment since I was a child. Even as a teenager I was wondering, "How can we humans live on the planet in a way that is not going to do the damage we're doing?"
I heard about permaculture before the book (Permaculture 1, the first volume by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren) got to this country; I bought a copy from Australia. I then took my course with Mollison in 1981, the second course he taught in the US.
I had been heading in this direction even before then. I have a bachelor's in environmental studies, with a minor in land use planning. After my permaculture course, I went to the Conway School of Landscape Design and got my master's there in 1984. I've been doing ecological landscape design, land use planning, and landscape construction ever since. I started teaching in 1984 as well, and have taught ten or eleven full permaculture courses.
I decided to write this book (Edible Forest Gardens, a two-volume set published by Chelsea Green Publishing, 2005) eight years ago with my coauthor Eric Toensmeier partly because I was so frustrated with the available permaculture literature. A lot of people were writing new books, but most were just regurgitating Bill Mollison. I was tired of that, and no one was writing in the US. So I said, "All right, we've got to do a book for the US." I looked at Mollison's big fat black book: so much of it relates to drylands and tropics. I asked, "What is it in the permaculture lexicon that distinguishes where I live?" I've lived in New England all my life: Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Well, forest gardening is really where it's at here. And it's the place where the least has really been developed in terms of ideas and practice.
Forest gardening is most applicable in the eastern deciduous forests, from the southeast out to the plains all the way up into the boreal zone in Canada and northern New England. But the boundaries extend beyond that--any temperate humid forested climate in the world, essentially. We have a database in the back of the book, a plant species matrix, which lists about 626 different species and varieties of plants, with all kinds of ecological information on them. Eric is the one who did that work. He looked for the best edible forest garden plants from the temperate humid forested climates and even from the prairies around the world.
CR: So someone in the Northwest could look at that chart and choose out the species that are most applicable here?
DJ: Absolutely, and there's actually a fair number of species native to western North America in the database. It's definitely temperate-wide, and that's just the specifics. Volume 1 of the book is on vision and theory and Volume 2 is design and practice. All the ecological principles, the vision, the design processes, the design ideas, the site preparation strategies, the planting strategies--all that is applicable throughout the world. It's an encyclopedic book. I felt a need to go to the science of ecology and the scientific literature. There are extensive footnotes and an extensive bibliography in this book. It's very solidly grounded in the most current theory as well as some old ideas and forgotten research. It's really changed my ideas about ecology and design. I'm reviewing the proofreading on Volume 2 now. Today I'm looking at the chapter called "A Forest Garden Pattern Language." I took Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language book and I asked, "How can I apply this to forest gardening design?" The book contains 59 patterns for forest garden design, most of which are completely new.
CR: Do you want to explain what forest gardens are, for the benefit of readers who may not know?
DJ: In some ways, forest gardening is really the core, the seed, of permaculture in its original formulation. The forest gardening vision is to mimic forest ecosystems in the way we do our agriculture. The question is, how can we mimic the structure and function of forest ecosystems in the way we grow food? Why would we want to do that? Well, we'd want to do that because forest ecosystems are self-renewing, self-maintaining, self-fertilizing, extremely low maintenance, they're stable, they're resilient--and those are all good things that we would like to have our agriculture embody. The only problem is that forest ecosystems as we know them are not very rich, especially after having been plundered by the European invaders 500 years ago. They don't grow a lot of food. Our current agricultural system is not self-renewing, not self-sustaining, not self-fertilizing, very high maintenance. It requires ten calories of energy for every calorie of food we get out of it, not including cooking and transportation and everything else. Loss of soil...you know the litany. But agricultural systems grow large amounts of food per acre.
So, you could say there are two ends of the spectrum: agriculture, which produces a lot of food at high cost; and natural ecosystems--in our case, temperate forest. The forest doesn't produce a lot of food but it has a lot of ecological benefits, whereas agriculture produces a lot of food but doesn't have those ecological benefits. Organic agriculture starts at the agriculture side of the spectrum and says, "How can we begin reintegrating some of the processes of nature, recycling of nutrients and so on, but maintain high food production?" What forest gardening is trying to do is start at the other end of the spectrum and ask, "How can we maintain the benefits of natural ecosystems, but increase the amount of food produced?" They're both valid approaches, but I'm focusing on the second approach.
To mimic forest ecosystem structure and function, but maximize the amount of food we can produce, we need to understand the structures and functions of forest ecosystems. In our book, we're not limiting ourselves to forest; we're using forest in the broadest sense, as a metaphor, and looking at how we can grow food throughout all stages of plant succession, from field to forest and everything in between. This means oldfield successions that have a mix of perennial grasses, herbs, shrubs, and trees; systems dominated by pioneer trees; shade-tolerant, shade-loving forest systems...the whole gamut. How can we mimic all those ecosystems, play with succession as part of the design, and mimic the architecture of these different communities? And what is the social structure?
CR: The social structure, meaning...
DJ: Meaning the interactions between species. Competition, cooperation, inhibition, facilitation, parasitism, herbivory--what are those different interactions? How are food webs put together? What can we learn by looking at natural food webs in order to mimic but improve upon them for our own use? What niches do different species fill? What is a niche, in ecological terms? How can we understand those niches and therefore how can we design with those niches in mind? What are guilds?
Guilds are not very clearly defined in the permaculture literature, and when I looked at the scientific literature I found that ecologists were using the word guild in several different ways as well. So I have come up with these new terms--mutual support guilds and resource partitioning or resource sharing guilds. These terms really help to clarify the specific kinds of interactions we're talking about between sets of species. We're trying to create mutual support, and we're trying to partition resources. We can also ask about the other social interactions between the species, and I'm not talking just plants here, I'm talking about plants, animals, microbes, everything. It's very fascinating stuff, it's very deep, it's very rich, and we have so much to learn.
Eric's and my book represents a comprehensive theory of forest gardening, both a theory of what they are and a theory of how to create them. Now that we have a comprehensive treatment of what this set of theories consists of, we have to go out and test them. Ecologists tend to look at ecology as a descriptive science. Forest gardening is an opportunity to take that descriptive science and make it a predictive science--to start testing those ecological theories to see if they work in practice. Can we improve these ecological theories as we apply them in the design of our agriculture?
That, I think, is really exciting. We've got lifetimes of adventure ahead of us. It's really going to be fun, and I wish I could live another 200 years to do it. Because you know we're just beginning, it's barely even born yet, and it's really exciting stuff. I've evolved a whole design process based on Christopher Alexander's work mixed with what I learned at the Conway School of Landscape Design, which is itself a very unique rational and intuitive design process. I've taken that and tried to integrate it with the complex theories of forest gardening. So I'm pretty excited by it, and I'm looking forward to getting it out there and having people play with it. We also have appendices that give much information about the ecological needs of plant species, mushrooms, beneficial insects and invertebrates, how we can design to improve the chances that we're going to get those beneficial animals in our gardens, and what they do for us.
CR: How far has the development of forest gardens progressed on the ground? What have been your results? It sounds as if there are a lot of conjectured designs in your book that maybe haven't been tested out yet.
DJ: Exactly. I started a forest garden back in 1991 and lost it to a divorce a little over a year later, so I'd lost my place to play with this stuff. I've been trying to land ever since then. I've started many forest gardens, but I haven't lived with them very long because I've had to keep moving for various reasons. It was out of that frustration that this book was born. So I don't have anywhere near as much on the ground experience as I would like to have had before I wrote it. But we did go traveling and looking at forest gardens all through Britain, and all over the US, in 1997.
CR: Is it more developed in Britain?
DJ: Yes. Except that what we found in all of our travels was that almost no one is doing a very good job designing their forest gardens. Almost everyone is making a lot of the same basic mistakes. The biggest mistake that almost everyone made, except for Martin Crawford at the Agroforestry Research Trust in Devon, England, is that they planted things too close together. They ignored proper spacing design, which blew us away--we saw this over and over and over and over, everywhere. It has caused a lot of problems for people, even Robert Hart. We visited Robert Hart for four days and made the first accurate map of his forest garden, and possibly the only one, because his forest garden is now in the middle of legal limbo after his death. The rumors I have heard are that the guy who owns the land wants to cut the forest garden down, but the woman that Robert deeded the garden to is trying to prevent that. Anyway, that's a whole 'nother story.
Robert Hart said to us, a number of times when we were visiting, "I don't know much about plants"--and it was true; you could see it in his garden. But it was beautiful; it was absolutely beautiful. The first time that I walked into his garden, I just started crying, because it was so beautiful. So we've been to the feet of the master, and we've been to the Bullocks, we've been to Martin Crawford, we've been to a number of places all over Britain, Wales, North Carolina, Colorado, New England. And we realized, even before we started writing the book, that few people were doing it very well.
CR: I didn't have the best impression of the first forest garden I saw. I think some of the same mistakes may have been made. A lot of times I would go in there and it just looked to me like a mess of cardboard and plastic tape. They were trying to kill weeds using this mulch, but it wasn't very aesthetically done, and most of the vegetables they tried to plant in the mulch got eaten by slugs. A lot of stuff just got grown over, and now it's been kind of abandoned.
DJ: Well, that's what's happened to a lot of forest gardens. The other big mistake we've seen people make over and over and over again is that they put their forest garden out in permaculture zones 3 or 4, far from their homes. And this starts tying us into the whole war and peace issue, and deep ecology issue, because I believe that the true purpose of forest gardening is to reintegrate humans with nature, to give us a visceral experience of ecology in our back yards, so that we can realize that we are not separate, that we are one with the natural world, that we are nature. Penny Livingston says it so beautifully (Starhawk quotes her in her newest book, The Earth Path); she says, "We are nature working." In permaculture we used to talk about "working with, not against, nature." But that statement is still said from a perspective of separation. "We are nature working." I think that is a very beautiful thing--and talk about peace! The first act of war is to create separation, to dehumanize the "enemy." That separation is what needs to be healed if we are to end war. And that's deep ecology, right there. We therefore must plant our forest gardens as "outdoor living rooms"--we have to inhabit them on a daily basis if we are going to gain this reintegrating perspective. Otherwise we will maintain the separation from nature that is the root of our problems.
CR: Reading some of the permacultural literature or hearing permaculturalists, it seems as if a lot of the way that different species are talked about is in relation to how useful they are to human beings--designing, managing, controlling them for our own purposes. Otherwise there's not that much interest in the species.
DJ: Yes, I know.
CR: So that's definitely based on separation.
DJ: Well, it's based on utility, and that's not necessarily separation; it can be. It's one of the paradoxes inherent in my book. Because I'm looking at things in a very objectified manner in a way, but it's also about grokking these beings.
Grokking is a term from Robert Heinlein's novel Stranger in Strange Land. Grokking is about knowing something completely in its essence. That's what my book and these theories are in service to: trying to understand deeply what is the reality of these other species that we're interacting with. The principle of stress and harmony plays in here. In Mollison's terms, stress is defined as forcing a function that is unnatural to something, not allowing it to get its needs met, or not allowing it to behave in a way that is natural. Harmony is the converse of that: having your needs met, being able to behave in ways that are natural to you, and not having functions that are unnatural forced upon you. So those two things are war and peace, right there. If we're trying to design a forest garden, and we don't understand the niche of a plant, and how it interacts with its neighbors, and we plant all flat-rooted trees, then we're creating stress, especially if we put them too close together. In dry or infertile soils, that's even more stressful, because in those soils, the root area of a tree is up to three times the tree's crown diameter. Even in moist, fertile soils, the root area is one and a half times the canopy diameter of the tree. You can create stress just by putting species together not knowing what their interactions are. So the way to create harmony there is to put a tap-rooted tree next to a flat-rooted tree.
CR: In nature, maybe two similar plants would establish themselves just as close to each other, but they would be in competition and one of them would lose out to the other.
DJ: Exactly, and that's why we try for mimicry and not imitation. In natural systems, plants are free agents to some degree. They're dispersing their seed willy-nilly, the birds are spreading them, the wind's blowing the seed around, or the seeds are falling and rolling down the hill, and they will plant themselves and grow wherever they can as best they can. And that can create competition. Competition is a negative interaction for anyone involved in it. Ecologically, both individuals who are in competition are suffering, whether it's a plant and a plant or a human and a human. You're suffering if you're competing with someone else.
CR: It seems as if, the way you're describing it, war and peace are inherent in nature, and what we're trying to do with permaculture and forest gardening is to reduce the war aspect of that. Is that what you're saying?
DJ: Well... It could be construed that way. And I guess in a natural system there is conflict. There is one species eating another. But is that war? I don't think so. But if we are imposing stress on a system for personal gain, I would think that would be war.
CR: Creating something that doesn't even imitate nature, like a large monoculture, seems like an example of that.
DJ: This is a sticky subject, and I can't say I'm an expert on what war is. It's really getting at how we define war. You could look at animal rights activists--they definitely have a lot of good points, but there's also the Bambi syndrome. I think there are some unrealistic ideas and expectations about animal behavior and ecosystems built into much of what I hear from animal rights activists. In north temperate climates, with long periods of winter, and particularly in the boreal forest where there's not much edible for humans, in order to survive as a human you pretty much have to eat animals. Animals will take things that we cannot eat and turn them into something we can.
CR: They might argue that people shouldn't be in those environments.
DJ: Well, you know, who's to judge? If people are choosing to be there, they're choosing that lifestyle, they're choosing to be an omnivore. If they can make a living, more power to them, as long as they're not destroying the environment for everyone else. The Inuit--that's their choice, that's their way of life; I'm not going to criticize them. But compare that to feedlot beef, where you're feeding soybeans and corn to beef to fatten them up--I mean that's ridiculous, there's no comparison.
CR: My impression is that a lot of people with ideologically based diets are not really taking into account the whole picture of where the food is coming from. They're eating food that has so much fossil fuel input into it to get it to them that it has much greater impact than eating more locally--even in terms of the number of animals killed by the trucks crossing the country carrying the food...
DJ: Or by the oil spills, or by the bombs in Iraq. I mean the oil peak is going to deal with a lot of these issues, but that's a whole other topic. So... It's all connected.
CR: Another challenge I've seen is people learning to eat foods that aren't familiar to them. Even in our diverse vegetable garden, at times when people have wanted to harvest something, they have to learn to distinguish ten different plants--they usually can't go to a bed that's full of just one.
DJ: Absolutely, and they have to know what part to harvest, when, how to prepare it--it's a whole culture.
CR: Some people are not patient with that. If they're not going to have it served to them or get it from a supermarket, they at least want it easy.
DJ: Ready to eat...
CR: Forest gardens present that challenge too. There's a lot of learning that has to take place.
DJ: Oh, absolutely. There's also a lot of plant breeding that needs to be done. There are many species that have great potential that still have problems. Skirret, Sium sisarum, in the Apiaceae family, is one. It's got great flowers for attracting beneficial insects, especially the specialist insects, like the tiny predator wasps that kill aphids. It also produces these pretty tasty, nutty-flavored roots. They're finger- or pencil-thick roots, and they're really a pain to clean. But that crop really hasn't been developed at all. And that's the thing: a lot of these crops, especially the native ones, haven't been developed much, whereas Eurasian species, like rice, wheat, barley, apricots, and Persian walnuts, have been developed for thousands of years. And the Persian walnut hasn't been developed that much. It's got a very long life span and a very long time period between planting a seed and seeing how good it is as a crop, so it takes a lot longer to develop that.
The Native peoples may have selected some of the native species here, but they didn't do much. They developed squashes, and corn, and beans in a big way. Their forms of agroforestry basically were invisible to the European colonists, who couldn't even see what was going on as agriculture, because it looks like the forest. The Native peoples were managing with fire, and doing swidden--slash and burn--and then using the plants like the raspberries and hazelnuts that come in after they let go of their fields after growing the annuals there for a few years. They probably were planting too. I know the peoples in California had cultural rituals for planting acorns, to keep the oaks going, and they were bringing up shells from the ocean to add to the soil.
They were practicing agriculture in some form. It's definitely in the grey area between agriculture and natural ecosystems. Because the Europeans didn't even understand what they were doing we have very little information about what that looked like, and what they were doing.
CR: They were obviously feeding themselves.
DJ: They were feeding themselves. And one of the quotes I remember was that parts of the eastern seaboard--Virginia and the mid-Atlantic--were more densely populated than western Europe at the time. They were supporting themselves on wild game, using fire to manage for wild game. There are also a lot of plant species, like the hazel and raspberry, that are adapted to a fire regime of one sort or another. That's one of the challenges that we face: it's kind of hard to do fire management in a suburban area, even though it's something I want to play with. There are ways to do it. The Nature Conservancy has a set of guidelines on that, posted on the web.
Anyway, these crops haven't been very much developed. The Native Americans actually had more time than we do, so they had more time to process stuff than we do. We spend a lot of our time supporting our automobiles, and paying the CEOs.
CR: The camas was one of the staple crops here, and that also took a little more time and attention than people are used to giving to their food in our culture.
DJ: Yes, and nut pines took a lot of work too... We're just not an agricultural culture any more, so people aren't used to working hard.
CR: It was also integrated into their whole daily life, their social life...
DJ: ...their seasonal rounds...
CR: ...and their rituals and ceremonies and everything. We aren't used to that.
DJ: A lot of people's ritual involves sitting down to watch the evening news or Saturday Night Live.
CR: So it seems as if there's a very big gap to bridge for us to come back to that kind of way of being. Do you have any ideas how we're going to manage to bridge that gap?
DJ: One family, one person at a time, little by little. That's why my book is really aimed at the backyard gardener. A lot of the ideas apply to the larger scale, but you can't do it as intensively at a larger scale. In back yards is where I think we have the most leverage. Getting thousands and thousands of people out there playing in their back yards is how we're going to get crops being developed. We get people planting seedlings of these various crops in their forest gardens, and we're going to have a higher chance of finding genetic chance events that give us better-quality stuff. We need industrial university breeding projects too, but they're likely to be breeding in monoculture anyway. I want to breed plants in polycultures. I want to breed plants that work better in polyculture--a more taprooted form of something, or a plant that does a better job soaking up calcium from the subsoil and bringing it up to the topsoil again, or yarrow plants that have more nectar for beneficial insects than the average.
CR: Have you worked at all with the Land Institute or any of the crops they're working on?
DJ: I have not. I tried to get Wes Jackson to review my book. He was interested but he was too busy. Once it comes out I intend to send them a copy and say, "Hey, I want to work with you guys," because they're well along the way, doing it for the prairie. I want to do for the eastern deciduous forest and other temperate forested climates what they're doing for the prairies in terms of mimicking the system and developing the crops. We have a lot more species to draw on than they do, and more niches that we can fill, because they're trying to create a grain crop, and that's in some ways easier and in some ways harder. We can produce root crops, leaf crops, fruit crops, woody, nonwoody, fiddleheads, medicinals, all kinds of stuff--we can put them all together and it's a much more diverse system with many more possibilities. And that's what's so exciting. A lot of the best shade-tolerant crops are medicinals.
CR: I know one topic that people talk about in relation to permaculture is natives vs. nonnatives. Where do you draw the line--is there such a thing as an inappropriate nonnative? It seems that most permaculture welcomes the use of nonnatives.
DJ: Well, going back to the discussion earlier about there being not that many well-developed food crops from North America, it's going to be hard not to use nonnatives, particularly with the populations we have of people that we really need to sustain if we're going to be ethical about it. I don't want us going around trying to shoot people rather than trying to feed them or help them feed themselves. We'll need to use what we've got, and that means we're going to be using nonnative crops. No question--there's no way around that. And every plant is native somewhere, and almost all native plants in all parts of the world are threatened. Their habitats are threatened and the species are threatened, except for maybe things like Japanese knotweed. I don't know what the "invasives" are in your area that are the worst, but I don't even use the word invasive anymore because it's a misnomer. Even the word native has scientific problems; how do you define what's native and what's not?
CR: How far back do you go?
DJ: Yeah. How long does each thing have to be in the system before you call it native? There are indigenous peoples in Central America that now consider various exotics native plants. It's been 500 years. Is that long enough? Hell if I know. How do you draw the line? If a plant came the day before Columbus by "natural" means on the back of a seagull, is that native? Some people define native as things that were here before Columbus, and things that came afterward, not. Well, that means that something that came on the back of a seagull after Columbus landed isn't native. Does the means of its getting here make a difference? I don't know.
I use the words native and nonnative or native and exotic, but I use them knowing that they have problems and that they're very questionable terms, number one. Number two, the word invasive ascribes to the species alone, if it's an invasive animal or a plant, the behavior invasiveness. And that is wrong; that is just impossible. There's pretty good evidence out there that healthy natural communities of "native" species resist invasion by "invasives." That throws water on the whole idea of an invasive plant.
CR: The invasive plants come into disturbed areas.
DJ: Well, that is exactly it. David Theodoropolis' book Invasion Biology: Critique of a Pseudoscience raises many very good questions that need to be answered. I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, but there are people who are reacting very emotionally against what he has to say. That just supports his thesis, which is that a lot of what's going on around this invasive plant "hysteria," as he calls it, has to do with people's emotional shit. He draws links to what went on in Nazi Germany. There was a strong native plant movement in Germany in the '30s and '40s--and many people are calling what is going on politically in the US now a form of neofascism, like in the early stages of Hitler's reign. Whether that is true or not only time will tell, but the correlation is food for thought, though it might be an explosive a kind of food for some people.
CR: Isn't it true that a nonnative plant coming into a system often reduces species diversity, not only of plants but of birds and other animals? I've heard first-hand accounts of this.
DJ: It's so variable, and it seems to always be in response to disturbance. Some places people say, "Well, it's not disturbed here," but if it's anywhere near an urban or suburban area, and you've got acid rain, you've got disturbance, because in some urban areas, the nitrogen oxides that form a large portion of acid rain are increasing the nitrogen content of rainfall by a factor of three. Even if there hasn't been a bulldozer going through, the increased nitrogen content of the rainfall is changing the ecological dynamics and making nitrogen available that wasn't there before. It gives an advantage to species that are what we call competitor plants, whose main strategy is to grow big fast.
CR: Yeah, it's very complex.
DJ: It's very complex. I tend to call the "invasive" plants opportunists instead--I think it's a more accurate term. I also further describe them as dispersive or expansive. An expansive plant is one that grows vigorously, rapidly, large, and propagates itself vegetatively, and a dispersive plant is one that produces copious amounts of easily dispersed seed and spreads by seed, either by birds or wind or whatever.
CR: Some plants are both, like the Armenian blackberry here.
DJ: Yes, that's true, and the ones that tend to be the worst "invasive" pests, are ones that are expansive, dispersive, and persistent, that are hard to get rid of.
CR: A neighbor of ours moved onto a property with large areas overrun by blackberry. He's removed a lot of that and planted native species. The bird population and diversity on the land have increased greatly since he started doing that. And that's a deliberate action on his part, because he wants to see the birds. From his land-management perspective, the blackberry could be described as the enemy.
DJ: Right, and it is this kind of thinking that denotes someone who is separate from the ecosystem. The plant isn't the enemy.
CR: Well, maybe he doesn't actually see the plant itself as the enemy.
DJ: But a lot of people look at it that way. A lot of people are taking out their emotional charge and hostility on these plants. Let's talk about war and peace in that context. What are we projecting onto these plants? And what are we projecting onto the mosquitoes that we whack at. "Grrrr, you bit me, grrrr," you know.
CR: And a lot of times the response is chemicals. All sorts of things are done to try to eliminate these nonnative plants.
DJ: People are going out into otherwise undisturbed natural areas and spraying herbicides to get rid of them, and then leaving...which means they're disturbing the system again, leaving a niche open for a plant to come in. There are three main causes of succession: niche or site availability, differential species availability (because some species are more available than others), and differential species performance. So if there's increased nitrogen available due to the rainfall, or if somebody's built a road and added more light into the deep woods, you've created a niche. Then the question is, what species are available to take advantage of that niche? If the species available are different than what were there before, then succession will take place, changing the composition and structure of the community. If a species can establish itself but it can't survive, because you get a drought and it's a droughty area, then succession may not take place. But if that species is oriental bittersweet or blackberry and it can rapidly dominate resources and prevent other species from maintaining or getting a toehold, then succession will have taken place.
CR: You were involved in starting Gap Mountain Permaculture, a land trust community. What are your thoughts on social sustainability and community? What have been your experiences?
DJ: I use that phrase social structure in terms of forest garden intentionally. I believe the same principles apply among people and among plants and animals. There's a principle called shifting the burden to the intervener that I'm introducing into the permaculture lexicon in my book. I read about this principle in The Fifth Discipline Field Book, which is about managing corporations. The idea is that if you have a system that is self-maintaining, and someone who is outside of that system intervenes and degrades that system's ability to self-maintain or to recover self-maintenance, the burden of maintaining that system falls to the one who intervenes. That is true of gardens, of ecosystems, and it's also true of individuals and social systems. If adults intervene in the development of children by not meeting their needs, or by shaming them, then the children become dependent on external validation, or external structure in order to know what they're doing for the day. Those unhealed wounds become like programming in us. Then if we don't want to feel that stuff, we project it onto the plants, or onto other people.
The Talmud says, "We see things not as they are, we see things as we are." I've definitely witnessed this in my own life experience. This is one of the ways I see forest gardening as supporting an ecological culture: by learning about forest gardens, by forest gardening in our back yards, by interacting and putting the effort into becoming cocreative participants in backyard ecosystems, we can start seeing ourselves and how we interact and intervene unnecessarily and cause work for ourselves. Then we can reflect that back to how we interact with other people and what kind of economic choices we make, and what kind of social structures we build, and so on.
At Gap Mountain, we had a pretty well-designed, well-put-together social and economic structure. We had a land trust community, we had 99 year leases on leaseholds, we all had our little solar homes, or if they weren't solar yet we were working towards that through renovation, we had gardens, we had chickens. I was doing constructed wetlands for wastewater treatment, and built the first one in New England for household wastewater treatment, back in '92. We had all kinds of great technologies, all kinds of great resources, all kinds of great social and economic structures, and those three pieces, the technology, the resources, and social and economic structures, are interrelated. You can't have a sustainable system if those things are not vibrating in harmony, if they are not coherent with each other.
But even if you have those three well designed for a sustainable system, if you don't have the cosmology, the intrapersonal dimension, the belief system, then it won't work. The cosmology is what governs... it's like the DNA of the cell. The way we see the world determines how we're going to interact with it. And that is about who I am, who I believe I am, whether I believe in a god or a goddess or gods or goddesses, what I believe is right and wrong, whether I believe I deserve love or not, whether I believe I deserve to be treated with respect or not--all that is reflected in how I perceive the world, therefore how I treat people and planet and plants and animals and resources. It's all of a piece.
My belief is that we have to be working on two edges: the inner edge and the outer edge. The inner edge is the inner work of clearing away the ego crapola, and the outer edge is about each of us taking on the piece that we're interested in taking on, whether it's developing more efficient solar-electric panels, or breeding a higher-yielding, better-tasting, easier-to-clean skirret variety, or breeding a blue jay that will harvest nuts for us and bring them back to us so that we don't have to harvest them ourselves. (laughter)
CR: You're talking about a self-aware and spiritual dimension of permaculture that I don't think was always inherently there.
DJ: Well, it wasn't there in the beginning in a concrete and clear, explicit way, but it was there implicitly.
CR: There was sometimes even hostility to it.
DJ: Oh, absolutely, still is, depending on who you talk to.
CR: It seems really essential.
DJ: It's part of the evolution of permaculture. Dave Jacke's website is at www.edibleforestgardens.com.
(c)2005 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2005
Volume 15, Numbers 2 & 3
Deep Ecology, Permaculture, & Peace
Talking Leaves was born in 1989, when Carolyn Moran and friends decided to start a Eugene-based monthly tabloid focusing on deep ecology and spiritual activism. Five years later, it shed its skin, becoming a quarterly (or, more accurately, "try-quarterly") magazine printed on tree-free paper. Three years later, having become immersed in care of her newly-hatched tree-free paper business, Carolyn turned Talking Leaves over to Lost Valley Educational Center, where it became a three-or-four-times a year "journal of our evolving ecological culture" in magazine format.
Now, it is time for Talking Leaves to shed its skin once again. The strictly scheduled print magazine format we have been following is no longer viable for us either personally or economically. (Read on to learn why.) As always, we invite reader feedback and offers of support in TL's process of evolution, which, as of press time, looks like this:
Starting after our Summer/Fall 2005 issue, Talking Leaves will cut back on its print editions, most likely publishing one larger annual journal in the wintertime (when the editor has time to work on it), and occasional shorter newsletters. Talking Leaves will simultaneously expand its web presence, doing more of its publishing online--probably with quite frequent additions and updates Please check out www.talkingleaves.org for details as they become available. We will honor all existing and new subscriptions with materials in the new formats, and will continue to seek new readers and supporters. Our winter journal will complete this year's cycle of issues (serving as Volume 15, Number 4), after which we will continue to send print materials whenever we produce them to supporting members of Lost Valley Educational Center/Talking Leaves. Because we will no longer be a print magazine per se, we will not accept new or renewal library subscriptions through EBSCO or similar services, but only directly from librarians who understand that the format and schedule will now be different. Talking Leaves will no longer appear on newsstands, although we will continue to make it available here at Lost Valley and at various conferences, events, and alternative venues.
To put it in a nutshell, we're abandoning the "magazine business," and focusing on what we do best, which is to document our explorations in ecological culture and to help inspire others to follow those voices of inner and outer nature as well. We will still consider materials that are sent to us by freelance writers for possible occasional inclusion in Talking Leaves, but expect that most of the material in the new Talking Leaves will be "homegrown," related to our and others' experiences here at Lost Valley Educational Center or to people, projects, and places we have influenced or been influenced by. A number of articles in the Summer/Fall issue foreshadow this adjustment in our approach, particularly the interviews with workshop presenters John Seed and Dave Jacke and the articles following John's interview.
For those who may be disappointed that we are not continuing in the same form, and will not be available on newsstands, please be assured that we have not made these decisions lightly. The economics of the magazine business have driven many small magazines out of business, and they have affected us as well. Subscription revenue is down, advertising revenue is almost nonexistent, and newsstand sales have dropped (along with wholesale distributors going out of business and/or stopping paying their small suppliers, like us). At present, given current expenses and income, we cannot afford to produce TL as a regular print magazine. Just as important in our decision, I have realized that, as the coordinator of our organic vegetable gardens as well as Talking Leaves' sole staff person, I am overcommitted, particularly during the spring-through-fall growing season. I have developed other passions, and I don't want to spend all my evenings and weekends working on the magazine because I was not able to work on it during weekday gardening times. Most of the time until now, TL has been a labor of love. In the new format, I believe it will continue to be, because online postings and less ambitious print publishing will make the work load manageable, while allowing me to spend more time doing other things I love as well. Any other choice at this point would be unsustainable.
Thank you for your understanding and support, and remember to stay tuned to www.talkingleaves.org for details on our new format. As mentioned above, we welcome your creative ideas about our publishing future, as well as practical aid in helping us reach that future. We are also considering more major potential publishing projects, perhaps in conjunction with the new journal format. Books that have been on the "back burner" for a while include a Lost Valley cookbook, a history of Lost Valley, a Lost Valley community guidebook, a Lost Valley sustainability primer, and a Lost Valley natural history field guide. If you'd like to help fund or support any of these projects, please let us know. Your input is vital to us, now more than ever.
We look forward to continuing to evolve with our readers. Please enjoy this issue,
Chris Roth
(c)2005 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2005
Volume 15, Numbers 2 & 3
Deep Ecology, Permaculture, & Peace
Her keepers are thoughtful: nutritious food, medicine, shelter, instructional arena flights.
She is safe from poachers, electric wires, hunger, territorial squabbles.
Her life should be long and comfortable.
But sometimes in her dreams
she tastes clouds on her wingtips,
fishes from a tree beside a wild river.
In the hollow shafts of her feathers,
ancient memories and instincts slumber.
Her cells remember carving a path against wild currents of wind
with strength of muscle, finesse of feathers,
the sensing and yielding to sensuous currents, like a lover carried into new delights.
Surrender and control, control and surrender: the great dance smolders in her cells,
felt only as a restlessness in the charged air before a storm,
a vague longing in the magic halflight of dusk,
or in the first beckoning blush of a clear dawn.
Once a keeper, awed by her wild beauty,
Smuggled her out to the high desert country and let her fly, free.
Ah! intoxicating discovery of power and grace in her body, in her blood!
Fierce joy of wind under her great wings,
The taste of choice and will,
the rapture and terror of freedom.
But there were still stripes across her sky.
And when her would-be liberator turned to leave, she followed him,
stooping to his reluctant glove.
Thoughts and imagination clipped, conformed,
muscles bound by fear, remembered pain, imagined pain...
She has become her own jailer.
How could it be otherwise? It's what she sees around her; it's all she knows.
Almost.
Except on clear nights with a silver moon.
Except when lightning flashes and wind calls the trees to frenzied dancing.
This will save her.
She cannot entirely forget the rich, astonishing possibilities she glimpsed in the world, in herself.
She will cherish the small flame of her longing for the "impossible"
until an inferno bursts her most ungently
into dangerous uncertainties and occasional ecstasy,
the wandering spiral flight to freedom.
Adelia (Dee) Kehoe is currently coauthoring a book with Ann Marie Holmes on how to hear/cooperate with the living energies of earth in daily life.
(c)2005 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2005
Volume 15, Numbers 2 & 3
Deep Ecology, Permaculture, & Peace