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