Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

Whole Earth, Winter, 2001 by Greg Williams

Gaia's Garden
A Guide to Home-Scale
Permaculture
Toby Hemenway
2001; 222 pp.
$24.95
Chelsea Green

Permaculture: HYPE OR HOPE?

Two Exceptional Horticulturalists Duke It Out Over the Meaning and Practice of PERMACULTURE

Whole Earth has been printing articles and reviewing books on permaculture for more than twenty years. Permaculture seems to hold a special feel for those involved; for many of our friends and readers, it's almost a way of life. We recently sent Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden to Greg Williams, editor of HortIdeas (see access) for possible review. We normally don't print negative reviews, but we found Greg's comments on permaculture surprising and passionate, so we asked him to elaborate, and then asked Toby Hemenway to reply. --EP and PW

QUESTIONING PERMACULTURE

In the 1970s, while searching for environmentally responsible agricultural methods that I could apply to my small-farm "homestead" in Kentucky, I read Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, by J. Russell Smith. Smith's vision of food and livestock feed-producing trees replacing tilled crops on erosion-prone hillsides seemed ideal for the rough topography throughout southern Appalachia and beyond. I established the Appalachian Regional Office of the International Tree Crops Institute U.S.A. [I.T.C.I.U.S.A], began corresponding with tree crop enthusiasts around the country and overseas, started a fruit- and nut-tree nursery, undertook literature surveys and field research, and started publishing Agroforestry Review.

Soon I was hearing of novel "permaculture" ideas developed in Australia, adapting and extending Smith's idea of founding a "permanent agriculture" upon woody plants rather than annuals. Permaculture coinventor Bill Mollison's first trip to the US was sponsored by I.T.C.I.U.S.A., and I recall my eager anticipation of his appearance at an intentional community near my farm. But my embarrassment knew no bounds when, not long into his first talk, Mollison pointed to a forested area and claimed that those woods were more highly productive than farmland. What I had learned about ecological succession (namely, that net productivity declines as ecosystems mature) belied that claim, and I was shocked into asking whether he was talking about productivity for deer rather than for humans. Things started to go downhill between us (and also between myself and several, others in the permaculture "movement"). My attempts--for example, when lecturing about tree crops at permaculture workshops--to point out the naive dogmatism contradicting ecological science that lay at the foundation of permaculture were generally ignored or dismissed as irrelevant to "real world" possibilities. But in the more than twenty years of the "movement," I have seen no scientifically respectable data (i.e., from experiments that include adequate control treatments) from permaculturists to refute my claim that their core ideas on the productivity of mature ecosystems are both unsubstantiated and contradict ecological theory.

In recent years, I have avoided arguing about first principles with permaculturists for several reasons. First, many of them showed no signs of listening. Second, the "movement" has remained small, almost entirely composed of individuals who do not require optimal solutions to pressing agricultural and ecological problems. In truth, permaculture has had only a marginal impact on mainstream society and on the lives of many of its followers. Third, those at the forefront of the "movement" are conducting interesting and potentially valuable (though unscientific) experiments in land use and social arrangements. At least some good is likely to come from these experiments. And fourth, I have remained on good terms with some (not especially dogmatic) permaculturists, whom I do not wish to alienate.

But, as the saying goes, ideas have consequences. And the fundamentally misguided ideas of some permaculturists--after a couple of decades of remaining almost completely internalized to the "movement"--show signs of polluting the larger culture, beginning with ecologically sensitive gardeners.

Toby Hemenway presents a compelling argument for maximizing the humanly useful production of backyard gardens. It must quickly be added that such maximizing should be constrained by the requirement that resource inputs be low and preferably sustainable. (And a highly practical caveat for gardens in developed countries is that labor requirements be fairly low--many gardeners, despite being well-intentioned, simply would refuse to do a lot of work). Therefore, protecting wildlands by making as productive use of backyards as possible would entail (1) maximum yields per unit area, (2) high yields per unit of resource inputs, and (3) high yields per unit of labor input. An additional stipulation can be added, although it is not implicit in the above argument: (4) local ecological conditions must not be degraded, and should be improved, by high-yielding backyard gardens.