Searching For The Existentially Correct Diet

I became a vegetarian in 1976. I was going with friends to visit one friend's father’s fish farm near Niota. We were going to ramble around in the woods, then clean some fish, and fry them. My dirty secret is that I stopped eating flesh because I didn’t want to kill the fish.

It’s a dirty secret because I’ve always said it was Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet that converted me. “I’m not unsympathetic to the animals,” I would say, “but it’s really starving people that keep me vegetarian.” Diet promotes the idea that a gram of meat protein represents several grams of grain and legume protein; if we all ate the livestock’s diet, there would be plenty for everybody. Lappe provided tables and recipes that combined different grains and beans to make sure the reader got each of the necessary amino acids. Beef, I think, came in at 21 grams of protein from livestock feed. Other meats, eggs, and milk were more efficient, but each required several times the protein it yielded to grow. I never quit eating eggs and milk.

Mollison has a flesh-versus-vegetable section in the difficult Chapter Two. He discusses the trophic pyramid, the idea that plants use energy from the sun to turn carbon and other elements into food, prey eats the plants, and predators eat the prey. Lower levels are much more massive than higher levels, with seas of grass, lots of bunnies, and very few wolves. This is a simplistic device, he says, except in lab or feedlot. Natural food webs are complex, with animals converting plants we can’t eat into food we can, and feeding those same plants with their manure and shed hair, feathers, or skin. We likewise feed the plants (or should) with our urine, feces, and corpses.

Getting our protein from vegetable sources takes a lot of fossil fuel, erodes soil (which contributes to global warming), simplifies the natural ecology, uses poison, and distorts economies (all soybeans are patented, concentrating wealth). Barbara keeps talking about growing grain and beans, and neither of us has done the arithmetic, but I’m guessing we don’t have room, and that’s probably typical for most gardeners. Mollison says that a lot of grains and beans are grown for export from places like India and Ethiopia where people starve. He says that traditional western farmers only sold animals or animal products. “...if the farm was to survive without massive energy inputs, animals were the only traditional recycling strategy for a sustainable export market.” He stipulates several practices necessary to “efficient” vegetarian diets:

* Crops must be easily grown and processed;

* Crops must be grown in home gardens;

* “Wastes, especially body wastes” must be returned to the garden;

* We must not exploit other people or move food long distances.

Mollison closes the section by saying that the trophic pyramid is valid in showing how poisons concentrate at the top -- a word to the wise -- and that an omnivore is “buffered” from famine by eating from a variety of sources.

Interestingly, there is an article, in the September/October issue of Ode Magazine, which quotes theologian Karen Armstrong as saying that the cave paintings of places like Lascaux were our ancient ancestors’ way of assuage their discomfort at killing their prey. I had always read that the paintings of animals deep inside the Earth were a shamanic means to create abundance. None of us were there 17,000 years ago, and the artists didn’t leave statements, but I like Armstrong’s idea. I can see myself beginning to eat meat again, for reasons similar to my alleged ones for giving it up, but it'll take some doing to wring my first neck.

An Open Letter To The Hennepin County Library

To Whom It May Concern:

I know I owe the Hennepin County Library System $2.90 for forgetting to return L’Avventura on time last month, and I will pay it just as soon as I am in the library with three bucks in my pocket. Somehow I just can’t bring myself to use my cash card for purchases less than ten. Anyway, I’ve been doing business with the Minneapolis System since I came to town almost thirty years ago, and they know I’m good for it.

There’s something you can do for me, and come to think of it, I think it’s a good idea for you.

There’s a book I’m returning today (on time), Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual. I haven’t finished it. It’s a good book, but kind of slow reading, being sort of a textbook. Somebody has a hold on it, so I can’t renew it. I had a hold on it, too. It’s one of five in your/our collection, and I requested it in the late spring. I’m going to request it again, when I return it later this afternoon. But don’t you think you/we should own more copies of a book this popular?

Let me tell you why I think Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual is always in circulation. Permaculture is a neologism -- being a librarian I’m sure you have an interest in examples of language’s evolution, and here's a fresh one -- a hybrid, of “permanent” and “culture,” particularly “agriculture.” The idea is that human enterprise should mimic and integrate with the natural local ecosystem. Since this is most easily done in growing food, fiber, and fuel, the book is (mostly) about designing farms and gardens with ecological sensitivity. An idea which is growing, but not widely articulated these days, is that, despite various proximate causes, much violence and many economic crises could be avoided, were we to live more harmoniously with the non-human world, mimic and integrate with its ecosystem. This is a plan for doing just that.

There are dozens or scores of Hennepin County permaculturists. They are the reason that Minneapolis now allows beekeeping. There is a vigorous membership organization, called “Permaculture Research Institute: Cold Climate.” A group called “Midwest Permaculture” holds week-long seminars for which twenty people at a time travel hundreds of miles and pay twelve hundred bucks a pop. You can best see that there is a market for a manual like this in your circulation records, though. If you were renting books to library patrons, the five copies of Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual would be subsidizing a lot of more widely-popular stuff. I have read Frank Miller’s Sin City comic book series courtesy of the Hosmer Branch, pretty sensational stuff, but I often notice them languishing on the shelves.

Post-Peak Oil, recessions will be more frequent and deeper, while recoveries will take longer and seem less like recovery, until we find true wealth by taking our place in the web of life, or until closing time. The Library can help us make the right choice by making more copies of Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual available.

Take Chapter Two...Please

Chapter Two of Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual is hanging me up. The title is “Concepts and Themes in Design." The problem is I can't say what it's about in a sentence.

There’s a joke about speed reading: “I took the Evelyn Wood Speed reading course, and read War and Peace in three minutes. It’s about Russia.” Or, “A lady went to see Hamlet. They asked her if she liked it, and she said, ‘Not really. It was just a bunch of quotes’.”

I might say that Chapter Two is about yield. This is the chapter that introduces the idea that the more you can cycle energy within your system, the more you can increase your yield. For instance, composting your kitchen scraps returns energy to your soil and to your vegetables. Add bees, and increase pollination, then harvest honey. Mollison says that yield is only limited by our knowledge and imagination (and I infer from this how little knowledge -- and maybe imagination -- I have).

The permaculture strategy increases the number of niches in which we can get a yield, because it increases a place’s surface area: Instead of thinking about a place like a map, a flat area, we think of it as something in three dimensions, and realize that there are niches above the ground. We can trellis grapes on trees, and grow shrubs, herbs, mushrooms, and animals under the canopy. Mark Shepard says that we can get twenty-five percent more ethanol from apples than we can from corn, and we can pasture cattle in the orchard, because we aren’t worried about fecal coliform bacteria’s contaminating a non-food crop. Permaculture also increases the number of cycles. Mollison says a cycle is a “niche in time,” because one critter is at one place all the time, but never over there. This critter is everywhere in the spring, another is everywhere in the summer, and so on. So the designer needs to recognize -- and create -- niches and cycles, and fill them.

But it takes five sections before we get to that discussion, and there's a lot more after. The introductory section is very abstract, too. Mollison speaks here regretfully about the absence of taboo and myth in western society. He says, “...by never having the time or common sense to evolve new or current guiding directives, we have forgotten how to evolve self-regulating systems.” He again mentions Lovelock and the Gaia Hypothesis, reminding us that Life maintains equilibrium, and if we threaten equilibrium, we’d better stand back. He outlines aboriginal myth as traditional "guiding directive": Willful act, Transmutation (Lot’s wife), Invocation of elemental force (the Flood), Atonement. Mollison says that we have replaced this with “fixed prohibitions” that are entirely about how we treat other people, never referring to our natural context. “Immutable rules” don’t apply in life or permaculture design. This isn’t license; what we have now is license, and it doesn’t work. We need “flexible principles and directives.” We need to pay attention.

There is a lot more to this chapter. It’s rich in anecdote and aphorism. The point is to increase yield within the context of a planet that “less and less appears to behave like a material assembly, and more and more appears to act as a thought process."

Today's illustration is the right-hand side of a page of notes I took at a Permaculture Design seminar in 2007. Just to the left of the browsers was a hard-to-see drawing of a woolly mammoth. One way to design is to find analogies for what would have been on a site way back.

Dune And Permaculture

First: This book is a turkey. A very long turkey. This is a story -- with appendices and a glossary -- which takes place against the background of an alien ecology. The ecology is practically a character, and yet it’s on a planet with a few scattered faunal and floral odds and ends, and zillions of predatory worms big enough to eat battle ships. Dune turns the trophic pyramid on its pointed little annelid head. Written in 1965, the characters -- the entire universe, in fact -- are addicted to a drug, maybe a stand-in for LSD, that makes them live for centuries and see the future. At a critical moment, Jessica, who gave birth to a son despite a promise to bear daughters, proclaims her word, straight-faced, as unfailing. Dune relies on inheritance of acquired characteristics (ancestral memories) as a plot device, in spite of its scientific pretensions. It’s primary theme, I think, is the unreliability of prescience. Anybody who needs that advice didn’t need to read it in sensational novels. Another theme is that heroes are bad news. They embody out-of-control history, and the Dune characters go jihadding around the universe beheading bad guys after securing their planet. Author Frank Herbert lets us know, by-the-way, that the chief female characters get a bad deal, then finishes the book with a grand summing up by one of them, telling us that even though they were only mistresses history will remember them as their men’s great loves.

Dune is probably Moammer Khaddafi’s favorite book.

And yet Dune featured ecology at a time when neither word nor concept were well known. Even if it appeared now, flawed as it is, Dune would be ahead of the curve! There is a chapter in which Liet Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist (see, I told you it was goofy!) is dying. As he waits for the ecological coup de grace, he hears his father’s voice lecturing him about -- what else? -- ecology. I’ve selected passages from Dune and from Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual, which echo each other.

Liet thinks, “The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape, how we take part in that basic source of civilization, agriculture.”

Bill Mollison: “Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity stability and resillience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of stable social order.”

Liet’s father, speaking out of Liet’s delerium: “The more life there is within a system, the more niches there are for life.”

Bill Mollison: “...life itself cycles nutrients, giving opportunities for yield, and thus opportunities for species to occupy...niches.”

Mr. Kynes: “Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life.”

Mollison (referring to James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis): “(Lovelock) sees the earth, and the universe, as a thought process, or as a self-regulating, self-constructed and reactive system, creating and preserving the conditions that make life possible, and and actively adjusting to regulate disturbances.”

Mr. Kynes: “You can’t draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Ecology is a cut-and-fit science.”

Mollison: “In life and in design, we must accept that immutable rules will not apply, and instead be prepared to be guided on our continuing exploration byt flexible principles and directives.”

Mr. Kynes: “(An ecologist’s) most important tool is human beings. You must cultivate ecological literacy among the people.”

Mollison: “The only limit on the number of uses of a resource possible within a system is in the limit of information and imagination of the designer.”

Dune would make a Tralfamadorian blush, but this chapter is a gem.

End of Summer

Summer lingered through September, a sensual pleasure but odd enough here on the forty-fifth parallel that I shivered at what it might mean. We bumped into Annie, Monday night, and she pointed out that the trees are still green. She’s a transplant here, as are we, but we’ve all been in the north country long enough to expect autumn a month earlier. The last week has been cool and rainy, but still without frost. The Arboretum included advice in its newsletter that we should have our grass short when the snow sticks, so as to deny cover to the tree-girdling mice. After losing two trees last winter, and fearing for the rest, I’m on it. It’s sunny today, and that should dry the grass, making it mowable.

Old hippie-friend KatieMae recommended Waltz with Bashir, which I rented and watched, and Barbara left alone. It’s an animated documentary about post-traumatic shock among middle-aged Israeli men who were young soldiers during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Kate is a Viet Nam vet who is wrestling with war demons she managed to keep waiting for forty years. Waltz is visually striking, and I found myself feeling protective toward its various protagonists. In one of the special features, director Ari Folman says that war is a useless horror caused by evil, charismatic men. (Bashir was Bashir Gemayel, leader of a right-wing, largely Christian party, assassinated in a bombing. Paramilitary followers avenged his death by the massacre of civilians in two refugee camps, while Israeli forces enclosed the camps.) My own take is that the egomaniacs steer and shape war, to a small extent, but war is a golem, set in motion by society’s thoughtless choices. The traumatized veterans of the Lebanon invasion were merely bystanders to the massacre that scarred them; what demons will haunt the veterans of last year’s Gaza adventure. Or haunt America’s Imperial legions.

Tuesday night was drawing group, thinly attended because of the loss of one parent, the infirmity of another, a long weekend at the cabin for two, and unknown. I liked what I did, drawing Liz, using a Sharpie in a five-and-a-half by eight-and-a-half notebook, staying loose, and getting decent proportion and foreshortening. A lot of the conversation was about the economy, and justifiably worried. People’s livelihoods seem precarious, and that's perverse. If society is in trouble, you’d think we’d want all minds on deck and ready for assignment. If you can’t afford to have them there, you’re doing the wrong thing. The economy doesn’t stop on a dime and make change, but full, meaningful employment should be part of the design program.

I continue my slog through the permaculture Designer’s Manual. It’s not a kind of reading I enjoy or do well, but despite that, I feel I have found my path with a heart. Mollison’s program for H. sapiens has ultimate potential for soothing our hurts and the ending the hurt we cause the planet, yet we’re so far from following it -- there’s so much to learn and it's so different from what we know -- that the odds seem long indeed.

Notes On Permaculture: A Designer's Manual: Intro

This is a book that will become more dear as we scoot the post-peak downslope. Not only will anybody who bought it want to hang onto it and sensible people want to get it, it’s the equivalent of a college textbook with similar prices ($94.28 new at Alibris, $98.00 at Seeds of Change, and $104.99 at Amazon, with used copies ranging from an even seventy-nine bucks up to more than two ninety), getting spendier as prices in general go up and discretionary cash goes down. When I got my copy from the Hennepin County Library, it owned five copies, there were holds on all, and I had to wait more than two months for my turn.

I’m reading the first four chapters of Bill Mollison’s Permaculture Designer’s Manual (Tagari Press, Tyalgum, NSW, Australia, 1988). This post will be an outline of Chapter One, the introduction.

Mollison argues from general to specific in three sections: Philosophy, Ethics, and “Permaculture in Landscape and Society.” That’s consistent with permaculture practice in which we patiently watch places and systems, relationships behaviors and patterns, then act respectfully to provide for ourselves. Mollison begins with the most general, with the result of his observation, and derives his action from that in stages.

Mollison is unequivocal in revealing his design philosophy. He says, “We are in danger of perishing through our own stupidity.” He is concerned with extinction and human appropriation of wilderness, and says that taking responsibility is “the only” ethical decision. Reductionism, the approach to understanding in which we isolate parts from systems, then study the parts of parts to understand what they are, has kept the western, dominant culture from being able to foresee results or to design integrated systems. Life, he says, is cooperative, we are not, and cooperation is the key to our future.

As an example of cooperation, Mollison mentions the relationship between mycorhiza and trees. This went over my head the first time I read it, but since then I’ve read Paul Stamets’ Mycellium Running, and found a pretty interesting anecdote. There are three basic ways fungus make a living. They scavenge dead things; they parasitize living things; and they cooperate with living things. Mycorhiza work the third way, penetrating trees’ roots and extending them. Researchers shielded some trees in a grove, and were able to trace the transfer of nutrients from trees in sun to trees in shade, via the fungi in the ground.

We are in transition, from what Mollison would probably say is a philosophy of soulless accountancy to one in which we can engage with the world honestly and down through millennia. It’s a meeting of science and mysticism. He quotes James Lovelock, author of the Gaia Hypothesis, as saying that life conditions the world for life, it is a “self-regulating system.” We may be the only exception, and maybe the Earth can’t accept that. He quotes native peoples as believing that the ideal way to spend life is to “lead the most evolved life possible and to assist and celebrate other life forms.” Life is trying for perfection and maybe transcendance. Native people understood this and suffered from contact with our technological materialism. Mollison believes that heaven and hell are here and now, and we choose between them.

Ethically, Mollison bases permaculture on three principles: Care of the Earth and preserving life systems; Care of People, in which everybody gets necessary resources; and Setting Limits to Population and Consumption.

He qualifies the third principle by saying, “By governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles,” and says we must be self reliant as individuals and cooperate as groups. Cooperation observed in nature becomes and ethical basis. He says he has evolved a philosophy that’s close to Taoism: “Work with rather than against nature. Observe thoughtfully for a long time. Look at systems and people in all their functions. Let systems demonstrate their own evolutions.”

Questions are more important to Mollison than answers. He says we should refuse or reframe mistaken questions. For instance, “What can I get from this land or person?” becomes, “What does this person or land have to give if I cooperate with them?”

Human beings can learn what’s appropriate, and stop doing harmful things. Conservative behaviors evolve this way, and this is the source of tribal taboos. He articulates two rules: “The Rule of Necessitous Use,” in which we leave natural systems alone until we need them, and “The Rule of Conservative Use,” in which we reduce waste, replace lost minerals, and assess long-term harms to life and society and buffer them.

Observing these rules, we may realize that we are connected to the rest of life, maybe by noticing help we receive from species that we did not extinguish. Mollison mentions the mycorhiza, and says we may learn the value of community from examples like this. He hopes that this awareness will expand from family and friends to the entire human species. According to Mollison, the Permaculture Designer’s Manual is about “mechanisms of mature ethical behavior.” Unequivocal. He mentions a global nation of people who share this ethic.

If industrialism is ephemeral, permaculture is permanent. Mollison mentions three approaches to permanence, the peasant or “feudal” approach, the modern or “baronial” approach, and the forest or “communal” approach. In the first, peasants gather and haul manure and other nutrients to fertilize grain. The second uses the most land, few people, machinery, and single species. He says this is the least productive use of land we can devise, destroys landscapes and soil life, and makes “agricultural deserts.” The forest approach needs generations of care, and reverence. This is the permaculture approach. The further you get from this, says Mollison, the greater the risk of “tyranny, feudalism, revolution, toil.” Modern agriculture is unstable and vulnerable to natural disaster or economic attack, it needs energy from outside the system, and it subordinates the needs of people to the needs of commerce.

Mollison has a two-page illustration at this point. The left side pictures three stages of transition from “Contemporary Western Agriculture” in year 1, through “Transitional and Conservation Farming” in year four, to “Permaculture; 70% of Cropland Devoted to Forage Farming” in year eight. The right side has bar graphs for each of the three stages showing improvement from year one to year eight in fifteen areas:

Total Cash Income (+ over time)
Total Cash Cost (- over time)
Oil or Calories Used for Fuel, Fertilizer, Biocides (- over time)
Energy Produced (+ over time)
Soil Loss (- over time)
Efficiency of Water Use and Soil Water Storage (+ over time)
Pollution (- over time)
Genetic Richness of Crops and Livestock (+ over time)
Soil Life (+ over time)
Forest Biomass (+ over time)
Loss to Pests (- over time)
Farm Employment (+ over time)
Food Quality (+ over time)
Human and Environmental Health (+ over time)
Life Quality as “Right Livelihood” (+ over time)
Caption: “Selected forests not only yield more than annual crops, but provide a diverse nutrient and fuel resource for such crops.”

Permanent agriculture is necessary for stable social order. Going from permanent agriculture to commercial, annual agriculture takes our society from low-energy to high-energy consumption, and leads us to exploit the third world. Mollison says he tells people to “go home and garden and not try to improve mechanized agriculture.” He sees a new ecological synthesis using whole-system energy flows as described by Howard Odum. (Howard Odum was an American ecologist, of the World War II generation. He was interested in general systems theory, and developed the concept of embodied energy, or “emergy,” which is commonly used by permaculturists to mean things which can be harnessed or harvested to promote yield. Examples are sun, rain, wind, and soil fertility. Embodied energy might also be the leaves that get caught in a fence or hedge. Odum used electrical circuits as analogies in discussing the flow of chemicals like carbon in natural systems. Larger ecosystems are more stable, with the world itself being most stable. I think Mollison would say that people should take advantage of this by integrating our systems with the largest and most stable.)

Permaculture designers should concentrate on rehabbing and rethinking already settled areas. This amounts to designing ecosystems. Focusing on food, fuel, and water supply will free most of the world’s natural systems and let wilderness come back, so designers will select species for yields that benefit humans. In natural ecosystems, organisms digest the native dead plant and animal matter. In designed ecosystems, humans have the responsibility of selecting and arranging it for the organisms to recycle. There would be cycles in which garden waste, kitchen scraps, graywater, and manure would become soils, along with occasional imports. Talking with Sam about brewing, and the effect yeast selection has on flavor makes me wonder if, someday, gardeners would select the organisms that live in the compost pile, designing compost to encourage some species or enhance the flavor of another.

Mollison reminds us that we can catch rainwater, and build soils to hold water longer, but we still need forests to feed clouds and rivers and “lock up gaseous pollutants.” Our survival demands conservation. He says, “We have abused land and laid waste to systems we need never have disturbed had we attended to our home gardens and settlements,” and stipulates four “Natural Systems Ethics: Implacable and uncompromising opposition to further disturbance of remaining forests; rehabilitation of damaged systems to steady states; establishment of our plant systems on the least amount of land; and establishment of refuges for threatened species.

Mollison says permaculture is most interested in establishing plant systems on the least amount of land. He insists that “all people who act responsibly” subscribe to these statements:
“Implacable and uncompromising opposition to further disturbance of any remaining natural forests where most species are still in balance,” and “vigorous rehabilitation of degraded and damaged natural systems to stable states.”

That said, he goes on to say that we should use all species that would be useful to our settlement designs, “provided they are not locally rampant and invasive.” This is probably the source for criticisms that permaculture promotes importing invasive species (despite Mollison’s disclaimer). How do you know what a foreign species will do in a new location? Due diligence would seem to require a survey of a species’ relationships in its native range before importing it, but someone like me would find that beyond practicality, and might be tempted to just go ahead and introduce “that Caucasian perennial spinach that’s been in all the permaculture magazines.”

Mollison says that the world changes naturally -- glaciation, continental drift, wind, birds, rafting on bodies of water -- the implication that we wouldn’t be doing anything that nature doesn’t do itself, just doing it a little faster. What he’s suggesting is that we mimic the natural, larger ecosystem, and integrate with it locally, but can we trust ourelves to do that, taking species for our purposes from foreign contexts? “Can you hunt the prey for the lions or satisfy the appetite of the young lions?”

In a period of deforestation and extinction, Mollison says there are “three parallel and concurrent responses to the environment: “Care for surviving natural assemblies to leave the wilderness to heal itself;” “Rehabilitate degraded or eroded land, using complex pioneer species (what is a complex species?) and long-term plant assemblies” (meaning trees, shrubs, and companion ground covers); and “Create our own complex living environment with as many species as we can save, or have need for from wherever on Earth they come.”

Mollison is talking about building useful, designed ecosystems. I’m all for that, but can we know enough about an exotic species and its relationships to add it to the backyard. There are at least two large operations within a half day’s drive from Minneapolis where the owners began by planting several varieties of apple, and selecting the varieties that did best on their sites. Without spraying, both these permaculture orchards yield tasty, unblemished fruit. How could the growers have anticipated whatever it was that made the varieties that succeeded thrive? Eathworms aren’t native to Minnesota. They are good for garden soil, but make forest soils hard, endangering the trees. Who knew?

Mollison says we need refuges for all global life forms. We should try to observe systems that remain and build “new or recombinant ecologies” to stabilize degraded ones.

The chemistry of the air, soil, and water is in flux because of human-invented materials.

The first thing Mollison says we need to do is to get our house (and garden) in order so that we can count on it to support us and not feed the poisons we have made back to us. The second one is to limit our population. These are “intimately connected duties,” and if we don’t perform them, we are a “plague.”

Unequivocal and implacable again, Mollison insists that “responsible conservationists” support themselves with gardens, and work to reduce their energy needs to what can be supplied locally and harmlessly. Mollison is not shy about saying that it’s hypocritical to call for conservation on one hand and live on mass-produced products on the other. Nor is he shy about implying that religion shares in this hypocrisy. Wonder and feeling for the environment are necessary, and religions need to cultivate an “live by” that wonder. My guess is that Mollison came out of a non-sacramental kind of Protestantism, but would he approve of a new religion that made compost as a sign of grace?

Or to sacramentally create and support wilderness? He believes permaculturists should support wilderness-conserving organizations, and maintain some wilderness on the land for which we are responsible, be it a butterfly garden in a backyard, or a forest preserve on larger property.

Mollison finishes the chapter by saying, “Design is the keyword of this book: design in landscape, social and conceptual systems, and design in space and time. I have attempted a treatment of the difficult subject of paterning, and have tried to order some complex subjects so as to make them accessible. The text is positivistic without either the pretended innocence or the belief that everything will turn out right. Only if we make it so will this happen.

“Adoption of permaculture strategies will reduce land needed to support us and release land for wildlife and wild systems. Respect for all life forms is a basic, and in fact essential ethic for all people.”