Place

My grandparents, both sets of them, were born, grew up, married, reproduced themselves, grew old, died, and were buried, all within an area of about a thirty mile radius in northeast Ohio. The same could be said for my parents, although my father and his brother fought in World War II which took them far afield — respectively, to India and to Northern Africa and Italy for brief portions of their young adulthoods. 

This was the early half of the twentieth century, and by the time I came along in mid-century, the pattern was starting to alter. Awash in media images of distant lands and exotic but accessible foreign territories (even, by way of science fiction, of other planets or the prospects of exciting unrealized futures), I and many other members of my generation were drawn away if not actually seduced, Pied Piper-like, from territories circumscribed by that radius. Place as a thing that mattered was an insubstantial construct, easily modified, unable to take root when confronted with the charms of elsewhere. 

Some of us were, in fact, still being shipped out to fight in foreign campaigns, but many of us, as we grew into our teens and twenties in the 1960s and 70s within a protective bubble of affluence, began to absorb the tenets of a counterculture that had commenced to grow and nurture generations, that celebrated the virtue of rejecting the place you were from, for reasons that had little to do with what other waves of immigrants had experienced in the past. It was, more than anything else, a kind of cultural diaspora more than a flight from intolerable or desperate conditions. 

That wasn’t always the pattern, of course. My parents had come of age during the period of the stock market crash and the Great Depression, an era that must have seemed like a door being slammed shut, the closing off of economic opportunities, an expanding horizon suddenly shrinking down again to that thirty mile radius. I can feel their ambition for a better life, if not for themselves then for their children. 

Our family has a record of a distant relative who traveled by sail from his home in Scotland in the 1700s to Baltimore, a voyage paid for with indentured servitude. We do not know under what sort of conditions he felt compelled to make such a journey — whether it was a certain bleakness in future prospects for finding a partner, for succeeding in business, for establishing a home and family — or the allure and attraction of a comparatively unknown land, glimpsed through a scrim of wishful thinking. We do know that he was able within a few years to settle on farmland near the current capital of Pennsylvania, that he married, that he and his sons fought in the Revolutionary War, that he continued to farm in the new United States of America free from British rule and raise his family within the confines of an area similar to the one that constrained my grandparents. 

And we know that some of his family eventually moved on, westward. Some of them fought in the Civil War, and at least one of them, my great grandfather, traveled far enough west to enjoy a brief career as a cowboy. He eventually returned to the family occupations of farming and coal mining, neither of which was on my menu of career choices when I graduated from college in 1971. Somehow I had been, in the space of twenty or so years, converted into the ranks of the cultural hunter/gatherers who would roam about, selecting a little of this, a little of that, sampling what was offered wherever we went and transporting it on to the next destination, or leaving it abandoned on the side of the road. I had been taught to reject the conventional pattern and apply a different set of cultural values, less a victim of a targeted advertising campaign than a willing accomplice to a process I gratefully embraced.

I realize, as my parents and their parents could not, that I have lived through a time of great material abundance, engineered with warfare, powered by fossil fuels — a period in which I was encouraged to ignore limits, to take another helping, to buy yet another product — to grow, to travel, to move beyond the imagined boundaries, even the boundaries of the planet itself. The place I have settled at last is over a thousand miles from where I was born and from where my parents and their parents and other members of our family are or will someday be buried. Late to the game, I am trying to lay claim to a place where I can grow old, and where quite possibly I can still set down patterns of living I did not devote myself to during my lifetime, that may offer some support to my offspring in an unknown but likely quite dangerous future. My wandering has brought me here, without knowing who or what exactly acted as my guide. 

It may very well be the case that I have rather been afloat in the movement of a great cultural wave that has deposited me on this distant shore — that lifted me up, pushed me forward and abandoned me here, not at a place but simply at the end of a process. 

Hempcrete House

Heading for the Winter Solstice

Prosocial

Back in the early 2000s, I was very much caught up in the frenzy of concern about Peak Oil, the constellation of ideas around the concept of Hubbert's Peak, the inevitable decline of worldwide petroleum extraction and all that might entail. Looking back, I don't regret it, since it set me on the path of discovery that eventually led me to Permaculture and, beyond that, to this particular piece of land and this particular community. 

Climate Change or Global Warming had not yet achieved its ascendancy in the hierarchy of doom (at least on the Internet) and sites like The Oil Drum (http://theoildrum.com/) were a daily warning that civilization was about to collapse due to shortages of its primary fuel. Writer James Howard Kunstler called the impending period of resource wars and financial chaos "The Long Emergency," and that framing seemed to stick. (For my own quasi-hysteric take on the topic, see https://www.youtube.com/)

One of the principal arguments underlying the Peak Oil theory was the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons, the brainchild of academic ecologist and sometime proponent of eugenics Garrett Hardin. It was so central to Peak Oil commentary that it was regarded as a given, as if it had been delivered from heaven on stone tablets authored by the Lord Himself. 

While Peak Oil no longer occupies its place among topics of overwhelming interest to the Internet, it's still out there, lurking in the background, ready to work its magic on our pro-growth Business As Usual road to ruin - and, frankly, given the melting of the Arctic, rampant and unchecked deforestation, loss of topsoil, rising sea levels, droughts, flooding, and the ongoing sixth mass extinction - we've got bigger fish to fry than trying to locate where we're at along Hubbert's Curve.

But just as people failed to adequately predict the ramifications of increased oil extraction in the second decade of the 21st century (the so-called Shale Revolution), they also failed to grasp the fact that the "Commons" Hardin was supposedly describing wasn't really a commons at all, because a true commons isn't some dog-eat-dog unregulated arena of perpetual competition. In fact, that's a pretty good definition of exactly what a true commons isn't. Regulation (good or bad) is key to how a commons functions, and more importantly, the dynamic interactions of groups attempting to divvy up this or that resource are precisely what determines their success or failure.

Happily, someone was actually studying those group dynamics, and her work on the topic founded a discipline that goes by the name "Prosocial". Her name was Elinor Ostrom, and her work garnered her a Nobel Prize in 2009.

At a recent workshop in which we were introduced to the core design principles of functioning groups, we were asked to consider the characteristics of groups we had participated in, whether or not they'd succeeded or failed, and to try to make a determination as to whether or not they'd aligned with these practices.

For myself, I thought back to the days in which I'd worked with a small group of Peak Oil-aware folks in Los Angeles who had dedicated themselves to follow the pattern of the Transition Town movement, a Permaculture-based endeavor to "power down" in advance of the Peak Oil decline and re-localize basic community services and the production of goods. We didn't so much crash and burn as we just slowly came apart, gliding down into inactivity after an initial burst of energy and enthusiasm. The principles listed below seemed to describe (by implication, in a kind of backhanded way) what we'd tried to do and failed. It was not so much the Tragedy of the Commons as it was the Melodrama of Malfunction. Did I mention that this happened in Los Angeles?

I think as I continue to read through the book (pictured above), I'll probably have more to say about our own local process of trying to establish, activate, and govern a volunteer organization dedicated to redefining our watershed (the North Fork of the Gunnison River) as a bioregion in relation to other watersheds, the stated purpose of the workshop. But for the moment, pinning the principles here will simply serve as a reminder, a handy checklist.     

Prosocial core design principles

1. Strong group identity and understanding of purpose.
2. Fair distribution of costs and benefits.
3. Fair and inclusive decision-making.
4. Monitoring agreed-upon behaviors.
5. Graduated sanctions for misbehaviors.
6. Fast and fair conflict resolution.
7. Authority to self-govern.
8. Appropriate relations with other groups.

 

  

Rainwater Catchment

 

According to my weather station, we not only have just gotten two-tenths of an inch of rain from our overnight stormfront, we've had almost an inch in the past week and a total to date of thirty inches for the year, which is considerably more than our annual average of fifteen. Maybe someone's adding in snowmelt equivalent? 

In advance of the storm, I emptied out both of my government-allowed 55 gallon rain barrels because a frost and freeze warning had been issued, and winter ice had pretty much destroyed a previous filled container. Well, there wasn't that much ice to speak of, and the barrels had, during the night, basically been refilled, which is remarkable to me. I mean, two tenths of an inch fills a 55 gallon barrel?

It got me wondering what the actual catchment capability might be of the new place we're building up the hill. Seems a little late to be doing this kind of calculation, but the idea of the house being located where it is was in part based on a fundamental principle of catching and storing water up at the top of the slope. So this is certainly a guess based on a formula, but here's what the roof looks like in the plan:

And all of that translates into roughly 4000 sq. ft. of catchment surface. If the actual annual rainfall is in fact closer to 15" than thirty, that amount alone might produce 35,380 gallons! It won't all be going into barrels - in fact, most of it will run through pipes buried peripherally around the foundation and directed either towards the garden topsoil or a pond. Given that this area is drying out at an accelerating rate, it would be truly remarkable to be able to hydrate at least this small portion of the field and kickstart a small water cycling process.

Wait & Watch

The mountains are a reminder that the main requirement is patience. And then, you also need . . .   patience.  And then, of course, some more . . . patience.

Observation is probably the most basic permaculture principle. It's difficult to know exactly how or where to start if your goal is to use permaculture design to remake, redesign, or regenerate a landscape. Your first impulse -- to do something, anything -- may be a great idea, but it could just as easily lock you into some terrible foundational errors which you will need to spend a lot of time and energy correcting. Course correction itself isn't a bad thing; the companion piece to "observe" is "interact," that is, try out a few ideas as they occur to you and observe the consequences, but on a manageable scale. When in doubt, sit back and wait it out.

And, if you're really observing and paying attention, the ideas will occur to you. Up here on the mesas of the North Fork Valley, the snows will show you how the land reacts to winter; the trees, shrubs, and grasses will slowly reveal their strategy for dealing with a frozen landscape; and the prairie dogs will pop up in January to check out what the world was up to while they were hibernating. The prairie dogs, by the way, have been observing and interacting with the landscape for a long time, and they seem to have it figured out. Wait and watch.

 

Where It Starts

 

Earthworks Workshop with Warren Brush near Pismo Beach in early December of 2017.

This is where it started for me, where vague theory transformed into actual practice. "It" being what I wanted to do with the 10 acre property I'd purchased in Western Colorado. I'd been involved with a permaculture makeover on a small suburban property in Los Angeles, but scaling up my thinking was a new process for me, and one I wasn't quite sure I was ready to tackle in practical terms.

Filmmaker Kellen Keene and his partner had purchased an old farm a few miles inland from the ocean, just south of San Luis Obispo, degraded farmland where there was already a legacy dam for water storage - but it was empty and dry here at the end of the season. And frankly, the dam was just sitting on a slope where, if it was actually put to use, the water would have no place to go. Below it, a relatively flat field intermittently flooded with irrigation or stormwater runoff from a farm next door - but again, it wasn't being put to any productive use. Kellen and his partner lived in a farmhouse slightly upslope, but wanted to downsize into a yurt elsewhere on the property, and they had plans to turn their residence into some sort of permaculture teaching center. I have no idea whether or not those plans were ultimately realized.

Warren and his design team (website here) had already mapped the property and assembled materials and the machinery, but they were also lecturing on the design principles that they'd employed to conjure up a flow of water, in and out of storage and across the property.

 

Warren Brush checking out soil horizons.

During the four days we were on the property, an amazing amount of work was done: the land was surveyed and contours plotted with a self-leveling laser. Trenches were dug and urbanite spillways were constructed, emptying into vetiver grass plantings. A major swale was created to harvest potential rainwater from a nearby roadway and run it across the property to the pond. Most of the slopes on the property were converted in some way to take advantage of whatever rainfall was available.

Broken concrete armors the spillway from a potential pond, slowing the overflow and delivering it into a winding vetiver grass buffer zone.

There's a great deal to be learned from attending one of these workshops, and you are, of course, paying for it both in terms of a registration fee and the labor you're donating to somebody else's project. But there really is no substitute for what you gain both in camaraderie and in inspiration, in seeing a plan develop into a practical application. It's an experience stateside of what Warren and other permaculture designer/developers are doing internationally with the tools and resources at hand.

The trusty old Yeoman's plow. The field was ripped on contour to ensure water infiltration and topsoil development.

Climate Battery Design

 

South-facing off the back of the garage, for use during the shoulder seasons. Wondering how it might work? So am I, but this is my best thinking so far. And progress . . .