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 . . .

Drying Out the Watershed

I need to make something clear from the start. I am not a trained hydrologist, and certainly not a water expert. The little I might contribute to the arguments around regional water issues is what I learned living in large cities – in particular, in Los Angeles which has had in the past what one might call a “troubled relationship” with the topic.

Los Angeles probably should not exist at its current level of demand and development, and certainly wouldn't exist, given its size, if it had only to depend on local aquifers and water sources to quench its enormous thirst. Instead, it dangles at the ends of long systems of water transport: gravity-fed pipelines, fossil fuel-powered pumping stations, and reservoirs and tunnels and aqueducts that twist their way across evaporative deserts from sources hundreds of miles away, from the north and east.

At the same time, the city's enormous hardscape of roofs and roads rushes what small intermittent amounts of freshwater precipitation it does receive, mostly in the winter months, into its flood control system of channeled rivers and buried streams, down through its basins and rapidly out to sea, leaving little to percolate into and recharge its aquifers. In other words, Los Angeles works hard to dry out its landscape, then spends the rest of the year sucking water out of distant regions to balance its account.

It can manage these supplies at this scale because its Metropolitan Water District, a collection of twenty-six collaborating water agencies spread along the length and breadth of coastal Southern California from Oxnard down to San Diego, is the five hundred pound gorilla in the room, and it can demand its “fair share” based in large part on its participation in the Colorado River Compact.

So that's Los Angeles, not exactly a model of intelligent systems design but able to allocate the water it has access to, allowing supply to stay within shouting distance of the demands of a growing population by concentrating, to a degree, on conservation and ensuring deliveries from distant sources. By some measures, it's not doing badly in that regard, but, like everyone else, it's being impacted by a warming climate and the constraints of prior agreements and legacy infrastructure. Rapidly shifting contemporary conditions – such as, for example, the growing threat of wildfires – do not allow much room for considered adaptation at a leisurely pace.

So I write – ignorantly as it may be – from the standpoint of a person now living at the other end of that chain of water delivery systems, our own North Fork Valley whose river is a tributary of the Gunnison River which is, in turn, a tributary of the mighty Colorado River, the centerpiece of a catchment basin that drains down out of the Rocky Mountains, carving its way across the desert Southwest, through the Grand Canyon, and exiting (when it's able) into the Gulf of California. In theory, our placement somewhere near the top of that watershed should ensure our spot in line and a seat at the table when the water is being shared out, but climate change is playing fast and loose with the rules we mere mortals cooked up into an agreement that was based (in 1922) on an inadequate and incorrect assessment of the size of the available supply. We do get our “share” but it is a share of a shrinking amount.

It takes some time, when you move to this state, to understand the many factors that affect the definition of a “share” of water in Colorado, especially if you move from anywhere east of the Mississippi River. Where rainfall is plentiful, the issue is how to get it where you want it to go (or keep it from going where you don't want it to go) – not worrying about whether there will be enough to go around. The idea that the state could claim ownership of every drop that falls from the sky and treat rainwater harvesting as a kind of crime – or at least a matter ripe for legal restriction and regulation – just seems preposterous.

Until, however, you arrive at the thought that the water – whether it falls from the sky or flows off of a mountaintop, down a valley and out of the state – is for the most part just passing through. Diverting, capturing and storing it, in a situation that more often than not would elsewhere pass for a drought, opens the door to commoditizing it and making it a target for market speculation.

And speculation in so basic a resource is precisely what Colorado sought to avoid by adjudicating water rights based on a “First in time, first in right” principle that basically means the rights travel over time with the deed to the property and are prioritized and enforced by contract. The two can be separated (like selling off mineral rights), but it's an unlikely scenario in rural areas. If you don't have access to a relatively predictable supply of water, you don't have a farm. Or a ranch. Or a mine. If, however, you live in a city, you don't pay that much attention to such matters. You turn on a tap and out comes the water – from somewhere. At the end of the month, you pay the utilities bill, and that's the end of the story. Let somebody else worry about where it comes from, or how clean it is.

There are a lot of people who do worry about these problems, however, and whose job it is to worry – a lot of stakeholders, especially when you consider the problem from the standpoint of all the parties to the River Compact and all of its associated treaties, federal and state laws, Supreme Court decrees and decisions made to enforce environmental regulations. The so-called “Law of the River” was never a finished and settled piece of business. It's been altered piecemeal in response to this or that demand or problem over the entire length of its existence, right down to 2019's “Drought Contingency Plan” negotiations. 

However, as the authors of a recent Center for Colorado River Studies White Paper make clear, “A gradual and incremental approach to adaptation . . . is unlikely to meet the challenges of the future.” They also note, “It is unwise to develop water-supply management plans based on unrealistic assumptions for future consumptive water use in the Upper Basin.” They offer a three-point rethinking of alternative management strategies, the first of which (“Changes in the rules of water-supply allocation and/or accounting”) is the one I'd like to address, but not in the big picture terms in which the paper necessarily frames it.

Essentially, I would like to break down the problem by defining given territories by their watershed characteristics, even though those boundaries represent land that may adjoin, contain, or be contained by larger catchment basins. County line boundaries or BLM regulation may work as governance structures for a multitude of problems (law enforcement, taxation, infrastructure, etc.), but they ignore or in some cases actively disrupt good management practices relative to specific local watershed conditions. Colorado water law helps to constrain the damage, but something more is needed – especially in a time of drought that is rapidly being augmented by climate change.

This increased warming seems to be primarily a function of increasing concentrations of CO2 and other heat-trapping gasses released into the atmosphere, the legacy condition of decades of fossil fuel combustion on a global scale. The mechanism is well understood, and measurement of CO2 is a more readily accessible gauge of the situation than other, possibly more subtle contributing causes of warming, such as disruptions to local or regional hydrological cycles (water vapor being a particularly potent greenhouse gas, uniquely sensitive to warming temperatures.)

How do we tease apart other factors such as deforestation, erosion and loss of topsoil, urban heat island effects, etc. that may illuminate a variety of heat-reduction and climate mitigation strategies? Are we just stuck with the primary task of reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, slowing the rise of greenhouse gasses, sequestering carbon and hoping we can thereby, eventually, lower the temperature?

What seems to me to be required is on-the-ground observation and data collection, and policy that is not necessarily based on historical precedent or assumptions fed into a computer model, assumptions that may, as the authors of the white paper suggest, be unrealistic. This is especially key at the top of the watershed. If the problems aren't addressed there, they tend to multiply as they move downstream. The present system may look as if it safeguards those downstream supplies, but as we move water more efficiently through the landscape, the knock-on effect is aridification.

Each resident or occupant of a watershed needs to act as an agent, steward, or manager of the system and operate according to a specific set of ethics, best management practices regulating and ensuring a sufficient supply of good clean water. The policy of top-down management – by water districts, court decrees, seniority of rights, or system monitoring – isn't currently flexible enough to even deal with year-to-year fluctuations in supply. Latest “hot topic” idea being explored: “Demand Management” – paying farmers (out of unspecified funding sources) not to irrigate. We are still meeting our contractual obligations to downstream users, but with less and less headroom and margin for error. And the yearly trend is toward increasing aridity, which may not be so much a product of the rules as it is a consequence of our behavior under those rules.

To be clear, the system was designed to countenance a certain amount of waste – not flagrant waste, but slow, incremental, nearly universal degradation of what should more accurately be termed a standard of watershed health. In the West, we are always fighting the rate of evaporation relative to precipitation, and now the evaporation – from rivers, from reservoirs, from clear-cut hillsides and over-appropriated water sources – is outpacing us. We may have been able to make up the difference in times past by pumping up groundwater (or enjoying a particularly “wet” year of abundant precipitation), but those sources too are falling victim to our lack of an accurate and trustworthy set of watershed ethics. If Colorado intends to reverse the process of aridification, it needs to craft as a goal the repair and restoration of its local hydrological cycles, in ways that may not necessarily follow the rules under which it's operated in the past.