Urban Permaculture #2
Getting serious
Rural villages
As I mentioned in the first article on urban Permaculture we have to think, as ever, globally, strategically and pay attention to all the details.
Again as I wrote before we cannot address the problems associated with cities if we don’t also deal with the forces that push people to abandon the countryside. We also need to encourage out-migration from the urban areas and help people install themselves in rural villages and small towns in order to breathe life back into them. Living in a village and watching it decline as people leave is extremely depressing and causes the cascade effect that I mentioned where eventually there are no services and little local economic activity. This pushes more people to leave the village to the point where it empties completely.
So, urban Permaculture can start with initiatives that will bring back life into rural villages and small towns, stimulate local production and boost the local economy. Many of the things that urban dwellers want, when considering moving to a village, are the same for the rural dwellers, good social life, entertainment, good work, good quality accommodation etc.
The design process and its implementation at village level will require the formation of a design team. This team will ensure that all inhabitants are involved in the design process. It will be necessary to carry out a range of studies examining in detail local energy production/use, soils/food production/consumption and water resources, buildings, health etc and then, ideally, follow a design process such as ADIM ; analysis, design, installation (of the design) and maintenance (of the whole and it’s parts)
The design group can adopt and adapt the following objectives:
Reducing the inhabitants' need for money by cutting their spending on food, energy and housing. Creating or improving the local economy to help people earn a living in and around the village.
A village must have enough food stored in case of the loss of a production season; what is in excess of current needs and storage can be redistributed to neighboring villages to help them make the transition to creating their own sustainable village. Creating links of interdependence between neighboring villages. One village, thanks to its microclimate or geographical position, can produce certain things that another village cannot, and vice versa. In this case, it makes strategic sense to create fair trade links. A village's infrastructure and economy should be such developed in such a way that said village is, as much as possible, autonomous.
A major part of the analysis will examine the desires and visions of the local people and in particular their major preoccupations, money? Better housing? Security? The major problem identified by the locals can become the starting point of the design process, it’s the open door so to speak.
For example it may be that the locals complain that they have too little money. The design will start here and spread out. The first part of the implementation will help to reduce waste and unnecessary expenses. Work groups who set out to radically improve house insulation for example. The design will also examine how the village can transition to ‘local production for local needs’, for example boosting or building in local energy production systems that are owned by the community and use renewable local resources.
The same is true for food production and consumption, a move away from supermarkets which drain the local economy (and sell may toxic ultra-transformed foods) towards local production within a local circular economy. The food production systems will ideally move away from the current dominant intensive synthetic agriculture to sophisticated sylvo-agro-pasturalist approaches which will predominantly be agroforestry type systems.
The design and it’s implementation will then roll over all the other aspects of village life, for example improving social interactions and entertainment, domestic water quality, governance etc.
If the design is well done and the implementation done efficiently the village and the quality of life for the locals and local non-human inhabitants can be dramatically improved in a relatively short period of time, for example within three years.
Most of the decisions that need to be made to correctly manage a local area need to be made locally. Government at distance has been shown over centuries to be ineffective, inefficient and ‘one size fits all’ policies being imposed on very diverse local areas. That said it will also be necessary to develop bioregional management where all the villages and small towns withing a bioregion work together to improve how the bioregion is tended. In a village where I worked many toilets flushed into a river. This is … inconvenient for anyone downstream and a waste of a local production which could, instead, be diverted towards a biodigester for methane production, the digester waste going to fertilise the village’s food production areas.
Some, but relatively few decisions will need to be made by all the local communities together, this doesn’t mean that a central government is necessary but does mean creating a just and fair decision making process. Each local area develops it’s own decision making process, one which suits the local people best but which won’t be imposed of future generations as they may decide to do otherwise. Ethical and efficient multi-local governance simply requires that the decisions made are voted for in each community. That said it is now possible, using tools such as https://pol.is/home which can avoid the problems associated with the various different types of voting systems.
When a design is well done biodiversity increases, we can see this as the non-human co-inhabitants ‘voting’ in favour of what is being done. If biodiversity doesn’t increase or declines then they are voting against the initiatives which must then be reassessed and the design changed.
Basically we are looking to restructure all local areas in such away that they become carbon sinks, local people have a good quality of life, well-being, food, housing etc. The local environment is improved and areas set aside as wilderness. Some of the necessary changes, moving away from personal car use for example, can be a challenge for people. The Permaculture approach precludes telling people what not to do, instead we work to remove the need, in this case, for a personal car (I wrote more about this here). A dynamic local economy means people can work from their homes of nearby, eliminating the need for daily car trips. In the same way removing out of town supermarkets and redeveloping local shops reduces or eliminates the need for cars and their associated pollution, danger and infrastructures.
Strategically this local/global type of approach will also mean that pressures to leave rural areas are reduced, eliminated even, and those people wanting to leave cities can easily be integrated into thriving local economies thus boosting them even further.
A critique of these type of initiatives that one hears sometimes is that ‘they seem too simple’. Well this is a good thing as experience has shown that complicated situations, for the most part, yield to simple solutions. To quote Bill Mollison “Though the problem’s of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.” I would have preferred he use ‘complicated’ in place of ‘complex’ as natural systems are complex and our societal one’s are complicated!
In the next article I will look at sophisticated Permaculture restructuring of our cities which they are I dire need of.