Submitted by Debbie Willis and the Grounds Committee
Welcome to Permaculture Potential! The Grounds Committee is excited to help educate co-op members (and ourselves!) about permacultures principles and techniques, with the eventual aim of proposing more permaculture projects to membership. This month, in honour of President Joe Biden rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, we will be discussing permaculture and its relationship to the climate crisis.
It's probably intuitive how permaculture—working with nature in order to grow food and regenerate natural systems—can be an important way to address climate change. Eating local food has long been a known as an effective way to lower your carbon footprint; our food forest at the co-op will be a way for all of us to enjoy local, healthy food that has not been transported by plane or truck.
Also, permaculture tends to include growing trees, shrubs, and other plants that will sequester carbon in the ground in the most natural, life-giving way—there is nothing wrong with carbon, per say, but there's something deeply wrong when we've released too much of it into the atmosphere.
But it's not simply trees that sequester carbon; it's the entire natural system, including the soil and mycelium. Agriculture monocrops do not sequester carbon the same way that complex polycultures do, in part because carbon cannot be effectively and naturally sequestered unless there is healthy soil.
Soil is full of trillions of living microorganisms, and those beings do enormous work to sequester carbon and communicate with each other, and they don't like to be disturbed. Permaculture—which mostly relies on perennial plants and is often no-till/low-till and organic—allows us to produce food without much disturbance of the top soil. In contrast, industrial forms of agriculture tend to involve using pesticides—which kill microorganisms in the soil—and then attempting to replenish the soil through the addition, each year, of more and more fertilizers. These chemicals are generally fossil-fuels based, and they lead to soil depletion and, over the long term, the death and disappearance of topsoil. The loss of topsoil is a huge topic, as it has led to the collapse of whole civilizations, so preserving our topsoil is one of our most effective ways of addressing the linked crises of climate change and food insecurity.
Permaculture uses natural methods to increase the soil's capacity to capture carbon, such as compost, compost teas, mulch, fungi, worms, beneficial micro-organisms, and sustainably produced biochar. Permaculture also generally involves ground cover, which protects and nurtures the soil. Permaculture is always concerned with building and preserving soil, rather than tearing it apart and letting it blow or wash away.
I highly recommend Kiss the Ground, a documentary that is informative about regenerative agriculture's effect on soil health, and therefore on the planet. It can be found on Netflix.
And of course, there are many other ways in which permaculture can help solve the climate crisis, but these are far too numerous for a short article. Here are just a few, and there's more information at permacultureclimatechange.org:
Water harvesting, retention and restoration of functional water systems allows for better management of watersheds and less waste (see our last article on permaculture and water management)
Forest conservation, rewilding, and sustainable forestry and agriculture allows for healthier ecosystems and natural carbon capture
Community-based economic models—incorporating strategies such as co-operatives, local currencies, gift economies, and horizontal economic networks—allow for citizen engagement instead of corporate monopoly
Conservation, energy efficiency, re-use, recycling and full-cost accounting (taking more than just economics into account) decrease waste
Conflict transformation, trauma counseling and personal and spiritual healing can allow for greater engagement with the natural world