Change is coming- but change is always coming. I know that we are facing all that comes with the potentials of great change- not only the proverbial "opportunities" but the predictability of great stress and fearful speculation.
One way to defuse the confusion created by speculation of what might happen, it to look at ways to start solving our basic needs differently now, by finding inspiration and answers in working examples.
In our Permaculture Design Courses I describe a design methodology I call solution multiplying, where we look at solution strategies and see how we can repeat or multiply their positive effects.
After working with various Community Development issues in countries like Mexico, Belize, Jamaica, Thailand and rural France, I find that issues of information, transportation, livelihoods, food and water are all identified as fundamental and key, and when solved, are core to the function of strong and stable communities.
I have noticed a pattern about how each of the projects share common issues and how they eventually share common solution strategiesÉAnd I am reminded that if we've been able to solve community survival issues in remote and seemingly adverse conditions Ðwe can certainly solve it here, where we have access to more of the comforts of information, technology and the world of multiple choice.
Most of our communities are in proximity to historical settlement sites- where we did live and flourish before the advent of cheap oil and chemical fertilizers. We fed, watered and equipped vast civilizations before oil and, I think we can do it again. Even as recently as the early 20th century, as few as five farmer/gardeners were able to feed up to a hundred hungry people without the use of petroleum products. With today's collection of information and historical review of successful land management strategies we could produce and feed even more- also without oil.
In Mexico, I worked with a long established family on developing a community plan spread out over several thousand acres. I spent weeks in the backcountry on horseback, observing undeveloped lands and describing how we could choose the right places for grazing, orchard, annual cropping and, of course, combinations of all those practicesÐincluding all necessary food, fuel, fiber, medicines and building materials. To my surprise (and some embarrassment), when we arrived at their villageÐI saw that the entire community was already set up in the small working networks I had suggested- and the site plan had been laid out as a working ecosystem. It was exactly the solution strategy I had (so self-importantly) described. It had been working quite well without any of my input for close to seven hundred yearsÉ
In Belize, we worked with Mayan homesteaders who had returned to live and build community in the steep hillsides of their ancestral lands: an isolated, remote area of Belize, which lies somewhere on the still disputed border of Guatemala. We eventually realized that the rainforest around us was a cradle of a vast civilization that had once flourished there, without gas or electric power. Like Mexico, we were amazed and humbled at the brilliance of the solution strategy of managing a community as a complete food and resource ecosystem, all without oil.
On our recent trip to rural southern France, where some of the earliest evidence of man can be found, we witnessed a continuation of that same theme. This time we experienced another revelation: a partnership that had continued for millennia between human and natural systems: fields, forests and waterways had been managed to provide for the needs of the entire ecosystem, wild as well as human!
Chestnuts, hazelnuts and walnuts, as well as apples, pears, hawthorns, medlars and berries of all types grew along the roadways. Well-used walking trails, built during Roman times, still weave throughout the landscape, and at their grassy edges, richly flowering meadows, thick with culinary and medicinal herbs flourish -all of course, without the use of biocides.
Modern rural France was like a Permaculture slide show- everywhere you looked; there was an example of integrated design, towns and villages supporting local and regional producers of foods, crafts and with a noticeable respect for traditional building skills. Towns there have survived the stressors of war, the shortages of resources and of plagues and pandemics throughout the centuries, because they solved their needs locally, and treated the entire community as an ecosystem, each part contributing to the health of the whole.
Although our numbers were smaller, evidence shows us that many communities of the early pioneers and settlers across America (as did some of the indigenous peoples) for a time, did function like ecosystems. We did have productive settlements before cheap oil, and we can have them after cheap oil. Today, with the easy accessibility of information new and old, and with the solution strategy of gathering working examples and experience- instead of more speculation Ðwe can develop the practice and redevelop the requisite skill sets to solve core and fundamental issues that will allow our communities to function again as an ecosystem.
