Reflections on Permaculture

Ita€™s hard to describe just how radical Permaculture is without delving into some examples of how it has worked in the past. One of my favorite is the story of how Permaculturalist Geoff Lawton a€oeGreened the Deserta€A on 10 acres of land in Jordan, near the Dead Sea. With no synthetic chemicals and 20 percent of the water usually used in the area, Lawton and his team turned salted, dead land into a productive orchard within six months. How? Through careful application of design appropriate for the areaa€"the use of swales as rainwater catchments, heavy mulching of agricultural wastes, the planting of various soil fixing and carefully placed shade trees, etc. Within a few months, scientists from the local agricultural college discovered that mushrooms growing under the mulch were effectively locking up the soila€™s salt and rendering it inert. To Lawton, this implied that given enough resources, the techniques of Permaculture could regreen the middle east; as he puts it in the presentation, a€oeyou can fix all the worlda€™s problems in a garden.a€A

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Posted: October 23rd, 2007
at 4:00pm by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: green,design

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