sustainability – Adventures in Permaculture

By Steven Saint Thomas

There was a lot of talk in 2016 about American progressives moving to Canada in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. They’re talking again. It’s easy to feel on the edge of a society that won’t take climate change seriously, embraces militarism and promotes an economic-growth paradigm that is crippling the planet.

But is Canada really the best destination? Through a lens of sustainability, what look like the best places to live the next 25 years?

There’s a certain randomness to where we live, where we move and where we end up. The two main forces seem to be jobs and family. People leave family for jobs, people rejoin family for – family!

Where would we live if we could pick a place by design?

The ancestors of most Americans migrated here for better economic opportunity – in modern parlance, a job. Native Americans had lived here sustainably for at least 14,000 years.

African Americans also came for jobs, but it was obviously somebody else’s economic opportunity.

In today’s age of easy mobility, most of us look across the country for a good (or better) job and move there. It’s a pretty random process.

I was born in San Diego, for example, because of jobs. My grandparents picked up and left the Midwest in the 1950s to find the land of plenty in burgeoning California.

My wife and I both grew up in San Diego but we moved to Colorado because of a job in 1999. Trudy and I were looking for journalism jobs in our increasingly expensive and unsustainable hometown when my brother (family!) decided to move to Colorado. He persuaded us to look there.

We loaded up a U-Haul, drove to Colorado and leased a house big enough for our family of five, and my brother and his wife. Trudy and I hired on at the daily paper in Colorado Springs.

Random settlement
There was little rhyme or reason in selecting the house we leased in 1999. Like most people, we had a short timeframe in which to find something with enough space in our price range.

In one whirlwind weekend, we found something suitable – but our universe of inventory was whatever people happened to be advertising those two days.

Our lives could have been drastically different, for better or worse, based on the luck of the house-hunting draw.

When our lease was up, we looked for a more diverse neighborhood closer to work. We dabbled in what I call “migration by design” by looking at some 40 houses in the last few months of our lease, taking our time and doing our homework.

Even though we broadened our universe of choices by taking a few months to shop, we still only had a couple of land-selection criteria. The main one was financial: getting a good real estate deal. We found a reasonably priced house and a decent mortgage interest rate.

We lived in the house for 15 years. Then along came permaculture.

Permaculture is an integrated system of designing homes and communities that cooperate with nature. We learned the true essence of sustainability – self-reliant communities free from the globalized, fossil-fuel driven food system.

In 2013, we met permaculture co-founder David Holmgren and toured his 2-1/4 acre homestead in Hepburn Springs, Australia. The property he picked to develop some 25 years ago – Melliodora – was not just a random good real estate deal. Holmgren had first developed a list of criteria and then searched until he found a property that delivered on most of them.

When I looked at my house and my community, it was clear to me I wanted something more than just an affordable mortgage payment.

If I could live anywhere – if I didn’t have a job or family situation that forced me to live in Colorado Springs, where would I go? What kind of community would Trudy and I want? What kind of property would be ideal to settle on?

Our green dream
Holmgren’s land-selection criteria (documented in Melliodora: Hepburn Springs Permaculture Gardens) included both big-picture context and site-specific details. On a geographic level, he was looking for cool, moist climate as well as a community with cosmopolitan sensibilities and prospects for work.

On a micro level, his nine criteria included proximity to a town with schools and culture, a lot between .75 and 2.5 acres for subsistence permaculture gardening, good solar exposure and opportunities for independent water supplies.

What would be on your wish list?

1. Climate: Rainwater. I would want a place with plentiful rain. Colorado Springs gets about 14 inches a year. San Diego gets around 6. From our calculations, we decided the ideal place should get at least 30 inches a year. And no snow! We’d want conditions for year-round cultivation.

2. Scale: Village. We also would want a village. In Australia, we observed permaculturists in four settings: urban, suburban, village and bush (what we would call “countryside”). The cities and suburbs were too crowded for our tastes and tempting fate by having millions of people completely dependent on centralized water and food systems.

The bush, on the other hand, was too remote. It’s hard to develop an interactive, sharing community when you’re 20 miles from the nearest neighbor.

That leaves the village – a small town with less than 15,000 people getting the best of both worlds. There’s still connection to the grid (redundancy is a good thing) and enough people to forge a local economy with the possibility of affordable land.

3. Prospects for work. That means internet access for most of what we do now. Also work in local gardening, teaching, culinary or media would be good.

4. Beauty. Within 10 miles of the ocean would be preferred if the land were affordable!

5. Proximity to family. We have family tied to both San Diego and Colorado. Living in Australia, for example, would be out of the question. We’d like a village with train or bus connectivity to the nearest city.

6. Political will. Could we find a existing community already committed to authentic sustainability and a local economy? Why fight so hard in our middle age to change a place like Colorado Springs when we could join with people already on track?

So, based on these big-picture design criteria, we began a quest in Northern California. Even in a drought, 15 counties in Northern California get 30 inches or more rain. There are lots of small, progressive towns in those coastal counties – Sonoma, Mendocino and Humboldt.

Then I would toss in site-specific criteria:
1. Between 2-5 acres
2. Avoid the San Andreas fault and coastal tsunami zones
3. Biking distance to village center
4. Internet access
5. Ability to capture rainwater
6. Water redundancy from an existing well, spring or utility grid
7. Decent soil with trees for mulch material
8. Existing structure for housing or place for mobile (or tiny) home
9. Sun exposure for solar power
10. Neighbors (hopefully permies) active in barter or trade economy

Sound good? How would you modify the list for your own needs? Migration by design – guess it’s time to stop voting and start looking!

By Steven Saint Thomas

***People who volunteered to be arrested stand in front of the White House during a march to the White House to protest against fossil fuels on Oct. 14 in Washington, DC.***
*Photo by Amanda Andrade-Rhoades | Survival Media Agency*

Over the past five years, climate change has become a disaster. The planet has been pummeling humanity into submission with tropical storms, volcanos, heat waves, fires and floods – and there’s no end in sight for extreme weather events.

From Oct. 31 to Nov. 12, representatives of more than 200 nations will meet in Glasgow, Scotland, to collectively address climate change. This will be the 26th climate summit – COP26 – since 1992, when the global Conference of Parties signed the first UN climate change treaty.

Some 400 protesters (pictured above) sang songs, gave speeches and held up signs outside the White House in mid-October, hoping President Biden will do something “real” at Glasgow.

I, for one, have little faith that nation-states will dismantle the large-scale, centralized economic systems that have driven climate change my entire adult life. In fact, a recent scientific report indicates that we have about five more years before the climate disaster overtakes us.

But I will be the first to take hope in this. That means we have five years to build personal and community-level systems that might sustain us through the eschaton beyond Glasgow. I call it the Personal Transition Plan.

The Next Five Years

In September, the UN started front-loading expectations for COP26. It published a stunning World Meteorological Organization report on the heels of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sobering Sixth Assessment Report.

The message is clear: the world is not stepping up to climate change – in fact, things are getting worse.

The 2015 Paris climate agreement adopted the goal of averting catastrophic climate change by halting global warming at 2.7°F (1.5°C) above pre-industrial averages. Scientists are now saying there is a 40 percent chance that the world may breach that threshold within the next five years.

“This report is clear. Time is running out,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “Unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to 1.5°C will be impossible, with catastrophic consequences for people and the planet on which we depend.”

Temperatures will continue to rise no matter how ambitious the nations get. Unified, drastic global action over the next five years might pull the greenhouse effect back to the 1.5°C target in the second half of the century.

The cost of nations failing to take drastic action at – and after – COP26 is “astronomical,” according to Shelley Inglis, executive director of the University of Dayton’s Human Rights Center.

“Studies have shown that the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius can mean the submersion of small island states, the death of coral reefs, extreme heat waves, flooding and wildfires, and pervasive crop failure,” Inglis writes.

Inertia of the State

Almost 30 years ago, 172 nations convened to create the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at a global “Earth Summit” held in Rio de Janeiro. While President George H.W. Bush signed the Rio Declaration, the United States never ratified the Kyoto Protocols that grew out of the declarations.

In fact, President Clinton’s support for Kyoto was completely countered by the U.S. Senate, which voted unanimously (both political parties, including then-Senator Joe Biden) to reject the protocol on grounds it would hurt the economy.

U.S. President George H. Bush is watched by his wife Barbara as he signs the Earth Pledge at the Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro, June 12, 1992. The Earth Pledge says that each signer pledges to work to all of his or her ability to protect the earth.
*AP Photo/M. Frustino*

Kyoto was essentially replaced by the Paris climate agreement in 2015. Although the U.S. initially signed on, President Trump withdrew the country for four years until President Biden pushed us back.

In or out, Democratic or Republican, the U.S. has had a dismal record for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But so has basically everybody else, according to a recent study by the Europe-based Climate Action Tracker.

“Action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions continues to lag behind what is needed – in practically all countries and sectors,” the report says.

Gambia alone has a plan the analysts deemed “compatible” with the Paris agreement and the United Kingdom is the only G20 country to win an “almost sufficient” stamp for its proposals. The report rates U.S. progress as “insufficient” (Germany, Japan and the EU as well) and says Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, New Zealand and Russia – among others – have submitted the same or less ambitious goals for their 2030 targets than they originally proposed in 2015.

If time is running out, the governments of the world have barely laced their shoes.

Ten Personal Protocols

While world leaders debate the real definition of “net zero” in Glasgow, the people of the world can step up – not to fight climate change, but to adapt to its reality. In essence, we have five years to build sustainable communities.

Here are 10 things you can do – now!

1. Capture your own water. Winter is upon us in the Northern Hemisphere and that means precipitation. Whether you use buckets and trashcans or 2,500-gallon tanks, capture as much water as you can.

2. Build your own soil. Let falling leaves lie. Ask your neighbors for their bags of yard debris. Find wood chip piles or buy mulch. Building layers of soil instead of tilling helps sequester carbon dioxide in the soil.

3. Make your own fertilizer. Topsoil needs organic material for better plant growth. Compost kitchen scraps, garden clippings, leaves, manure and other organic castaways in barrels, buckets or piles. Gardens are always hungry for fertility.

4. Grow your own food. Kill your grass and weeds with sheet mulch (cardboard covered with wood chips) and plant food gardens. Plant food you actually eat, so you can eventually phase out buying it at the grocery store. Fruit and nut trees are great perennials for long-term eating. Stop eating corporate factory-farmed methane-producing meat immediately – find local protein sources.

5. Own your home. If you have access to land, build an energy-efficient home or tiny house. If you have a mortgage, pay it off in the next five years (this may take borrowing from friends and family, but it’s better to pay them back than the banks). Pay down the mortgage by liquidating any Wall Street investments, including IRAs. If you rent, make sure your landlord is a friend or in small-scale business and will let you lease long term. If you’re in a tenant mill, sustainable housing might require a move or purchase.

6. Use your own energy. Minimize your use of electricity, which is most likely generated by burning fossil fuels (yes, that includes natural gas). Invest in a small-scale solar system to run lights, phones and computers, and to charge batteries. Phase out large refrigerators and freezers. Shift from air conditioning to fans.

7. Transport yourself. Get to a place where you can meet most of your travel needs by walking or riding a bicycle. You might need a different job if you can’t telecommute. If you have a vehicle, find ways to use it less and less. Share rides and carpool whenever possible.

8. Keep your money in your neighborhood. Move out-of-town bank accounts to local credit unions. Buy locally made products whenever possible instead of importing stuff via Amazon. Discontinue business with corporate chains.

9. Join neighborhood trading/barter networks. Phase out your daily need for cash by trading with neighbors, bartering or joining a local alternative-currency network or mutual-aid group. Use social networking to give unneeded stuff to neighbors.

10. Migrate by design. If you don’t live in a sustainable place (i.e. your region needs to import water, food and energy from somehwere else), consider moving. You have five years to find a better place. This is how we did it.

You have about five years for your Personal Transition Plan, to get your boat ready for the flood. There are at least 10 things you can be working on – and probably are already. I think I’ll skip flying to Glasgow for a conference and build a greenhouse instead.

Tag: sustainability

Migration By Design

Beyond Glasgow: The 5-Year Personal Transition Plan