The New Normal: We Are All Farmers

By Steven Saint Thomas & Trudy Thomas

The whole neighborhood is now sheltering in place. Everyone’s looking for something to do or catching up on their existing to-do lists, while we wait for the world to get back to normal. 

We’re using lots of post-layoff time to work on our permaculture homestead in Humboldt County, Calif. We’re wrapping up the sheet-mulch on about a quarter-acre and building garden beds – even planting! Our neighbors, all unseen on the other sides of the fences, are out filling the air with the sound of power mowers and the smell of new-mown grass.

Ironic – they’re out farming the grass that we’re trying to kill. It’s not that we hate grass, but we can’t eat it. We need to transform my grass-dominated yard into a place where fruit, berries, vegetables, garlic, herbs and pollinators can grow without the competition. Permaculturists often use sheet-mulching to create a fresh palette of topsoil on which to design self-reliant food systems.

A greenhouse, mini-orchard and keyhole beds of various designs now occupy land once given over to grass.

We are all farmers, it’s just that we’ve spent most of our lives up to now farming dollars. The New Normal will be farming our own food! 

I’m guessing my neighbors are expecting the Old Normal – back to fully stocked grocery stores, plenty of gasoline and mowing the lawn every other Sunday. The current coronavirus pandemic has brought home what permaculturists have been saying for 40 years. The normal we grew up with, powered by fossil fuels and other non-renewable natural resources, is coming to an end. The future will be different and we need to be ready for that. 

The coronavirus has put the entire world on pause –  an unprecedented opportunity to make a course correction!

As permaculture co-founder Bill Mollison put it: “The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10 percent of us do this, there is enough for everyone.” 

Our family is seven years into a 10-year plan to get ready for the future. We’re not ready yet, but if we keep our hands to the plow, we just might get there. We’d like to offer the following New Normal steps based on our recent adventures in permaculture.

1. Start growing food now. If you are currently farming grass, stop and let it die. Grow food – some is better than complete dependence on grocery store chains. If you have land, start planting something you will actually eat – potatoes, onions, lettuce, zucchini. If you don’t have land, grow something in containers on the porch or in a window sill. Don’t let another spring go by without planting new food sources somewhere within your reach!

If you REALLY want some grass, just sheet mulch a section for your garden.

2. Look for ways to grow more food. Already growing? Need more space for gardens? Get rid of your lawn and plant – edible landscapes are gorgeous and have far greater value than grass. How about a greenhouse for starts and extending the growing season? Maybe you have a neighbor with land but no skills for gardening – offer to help out. Find a school, church or community garden that needs some tender loving care. Aim to grow 10 percent more food this year than you did last year.

3. Start storing water. Rainwater can be stored in the topsoil as well as in containers. Mulch helps catch rain and minimize evaporation. Swales (Australian for “ditches”) can also capture runoff, spread and sink water, and prevent erosion. Here’s a swale we dug that moves water running down the street into our yard to irrigate trees and hedges. Rainbarrels can store water from rooftops for times when it doesn’t rain. 

Swales can boost water storage anywhere without picked barrels or gutter diverters.

4. If you can, move to a place where you can grow more food and store more water. If it doesn’t rain much where you live, it’s probably time to move! Big cities in the Western U.S. are sucking the life out of the Colorado River. Ideally, find a piece of land and devote most of it to food production (more land, less house). Own it without a mortgage if at all possible – liquidate any Wall Street assets (401ks, IRAs, mutual funds) you have and pay off your mortgage. Move in with other family members. Buy or build a tiny home on family property. Pool your resources with family members and buy land, or pay off mortgaged property (Sorry, but working with family will be part of the New Normal. Swallow your pride and do it for your kids.)

5. Connect with neighbors and find ways to work together for sustainability. Explore sharing rides – complete with face coverings! – or get/share a bike (and drop that gym membership). Share tools, seeds, labor and the harvest. 

It’s easy to organize a sheet-mulch gathering while maintaining social distance!

6. Get ready for the long emergency. The New Normal means the Old Normal won’t be coming back. The endless-growth economic model won’t be coming back. The consumer will need to become a producer. It might be the next pandemic (yes, there will be more) or utilities going bankrupt, trucking companies folding or collapse of ecosystems… imagine a sheltering in place that doesn’t end in our lifetimes. Build diverse revenue streams: Evaluate your skills and sell or trade those skills with the local community. Reduce grid-use: Transition to alternative sources for lights, water and heat.  Get rid of your power-sucking clothes dryer and put up a clothesline. These are changes we can make while there is still time.

7. It is easier to stay positive when you connect with nature. The New Normal needs to be a world where humans are a part of nature, not above and beyond it. This is why indigenous people survived for eons while empires rose and fell. Back to Bill Mollison: “Sitting at our back doorsteps, all we need to live a good life lies about us. Sun, wind, people, buildings, stones, sea, birds and plants surround us. Cooperation with all these things brings harmony; opposition to them brings disaster and chaos.”

We are all farmers – of something. We will reap what we sow. Happy growing!

If you’ve read this far, you might be interested in a relatively new documentary on (mostly) East Coast permaculture – from rooftop gardens to suburban lots to farms. It’s called “Inhabit” – beautifully done!

We’re also an organizing “Adventures in Permaculture: Saturday Night Thrive” check-in via Zoom. Hope we can connect soon!

Migration By Design

migration-map

By Steven Saint Thomas

There’s been a lot of talk about American progressives moving to Canada in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. 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!