Dancing in the Rain

Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass...

 it's about learning to dance in the rain.   
 - Author Unknown -

I was recently asked by my local council to write something about Climate Change to counter scepticism after the negative publicity of Glaciergate and the accusation of the lack of peer group reviews by the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The article is to go to every household in my district and is meant to encourage positive behaviour change without alarming people. I generally find that most people either switch off to argumentative discourses or get polarised by them so browbeating is not my usual approach.

As you know, recent news reports have focused on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich exaggerating their data. The IPCC report claimed the Himalayan glaciers would melt in 25 years but got it wrong by a factor of 10 – they are expected to disappear within 250 years. Given that most of northern India and almost all of Pakistan depend on the glacial water for their agriculture, this is still devastating news for future generations.

The CRU have also been accused of ‘bad science’, yet many of the reported scandals that have fuelled Global Warming scepticism broke around the time of COP 15 when the world’s nations were trying to seek a deal on global emissions. Not surprising really.

The problem is that climate change is a hot political issue. In the USA in 2009, the Center for Public Integrity detailed the massive expansion in lobbying by polluting energy interests, leading to over 1,150 groups buying influence as the U.S. Congress sought to pass the Waxman-Markey climate bill. The actual dollar amount spent is unknown, as disclosure laws require few details, but the Center calculated that an extremely conservative estimate would give a minimum figure of more than US$27 million spent in direct lobbying from April to June 2009.

My personal position is that the degree to which we are warming the Earth is still unknown but that it is to such a significant degree that it requires us to act immediately. Not knowing the exact percentage of temperature increases doesn't mean we can sit back and continue to pump the Earth's atmosphere with carbon dioxide. That really is understatement! 

Here is some climate change data from NASA and the Royal Society – both not known for their radical politics.

* 2009 tied as the second warmest year on record and the warmest since records began in the Southern Hemisphere.

* The greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO₂) has risen by 30% since pre-industrial times (300 years).
This is 10 times larger than any fluctuation in the past 600,000 years. Therefore the current rise is almost certainly due to human activity.

* Increasing atmospheric CO₂ also leads to ocean acidification which risks profound impacts on many marine ecosystems and in turn the societies which depend on them.

* Whilst the extent of climate change is often expressed in a single figure – global temperature – the effects of climate change (such as temperature, precipitation and the frequency of extreme weather events) will vary greatly from place to place.

I could say a lot more but the editor of the local rag gave me just 500 words and I did not feel it would be effective to terrify the local populus. Understatement seemed best at that juncture.

Peak Uranium & Peak Oil

As for fuel resources peaking (I continued, imagining the local pro-nuclear lobby on my back), we know that uranium is a scarce resource – its supply is estimated to last only for the next 30 to 60 years depending on the actual demand. Geologists working for the oil exploration industry also agree that the supply of oil has peaked (probably around 2004). We drive our society with fossil fuels and uranium and scientific consensus agrees that these resources are running out.

“What Kind of World Do We Want?”

This to me is the crux of the question. Do we want a biosphere polluted by chemicals with power generated by CO₂ emitting coal, or nuclear devices that create waste that must be buried for 1,000 years in a geological safe repository? Of course not. Most of us care deeply for the planet and realise there that we cannot continue to ravage forests, dump toxic waste and indefinitely burn fossil fuels. We need to hear more about practical solutions and creatively explore better ways of living and working. That is why I have devoted 20 years of my life to publishing solution-orientated information, even at times when it seemed the world wasn't very interested.

My joy, however, comes from actually applying that knowledge – growing food, transforming waste into fertility, heating water with the sun, establishing biodiverse habitats, encouraging rare species into my garden, working with others to set up community-based projects... Best of all, learning to work in a team and nurturing each others' creativity and commitment to this vision of a better world. Co-operation is a greatest form of human endeavour.

Really we should be shouting from the rooftops about the dangers of climate change and the devastation of the world. Instead we are somewhat genteely trying to counter vested interest and scepticism with well argued debate and sensible alternatives. It is a mad situation but I cannot see what else to do to get through this maze born of human ignorance. I hope one day we all look back and say we not only tried our best, we succeeded. Until then, we keep dancing.

Maddy Harland is editor of Permaculture Magazine - inspiration for sustainable living. To read free copies of of the magazine click here.

Gardening with Kids, the Permaculture Way

The snowdrops are in flower and new life is stirring. It's time to sow seeds and prepare the beds and find out what to plant now...

There are so many compelling reasons for growing even a little of your own food in the garden or allotment, on the patio, or even on the windowsill.

Take for instance the humble lettuce. On average of over 11 pesticides are sprayed on lettuces, more than any other vegetable crop. In one study by what was called the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food (MAFF), pesticide applications had increased by 600% over a ten year period. Then those innocent bags of mixed salad from the supermarket are washed with chloride to prevent decay. This is hardly healthy eating for ourselves or our children.

Food can contribute up to one third of your family’s carbon footprint – so buying locally produced food and growing your own is one of the greenest things you can do. It is also great fun and children love gardening.

Permaculture – Learning From Nature

As the old saying goes, ‘Nature is the best teacher’ and permaculture is based on observing natural systems, deriving principles to understand how they work and then applying to designing low carbon, green systems. These can be anything from a farm, woodland or community, but one of the best ways to demonstrate permaculture is in the garden. Here we can make connections, turn our waste into useful resources and create self-sustaining cyclical systems that work together healthily.

Setting up a Garden in Spring

The first task is to establish good composting systems as soon as possible. If you have room you can make your own composters from recycled pallets and add a mixture of kitchen waste (uncooked), grass cuttings and materials like shredded paper and spoilt straw to get the right mixture of nitrogen and carbon. You can also make a composter specifically for leaves and also one for ‘green brew’ – a DIY liquid organic fertiliser. If you are limited for space proprietary composters (often at a reduced price from your local council) and a worm bin for cooked food and vegetable scraps are very useful.

If you are starting from scratch select an area near your house for your veggie beds and composting area. The aphorism that the best fertiliser is the gardener’s shadow is so true. We all tend to live busy lives and so growing food near the kitchen door ensures that you can more easily pop out, pull a few weeds, sow some seeds and compost our waste. Make sure your beds are wide enough to reach in the middle but not too wide so that you have to stand on them to work which will compact the soil and cause water logging.

Before:

After:

Define the edges of beds with long planks if you can but not bricks or stones in a damp climate as these are ideal habitats for slugs and snails. Planks clearly mark the paths – useful also for the children to know exactly where to tread – and allow you to build up the soil and make raised beds. These will be no-dig once you have removed all the weeds. The advantages of not digging but mulching and spot weeding instead are many. Soil is a living being with a delicate balance of micro-organisms that interact. Digging damages this living microcosm and destroys soil structure. Much better to leave ‘ploughing’ to the worms which turn the soil and aerate it. Don’t forget to add lots of well-rotted organic matter.

Next, select what to grow and order in your seeds. This is the fun part so be sure to involve the kids and choose vegetables and salads that they actually like to eat. There is no point growing food they don’t like! A strawberry bed is usually a must but remember you can also plant alpine strawberries anywhere in the garden as ground cover and children will enjoy foraging for their small but delicious fruits.

Even when much younger, my children loved vegetables like sweetcorn, French beans, parsnips, spinach, carrots, various varieties of beefsteak, bush and cherry tomatoes, broad beans and spaghetti and butternut squashes. These are always top of my list for space. I also like to plant as many varieties of ‘cut and come again’ and self seeding salads as possible such as mizuna, mibuna, oak leaf lettuces, land cress, rocket, and corn salad. Most seed catalogues have salad mixes that you can sow in one go so that you get variety for the price of just one packet – even a small salad bed can save a fortune on the weekly shopping bills and provide healthy greens from early spring to late autumn. There is nothing as scrumptious as freshly picked greens.

We prefer to buy organic seeds and also mainly choose varieties that are ‘heritage’ or at least not hybrids. F1 hybrid seeds may look nice but they are bred for a mass market and are not self-fertile and you can’t save their seed and germinate them next year. Heritage seeds are usually the older varieties that may not be popular in the supermarket (because they lack uniformity of size, shape or colour or don’t store in refrigerated units well) but they are often more tasty, store well and produce good seeds for next year. They can be more robust against pests and diseases as well and by growing them you are supporting biodiversity in the garden.

My favourite spring job, besides getting out on crisp days and preparing the beds for sowing, is planting seeds inside. Children enjoy sowing pots and seed trays and watching them germinate in the warm. This is biology at home. My daughters never had any problem understanding hydro-, photo- or geo-tropism at school. They had learnt that plant growth is determined by moisture, light and gravity on the windowsill from an early age. Botany too is so much easier to learn when you have a familiarity with germination, photosynthesis and how roots grow, for instance. All in all, growing plants is a wonderful way for a family to play and learn together and enjoy being outside.

“Growing what you eat has to be a good thing,” says my daughter Gail who is now 17. “It taught me from a very young age to understand where food comes from and want to try new vegetables because I had grown them myself. We even revised for my Science GCSE in the greenhouse. It was the best way to learn photosynthesis – right next to the plants!"

What to Plant in Spring

February

Early Peas and Broad Beans

Parsley unless it is cold or wet

Carrot, Onion & Lettuces under glass

Beetroot, Spinach and Carrots but protect from frost with cloches

March

Lettuces, Radishes, Spring Onions, Beetroots, Carrots and Turnips outside

Summer Cabbages, Leeks and Brussels Sprouts in a seed bed

Early Potatoes and Onion Sets as long as the soil is not excessively wet

Tomatoes inside in trays

  

April

Cucumbers, Marrows, Pumpkins and Squashes under glass

Winter Cabbages and Late Summer Cauliflowers in a seed bed

Plant out Onions grown from seed under glass into the soil

Main Crop Potatoes

Sweetcorn, runner and French beans inside

Tomato seedlings in the greenhouse or cold frame

How to Make Your Own Organic Fertiliser

Take a barrel with a tap that’s not connected to a downpipe. Add rainwater. Then add comfrey, stinging nettles (before they have gone to seed) and a shovelful of manure. Leave to ‘brew’ for a few weeks. Be prepared for the smell and avoid contact with your hands! Dilute 1:10 in water and use as a fertiliser on maturing plants but not seedlings and watch them grow.

Maddy Harland is editor Permaculture Magazine - inspiration for sustainable living. To read free copies of of the magazine click here.

Building Community & How a Book Was Born

A couple of years ago a manuscript called Birthrites landed across Tim Harland’s desk and he started to read it immediately. ‘It engaged me straight away. The manuscript was very well written, grounded and I found it deeply moving,’ he says.

We have been publishing books about ‘earth care’ – permaculture design, edible forest gardening, woodland management, eco-building, renewable energy – since the early 1990s but the ‘people care’ aspect of permaculture which we consider vital had not been explored. I was also aware that our wonderful list of talented authors are mostly men and I wanted to redress this so I sent out an inner request for more women authors. The intuitive Jackie Singer must have registered because the manuscript arrived soon afterwards. 

I have long felt that ceremony and ritual has an important role to play in building community and inner healing. If we can celebrate and mourn together, mark rites of passage and significant events in groups, we will rebuild and strengthen community and thus our capacity to co-operate. We will also build group consciousness. These are vital aspects of our evolutionary journey as humans – underpinning values for living more peacefully and more ecologically. They engender sharing of skills and resources, compassion and nonviolence, and a sensitivity to the limits of the earth. 

The joyful times that I spend with Glennie Kindred, another intuitive and masterful celebrant, have long emphasised this aspect of inner sustainability. We of course need practical approaches like permaculture design and other low carbon solutions but, without the connections found in community, the hands do not have the opportunity to work with the heart in a wider arena. The opportunity to collaborate with and serve others is the key to creating a civilised and low carbon society, one that ultimately can repair the damage our postindustrial growth society has so effectively done. 

The value of private ritual
My work as a healing practitioner and, earlier in my life, as a psychotherapist, have also shown me the value of private ritual. There are times when we simply do not want to share our pain but we need to mark it and encourage healing. Simple rituals performed on our own or with a close friend or partner can begin that healing process. It is never too late to try. 

It therefore fascinated me that Jackie had written a book that not only celebrated the wonders of conception, birth, the naming of children – all events that you would expect frankly – she had written a book about the other aspects of the birthing years. Here we can read about peoples’ experiences in adoption or simply not choosing to have children, even miscarriage, stillbirth and the abortion. I felt this was brave.

I also like her inclusive approach to ceremony and ritual. There is a rich sense that anyone can do this – whether we have a formal spiritual practice, follow a religion or believe nothing. This is achieved not by setting out ceremonies but by telling stories – we hear the author’s personal experiences and also the voices of the many people with whom she has spoken. This gives us a wonderfully rich variety of approaches and inspires us to be creative and weave together our own events. There is no prescription, just inspiration and the fruits of many peoples’ experiences. In keeping with the soul of this book, its creation was also a deeply co-operative exercise. For the first time in our company’s history, the early production of the book was managed exclusively by the women; we edited, evolved the very distinctive style of illustrations together, designed, and typeset it. Imogen, newly arrived with us, produced the final drawings with exquisite care and Jackie responded to new ideas and requests. At Permanent Publications we all work together as a team and so before going to press we naturally pulled the men back into the project for their expertise. We launched the book in Oxford and celebrated with a ceremony and a ritual. 

Synchronicity at work
There was also a lovely synchronicity at work. Jackie’s sister is Nicky Singer, author of children’s novels and other works. One rainy day, whilst camping in Cornwall years ago, I had read to my two daughters and Tim Featherboy, from cover to cover. It is a beautifully written and moving story and we all shed tears together at the end. What familial catharsis! The atmosphere of that book has stayed with us all to this day. It was therefore with great pleasure that I met Nicky at the Birthrites book launch and Tim and I told her how much our family enjoyed her work. We were all moved. 

There are times in life when a creative project has an energy of its own and a flow that takes it to fruition. It becomes a labour of love, literally. This book is just this for me, both a positive and inclusive contribution to the invisible but vital aspects of social sustainability and an aesthetic work that has nourished all involved. We are therefore delighted that Ann quite independently and without coercion from me has decided to offer you our book.

Maddy Harland is editor Permaculture Magazine - inspiration for sustainable living and a director of Permanent Publications where you can find out more about Birthrites. To read free copies of of the magazine click here.

Transition Culture: Revolution By Stealth?

Ted Trainer, the eminent sustainable economist, has written a lengthy critique of the Transition Movement.

http://pacific-edge.info/the-trainer-papers-1/

It is interesting to read critiques of a movement that is inspiring a global response. My view is that Transition is an evolutionary process – that it has never claimed to have all the answers to peak oil, climate change or our social ills – and that it is ‘work in progress’ (like the evolving discipline and practice of permaculture design). The Transition vision needs to be steered, and people like Rob Hopkins, Ben Brangwyn, Shaun Chamberlin and Tamsin Pinkerton (and I have no doubt many, many others working in their communities all over the world) are doing this. Transition is, however, an experiment and it has to be capable of responding to cultural variation.

The core issue for Dr Trainer is that Transition is pitched at retrofitting an existing unsustainable economic system – namely capitalism – and that will never work. I agree. It won’t. Capitalism is dependent on growth, affluence and consumerism. It will never be capable of adequately addressing resource depletion and reducing carbon levels. It is like the proverbial drug addict being in charge of the pharmacy. The temptation to default to the modus operandi is too great.

Ted rightly says that we have to create an entirely new economic system that steers down the bastion of capitalism. I agree. The problem is how do we grow such a movement? Will it grow in our local governmental systems? Will it be nurtured in our local business community? Will it be adopted by ordinary people paying mortgages and trying to bring up their families? No it won’t because asking people to tear down an edifice that actually supports then in the short-term is literally like asking them to shoot themselves in the foot. People only adopt change if it is incontrovertibly necessary. 

So what do we do? We develop steps, however imperfect, towards transition. We begin the process of charting a different way of living. Ted criticises The Kinsale Energy Descent Plan as if it is a document contemporary to The Transition Handbook. It was of course an early piece of work written when Rob Hopkins was teaching permaculture in Kinsale, Ireland, and had the first inklings of the Transition idea about 10 years ago. 

The Transition Handbook too is just the beginning of the process. It will be interesting to see where the next Transition book, Local Money: how to make it happen in your community, develops the theme. None of these books are, however, the last word. We are at the beginning of envisioning how a new sustainable society will be constructed.

Another problem that Ted identifies is that we do not have much time left. Even a three degree rise in global temperature will be catastrophic. We have to reduce global atmospheric carbon now and Copenhagen’s outcome indicates that this is unlikely. Global political will is completely inadequate and China is now the superpower that calls the shots, not the USA. So what do we do? Give up our jobs, take to the streets en masse and foment revolution? I think we know this will not work. Most of us live in powerful states with modern surveillance technology and police forces with hidden powers.

The other aspect is how do we engage people? If we slap people in the face with climate change, give them our worst statistics and ask them to dismantle their lives and all they know – if we cry “Revolution!” – we will only alienate our audience. This revolution is one that must be conducted with stealth.

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood... Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

Transition, the ecovillage movement, permaculture, they all have one thing in common. They provide inspiration, they ask us to explore alternative ways of living and they encourage people to take the first steps in changing their lives. Of course, these approaches are not going to unravel the ecological crisis alone. Yet as long as we acknowledge that all these approaches are work in progress and don’t don the mantles of gurus, claiming to have all the answers, we keep the door open to new ideas. Let’s welcome the debate and the friendly critiques and build intellectual muscles in an open culture. Let’s be honest about not having all the answers. 

Personally, I yearn for the vision of the sustainable culture that I hope is just beyond my own horizon.

Maddy Harland blogs regularly and is editor of Permaculture Magazine – inspiration for sustainable living – to read sample copies online please go to Exact Editions.

"It was 20 years ago today!"

Literally.

20 years ago today Permanent Publications was started by Tim and Maddy Harland and Liz and the late Glen Finn in a back bedroom in our house. Our eldest daughter was just six months old, our forest garden was still an arable field and all we had was a brown telephone, two desks and an Amstrad – remember them!? We also had a crazy amount of optimism and boundless faith that we could be publishers. It is amazing what unfailing naivity and youthful enthusiasm can achieve!

During all this publishing activity we helped found The Sustainability Centre where we are now based (we grew out of that back bedroom and needed it to accommodate our next daughter, born in 1993), and I co-founded Gaia Education, a UN endorsed education programme for sustainability.

20 years later Permaculture Magazine is read in 77 countries and has over 100,000 readers. We have a great list of authors that includes Ben Law of Woodland House fame, Patrick Whitefield who wrote The Earthcare Manual, Tony Wrench, who built the famous Low Impact Roundhouse, Ken Fern of Plants For a Future and some wonderful up and coming writers like Alternative Kitchen Gardener, Emma Cooper, and we are about to publish David Holmgren and Sepp Holzer. Have a look here.

The bare field behind our house is now a wonderful forest garden full of trees, shrubs and groundcover and we also have a raised bed kitchen garden. We share it with abundant wildlife, including (not-so) common lizards. Here's one of the little fellas:

Probably most important to us is that we work closely with some wonderful people. The team at Permanent Publications are outstanding – dedicated, loyal and hardworking as well as multi-talented. Our friends at the Sustainability Centre are our close allies and we appreciate the support and encouragement that we receive the world over. We even won a Queens Award For Enterpirse in the Sustainable Development category for being 'outstanding' ('Her' words, not ours).

So the moral of this tale is that you need a few things to succeed: a good idea, boundless optimism and hard work, and good friends and allies (especially in the years when we hardly had two pennies to rub together). Then most things are achievable, even in the corporate dominated publishing world.

So thanks to all of you who helped us make 'Permanent' Permanent Publications.

Maddy Harland is the editor of Permaculture Magazine and a co-founder of Permanent Publications