Permaculture Convergence

Eight years ago I was here in Pirenopolis to teach an Ecovilla design course to architects, city planners, regional planners, and permaculture graduates, today I am arriving for the pc convergence and it is unbelievable the amount of change and work that has transpired in those eight years.

This is the site of Instituto Permacultura Ecovilas do Cerrado which has evolved into the most active permaculture training center for land based learning on the planet. Andre Soares and his wife Lucy are the driving inspiration and labor behind this incredible place.


We will be meeting in the Bill Mollison Amphitheater which is pictured above. The structure is made of bricks that were manufacuted here at IPEC with IPEC soil. The Amphitheater can handle several hundred participants and they have built many small rooms to accommodate their students and for the next four days, us.

Sustainable Corporations?

With the exception of Carlos Louge (an Argentinean Economist), Donna Morton (a Canadian Economist), Paul Stammets (an US Mycologist), Roberto Perez (a Cuban permaculturalist), Robin Francis (an Australian Permacuture Teacher), and Declan Kennedy (an Irish Permaculturist), all of the other presenters were representative of an emerging new corporate model “the sustainable corporation”.

I think that the non corporate presenters had much more to offer in the way of solutions and ethics. I think that all of us keep hoping that the corporate world has something to teach or offer us that will make us more effective and able to affect change on a much larger scale. After this conference I think that quite the opposite is true and that we should lay the myth of big is better or more effective to rest. Perhaps its time to dust off Shumacher's “Small is Beautiful” and have another look.

There is much more that I would like to write about but I feel that I need more time for my thoughts to gestate and that they could use a good marinating in talk with my peers during the convergence. I am still convinced that Permaculture is the best show in town!

Limits to Sustainability - some musings

The theme of the conference was invisible structures, particularly finance and sustainable corporations. We heard presentations from some of the top foundations and corporations in Brazil. Two very large banks presented their sustainability programs. Other groups spoke of their Corporate Social Responsibility Programs.
For the most part I was under-impressed but I did come away with some provocative and new thoughts.

If one applies pattern to invisible structures then one has to figure out what are human patterns and how do they work. What seems glaringly obvious is that there is an order of scale problem. Rivers and trees have a limit to the orders of branching, but human constructs seem to be able to ignore limits. This is true of economics which allows one percent of mankind to control 40% of the total resource base of the planet, and of agriculture which allows a corporation to farm tens of thousands of hectares. Both of these examples are examples of exploitive systems. You cannot operate on such large scales without being extremely exploitative both of the environment and of humans. If this is true then to talk in terms of the sustainability of City Bank is an oxymoron.

Sustainability was the key word of every corporate presenter but not once did any of them give a definition of sustainability or their understanding of it. Tony Anderson who is an old permaculture teacher and designer from Denmark was of the opinion that to be sustainable one had to be constrained to ones bioregion – or that was the appropriate order of scale. Once you start importing and exporting product and money in and out of the bioregion the bioregion inevitable suffers. I’m sure we will spend some time hashing this out during the convergence.

Sao Paolo, IPC8 - gathering of the alternative nation

I am a little overwhelmed right now with the delight of seeing and talking with all of my old pc buddies. Robin Francis, Rosemary Morrow (Australia), Tony Anderson (Denmark), Juao Rochet (Bage, Brazil), Africa, Asia, names I have forgotten all here sitting around the table talking about our projects, our dreams, and new strategies. Right now we are all walking to the conference center to view a large bamboo structure that is being constructed in honor of the conference.

Last night the African contingent got in and I showed around. They are delightful and so spontaneously in love with life. I could take some lessons. I am off to the first day of conference - more later.

Gaia Ecovilla and Argentina Permaculture Institute

Another overnight bus ride to Buenos Aires and a 110 km cab ride takes us past Navarro to the permaculture site of Gaia Ecovilla and the Argentina Permaculture Institute. If you go to their web site - you will find that this is a place that is truly walking the talk. Most of our short time there was spent with founder Gustavo Ramirez who lead a tour of over twenty architects and other design professionals around the site.

Totally off the grid thanks, primarily, to three wind generators with some help from a six panel array of solar cells. Their food forest is well designed and developing into a multi use ecology for the future. The most visually captivating elements in their community are the whimsical and beautiful cob structures that are built as residencies and community buildings. Thatched roofs are predominant though there are sheet metal, living roofs, and other configurations.

The whole community was very welcoming and I felt honored that I was treated as some legendary permaculture figure. It made me regret that I hadn’t worked harder to come to Gaia Ecovilla in 2000 when I had been invited for the Latin American convergence.

The community supports itself primarily through course offerings of all kinds. Right now there are around ten adults and three very young children. I encourage anyone who is traveling in South America to include this wonderful demonstration site on your itinerary.

Permaculture Talk in La Cumbre - on fire, water and other messes

I visited the English Language Prep school and addressed about 40 students aged 14 through 17. Most of them were too shy to interact much so I monologued my way through an hour of Permaculture. The teachers were quite interested and I think that the students were also intrigued but not a word. Maybe next time….

T.V. station in La Cumbre is a room in a strip mall kind of situation with a table and three chairs. There is a rubber plant positioned as background. Diana translated for me as I was interviewed. The monitor for the camera faced me so I was a little distracted by my image talking to me as I talked.

It was a good interview the woman who did it was interested and asked good questions, primarily about the water reservoir that supplies the town. A year ago there was a big fire that burned right down to the water, killing trees, shrubs and wildlife. Then the rains came and washed it all into the reservoir. The question is how to remediate this situation and prevent it from happening in the future. My concerns are that nothing has been done to clean up after the fire. Dead trees are still lying in the water along the shore and erosion continues to fill the reservoir. It seems that the mayor has already been tooting his horn about the clean up he has initiated and I wasn’t informed of his statements so mine were not the most discrete suggestions in this circumstance. The truth always gets one in trouble in a political environment.

To add insult to injury the city poured cement to the top of the existing dam to increase the volume of water that can be held which caused the water to rise on the banks further killing the trees and shrubs that escaped the fire. For me step one is to clean up the mess, step two is to start building contour check dams on the slopes above the reservoir to stop runoff and slow down the overland flow of rain water. Then use the contour dams as enriched zones for starting to restore the vegetation. Some kind of fire break needs to be established to prevent this from happening in the future.

Fires are a major threat in this area because of drought and deforestation – the same sad story being repeated around the globe. Mankind is mindlessly and greedily destroying his habitat.

There was a great gathering of citizens and the city counselors to hear me speak about permaculture and the environment. Seems that I struck a chord and there was a lot of talk about organizing committees to deal with recycling, water, and fire. I hope this is something that will continue into the future, there certainly was a lot of enthusiasm and hope the evening of my talk.

In spite of the hospitality and beauty of La Cumbre I must say I was glad to be headed for the warmer climes of Brazil. Everyone kept insisting that it was an unseasonable cold fall in La Cumbre but even after searching successfully for long johns and a sweater I was cold; it seemed that the brick and stone walls and floors sucked all of the heat out of me. Solar orientation and technology would go a long way in improving life in La Cumbre.

Argentina - La Cumbre (The Summit)

Monday, May 14, 2007

We arrived at our destination, La Cumbre, mid morning and are met by Diana’s brother Carlos. Diana comes from a large family of second generation Italian immigrants who have maintained the excitability and hand waving of their ancestors.

La Cumbre is a tourist town in the mountains where many wealthy Argentineans maintain second homes that they occupy in the summer to escape the heat of the coastal and other lower regions of the country. It is very reminiscent of Santa Fe, NM twenty years ago, with a population of 10,000 that swells to 30,000 at times during the summer. The architecture is very European executed in the local brick with rock accents around doors, windows, and corners.

Given that the winter temperatures drop to -10 to -15 Celsius brick and stone are not the best building choice for maintaining heat. It is my guess that forests once grew to the edges of La Cumbre and the fireplaces were stoked day and night and now that the forests have been cleared the houses are miserable in winter. One of our reasons for being here is to come up with some economic ways to insulate these old structures and to present some alternative construction techniques for new construction as the city grows.

La Cumbre has a large immigrant population of both Italian and English. The English were brought to Argentina to build the railroad system and many stayed on once they were finished. It is startling for me to go into a store, start mumbling my inexecrable
Spanish, and receive a reply in Etonian English from a third or fourth generation resident. Many of the residents of La Cumbre graduated from the local English school that was established in the early twentieth century.

The Italians were primarily farmers who moved to this region for its rich and inexpensive land. Prosciutto abounds, available in the smallest corner shop, grown from abundant corn crops fed to healthy pigs.

I must say this is the most carnivorous culture I have ever witnessed. Every time you turn around someone is inviting you to a barbeque. This does not in any way resemble what we know as a barbeque. This is a barbeque with every animal represented and every part of every animal – I’m talking glands, blood sausage, liver, kidneys, and everything else except the moo and the oink. All cooked over coals of mesquite which is the keystone vegetative species of this region, and is being lost to deforestation and fire at an astonishing pace.

Next week will be full of appearances before august government bodies, the local English Language Prep School, and the municipal television station. This being the first time a permaculture creature has appeared publicly in La Cumbre – I can’t wait!!

Argentina - the country side

The bus station is huge, pretty seedy and full of people waiting to begin their journey. Distances are huge in this country and airports few so the bus is a common form of transportation. The buses come in all sizes and various states of repair, ours is a double decker with seats that fully recline into cot sized beds. There are curtains between each passenger if one wants privacy. Headsets are available for listening to Tango or the dialog of Hollywood’s latest offering which is displayed on a large screen overhead. Each seat is provided with a blanket, pillow, and access to all the coffee you can drink. It is not long until I am fully prone and snoring happily in my little mobile cocoon.

We spend the night crossing the bread basket of Argentina, what was once endless pampas (grasslands) has suffered the indignity of the moldboard plow and like our great plains is covered in commodity crops that are pampered by petrochemical products while the soil rapidly erodes away. When I later suggested that we take a day bus back in order to see the countryside, a room full of listeners looked at me incredulously. Diana’s brother said “why would you want to witness the destruction of the land?” Why indeed.

The U.S. top salesman for biofuels, Al Gore arrives in Buenos Aires next week to flog his solution to peak oil and global warming – plant more corn and soy! And who better to fuel our automobiles than the third world. Argentina has all of this fertile soil and has fully embraced Monsanto’s mad agenda of GMOs coupled with glycophosphate herbicide. It is so convenient to have someone else’s back yard to play in now that we have trashed our own. Of course North American farmers will also subscribe to the wall to wall commodity crop program since it is a guaranteed money maker with all of the government subsidies. I hear that farm land in the Midwest has doubled since Bush and Gore have started the church of biofuels. Though I wouldn’t rush to invest!

Argentina - Buenos Aires and the country side

Friday – April 27, 2007

First of all, and once again getting past the hydrocarbon pollution from flying around the planet, and the contradictions of separating my trash at home contrasted to pouring barrels of C01 into the air as I fly south for the next 15 hours, and then dealing with the culture induced paranoia of bombs in shoes, shampoo, water bottles and etc. There is something basically humiliating in being treated as a potential terrorist while at the same time understanding that terrorism exists and that it exists, in large part, because of the way the developed world, particularly the U.S., has treated the undeveloped world. On to Buenos Aires….

Buenos Aires airport has a very efficient customs, at least it does this evening, and we are met by my traveling companion, Diana’s, cousin who will ferry us from the south of town to the north where we will catch an overnight bus to La Cumbre.

As we drive across the night time Buenos Aires there is something that is very different for such a big city, 15 million population, and it is so obvious that it takes me a couple of miles before I identify it. It is dark and there are multistoried apartments and businesses on both sides of the expressway with no lighted windows! So my first conclusion is that everyone is still at work at eight o’clock in the evening but that doesn’t account for children at home and the elderly; are they all sitting around in the dark? The answer is that Argentineans are energy conscious – they turn off their lights except in the room where they are occupied. As I looked more carefully I noticed the bluish glow of the T.V. with no other sign of light in the apartment. Diana tells me that they also turn off all the pilot lights in hot water heaters except when they need hot water. Most water heaters are “demand” heaters which means only the amount of water needed is heated at the time you need it.

The city seems impervious to energy economics since street lights are ablaze throughout. Huge bill boards along the highway are also lit up advertising all of the things you could buy if your utility bill wasn’t so high.

I am an early to bed early to rise kind of guy but this is not a category recognized by Argentineans. Our arrival at 8:00pm coincides with the end of the work day and dinner is served at 10:00pm. Since we have a bus to catch we have to order takeout empanadas since no respectable restaurant opens until 9:00pm. The take out is delicious and plentiful and our time is quickly passed in a tiny two bedroom apartment that couldn’t be more than 500 square feet in size yet seems to comfortable accommodates a family of four plus cat.