Wynton in his element. I am doing an internship at Zaytuna farm, which is located just outside Lismore, New South Wales, Australia. Every day brings something new to learn. This past month I have taken the aid work and teacher training courses. In addition to that there has been two work weeks, but even in the work weeks there is so much to learn. The aid work course was quite inspirational for me. I had never even thought about doing an aid project or even participating in one. But now I see most permaculture projects as aid projects. In its essence permaculture is only a philosophy of design to create a permanent natural culture, but it is so needed everywhere and our planet is so degraded that most permaculture projects quickly become aid projects, whether it’s helping by teaching or restoring a small area of the earth or feeding desperate people. Of course, some places and people need it more than others, but we are all in the same boat; we all share these problems.
Now I should say that the kind of aid work that Geoff Lawton is teaching us to do isn’t the standard aid project. Most aid focuses on giving temporary relief often with items that the people don’t really need or know how to use. Then there are some that try to help people grow food or dig wells but don’t have any concept of the whole system and so the projects fail. We separate people aid and earth aid but they are one and the same. A lot of aid can disempower people and make them dependent on more aid. Geoff gave the example of when he was in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. He found that aid primarily was bringing in huge amounts of wheat and giving everyone American money. What this did was to completely collapse the local economy by completely saturating the market, dis-empowering the farmers, who primarily grew wheat.
Now I should say that the kind of aid work that Geoff Lawton is teaching us to do isn’t the standard aid project. Most aid focuses on giving temporary relief often with items that the people don’t really need or know how to use. Then there are some that try to help people grow food or dig wells but don’t have any concept of the whole system and so the projects fail. We separate people aid and earth aid but they are one and the same. A lot of aid can disempower people and make them dependent on more aid. Geoff gave the example of when he was in Iraq after the U.S. invasion. He found that aid primarily was bringing in huge amounts of wheat and giving everyone American money. What this did was to completely collapse the local economy by completely saturating the market, dis-empowering the farmers, who primarily grew wheat.
Geoff building a mini earthworks dam. Alternatively, permaculture aid functions on the ethics of the care of people, care of the earth and return of surplus. These are fairly self-explanatory but it really means we are looking at issues from all angles so we are soothing the situation at many levels. And then we develop systems that return that surplus, whether its money, kitchen scraps or manure, back into those systems making them sustainable. This means the people will eventually be independent of aid. The focus is on teaching people how to develop sustainable systems and how to use those skills and abilities they were born with productively within that system, not irrelevant conventional farm techniques. Thus people are empowered. Geoff has a plan of implementation of such aid that is called the PRI master plan, the idea of which is to set a plan of installment in order to make it easier and more financially achievable for people to set up permaculture educational institutions. If you want more information check out the www.permaculturenews.org. There is a little video on the home page about it.
The teacher training course was also very educational. I have always been fairly nervous about making presentations but always managed it. Although I am not completely cured of that fear, I am a whole lot more comfortable in front of large groups. Geoff, who I consider to be a master teacher, taught us many teaching techniques. Some of these are as simple as how to effectively utilize a white board or as complex as moving into a new topic by baiting certain students. One of my favorite techniques he showed us was the use of a dirt pile to demonstrate earthworks. This not only shows students in 3-d what damsand swales will look like but also allows them some playful experimentation. I myself had a lot of fun and could have continued for quite a while.
The teacher training course was also very educational. I have always been fairly nervous about making presentations but always managed it. Although I am not completely cured of that fear, I am a whole lot more comfortable in front of large groups. Geoff, who I consider to be a master teacher, taught us many teaching techniques. Some of these are as simple as how to effectively utilize a white board or as complex as moving into a new topic by baiting certain students. One of my favorite techniques he showed us was the use of a dirt pile to demonstrate earthworks. This not only shows students in 3-d what damsand swales will look like but also allows them some playful experimentation. I myself had a lot of fun and could have continued for quite a while.
Another earthworks feature we learned about is gabions, mine is pictured to the right. Gabions are one of the crucial feature elements of dry land landscape water harvesting design. A gabion is a leaky rock dam wall built in a wadi, valley canyon or water flow, at a point where there would be a reasonable amount of water caught if there was a dam wall in the same position, but the gabion instead leaks through the rocks, slowly releasing a steady flow of water and retained moisture over time. As the water is slowed down by a gabion, it drops its sediments, organic materials, behind the rock wall.
Daniel Lawton Besides those two courses we had two shorter courses as well: hand tool construction, maintenance and utility course taught by Daniel Lawton, pictured on the left demonstrating grass clearing using a machete and hook. According to Daniel this grass clearing method is as fast as using a weed wacker.
A swarm we caught We also had a beekeeping course, taught by Tom Kendall, a great teacher from PRI Sunshine Coast, who came for a couple weeks. One of the things we talked about was stingless native bees, which apparently are better for pollination. Tom also suggested alternative bee hive set-ups because as many of you know our honey bees are suffering from multiple ailments. With most modern farming techniques such issues come back to how we treat the plant, whether we allow it to take it’s natural course or impose artificial constraints on it. The standard bee hive has the brood box on bottom and the honey boxes on top. This is backwards to how they form hives in the wild; they put the honey combs below the brood, which apparently lets the bees easily moderate hive temperature. The warre box mimics this aspect, and although it means less honey for us, it means a stronger hive in the long run. The beekeeping course was offsite on a conventional custard apple (atemoya) farm where we learned how to setup and manage a standard bee hive.
In addition to these great courses some pretty cool stuff has been going. We each had to pick an internship project. Mine is training the two horses on the property. Here is one of them. Her name is Shadia and the other is star. They are both doing very well and I’m hoping to be able to ride Shadia before I leave. Also Bill Mollison has come to visit. For those who don't know, he is pretty much the originator of permaculture and has written most of the literature on permaculture. He is a great man and he still has great ideas, even though he is about 83 and has suffered a stroke recently. I really want to hear some of his stories. A hui hou, Wynton
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