Re: Pc slammed in Whole Earth Review

[Claude Genest <genest@together.net>]

The thing about measuring mere outputs is that it
a)doesn't consider inputs. (time, energy, resources) - How much does your
"superior yield" COST ?!
b) It looks only at the yield of specific things ( corn, potatoes etc.) To
the exclusion of others.

A Food forest by definition will yield less of any one "crop" and by
definition far outyields anything else because of the
food/fiber/fuelwood/forage/mulch etc. Vandana Shiva speaks eloquently on
this, about the number of "weeds" that formerly supplemented a traditional
Indian's farm/diet/livestock and how the green revolution wiped all that out
for the supposed superior yield of a quantifiable monocrop.
Those weeds were never counted, partially cause it was hard to do so,
partially because our cultural bias prohibited us from even seeing them.
When you factor in the total yield and substract the inputs, these systems
far outperform a conventional one and that's plain to see to anyone who
bothers to leave academia behind long enough to walk though the food forest
and see with their own eyes.

I know this isn't the hard numbers you're looking for, and while I agree
that it'd be useful to have some to stick it right back to the bashers, I
also question why we should  "reduce" our  systems to meet the exigencies of
quantification ? 

More to your point:  I was rereading the Manual last night and on page 5
there's that interesting bar graph that shows the transition from
conventional to Permaculture - nice to see all the benefits layed out
graphically - all the usually unconsidered  ecological
( unquantifiable ?)"yields" of  soil building, diversity, wildlife, cleaner
waters etc etc .

"we are clearly looking for the right questions rather than for answers. We
should be alert to rephrase or refute the 'wrong' question." Says Bill on Pg
3.

And on Pg 12 " We can predict only those things we set up to be predictable,
not what we encounter in the real world of living and reactive
processes...... We can find out many things, both living and inorganic by
timing, measuring and observing them....but never enough to understand the
complex actions in even a simple living system.You can hit a nail on the
head, or set up a machine to do so, and get a fairly predictable result. Hit
a dog on the head and it will either dodge, bite back or die, but it will
never react  in the same way again."

Toby, may I suggest as an approach to rebuttal redefining the parameters of
the discussion. This guy's narrow, reductionistic, linear, materialistic
view of yield  IS THE PROBLEM and the very mindset PC seeks to redress !

Focusing on yield has led to a situation that is by any measure not only
unsustainable, but disastrous.
Proof ?
Even the highest yielding ( even by their own $ $ standards)agri-biz farms
are dismal failures as is evidenced by the fact that farmers, having fallen
below 1.5 % of the population have literally fallen off the U.S census. They
no longer exist ! Now how's that for a success story ?

In other words, if  enough is never enough, how can more possibly be better
?

Put another way : if you wanna keep getting what you've been getting, keep
doing what you've been doing.....



Claude



From: Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>
Reply-To: "permaculture" <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2002 12:06:01 -0800
To: "permaculture" <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Subject: Pc slammed in Whole Earth Review


Those of you who can get Whole Earth Review may want to look at the new
Winter 2001 issue. WER sent a copy of Gaia's Garden for review to Greg
Williams, a one-time agroforestry guy who publishes the HortIdeas
newsletter. Turns out Williams absolutely hates permaculture, thinks its
mostly bull (he took one of the first American courses from Bill). Williams
didn't focus too much on my book, but spent a couple thousand words blasting
permaculture, very persuasively. Whole Earth was kind enough to let me reply
in print, and I did my best to address his gripes, but he raised a couple of
very good points (both Greg's piece and mine were cut about 30% by the
editors; the tone of Greg's was originally very nasty and sarcastic, but the
editors removed most of that).

He used some pretty strong language: "The fundamentally misguided ideas of
some permaculturists . . . show signs of polluting the larger culture." It's
unpleasant to see this in a widely respected and influential magazine.

One of Greg's less cogent arguments was that Pc's whole idea of mimicking
mature ecosystems was stupid because immature ecosystems are more productive
than mature ones. This was easy to dispose of, since he missed the
difference between fully mature (senescent, ancient, less productive)
forests and maturing forests (5-200 years old, which Pc seeks to mimic),
which are 2-10 times more productive than meadows or farms.

But his most damning points were about the absence of data, testing, and
experiments with controls to support any of permaculture's claims of being a
superior system to conventional agriculture or gardening. He wrote that he
has never seen "any convincing evidence that temperate zone forest gardens
can do better than meadow gardens at providing useful products." If anyone
ever did measure, he says, the yields of conventional gardens should dwarf
those of forest gardens.

Permaculturists, he writes, "have neglected the scientific approach to
determining the worth of their ideas . . . and instead have argued for and
against particular gardening techniques on the basis of (at best) incomplete
theoretical notions and (at worst) pure intuition. This is worse than
glossing over the details; it is misconstruing the details. . . . It is
completely unacceptable when their claims are made to the general public,
who stand to waste huge amounts of time and money on a (much)
less-than-optimal approach to boosting garden output."

The problem is, it's hard to find data to refute his claims (I did my best,
but to an insider, there may be a faint whiff of the barnyard about some of
my reply). We just don't collect data. What do we answer when a farmer asks,
"How much more money or produce, or less erosion, will your system get me?"
That we just know it works better? Does anyone have any numbers? I've looked
at a lot of Pc sites in North America, and I haven't seen one where people
are measuring yields.

So are we justified in saying that this stuff works? Or is permaculture just
for those, as Williams says, "who do not require optimal solutions to
pressing agricultural and ecological problems"?

If anyone's got any hard numbers, or other reputable data, please share
them. If not, it points to a huge lack in permaculture, and we should get
busy setting up trials and getting reliable data instead of just banking on
Bill's wild claims. Without data, more folks like Williams will erode
permaculture's credibility.

I've also had inquiries from a researcher who wants yield data from
permaculture farms for a thesis. If anyone has these, let me know.

Toby
_____________________________________________
For a look at my new book on ecological gardening,
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, visit
http://www.chelseagreen.com/Garden/GaiasGarden.htm



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