03 Oct “Permaculture 101” Series: Location Is Everything

"Location, Location, Location" … This favorite catch-phrase of real-estate agents could just as well be a permaculture designer's mantra.

Permaculture is a set of design principles and ethics for creating sustainable human environments. In other words, environments that allow people to meet their basic everyday needs (food, water, shelter, energy, transportation, community) sustainably.

A key factor in sustainable design is relative location: Buildings, landscape features, and other elements need to be well-situated relative to one another, so as to maximize beneficial relationships. (Permaculture has been described as "the science of maximizing beneficial relationships.")

So, for example, a housing development based on permaculture principles would be located in easy walking or cycling distance of offices, shops, schools, and natural amenities such as rivers and forests.

An office park would be a pleasant place where employees on their lunch hour could get out into nature, grab a bite to eat, and run errands without getting into their cars. They might not even need to have cars at all.

Mother Earth is a genius of relative location. Nothing goes to waste; one creature's waste provides food for another creature, which is always located right nearby. In permaculture we set out to mimic nature's genius.

In his book Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough describes an "Eco-Industrial Park" in Denmark where the waste from one process becomes the feedstock for another. Surplus heat from a coal plant heats 3,500 homes and a fish farm; sludge from the fish farm is sold as fertilizer. Steam from the powerplant is sold to a chemical manufacturer. The reuse of heat reduces thermal pollution in local waterways. Yet more byproducts of the coal plant are turned into resources: Gypsum is used by a wallboard manufacturer, reducing its need for mining; fly ash is used for road-building.

Although McDonough never mentions the word "permaculture," this setup is an excellent case study of permaculture design principles and ethics applied to an industrial setting.

The use of relative location as a cornerstone of design seems like only good common sense. But access to abundant land and cheap fossil fuels has led us astray from common sense over the last several decades. This is true of the United States in particular.

We grow our crops very far from where we live. We build, or choose, homes so far from our kids' schools that the kids need to travel by motor vehicle to get to class. We put greenhouses out in the middle of fields (rather than adjacent to buildings that could capture the heat and the plant-freshened air). We build bus stations far away from train stations and airports; put convention hotels out in the middle of nowhere — an hour by shuttle from the airport, and not near any shops or services. We build huge roads that connect one non-place to another non-place, with miles of nothing in between. All of this is simply bad design that flies in the face of common sense. And you can find examples of it everywhere you look.

Permaculture is in many ways a return to old-fashioned common sense — with appropriate technology and best practices from other cultures added to the mix.

More and more everyday people are plugging into permaculture these days. As more developers and city planners get permaculture on their radar too, our communities, streets, transportation networks, and public facilities could soon start to become a lot more vibrant and user-friendly in many ways — some old; some new.

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Recommended resources:

A Pattern Language (book by Christopher Alexander and several others). Superb resource for heightening our sensitivity to what makes a space user-friendly; and expanding our sense of possibility in design on all levels from household to city. Retails for about $75; you might find it in your local library. (That said, even after downsizing from several hundred to a couple dozen books, I still choose to keep this one in my personal library.)

Eco-cities (book by Richard Register; very inspiring to all who love cities and cherish nature. Also check out his website ecocitybuilders.org ).

Cradle to Cradle (book by William McDonough). What if a building were designed like a cherry tree? McDonough introduces the important concept of "technological wastestream", and many other useful concepts.

Development Center for Appropriate Technology (organization dedicated to getting the building and zoning codes revised to allow more sustainable and regenerative development) www.dcat.net