November 9, 2017 • 51 mins
Permaculture is a growing trend in the world of farming and home landscaping. It's basically a design principle that emphasizes sustainability and the would-be, natural ecosystem of an area. Simple concepts like planting downhill from a pond and using gravity to feed plants to planting native plants and vegetation that work well together are hallmarks of permaculture. Learn all about this eco-friendly trend today.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chipper, Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry Rowland.
And we're all in great moods everybody, because it's stuff
(00:23):
you should know. Time. Everything else just falls to the
wayside when we record stuff you should know. It's just
it's the reason we love doing it. Still, after a
thousand episodes, do you realize every single listener right now
is thinking why are they in a bad mood? And
why is Josh being so weird? I don't think I'm
being weird? Am I being? Am I overselling it? I
think so? Oh sorry, it makes it sound like we
(00:45):
all three were in a big fist fight and then
Jerry had recorded, right, She's like just jammed to clean
X upper nose to staunch the bleeding. I am recovering
a bit because we just got back from New York City. Dude,
it has been a week. So we did. We did
show a show Sunday, a show Monday, in a show Tuesday,
(01:05):
all sold out at the Bellhouse travel Home Wednesday, and
our recording today Thursday. Yes, and I I just want
to say, there's no way that people will ever hear
Tuesday's episode because it was the filthiest thing we've ever
done on stage. It was seriously, man, I don't know
what got into us. I think it was night three
(01:26):
of three. Uh so that is for the three and
fifty people in that room. Yeah, I hope they enjoyed it.
It was fun. It was fun, and come on out.
Whenever we do a live show, you never know for
this gonna be like this one's not getting released. Let's
just go crazy, you know, especially it was a twenty
one and up show, which is really well, that's why
we for sure why we did it. Yeah, that's what
(01:49):
took the feedbag off, you know. And that is saying
I think so put the feedback on take it off. Yeah,
I guess so. I guess so it's not really but
we'll just pressed forward. How about that. Let's do so, Chuck,
I know that you know this, but not everybody knows this.
I had a personal conversation with one Charles C. Man,
(02:12):
who wrote my favorite book of all time that is correct.
Uh And I was talking to Mr Man and he
has a I was talking to him. I've got a
show coming out on Existential Risks eventually, but um, and
he's going to be in it, and it's just like
interviewed for it. But he has a book coming out
this January and it's called The Wizard and the Prophet.
(02:33):
Have you heard of it? No? But did you just
say that he's going to be uh part of Existential Risks. Yeah,
he's an Interviewee. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's gonna be pretty
I was really psyched to just be able to talk
to him, and even better than that, like you know,
we were kind of rapping for a few minutes beforehand,
and it was just as calm and casual as I
(02:53):
had always like envisioned talking to him that would be. Yeah,
it was a really really neat conversation. But he was
telling me about the book has coming out, The Wizard
and the Profit, and it's basically about him trying to
find out how we can possibly or even if it
is possible, um sustain ten billion people on planet Earth
(03:14):
and not just sustained meaning like you know, keeping him alive,
but how can we do it sustainably? And he goes
back and starts digging in and finds that there's this
long standing head butt between the techno optimists, the people
who are like, well, we humans are smart enough to
invent our way out of any problem, and the people
who are like, no, we need to really like mitigate
(03:38):
a lot of things that we're doing right now to
to make sure that we actually can keep doing this
for the foreseeable future. Uh. And part of it is
on Norman borlog Um, and he is the wizard that's
actually absolutely right there. The profit is a guy named
William voked v O g T. I believe his name,
and he I don't know nearly as much about him
(04:01):
as Norman borlog which is say, I know basically zero
about him, but he's the prophet, so I will know
all about him when the book comes out in January.
I'm psyched about it. But as I was researching this
pull Perma Culture article, I was like, you can really
see that that same head butt, that same push and
pull between people who are saying we need sustainability and
(04:22):
other people are like, we need to feed, you know,
billions and billions of people. And that really comes together
in the debate over perma culture and whether it works
or whether it is just just a pie in the
sky kind of idea. Well, I have a little something
to say. I am a bit of an earth well
(04:42):
not a bit. I'm an urban perma culturist. That's awesome.
We have not in me as like I don't know
much of while I do know about the stuff now
after researching it. But we uh have are redoing our
front and backyards and we hired a perma culture company
to do so. Really, the Perma Culture Pros. That's not
(05:03):
their name, but maybe it should be. Uh yeah, So
we're we're we are like right in the middle of
making our small little piece of Atlanta UM a perma
culture urban permic I know it's hard to say now
that I'm saying it out last an urban perm habitat
if you will herb perm that's right. So I'll be peppering,
(05:26):
you know, little things here and there. I think that
would help a lot because UM perma culture, as it
turns out, and I didn't know really anything about it
until we started researching this. UM it is a wooly idea.
It's tough to pin down, which is really weird because
it's actually a set of design principles meant to grow
(05:49):
food for people in a way that's sustainable and not harmful.
And it basically stands in contradiction of what you would
consider like big modern and agriculture, which is, we grow
one kind of food and we squeeze as much as
we possibly can out of it from the ground we have,
using as much artificial resources as we possibly need to
(06:12):
to increase our yield. Yeah, and that's like people throw
around the word sustainable or unsustainable. Um, and maybe people
sometimes folks don't even stop to think about what that means.
Sustainable or I guess we'll start with unsustainable. That means
that you are you're depleting resources around you, and you're
depending very much on bringing in different resources to make
(06:36):
that thing work. Right, Like you're not just using what's available,
Like that's what sustainable would be. You're using what's available
at all works together to ideally sustain itself without saying, well,
now I need to bring in this thing from where
we're here to make this these acres of corn grow. Yeah,
I've got to go burn a bunch of fossil fuels
(06:57):
to create nitrogen based fertilizer. And uh, it's not going
to attach to the soil very well, so a lot
of it will run off and be wasted, and even worse,
it'll end up in a pond, which will create an
algae bloom which sucks up all of the dissolved oxygen,
which creates a fish kill. That's unsustainable. And and it's
weird because I hadn't really thought about that either, Chuck.
(07:20):
But as growing up, as like kids who were sentiented
in the nineties, you hear unsustainable and it's just basically
in your mind equated with evil, like almost intentionally malicious
acts against the earth, and that's just not necessarily the case.
And that that's another thing about like Norman Borlog the Wizard. Um,
(07:41):
he had the greatest of intentions, but you can also
lay at his feet a lot of the ecological problems
we're facing right now because of agriculture and the agricultural
practices he helped pioneer in order to feed a bunch
of people. So there's this this this tension between unsustainability
and sustainability, but it's also of attention between what's realistic
and what's not. You know, Yeah, it's definitely a little sticky.
(08:04):
It is a little sticky, But permaculture basically is trying
to create like a harmonious, holistic approach to um farming
and whether it be a large farm or like in
my case, like an urban a small urban plot. Uh.
And like I said, well kind of go over both
of those through my lens and then through the larger
(08:26):
ideas of the farm. Um. And it's not like Robert
Lamb wrote this article from stuff to pull your mind.
He did a good job with it. He does, but um,
he does point out that you shouldn't. It doesn't necessarily
mean that you have to go back to caveman days
and like you have to live like tuk tuk and
scavenge the earth. Um. He said, to think of it,
(08:47):
uh in terms of a river, Like you're a boat
floating down a river and you were sustained by that river,
but you are also navigating it as well with your
rudder and if you have to you right now, it
just increased tenfold. That's right. So yeah, it's it's it's
not like just passively taking from the land what it
(09:08):
has to offer. There's still management of it, right, But
but the idea behind that management of it is is
managing the land um in a way that that the
land is happy with you, Like you can walk past
the dog that's just sitting there looking at you, and
maybe you know, give it like a wink or something
like that and keep walking. Um, that's passive. But if
(09:31):
you stop and scratch it behind the ear, you're managing
that dog in a way or something like that. You're
at least interacting with it more and the dog likes it.
You could also walk past the dog and like poking
in the ribs. That's interacting with it in a way
that the dog wouldn't like. Permaculture is the middle one, right,
So you're saying, hey, I want to get something out
of you, like a good feeling, so I'm gonna scratch
(09:52):
it behind the ear earth. And again, like you said,
you're doing that by trying to create a system, whether
it's you're little plot of land or a full scale
industrial sized farm, um, in a way that it has
it's sustainable, meaning it requires as few external inputs as possible.
That's right, But sorry, I just need to point it again.
(10:14):
It's still being managed. It's still being managed by you,
just in a harmonious way. Yeah. I think there's a
word for the other thing where you just just let
everything do its thing, right. Yeah, that's nature. Maybe like
wilding or something or rewilding. Have we talked about that? No,
we did. I'm probably wrong anyway, although we also thought
(10:37):
we didn't do a cat episode, So who knows if
we've talked about it before or not. All right, so
this all goes back to Australia and see you in
September of next year Australia. Yep, right, yep, get get excited.
Oh man, you just sold us a million tickets for
that accent, buddy? Uh in New Zealand, Um, you gotta
(11:01):
you gotta take it better than that. Well, no, I'm
I'm super excited about going to New Zealand. I didn't
want to not mention that, you say in New Zealand.
In New Zealand. Uh So in Australia in the nineteen
seventies there were a couple of dudes named Bill Mollison
and David Holmgren and imagine they were sitting around smoking
a joint one night and in the version that I
(11:23):
have in my head, when they dreamed up the word
perma culture, in which is basically what we've been talking about.
This is just put a word on it. Um actually
two words permanent and agriculture. Good point, and they said,
let's join those up. And he said, and that was it.
That's how I went down. Uh. And it's a self
(11:45):
sustaining alternative to like what you were talking about, which
is mass production of a single crop. And there are
three basic ethics to the perma culture movement. Um, care
for the earth, care for the people, and then setting
limits on population and consumption. Right. And so Mollison, I believe,
was a professor at the time and Homegren was a student,
(12:09):
and they they split within a few years. They had
creative differences. I guess you could kind of call it.
They both like pursued perma culture, but through different ways.
So Mollison is frequently um accused, or was I think
he may have passed um accused of being kind of
a dogmatic, um charismatic, egomaniac maybe where it was like,
(12:34):
it's more way, you're the high way, um, and and
that that extended to even principles of perman culture, right,
like if he said it, it was just that was
just true. Whereas Homegrown apparently took a little more of
a pragmatic approach to studying it, finding out the best practices,
discarding the ones that didn't work. Even if they were
(12:55):
like precious to everybody, including the entire Perma culture movement,
and and movement is actually the right word, because there
is like this definite um well, like Mollison put the
cult in permit culture, you know what I'm saying, Like,
there's definitely an adherency to it that's kind of fervent.
You know that that the whole movement gets criticized for,
(13:18):
rightfully or wrongly, but they they both kind of um.
I think the fact that they did split probably added
to this field even more because there's two different courses
of study or of um thinking about it, at least
um that were able to develop in tandem. Yeah, and
this stuff is nothing new. They didn't intervent this idea
(13:38):
because took took in the gang way back in the
ancient days did things like this. They worked with what
they had. They didn't have four acres of corn. They
had they did forest farming, they had crop rotation, they composted,
they had multiple crops. Uh. And they were not just
out to be leading pioneers and environmentalism. They were that
(14:00):
was just the way you work the earth back then.
And that's a lot of what perman culture is all about.
Is returning to this idea of of just sort of
doing it the smart right way. Uh. And again, this
is probably not going to be the thing that feeds
the world. But that's not to say you can't have
a perman culture movement in farms and urban perman culture
(14:23):
going on. Well, that's one of the things that it
gets criticized about is that people, um who are big
time adherents of perman culture do tend to say, like, uh, yeah,
this is this is what we need to feed the world,
and if we don't do this, then there's not going
to be people around two feed because we're going to
wreck the earth and die from climate change. Yeah. I
(14:45):
get that, but I think I come from the like
reality camp, and you're not going to undo conventional modern farming.
You're not gonna just completely supplant that anymore. It's kind
of too late. I agree with you. I am of
the same mindset. Um. I do think though that you
these practices are most of them should be incorporated as
(15:07):
best as possible. That'd be great. So I think there's
a happy medium between you know, big big time monoculture
agriculture and pure perma culture, just because they're both probably
unsustainable for what we need, which is to feed a
bunch of people in a way that doesn't wreck the earth. Yeah,
(15:28):
I'm with you, man. Should we take a break? All right,
We're gonna take a little, uh, a little pause for
the cause and then come back. That was so corny
and so I'm like a radio dj uh and then
come back and talk about design principles of perman culture
right after this. Okay, you're back, We're back. Are we back?
(16:06):
I'm back. Okay, I'm back to Jerry. You're back. She's back.
She's back. So um, Like I said early on Chuck,
the permaculture is a little it's wooly. It's a wooly idea.
There's so many different definitions of it, and as a result,
it's it's um image kind of suffers in the mind
of rational skeptics. Right. But I did find one um
(16:29):
one definition of it that I thought really got the
whole point across the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally
productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of
natural ecosystems. That's a big one. There's a second half
even it is the harmonious integration of the landscape with
(16:49):
people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and
non material needs in a sustainable way. That is a
great definition. I agree wholeheartedly. And I'm not sure who
the actual person who who said or wrote it was,
because it's it was misattributed to at least three different people.
But regardless, it's a great definition. We should just throw
your name in there too. Sure we'll say I said it.
(17:12):
So you said you brought up the three basic ethics, right,
the care for earth, care for people, and setting limits
on population. I feel like we should kind of go
over those a little in depth, don't you think. Yeah,
care for earth is um it's not just like a
lot of this is about plants, of course, but it's
also animals and insects and how the air moves through
(17:33):
the area and minerals in the earth. Um, And it's
basically respecting all of the things within the ecosystem. How's that?
I think that's great? Care for people right? So basically
that's saying like, um, that there's an importance to community.
It's every person isn't just an island, right, and that
(17:56):
this is a big one too, that access to resources
is a human right and it's easy to take that
for granted. You know where in places where you you
have easy access to um land or water or something
like that, but in places as diverse as Flint, Michigan,
or Central America, they're there the access to good stuff
(18:21):
like water is highly restricted or the water is just
not good. So the idea that everybody should have easy, cheap,
if not free, access to something like clean water is
that's a that's a big one. That's that's kind of
radical in a weird way these days. Yeah. And as
far as the limits on population and consumption, Robert puts
(18:42):
it as recognizing how you have to reinvest money in
surplus labor and energy into caring for the planet. Like
it's it's it takes work. Right, So those are like
the three ethics. That's not how you go permacal ulture.
That's just kind of the basis for the designs to permaculture, right.
(19:06):
And I think, um, you said that this is this
is not new, right, this is something that's been around
for a very long time or these some of these
ideas are the sustainable practices are adopted from like generations
and generations of proven techniques, right, Um, which is pretty
interesting if you ask me. That's another thing too. If
(19:26):
if you if you have not read have you read
fourteen ninety one yet? Oh man, you have to read it.
It talks about this kind of stuff where like they
they from just looking into it, they've and they've found
that there's always sophisticated land management techniques that were just
totally lost the time until um archaeologists started discovering them.
(19:49):
And at first they didn't even realize what they were
looking at, and they'd be like, well, there's a lot
of kind of weird hills in this this area, it's
otherwise pretty flat, and then they realized, oh wait, this
is entire system of berms that used to be planted.
And in between the berms were aquaculture ponds where they
raised fish, and they were just doing all the sophisticated
stuff that no one had any idea. That book is
(20:11):
just all about chasing that stuff down and figuring it out.
So so good, Chuck, one day you'll read it, right
of course. Yeah, So before the break, I promise some
design principles and there are believed like ten of these
in our article. And it breaks down like this, and
this is this is talking about a farm, but we
(20:32):
have incorporated in this company that's come in is incorporating
these most of these same principles within like our place
as small as our backyard, for instance, zones. We have
divided our yard up into zones now, uh, And basically
in the case of a farm, it's a little bit different.
They divide areas into zones based on based on the
(20:53):
and all this stuff. It's just sort of makes sense,
and it's all seems like it would be intuitive and
how tuk tuk would have done it. So it divides
into zones based on like how much attention certain things
need on the farm and what does it require out
of people in the different areas. And so if if
you think of it as a circle, you got your
farm in the center. So obviously the stuff that needed
(21:15):
the most attention would be closest to the center where
the people are. And then as you go out and out, uh,
the activity uh decreases, like the human activity, and things
are allowed like maybe trees to grow a little more wildly. Right, Yeah,
So like the zone is kind of like riffles in
in a pond or something right there, concent concentric circles, yeah,
(21:39):
radiating from the center. And I guess the center is
the actual farmer, in this case your house. Uh yeah, okay,
so that's understandable enough. And then you look into something
called sectors, and that's kind of similar, it seems like,
but it's actually not. With sectors again, the center of
the whole, the whole um permana culture land or whatever,
(22:04):
is the farm where the people live or whatever. And
then the the zone or the sector's radio outwards. So
the whole thing is one big circle around the center,
but this time it's sliced into like like pizza slices.
Basically alright, I'm hungry enough, okay, So but with that,
so that doesn't mean like you do sectors or zones.
(22:27):
These are two different ways of looking at the land
that will overlay one another. Right, And I've seen a
couple of places that recommend if you're setting up a
perma culture farm, you want to spend basically an entire
year doing nothing but observing. Don't plant anything, don't cut
anything down, don't dig a pond, don't do anything like that.
(22:49):
Just observe. Figure out where the sun is at different
parts of the year, where does the wind come from,
where does the water go, um are there pollutants that
come on the property that you need to to you know,
manage where do the animals, Like if there's deer that
come in and eat the eat the garden, like, where
would they be coming from? And so that's what you
(23:11):
base the sectors on. And then that that creates kind
of like this underlying map beneath the zones. Does that
make sense? Yes? Okay? And I got that one right, Yeah,
I think so? Okay. I mean I'm sure a perma
culture expert would say, oh boys, right. Uh. Relative locations
(23:33):
another important part of permaculture. That is basically designing things
and again in a way that makes sense relative to
one another. So the great example that Robert gives is
is planning a crop downhill from a pond. That way,
it's downhill, you don't need to install a pump system.
The whole idea of sustainability and so if you can
(23:54):
have the stuff you need to water downhill from your water,
then you have just created a stable environment. Right, And
that one is um there's a it's an actual design principle.
Like David Holmegrin came up with twelve of them. One
of them was called integrate rather than segregate, and that
one's definitely part of that. That's right. There's also um
(24:16):
having single elements with multiple functions. Right, So going back
to that, like a pond example, um upon also um
not only serves as a source for irrigation, but it's
also a water source for your livestock. And depending on
where you put it, it also acts as a barrier
between your livestock and the edge of your property. So
(24:36):
you don't even need offense because cows aren't going to
swim across the pond. No, you try to find one
doing it, they won't do it. Or a hedge, a
hedge lovely hedge connect as a wind block, things like that,
right or and and it can also like produce seeds
that your chickens eat right right, or shade if you
need shade, right and so all that, I mean that
(24:58):
just makes total sense. Of course you want to do that.
But when you stop and think about the fact that
they don't do this on big modern farms, like this
stuff is not that's just wasted area where you could
be planting more corn, you know what I mean. Yeah,
and they don't do Most people don't think about this
when they're designing their home backyards either they want they
(25:19):
just say this looks pretty. That looks pretty, uh, and
it and it may be laid out in such a
way that it's completely unharmonious and working against each other
at times. Likewise, that thing, Diane, it's so pretty, it's like, well,
it's not. It's not where it should be. Another permit
culture principle that stands in stark opposition to monoculture is
(25:42):
having a single thing um have just one function, or
have okay, a bunch of different things serving as fail
safes to one another. See what I'm saying. So like
that pond um can also provide water, right, so it's
a it's a water reservoir um. But you may also
(26:03):
have rain barrels on site as well. So you have
all these different things serving multiple functions but also serving
backups to the functions that they share with one another.
And again, this is the idea that you're doing this
if you take the time to diversify. Like this is
where the idea that you you shouldn't put all of
(26:24):
your eggs in one basket. It came from the farm.
And this is this pert Like some of these principles
are just getting back to that very simple maxim which
is you have to diversify, and the more you diversify,
the better off you're gonna be. If something befalls, like
if an avian flu wipes out your chicken flock, well,
if all you do is raise chickens, you're ruined. Your
(26:45):
your family is going to start, You're gonna lose all
of your money, and the farm is going to be
taken from you. If chickens are just one part of
a larger holistic farm you have going on, then you
lose your chickens, and that's awful, but you still have
You know you can you can out off a cow's
foot and chew on that for the winter. You know
where the chicken and the eggs in the basket comes from. Right,
(27:08):
Little Bobby Joe going out to get the chicken eggs
one morning, taking one basket, he says, Paul, I got him,
don't don't fret, And then he trips on the way
back and breaks all his eggs, and Pau says, put
all the chicken eggs in one basket. Now, ain't got
no eggs. And then Bobby Joe says, will then Paul
(27:29):
have more kids or get more baskets? That's right, and
that happened in December of eighteen forty two in Georgia.
That's right. Those were my relatives. That was a great ware.
They choc taw no, no, no, this is from the
other side of the family, the other side. Okay, yes,
you can say, the redneck side. Uh. Energy efficiency is
(27:49):
a big deal using energy efficient designs, whether or not
you're straight up using like wind power or solar or
you can just simply, like I said, build in a
way where you have natural wind breaks built in or
places to allow the wind to come through and spread
seed and stuff like that. Right. Uh, My favorite dude
of all is the biological resources, let's hear it. So
(28:13):
it's just basically using nature to help solve the problems
that you have. Right. So Um Mollison one of the
creators of it. What is his first name again, Bill
Bill Mollison. He had a saying you don't have a
snail problem, you have a duck deficiency, which is to
say that that was a great T shirt too. It
was for a little while. It was almost out sold
(28:36):
gas grass or you know, right, Um. But the premise
of it is that if you are over hum with snales,
get more ducks because the ducks are gonna eat the snails.
And it's fine. It's good to have ducks because they
do other stuff too, like they walk around and poop
um all over your property, fertilizing it as they're doing. Right. So, um,
(28:59):
the just to kind of take a take a step
back and look at it like, okay, what how just say,
like what would nature do? That's a great way to
solve your problems through permit culture. Um. Another one is
um using pigs or chickens to till the ground and
to actually rotate where you plant crops every year, and
(29:19):
so this year's pig pen is next year's crop land
because you can move the pigs onto another area and
they'll turn it all muddy and turn it up and
and get it ready for planting, just like they did
for this year's crop land that you're using. Now, pretty
great insects too, Yeah, very big thing to bring in
the right kinds of plants, to attract the right kinds
(29:41):
of insects, to take care of the wrong kinds of insects. Right,
But this raises an issue though too. Um. One of
the criticisms of permit cultures. It's like, well, where you're
gonna bring in those insects from right. So if, for example,
if you order ladybugs online, it can actually be really
bad for the ladybugs that live in your area because
(30:03):
if they are lab raised or farm raised ladybugs, they
very frequently carry a parasite that you're bringing now into
your neighborhood and you can wipe out the existing native
ladybug population. So what do you do? Well? The permit
culture way would be to say, I need to attract
more native ladybugs because I got a FIDS on my
(30:23):
lemon trees. So how do I do that? Well, you
just plant more high pollinating plants like sunflowers and um
voila native ladybugs parasite free. I love it. I didn't
know people about ladybugs online. Yeah, I know that because
I've had a FIDS before I looked into it, he said, Duck,
(30:45):
I got a FIDS in my lemon tree. Shot. Plant
succession is another design principle. UM. If you think about
how land was before people were messing around with it.
In a natural scene, UM, things that just sort of
grow and develop as they as nature intended, and fields
(31:09):
might be barren and then grow into weeds, and that
that that might eventually grow into plants that may eventually
grow into trees, and then what do you know, You
have a forest. Right, So Robert makes the case like
that's apparently the natural progression of a temperate area that
if you leave it alone for long enough, it's going
to turn into a forest. I didn't realize that. I
(31:31):
guess it makes sense. So this is basically saying, well,
how can we how can we do that if that's
the way the plant, if that's the way that the
area wants to be, how can we accommodate that while
also getting um, you know, food food staples from that too. Right.
There's also a nutriment recycling, which is basically composting. And
(31:51):
I was thinking the other day, I don't answer enough
when asked to what my favorite episode is. Composting is
definitely up there. That was a great one. All right,
if you're digging this episode at all, go listen to
composting if you haven't already, it's a good one. Yeah.
And finally, diversity, uh, raising multiple crops um, having different
(32:13):
kinds of animals. Like we said, we've kind of been
beaten up on corn. But that's the ideas and not
have you know, a thousand acres of a thing and
have many different things. So, like you said, the benefits
there if if something comes along that is an illness
to a crop, you're not wiped out completely, right, you know.
(32:34):
So speaking of wiping out, let's take a break for
a second. Okay, are you wiped out? I'm a little
wiped I need to regenerate here. Okay, Okay, we'll be
right back. Okay, we're back. I'm feeling restored. Chuck good, Well,
(33:05):
he took a nap on my shoulder and that always helps.
I got a little jewel on your sleep. Okay. So
when when you're talking about this, like design principles are
great and and good and they are really interesting to me.
I think ecology is incredibly fascinating. Um. But there to
(33:27):
actually feed people, you have to take them into action
and like do something. And people have been trying this
right to varying degrees of success, and more importantly, to
varying degrees of scientific study. Um. I ran across a
professor and I believe the UK, at a place called
Schumacher College. Her name is Bethan Stag and she I
(33:51):
get the impression Schumacher College is a little crunchy. I
think they're the fighting granola just a tad But one
of the things they teaches permaculture, and so Beth and Stagg,
one of the professors there, um basically studied this permaculture
next to traditional like gardening um plots that are the
(34:13):
same size there there like everything's the same, the amount
of wind and rain and sun they're getting. The differences
one is one is cultivated in a through perma culture methods.
The other ones more just like traditional gardening like go
by fertilizer and stuff like. It depends on your definition
of one. Well, which one was lying dead in the
(34:34):
field afterwards the regular gardener. They both got a couple
of good licks in on one another. Ultimately, I think
most people would say that the traditional gardening UM or
the the normal modern gardening method one. The reason why
it one was because for a hundred for every hundred
square meters of land, it yielded thirteen of edible food.
(35:01):
The permit culture one yielded two point three kilograms per
hundred meters. So far far far less food was grown.
But there's a couple of things you got to point
out here. There was also far, far far less time
put into the perman culture plot, because that's one of
the tenants of permit culture is just like like plant
this stuff and then just forget about it. You're not
(35:22):
ever supposed to mess with it again except to harvest stuff.
There's an emphasis on perennials rather than annuals. There's far
less inputs that are meant to be made into it.
It's just supposed to be like a like a little
engine you you build and then start and it just
keeps going forever. So far less time and far less
effort on the permit culture side, so it kind of
(35:43):
wins in that respect, right. But then also there was
over this three year study there were also at least
one year where the weather was really bad, and so
the normal modern gardening suffered as a result, whereas the
perma culture one, which was more diversified I had about
the same yield as the other years. So so they
(36:05):
both won. They're all winners. It's like a soccer game. Yeah,
And I think the idea too, is it's not like
like that's the kind of test that should be carried
out over a hundred years. Almost, Yes, And the whole
point is that though still that perma culture is not like,
they're not saying we will shall create more yield than
any other farm. That's not the whole point. Again, though
(36:27):
it depends on who you talk to. There are definitely
perman culture adherents out there who think that anyone who
doesn't use permacultures, anydiget who's ruining, ruining the planet and
this is the way. No, I'm not saying that. But
are they saying that they can they can provide more
yield the conventional farming. I think if you backed them
into a corner, they would probably hedge that. But I
think that when they're amongst themselves, they may yes, okay
(36:52):
there like you guys, totally no, we can't comp okay,
we just wanna talk about it. Shut up, simon. Um.
So there are people doing this to varying degrees all
over the world. Whether or not is uh. If you
have a full scale permaculture farm, then you are almost
likely to be a pomic perma culture activist. For an educator, um,
(37:17):
it's not something you're doing lightly. You may also be
someone who's like, well, you know, part of my part
of my farm here, I'm doing in in such a
manner part of it. I'm not, um, but there are
things that you can do even at your own home,
like a forest garden. Well that that's like what perma
culture seems to really be best at is is backyard gardening. Yeah,
(37:42):
so tell him about the forest garden because I found
this fascinating. Man. Yeah. I mean, if you've got a
if you have a back lawn that is just a
big grass lawn. Um. And you know, during our grass episode,
we we didn't get preachy, but a lot of people
will say, like, that's the worst thing you can do
is just to have a huge flat thing of grass
(38:03):
as far as what's good for the earth. And that's
a total I mean once in that I think I
remember we talked about that literally being just like an
American creation and the fifties or something. No, it was
than that, Yeah, but yeah, I'm pretty sure it was
pretty American. Yeah. So a forest garden is a food
garden that you build or plant. You build it out
(38:27):
of wood and iron in your backyard to that imitates
a natural forest. So you're trying to sort of replicate
what you might find in that natural setting in your yard. Uh.
And this is gonna, like you said, make things a
little easier on you because you're not gonna have to
rotate crops or till like you normally would. Um, and
(38:49):
everything is just sort of working together. And and Robert
has sort of a four part example for layers, if
you will, starting with trees, which are gonna obviously the
big guts sing in that forest garden. They're gonna eat
most of that sunlight. But they're also gonna let dappled
light through, which can be great growing conditions for certain things. Right. Um,
(39:12):
so the there's you're gonna grow things like blackberries or
leaf lettuce or strawberries. Um, any vines that are shade
loving that there that produce food. But the point of
this is like the tree isn't just like, well, here's
a tree, isn't that great? Um, It's like the tree
also provides stability for the vine to climb up, right,
(39:34):
like you said, it provides shade for these shade loving plants.
And I guess the point. And I didn't really see
anywhere explained why people do this. I know it's like
an ancient technique from um South America, I believe, like
in the Brazilian rainforest it's used to great impact the trees. Yeah,
forest egro forest tree basically is what it's called. But um,
(39:58):
the I did really see what the benefits of it are,
especially if it limits you to shade loving food plants, right,
because there's plenty of food plants out there that don't
love shade. Isn't that correct? Yeah? It, well, I guess
let me talk about what we're doing. So this lady
came in and she's a company owner, and she takes
(40:20):
a look at our yard and she's basically instead of saying, hey,
let's plant a tree that will take twenty years to
grow to provide whatever shade and then go, she's like,
let's let's look at what you got now, because Atlanta
is an urban forest on its own, as you know,
and there are trees everywhere, so we we had existing
trees and stuff, and she basically just sort of looks
(40:43):
at everything, draws up a design, and then comes back
to us and said, here's what we're gonna do. Um.
And that she's working mainly with Emily because this was
sort of her initiative and she knew more about it
than I did. And Emily, it's more of the gardener
in the family. Emily. Yeah, but I was on board,
you know, and I was it in on these meetings,
going this sounds great, this sounds great. Uh. So she
(41:03):
would say, all right, you have shade over here, so
why don't we think about this here, um, like blueberry bushes. Um,
this is where you might want to think about putting
your herbs and downwind from there because of how the
way the wind blows through your yard. You might want
to think about this there. And we can move. Like
we had certain things that we wanted to keep, like
some azaleas and some roses and things, and she was like,
(41:24):
we gotta move those because they're not in the right place.
So we'll put that over here, move this over there,
and then before you know it, she's drawn a schematic
for a sustainable backyard that all works together. And you know,
the the insects from the one plant are close to
the where they need to be to to help kill
(41:44):
insects that affect the other plant. And you know, I wish, I, well,
it's probably great to get too wonky over my yard,
but it just all works together in harmony, and we're
doing it in stages. The main thing, big big change
that we've done, aside from rearranging and planting new things.
Is we got a a cistern finally, so we have
(42:06):
a big huge jeez, I don't even know how many
gallons I want to say, like gallon. No, it's large.
I mean it's as big as that's that's an above
ground swimming pool. I think you're describing. Is it is
that too many gallons? That's a lot. I don't know.
Let's let's say this. It is as big as a
(42:27):
it's like half as big as a Volkswagen Beetle. Wow,
it's large. So this is under our deck, so it's
not an is or anything. Um, all the gutters in
the house, all the water that falls onto our roof
is fed into this cistern. And then that cistern has
pipes that they trenched and they go all underground throughout
(42:49):
the whole yard and just sort of uh leech water
where it needs to be. And then there's also a
couple of pumps. We didn't have spigots in our backyard. Um,
we still don't. It's been awful, you know, we haven't
had a We've had to run like hundreds of feet
of hose every time we wanted to water anything. And
it just feels wasteful anyway, and so we didn't have
(43:10):
backyards pickets. So now we have these two posts with
the little pumps and it's sort of gravity fed in
a way, like if the cistern is full and you
turn that pump on, it'll water will flow some. But
then we have an actual pump installed on the cistern
to where we can actually use a sprinkler if we
want to. But but the the pump is squirrel run
(43:32):
by a hamster wheel, right, and it's it's located in
the the chestnut tree, so it's kind of attract the
squirrels anyway. Now it's sadly it does run an electricity.
I wish it was hooked up to solar, but we're
not that far along yet. That's pretty cool though, Man,
that's a that's a neat pro plane you got. It's
pretty awesome. And guess what we have a swale. Oh,
(43:54):
I was hoping we were going to be able to
talk about sils. Yeah, Robert didn't include this in his article,
but I sent you know a thing on swales, And
we have a swale, which is to say, in the
back right corner of our yard. Now we have a
a tiny pond it's only about five ft across by
five ft across, and it is around and it has
(44:14):
a like a round berm around it, so, uh, you know,
it's like a little hill and a swale. The definition
of a swale it is a is a level ditch
that has dug across whatever site you're in with a
purpose of stopping the flow of water in order to
make the water slowly filter into the land instead of
rushing over it. And the idea there is is that
(44:38):
most people design their yards uh so water won't accumulate
and it will run It's graded in such a way
that water rain water will just run off of it
as quickly as possible. And that's you know, that's very wasteful.
And that's not how the ground. The ground is supposed
to accept the water. I know that sounds so hippy,
but in an ideal situation, the ground x steps the
(45:00):
water into it and it's not dry a day later.
It is actually feeding the ground. And so this swale
now has a has a a runoff from the cistern,
So when the cistern gets too full, the water will
then run out into the swale and just sort of
slowly lead into the ground. Around it, or if we
(45:21):
get just tons of tons of rain, obviously the swale
will collect it and the water will leach it to
the ground around it. That's very cool. That is swale.
It's it is super swale. But it was an important part.
Like when this lady came over, she's like, we gotta
have a swale. Yeah, alright, Like swales are my biggest seller,
and right now it's not the most attractive thing in
the world. But over time we're planning. Instead of grass
(45:44):
and between everything or even maltu, we're doing groundcover. I
can't remember the specific variety, but groundcover or malt are
the two most sustainable ways to treat your yard period. Yeah,
that makes sense because the multiple break down right and
degrade and become nutrients. Yeah. So it's it's pretty neat,
(46:04):
Like we've got a good scene. It's going to be
years in the making. Well that's another thing too. I mean,
like you've got to be very patient with this kind
of stuff. That's great man. Anywhere there are and I'm wondering, um,
you seem to have a pretty realistic approach to perma
culture though, Like you're not going to save the world
with your backyard it sounds like, but it's certainly not
(46:27):
hurting some of the issues that the world is facing
right now. We're just trying to create our own little
sustainable habitat. So there are there are we should mention
some criticisms of perma culture. A lot of criticisms of
perman culture we should say, but um, they you know,
we've kind of hit on a couple of them. But
the big one probably is that it's not rigorously tested
(46:49):
scientifically enough that it's just kind of taken like, oh, yeah,
that that would work intuitively, and then that it's just
left at that in a lot of ways. So there
are people like Beth and Stagg who I mentioned in
other people around the world who are starting to apply
science to these things to say this one works, let's
keep at it. Uh, this one works better if you
(47:10):
do it this way, or this one doesn't work at all,
don't waste your time. Um. And as long as they're
doing that, permaculture deserves any respect it can get because
it really is again intuitively, it makes a lot of sense.
But um, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true in fact,
which is why you got to study that kind of thing. Yeah,
(47:31):
and the other thing that I saw in the Robert's
article that did make sense to me was one of
the criticisms was to Mullissen himself because he apparently had
a stress on bringing in exotic plants. Uh, and that
goes counter to everything that our lady for her company
talked about. She is all about native plans, only native plants.
(47:53):
And Mullison's response was, well, we've already screwed up the
earth so bad that we're not trying to preserve ecosysts
says they are specifically where um, we're trying to make
them better through management. And it's like, um, actually just
contradicted everything you said back in And I think that's
a pretty good example of from what I understand of
(48:15):
that guy. He's like, well, this is what I'm saying now,
so this is true, you know what I mean? That's
just and I've never met him, never heard him speak
anything like that, just from reading about him. That's the
impression that I have. So to the Mules and family, sorry,
if that's not right, Do you have anything else? Got
nothing else? You'll have to come over in in two years,
(48:37):
I'll take you upon you to see it. Now. I've
been waiting for this invitation for ten years twelve total.
All right, Uh, if you want to know more about
permit culture, you can type that word into the search
bar how stuff works. And uh, since I said search bars,
sime for listener mail, I'm gonna call this harrowing story
(48:58):
from a fashion design In turn. Yeah, it's a good one,
and I got her permission. Hey, guys, listen to internships.
I wanted to say thanks for addressing this issue. When
I was in college, I went to work or I
wanted to work in the fashion industry, and the internship
process was very difficult and exploitive. I managed to somehow
get an internship without any connections, which felt nearly impossible,
(49:20):
and worked my first gig for a top designer and
she did not name the designer, and a follow up
email she did, but then said maybe don't read it,
but it's a top designer. And not only was the
internship unpaid and one of the most expensive cities in
the world, but I was also expected to wear an
all black, fashionable wardrobe at all times, so I had
(49:43):
to find housing in New York by all new clothes. Luckily,
my parents were able to help me out there, but
I hated how prohibitive the whole thing was. While I
was with that designer, the Condonast lawsuits were going on,
and I remember people saying the lawsuit was just another
example stereotypical millennial entitlement. That's obviously not the case, because,
(50:04):
as you mentioned, it's a social issue. Because of my internship,
I was able to get more experiences in the fashion
industry and eventually a full time job in New York
after I graduated. Everyone I work with now had unpaid,
fashioned internships, and almost everyone I work with as white,
upper class and from a good school. Unpaid internships have
led to bigger problems and diversity that I think really
(50:26):
have hurt the fashion industry. You always hear about how
retail and department stores are dying. Well, all the companies
are run by old, white, straight dudes, and we lack
a variety of perspectives which prevents innovation. I'm glad I
had internships and I learned a lot, but I think
the internship market really needs to change. So thanks again
for addressing this. With a lot of people listen to
(50:48):
your podcast and reevaluate how they do things at their
own companies. And that's from Gail thanks a lot, Gail,
nice one. Actually, uh, if you want to get in
touch with us, like Gail did, you can tweet to us.
I'm at s Y s K podcast or at Josh M. Clark,
Chuck's at Charles W. Chuck Bryant on Facebook and at
Stuff you Should Know on Facebook. I'm on there too somewhere,
(51:10):
although I'm not sure where. You can send us all
an email, including Jerry J. E. R. I to Stuff
Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and in the meantime,
hang out with us at our home on the web
Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works
(51:30):
dot com
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chipper, Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry Rowland.
And we're all in great moods everybody, because it's stuff
(00:23):
you should know. Time. Everything else just falls to the
wayside when we record stuff you should know. It's just
it's the reason we love doing it. Still, after a
thousand episodes, do you realize every single listener right now
is thinking why are they in a bad mood? And
why is Josh being so weird? I don't think I'm
being weird? Am I being? Am I overselling it? I
think so? Oh sorry, it makes it sound like we
(00:45):
all three were in a big fist fight and then
Jerry had recorded, right, She's like just jammed to clean
X upper nose to staunch the bleeding. I am recovering
a bit because we just got back from New York City. Dude,
it has been a week. So we did. We did
show a show Sunday, a show Monday, in a show Tuesday,
(01:05):
all sold out at the Bellhouse travel Home Wednesday, and
our recording today Thursday. Yes, and I I just want
to say, there's no way that people will ever hear
Tuesday's episode because it was the filthiest thing we've ever
done on stage. It was seriously, man, I don't know
what got into us. I think it was night three
(01:26):
of three. Uh so that is for the three and
fifty people in that room. Yeah, I hope they enjoyed it.
It was fun. It was fun, and come on out.
Whenever we do a live show, you never know for
this gonna be like this one's not getting released. Let's
just go crazy, you know, especially it was a twenty
one and up show, which is really well, that's why
we for sure why we did it. Yeah, that's what
(01:49):
took the feedbag off, you know. And that is saying
I think so put the feedback on take it off. Yeah,
I guess so. I guess so it's not really but
we'll just pressed forward. How about that. Let's do so, Chuck,
I know that you know this, but not everybody knows this.
I had a personal conversation with one Charles C. Man,
(02:12):
who wrote my favorite book of all time that is correct.
Uh And I was talking to Mr Man and he
has a I was talking to him. I've got a
show coming out on Existential Risks eventually, but um, and
he's going to be in it, and it's just like
interviewed for it. But he has a book coming out
this January and it's called The Wizard and the Prophet.
(02:33):
Have you heard of it? No? But did you just
say that he's going to be uh part of Existential Risks. Yeah,
he's an Interviewee. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's gonna be pretty
I was really psyched to just be able to talk
to him, and even better than that, like you know,
we were kind of rapping for a few minutes beforehand,
and it was just as calm and casual as I
(02:53):
had always like envisioned talking to him that would be. Yeah,
it was a really really neat conversation. But he was
telling me about the book has coming out, The Wizard
and the Profit, and it's basically about him trying to
find out how we can possibly or even if it
is possible, um sustain ten billion people on planet Earth
(03:14):
and not just sustained meaning like you know, keeping him alive,
but how can we do it sustainably? And he goes
back and starts digging in and finds that there's this
long standing head butt between the techno optimists, the people
who are like, well, we humans are smart enough to
invent our way out of any problem, and the people
who are like, no, we need to really like mitigate
(03:38):
a lot of things that we're doing right now to
to make sure that we actually can keep doing this
for the foreseeable future. Uh. And part of it is
on Norman borlog Um, and he is the wizard that's
actually absolutely right there. The profit is a guy named
William voked v O g T. I believe his name,
and he I don't know nearly as much about him
(04:01):
as Norman borlog which is say, I know basically zero
about him, but he's the prophet, so I will know
all about him when the book comes out in January.
I'm psyched about it. But as I was researching this
pull Perma Culture article, I was like, you can really
see that that same head butt, that same push and
pull between people who are saying we need sustainability and
(04:22):
other people are like, we need to feed, you know,
billions and billions of people. And that really comes together
in the debate over perma culture and whether it works
or whether it is just just a pie in the
sky kind of idea. Well, I have a little something
to say. I am a bit of an earth well
(04:42):
not a bit. I'm an urban perma culturist. That's awesome.
We have not in me as like I don't know
much of while I do know about the stuff now
after researching it. But we uh have are redoing our
front and backyards and we hired a perma culture company
to do so. Really, the Perma Culture Pros. That's not
(05:03):
their name, but maybe it should be. Uh yeah, So
we're we're we are like right in the middle of
making our small little piece of Atlanta UM a perma
culture urban permic I know it's hard to say now
that I'm saying it out last an urban perm habitat
if you will herb perm that's right. So I'll be peppering,
(05:26):
you know, little things here and there. I think that
would help a lot because UM perma culture, as it
turns out, and I didn't know really anything about it
until we started researching this. UM it is a wooly idea.
It's tough to pin down, which is really weird because
it's actually a set of design principles meant to grow
(05:49):
food for people in a way that's sustainable and not harmful.
And it basically stands in contradiction of what you would
consider like big modern and agriculture, which is, we grow
one kind of food and we squeeze as much as
we possibly can out of it from the ground we have,
using as much artificial resources as we possibly need to
(06:12):
to increase our yield. Yeah, and that's like people throw
around the word sustainable or unsustainable. Um, and maybe people
sometimes folks don't even stop to think about what that means.
Sustainable or I guess we'll start with unsustainable. That means
that you are you're depleting resources around you, and you're
depending very much on bringing in different resources to make
(06:36):
that thing work. Right, Like you're not just using what's available,
Like that's what sustainable would be. You're using what's available
at all works together to ideally sustain itself without saying, well,
now I need to bring in this thing from where
we're here to make this these acres of corn grow. Yeah,
I've got to go burn a bunch of fossil fuels
(06:57):
to create nitrogen based fertilizer. And uh, it's not going
to attach to the soil very well, so a lot
of it will run off and be wasted, and even worse,
it'll end up in a pond, which will create an
algae bloom which sucks up all of the dissolved oxygen,
which creates a fish kill. That's unsustainable. And and it's
weird because I hadn't really thought about that either, Chuck.
(07:20):
But as growing up, as like kids who were sentiented
in the nineties, you hear unsustainable and it's just basically
in your mind equated with evil, like almost intentionally malicious
acts against the earth, and that's just not necessarily the case.
And that that's another thing about like Norman Borlog the Wizard. Um,
(07:41):
he had the greatest of intentions, but you can also
lay at his feet a lot of the ecological problems
we're facing right now because of agriculture and the agricultural
practices he helped pioneer in order to feed a bunch
of people. So there's this this this tension between unsustainability
and sustainability, but it's also of attention between what's realistic
and what's not. You know, Yeah, it's definitely a little sticky.
(08:04):
It is a little sticky, But permaculture basically is trying
to create like a harmonious, holistic approach to um farming
and whether it be a large farm or like in
my case, like an urban a small urban plot. Uh.
And like I said, well kind of go over both
of those through my lens and then through the larger
(08:26):
ideas of the farm. Um. And it's not like Robert
Lamb wrote this article from stuff to pull your mind.
He did a good job with it. He does, but um,
he does point out that you shouldn't. It doesn't necessarily
mean that you have to go back to caveman days
and like you have to live like tuk tuk and
scavenge the earth. Um. He said, to think of it,
(08:47):
uh in terms of a river, Like you're a boat
floating down a river and you were sustained by that river,
but you are also navigating it as well with your
rudder and if you have to you right now, it
just increased tenfold. That's right. So yeah, it's it's it's
not like just passively taking from the land what it
(09:08):
has to offer. There's still management of it, right, But
but the idea behind that management of it is is
managing the land um in a way that that the
land is happy with you, Like you can walk past
the dog that's just sitting there looking at you, and
maybe you know, give it like a wink or something
like that and keep walking. Um, that's passive. But if
(09:31):
you stop and scratch it behind the ear, you're managing
that dog in a way or something like that. You're
at least interacting with it more and the dog likes it.
You could also walk past the dog and like poking
in the ribs. That's interacting with it in a way
that the dog wouldn't like. Permaculture is the middle one, right,
So you're saying, hey, I want to get something out
of you, like a good feeling, so I'm gonna scratch
(09:52):
it behind the ear earth. And again, like you said,
you're doing that by trying to create a system, whether
it's you're little plot of land or a full scale
industrial sized farm, um, in a way that it has
it's sustainable, meaning it requires as few external inputs as possible.
That's right, But sorry, I just need to point it again.
(10:14):
It's still being managed. It's still being managed by you,
just in a harmonious way. Yeah. I think there's a
word for the other thing where you just just let
everything do its thing, right. Yeah, that's nature. Maybe like
wilding or something or rewilding. Have we talked about that? No,
we did. I'm probably wrong anyway, although we also thought
(10:37):
we didn't do a cat episode, So who knows if
we've talked about it before or not. All right, so
this all goes back to Australia and see you in
September of next year Australia. Yep, right, yep, get get excited.
Oh man, you just sold us a million tickets for
that accent, buddy? Uh in New Zealand, Um, you gotta
(11:01):
you gotta take it better than that. Well, no, I'm
I'm super excited about going to New Zealand. I didn't
want to not mention that, you say in New Zealand.
In New Zealand. Uh So in Australia in the nineteen
seventies there were a couple of dudes named Bill Mollison
and David Holmgren and imagine they were sitting around smoking
a joint one night and in the version that I
(11:23):
have in my head, when they dreamed up the word
perma culture, in which is basically what we've been talking about.
This is just put a word on it. Um actually
two words permanent and agriculture. Good point, and they said,
let's join those up. And he said, and that was it.
That's how I went down. Uh. And it's a self
(11:45):
sustaining alternative to like what you were talking about, which
is mass production of a single crop. And there are
three basic ethics to the perma culture movement. Um, care
for the earth, care for the people, and then setting
limits on population and consumption. Right. And so Mollison, I believe,
was a professor at the time and Homegren was a student,
(12:09):
and they they split within a few years. They had
creative differences. I guess you could kind of call it.
They both like pursued perma culture, but through different ways.
So Mollison is frequently um accused, or was I think
he may have passed um accused of being kind of
a dogmatic, um charismatic, egomaniac maybe where it was like,
(12:34):
it's more way, you're the high way, um, and and
that that extended to even principles of perman culture, right,
like if he said it, it was just that was
just true. Whereas Homegrown apparently took a little more of
a pragmatic approach to studying it, finding out the best practices,
discarding the ones that didn't work. Even if they were
(12:55):
like precious to everybody, including the entire Perma culture movement,
and and movement is actually the right word, because there
is like this definite um well, like Mollison put the
cult in permit culture, you know what I'm saying, Like,
there's definitely an adherency to it that's kind of fervent.
You know that that the whole movement gets criticized for,
(13:18):
rightfully or wrongly, but they they both kind of um.
I think the fact that they did split probably added
to this field even more because there's two different courses
of study or of um thinking about it, at least
um that were able to develop in tandem. Yeah, and
this stuff is nothing new. They didn't intervent this idea
(13:38):
because took took in the gang way back in the
ancient days did things like this. They worked with what
they had. They didn't have four acres of corn. They
had they did forest farming, they had crop rotation, they composted,
they had multiple crops. Uh. And they were not just
out to be leading pioneers and environmentalism. They were that
(14:00):
was just the way you work the earth back then.
And that's a lot of what perman culture is all about.
Is returning to this idea of of just sort of
doing it the smart right way. Uh. And again, this
is probably not going to be the thing that feeds
the world. But that's not to say you can't have
a perman culture movement in farms and urban perman culture
(14:23):
going on. Well, that's one of the things that it
gets criticized about is that people, um who are big
time adherents of perman culture do tend to say, like, uh, yeah,
this is this is what we need to feed the world,
and if we don't do this, then there's not going
to be people around two feed because we're going to
wreck the earth and die from climate change. Yeah. I
(14:45):
get that, but I think I come from the like
reality camp, and you're not going to undo conventional modern farming.
You're not gonna just completely supplant that anymore. It's kind
of too late. I agree with you. I am of
the same mindset. Um. I do think though that you
these practices are most of them should be incorporated as
(15:07):
best as possible. That'd be great. So I think there's
a happy medium between you know, big big time monoculture
agriculture and pure perma culture, just because they're both probably
unsustainable for what we need, which is to feed a
bunch of people in a way that doesn't wreck the earth. Yeah,
(15:28):
I'm with you, man. Should we take a break? All right,
We're gonna take a little, uh, a little pause for
the cause and then come back. That was so corny
and so I'm like a radio dj uh and then
come back and talk about design principles of perman culture
right after this. Okay, you're back, We're back. Are we back?
(16:06):
I'm back. Okay, I'm back to Jerry. You're back. She's back.
She's back. So um, Like I said early on Chuck,
the permaculture is a little it's wooly. It's a wooly idea.
There's so many different definitions of it, and as a result,
it's it's um image kind of suffers in the mind
of rational skeptics. Right. But I did find one um
(16:29):
one definition of it that I thought really got the
whole point across the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally
productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of
natural ecosystems. That's a big one. There's a second half
even it is the harmonious integration of the landscape with
(16:49):
people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and
non material needs in a sustainable way. That is a
great definition. I agree wholeheartedly. And I'm not sure who
the actual person who who said or wrote it was,
because it's it was misattributed to at least three different people.
But regardless, it's a great definition. We should just throw
your name in there too. Sure we'll say I said it.
(17:12):
So you said you brought up the three basic ethics, right,
the care for earth, care for people, and setting limits
on population. I feel like we should kind of go
over those a little in depth, don't you think. Yeah,
care for earth is um it's not just like a
lot of this is about plants, of course, but it's
also animals and insects and how the air moves through
(17:33):
the area and minerals in the earth. Um, And it's
basically respecting all of the things within the ecosystem. How's that?
I think that's great? Care for people right? So basically
that's saying like, um, that there's an importance to community.
It's every person isn't just an island, right, and that
(17:56):
this is a big one too, that access to resources
is a human right and it's easy to take that
for granted. You know where in places where you you
have easy access to um land or water or something
like that, but in places as diverse as Flint, Michigan,
or Central America, they're there the access to good stuff
(18:21):
like water is highly restricted or the water is just
not good. So the idea that everybody should have easy, cheap,
if not free, access to something like clean water is
that's a that's a big one. That's that's kind of
radical in a weird way these days. Yeah. And as
far as the limits on population and consumption, Robert puts
(18:42):
it as recognizing how you have to reinvest money in
surplus labor and energy into caring for the planet. Like
it's it's it takes work. Right, So those are like
the three ethics. That's not how you go permacal ulture.
That's just kind of the basis for the designs to permaculture, right.
(19:06):
And I think, um, you said that this is this
is not new, right, this is something that's been around
for a very long time or these some of these
ideas are the sustainable practices are adopted from like generations
and generations of proven techniques, right, Um, which is pretty
interesting if you ask me. That's another thing too. If
(19:26):
if you if you have not read have you read
fourteen ninety one yet? Oh man, you have to read it.
It talks about this kind of stuff where like they
they from just looking into it, they've and they've found
that there's always sophisticated land management techniques that were just
totally lost the time until um archaeologists started discovering them.
(19:49):
And at first they didn't even realize what they were
looking at, and they'd be like, well, there's a lot
of kind of weird hills in this this area, it's
otherwise pretty flat, and then they realized, oh wait, this
is entire system of berms that used to be planted.
And in between the berms were aquaculture ponds where they
raised fish, and they were just doing all the sophisticated
stuff that no one had any idea. That book is
(20:11):
just all about chasing that stuff down and figuring it out.
So so good, Chuck, one day you'll read it, right
of course. Yeah, So before the break, I promise some
design principles and there are believed like ten of these
in our article. And it breaks down like this, and
this is this is talking about a farm, but we
(20:32):
have incorporated in this company that's come in is incorporating
these most of these same principles within like our place
as small as our backyard, for instance, zones. We have
divided our yard up into zones now, uh, And basically
in the case of a farm, it's a little bit different.
They divide areas into zones based on based on the
(20:53):
and all this stuff. It's just sort of makes sense,
and it's all seems like it would be intuitive and
how tuk tuk would have done it. So it divides
into zones based on like how much attention certain things
need on the farm and what does it require out
of people in the different areas. And so if if
you think of it as a circle, you got your
farm in the center. So obviously the stuff that needed
(21:15):
the most attention would be closest to the center where
the people are. And then as you go out and out, uh,
the activity uh decreases, like the human activity, and things
are allowed like maybe trees to grow a little more wildly. Right, Yeah,
So like the zone is kind of like riffles in
in a pond or something right there, concent concentric circles, yeah,
(21:39):
radiating from the center. And I guess the center is
the actual farmer, in this case your house. Uh yeah, okay,
so that's understandable enough. And then you look into something
called sectors, and that's kind of similar, it seems like,
but it's actually not. With sectors again, the center of
the whole, the whole um permana culture land or whatever,
(22:04):
is the farm where the people live or whatever. And
then the the zone or the sector's radio outwards. So
the whole thing is one big circle around the center,
but this time it's sliced into like like pizza slices.
Basically alright, I'm hungry enough, okay, So but with that,
so that doesn't mean like you do sectors or zones.
(22:27):
These are two different ways of looking at the land
that will overlay one another. Right, And I've seen a
couple of places that recommend if you're setting up a
perma culture farm, you want to spend basically an entire
year doing nothing but observing. Don't plant anything, don't cut
anything down, don't dig a pond, don't do anything like that.
(22:49):
Just observe. Figure out where the sun is at different
parts of the year, where does the wind come from,
where does the water go, um are there pollutants that
come on the property that you need to to you know,
manage where do the animals, Like if there's deer that
come in and eat the eat the garden, like, where
would they be coming from? And so that's what you
(23:11):
base the sectors on. And then that that creates kind
of like this underlying map beneath the zones. Does that
make sense? Yes? Okay? And I got that one right, Yeah,
I think so? Okay. I mean I'm sure a perma
culture expert would say, oh boys, right. Uh. Relative locations
(23:33):
another important part of permaculture. That is basically designing things
and again in a way that makes sense relative to
one another. So the great example that Robert gives is
is planning a crop downhill from a pond. That way,
it's downhill, you don't need to install a pump system.
The whole idea of sustainability and so if you can
(23:54):
have the stuff you need to water downhill from your water,
then you have just created a stable environment. Right, And
that one is um there's a it's an actual design principle.
Like David Holmegrin came up with twelve of them. One
of them was called integrate rather than segregate, and that
one's definitely part of that. That's right. There's also um
(24:16):
having single elements with multiple functions. Right, So going back
to that, like a pond example, um upon also um
not only serves as a source for irrigation, but it's
also a water source for your livestock. And depending on
where you put it, it also acts as a barrier
between your livestock and the edge of your property. So
(24:36):
you don't even need offense because cows aren't going to
swim across the pond. No, you try to find one
doing it, they won't do it. Or a hedge, a
hedge lovely hedge connect as a wind block, things like that,
right or and and it can also like produce seeds
that your chickens eat right right, or shade if you
need shade, right and so all that, I mean that
(24:58):
just makes total sense. Of course you want to do that.
But when you stop and think about the fact that
they don't do this on big modern farms, like this
stuff is not that's just wasted area where you could
be planting more corn, you know what I mean. Yeah,
and they don't do Most people don't think about this
when they're designing their home backyards either they want they
(25:19):
just say this looks pretty. That looks pretty, uh, and
it and it may be laid out in such a
way that it's completely unharmonious and working against each other
at times. Likewise, that thing, Diane, it's so pretty, it's like, well,
it's not. It's not where it should be. Another permit
culture principle that stands in stark opposition to monoculture is
(25:42):
having a single thing um have just one function, or
have okay, a bunch of different things serving as fail
safes to one another. See what I'm saying. So like
that pond um can also provide water, right, so it's
a it's a water reservoir um. But you may also
(26:03):
have rain barrels on site as well. So you have
all these different things serving multiple functions but also serving
backups to the functions that they share with one another.
And again, this is the idea that you're doing this
if you take the time to diversify. Like this is
where the idea that you you shouldn't put all of
(26:24):
your eggs in one basket. It came from the farm.
And this is this pert Like some of these principles
are just getting back to that very simple maxim which
is you have to diversify, and the more you diversify,
the better off you're gonna be. If something befalls, like
if an avian flu wipes out your chicken flock, well,
if all you do is raise chickens, you're ruined. Your
(26:45):
your family is going to start, You're gonna lose all
of your money, and the farm is going to be
taken from you. If chickens are just one part of
a larger holistic farm you have going on, then you
lose your chickens, and that's awful, but you still have
You know you can you can out off a cow's
foot and chew on that for the winter. You know
where the chicken and the eggs in the basket comes from. Right,
(27:08):
Little Bobby Joe going out to get the chicken eggs
one morning, taking one basket, he says, Paul, I got him,
don't don't fret, And then he trips on the way
back and breaks all his eggs, and Pau says, put
all the chicken eggs in one basket. Now, ain't got
no eggs. And then Bobby Joe says, will then Paul
(27:29):
have more kids or get more baskets? That's right, and
that happened in December of eighteen forty two in Georgia.
That's right. Those were my relatives. That was a great ware.
They choc taw no, no, no, this is from the
other side of the family, the other side. Okay, yes,
you can say, the redneck side. Uh. Energy efficiency is
(27:49):
a big deal using energy efficient designs, whether or not
you're straight up using like wind power or solar or
you can just simply, like I said, build in a
way where you have natural wind breaks built in or
places to allow the wind to come through and spread
seed and stuff like that. Right. Uh, My favorite dude
of all is the biological resources, let's hear it. So
(28:13):
it's just basically using nature to help solve the problems
that you have. Right. So Um Mollison one of the
creators of it. What is his first name again, Bill
Bill Mollison. He had a saying you don't have a
snail problem, you have a duck deficiency, which is to
say that that was a great T shirt too. It
was for a little while. It was almost out sold
(28:36):
gas grass or you know, right, Um. But the premise
of it is that if you are over hum with snales,
get more ducks because the ducks are gonna eat the snails.
And it's fine. It's good to have ducks because they
do other stuff too, like they walk around and poop
um all over your property, fertilizing it as they're doing. Right. So, um,
(28:59):
the just to kind of take a take a step
back and look at it like, okay, what how just say,
like what would nature do? That's a great way to
solve your problems through permit culture. Um. Another one is
um using pigs or chickens to till the ground and
to actually rotate where you plant crops every year, and
(29:19):
so this year's pig pen is next year's crop land
because you can move the pigs onto another area and
they'll turn it all muddy and turn it up and
and get it ready for planting, just like they did
for this year's crop land that you're using. Now, pretty
great insects too, Yeah, very big thing to bring in
the right kinds of plants, to attract the right kinds
(29:41):
of insects, to take care of the wrong kinds of insects. Right,
But this raises an issue though too. Um. One of
the criticisms of permit cultures. It's like, well, where you're
gonna bring in those insects from right. So if, for example,
if you order ladybugs online, it can actually be really
bad for the ladybugs that live in your area because
(30:03):
if they are lab raised or farm raised ladybugs, they
very frequently carry a parasite that you're bringing now into
your neighborhood and you can wipe out the existing native
ladybug population. So what do you do? Well? The permit
culture way would be to say, I need to attract
more native ladybugs because I got a FIDS on my
(30:23):
lemon trees. So how do I do that? Well, you
just plant more high pollinating plants like sunflowers and um
voila native ladybugs parasite free. I love it. I didn't
know people about ladybugs online. Yeah, I know that because
I've had a FIDS before I looked into it, he said, Duck,
(30:45):
I got a FIDS in my lemon tree. Shot. Plant
succession is another design principle. UM. If you think about
how land was before people were messing around with it.
In a natural scene, UM, things that just sort of
grow and develop as they as nature intended, and fields
(31:09):
might be barren and then grow into weeds, and that
that that might eventually grow into plants that may eventually
grow into trees, and then what do you know, You
have a forest. Right, So Robert makes the case like
that's apparently the natural progression of a temperate area that
if you leave it alone for long enough, it's going
to turn into a forest. I didn't realize that. I
(31:31):
guess it makes sense. So this is basically saying, well,
how can we how can we do that if that's
the way the plant, if that's the way that the
area wants to be, how can we accommodate that while
also getting um, you know, food food staples from that too. Right.
There's also a nutriment recycling, which is basically composting. And
(31:51):
I was thinking the other day, I don't answer enough
when asked to what my favorite episode is. Composting is
definitely up there. That was a great one. All right,
if you're digging this episode at all, go listen to
composting if you haven't already, it's a good one. Yeah.
And finally, diversity, uh, raising multiple crops um, having different
(32:13):
kinds of animals. Like we said, we've kind of been
beaten up on corn. But that's the ideas and not
have you know, a thousand acres of a thing and
have many different things. So, like you said, the benefits
there if if something comes along that is an illness
to a crop, you're not wiped out completely, right, you know.
(32:34):
So speaking of wiping out, let's take a break for
a second. Okay, are you wiped out? I'm a little
wiped I need to regenerate here. Okay, Okay, we'll be
right back. Okay, we're back. I'm feeling restored. Chuck good, Well,
(33:05):
he took a nap on my shoulder and that always helps.
I got a little jewel on your sleep. Okay. So
when when you're talking about this, like design principles are
great and and good and they are really interesting to me.
I think ecology is incredibly fascinating. Um. But there to
(33:27):
actually feed people, you have to take them into action
and like do something. And people have been trying this
right to varying degrees of success, and more importantly, to
varying degrees of scientific study. Um. I ran across a
professor and I believe the UK, at a place called
Schumacher College. Her name is Bethan Stag and she I
(33:51):
get the impression Schumacher College is a little crunchy. I
think they're the fighting granola just a tad But one
of the things they teaches permaculture, and so Beth and Stagg,
one of the professors there, um basically studied this permaculture
next to traditional like gardening um plots that are the
(34:13):
same size there there like everything's the same, the amount
of wind and rain and sun they're getting. The differences
one is one is cultivated in a through perma culture methods.
The other ones more just like traditional gardening like go
by fertilizer and stuff like. It depends on your definition
of one. Well, which one was lying dead in the
(34:34):
field afterwards the regular gardener. They both got a couple
of good licks in on one another. Ultimately, I think
most people would say that the traditional gardening UM or
the the normal modern gardening method one. The reason why
it one was because for a hundred for every hundred
square meters of land, it yielded thirteen of edible food.
(35:01):
The permit culture one yielded two point three kilograms per
hundred meters. So far far far less food was grown.
But there's a couple of things you got to point
out here. There was also far, far far less time
put into the perman culture plot, because that's one of
the tenants of permit culture is just like like plant
this stuff and then just forget about it. You're not
(35:22):
ever supposed to mess with it again except to harvest stuff.
There's an emphasis on perennials rather than annuals. There's far
less inputs that are meant to be made into it.
It's just supposed to be like a like a little
engine you you build and then start and it just
keeps going forever. So far less time and far less
effort on the permit culture side, so it kind of
(35:43):
wins in that respect, right. But then also there was
over this three year study there were also at least
one year where the weather was really bad, and so
the normal modern gardening suffered as a result, whereas the
perma culture one, which was more diversified I had about
the same yield as the other years. So so they
(36:05):
both won. They're all winners. It's like a soccer game. Yeah,
And I think the idea too, is it's not like
like that's the kind of test that should be carried
out over a hundred years. Almost, Yes, And the whole
point is that though still that perma culture is not like,
they're not saying we will shall create more yield than
any other farm. That's not the whole point. Again, though
(36:27):
it depends on who you talk to. There are definitely
perman culture adherents out there who think that anyone who
doesn't use permacultures, anydiget who's ruining, ruining the planet and
this is the way. No, I'm not saying that. But
are they saying that they can they can provide more
yield the conventional farming. I think if you backed them
into a corner, they would probably hedge that. But I
think that when they're amongst themselves, they may yes, okay
(36:52):
there like you guys, totally no, we can't comp okay,
we just wanna talk about it. Shut up, simon. Um.
So there are people doing this to varying degrees all
over the world. Whether or not is uh. If you
have a full scale permaculture farm, then you are almost
likely to be a pomic perma culture activist. For an educator, um,
(37:17):
it's not something you're doing lightly. You may also be
someone who's like, well, you know, part of my part
of my farm here, I'm doing in in such a
manner part of it. I'm not, um, but there are
things that you can do even at your own home,
like a forest garden. Well that that's like what perma
culture seems to really be best at is is backyard gardening. Yeah,
(37:42):
so tell him about the forest garden because I found
this fascinating. Man. Yeah. I mean, if you've got a
if you have a back lawn that is just a
big grass lawn. Um. And you know, during our grass episode,
we we didn't get preachy, but a lot of people
will say, like, that's the worst thing you can do
is just to have a huge flat thing of grass
(38:03):
as far as what's good for the earth. And that's
a total I mean once in that I think I
remember we talked about that literally being just like an
American creation and the fifties or something. No, it was
than that, Yeah, but yeah, I'm pretty sure it was
pretty American. Yeah. So a forest garden is a food
garden that you build or plant. You build it out
(38:27):
of wood and iron in your backyard to that imitates
a natural forest. So you're trying to sort of replicate
what you might find in that natural setting in your yard. Uh.
And this is gonna, like you said, make things a
little easier on you because you're not gonna have to
rotate crops or till like you normally would. Um, and
(38:49):
everything is just sort of working together. And and Robert
has sort of a four part example for layers, if
you will, starting with trees, which are gonna obviously the
big guts sing in that forest garden. They're gonna eat
most of that sunlight. But they're also gonna let dappled
light through, which can be great growing conditions for certain things. Right. Um,
(39:12):
so the there's you're gonna grow things like blackberries or
leaf lettuce or strawberries. Um, any vines that are shade
loving that there that produce food. But the point of
this is like the tree isn't just like, well, here's
a tree, isn't that great? Um, It's like the tree
also provides stability for the vine to climb up, right,
(39:34):
like you said, it provides shade for these shade loving plants.
And I guess the point. And I didn't really see
anywhere explained why people do this. I know it's like
an ancient technique from um South America, I believe, like
in the Brazilian rainforest it's used to great impact the trees. Yeah,
forest egro forest tree basically is what it's called. But um,
(39:58):
the I did really see what the benefits of it are,
especially if it limits you to shade loving food plants, right,
because there's plenty of food plants out there that don't
love shade. Isn't that correct? Yeah? It, well, I guess
let me talk about what we're doing. So this lady
came in and she's a company owner, and she takes
(40:20):
a look at our yard and she's basically instead of saying, hey,
let's plant a tree that will take twenty years to
grow to provide whatever shade and then go, she's like,
let's let's look at what you got now, because Atlanta
is an urban forest on its own, as you know,
and there are trees everywhere, so we we had existing
trees and stuff, and she basically just sort of looks
(40:43):
at everything, draws up a design, and then comes back
to us and said, here's what we're gonna do. Um.
And that she's working mainly with Emily because this was
sort of her initiative and she knew more about it
than I did. And Emily, it's more of the gardener
in the family. Emily. Yeah, but I was on board,
you know, and I was it in on these meetings,
going this sounds great, this sounds great. Uh. So she
(41:03):
would say, all right, you have shade over here, so
why don't we think about this here, um, like blueberry bushes. Um,
this is where you might want to think about putting
your herbs and downwind from there because of how the
way the wind blows through your yard. You might want
to think about this there. And we can move. Like
we had certain things that we wanted to keep, like
some azaleas and some roses and things, and she was like,
(41:24):
we gotta move those because they're not in the right place.
So we'll put that over here, move this over there,
and then before you know it, she's drawn a schematic
for a sustainable backyard that all works together. And you know,
the the insects from the one plant are close to
the where they need to be to to help kill
(41:44):
insects that affect the other plant. And you know, I wish, I, well,
it's probably great to get too wonky over my yard,
but it just all works together in harmony, and we're
doing it in stages. The main thing, big big change
that we've done, aside from rearranging and planting new things.
Is we got a a cistern finally, so we have
(42:06):
a big huge jeez, I don't even know how many
gallons I want to say, like gallon. No, it's large.
I mean it's as big as that's that's an above
ground swimming pool. I think you're describing. Is it is
that too many gallons? That's a lot. I don't know.
Let's let's say this. It is as big as a
(42:27):
it's like half as big as a Volkswagen Beetle. Wow,
it's large. So this is under our deck, so it's
not an is or anything. Um, all the gutters in
the house, all the water that falls onto our roof
is fed into this cistern. And then that cistern has
pipes that they trenched and they go all underground throughout
(42:49):
the whole yard and just sort of uh leech water
where it needs to be. And then there's also a
couple of pumps. We didn't have spigots in our backyard. Um,
we still don't. It's been awful, you know, we haven't
had a We've had to run like hundreds of feet
of hose every time we wanted to water anything. And
it just feels wasteful anyway, and so we didn't have
(43:10):
backyards pickets. So now we have these two posts with
the little pumps and it's sort of gravity fed in
a way, like if the cistern is full and you
turn that pump on, it'll water will flow some. But
then we have an actual pump installed on the cistern
to where we can actually use a sprinkler if we
want to. But but the the pump is squirrel run
(43:32):
by a hamster wheel, right, and it's it's located in
the the chestnut tree, so it's kind of attract the
squirrels anyway. Now it's sadly it does run an electricity.
I wish it was hooked up to solar, but we're
not that far along yet. That's pretty cool though, Man,
that's a that's a neat pro plane you got. It's
pretty awesome. And guess what we have a swale. Oh,
(43:54):
I was hoping we were going to be able to
talk about sils. Yeah, Robert didn't include this in his article,
but I sent you know a thing on swales, And
we have a swale, which is to say, in the
back right corner of our yard. Now we have a
a tiny pond it's only about five ft across by
five ft across, and it is around and it has
(44:14):
a like a round berm around it, so, uh, you know,
it's like a little hill and a swale. The definition
of a swale it is a is a level ditch
that has dug across whatever site you're in with a
purpose of stopping the flow of water in order to
make the water slowly filter into the land instead of
rushing over it. And the idea there is is that
(44:38):
most people design their yards uh so water won't accumulate
and it will run It's graded in such a way
that water rain water will just run off of it
as quickly as possible. And that's you know, that's very wasteful.
And that's not how the ground. The ground is supposed
to accept the water. I know that sounds so hippy,
but in an ideal situation, the ground x steps the
(45:00):
water into it and it's not dry a day later.
It is actually feeding the ground. And so this swale
now has a has a a runoff from the cistern,
So when the cistern gets too full, the water will
then run out into the swale and just sort of
slowly lead into the ground. Around it, or if we
(45:21):
get just tons of tons of rain, obviously the swale
will collect it and the water will leach it to
the ground around it. That's very cool. That is swale.
It's it is super swale. But it was an important part.
Like when this lady came over, she's like, we gotta
have a swale. Yeah, alright, Like swales are my biggest seller,
and right now it's not the most attractive thing in
the world. But over time we're planning. Instead of grass
(45:44):
and between everything or even maltu, we're doing groundcover. I
can't remember the specific variety, but groundcover or malt are
the two most sustainable ways to treat your yard period. Yeah,
that makes sense because the multiple break down right and
degrade and become nutrients. Yeah. So it's it's pretty neat,
(46:04):
Like we've got a good scene. It's going to be
years in the making. Well that's another thing too. I mean,
like you've got to be very patient with this kind
of stuff. That's great man. Anywhere there are and I'm wondering, um,
you seem to have a pretty realistic approach to perma
culture though, Like you're not going to save the world
with your backyard it sounds like, but it's certainly not
(46:27):
hurting some of the issues that the world is facing
right now. We're just trying to create our own little
sustainable habitat. So there are there are we should mention
some criticisms of perma culture. A lot of criticisms of
perman culture we should say, but um, they you know,
we've kind of hit on a couple of them. But
the big one probably is that it's not rigorously tested
(46:49):
scientifically enough that it's just kind of taken like, oh, yeah,
that that would work intuitively, and then that it's just
left at that in a lot of ways. So there
are people like Beth and Stagg who I mentioned in
other people around the world who are starting to apply
science to these things to say this one works, let's
keep at it. Uh, this one works better if you
(47:10):
do it this way, or this one doesn't work at all,
don't waste your time. Um. And as long as they're
doing that, permaculture deserves any respect it can get because
it really is again intuitively, it makes a lot of sense.
But um, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true in fact,
which is why you got to study that kind of thing. Yeah,
(47:31):
and the other thing that I saw in the Robert's
article that did make sense to me was one of
the criticisms was to Mullissen himself because he apparently had
a stress on bringing in exotic plants. Uh, and that
goes counter to everything that our lady for her company
talked about. She is all about native plans, only native plants.
(47:53):
And Mullison's response was, well, we've already screwed up the
earth so bad that we're not trying to preserve ecosysts
says they are specifically where um, we're trying to make
them better through management. And it's like, um, actually just
contradicted everything you said back in And I think that's
a pretty good example of from what I understand of
(48:15):
that guy. He's like, well, this is what I'm saying now,
so this is true, you know what I mean? That's
just and I've never met him, never heard him speak
anything like that, just from reading about him. That's the
impression that I have. So to the Mules and family, sorry,
if that's not right, Do you have anything else? Got
nothing else? You'll have to come over in in two years,
(48:37):
I'll take you upon you to see it. Now. I've
been waiting for this invitation for ten years twelve total.
All right, Uh, if you want to know more about
permit culture, you can type that word into the search
bar how stuff works. And uh, since I said search bars,
sime for listener mail, I'm gonna call this harrowing story
(48:58):
from a fashion design In turn. Yeah, it's a good one,
and I got her permission. Hey, guys, listen to internships.
I wanted to say thanks for addressing this issue. When
I was in college, I went to work or I
wanted to work in the fashion industry, and the internship
process was very difficult and exploitive. I managed to somehow
get an internship without any connections, which felt nearly impossible,
(49:20):
and worked my first gig for a top designer and
she did not name the designer, and a follow up
email she did, but then said maybe don't read it,
but it's a top designer. And not only was the
internship unpaid and one of the most expensive cities in
the world, but I was also expected to wear an
all black, fashionable wardrobe at all times, so I had
(49:43):
to find housing in New York by all new clothes. Luckily,
my parents were able to help me out there, but
I hated how prohibitive the whole thing was. While I
was with that designer, the Condonast lawsuits were going on,
and I remember people saying the lawsuit was just another
example stereotypical millennial entitlement. That's obviously not the case, because,
(50:04):
as you mentioned, it's a social issue. Because of my internship,
I was able to get more experiences in the fashion
industry and eventually a full time job in New York
after I graduated. Everyone I work with now had unpaid,
fashioned internships, and almost everyone I work with as white,
upper class and from a good school. Unpaid internships have
led to bigger problems and diversity that I think really
(50:26):
have hurt the fashion industry. You always hear about how
retail and department stores are dying. Well, all the companies
are run by old, white, straight dudes, and we lack
a variety of perspectives which prevents innovation. I'm glad I
had internships and I learned a lot, but I think
the internship market really needs to change. So thanks again
for addressing this. With a lot of people listen to
(50:48):
your podcast and reevaluate how they do things at their
own companies. And that's from Gail thanks a lot, Gail,
nice one. Actually, uh, if you want to get in
touch with us, like Gail did, you can tweet to us.
I'm at s Y s K podcast or at Josh M. Clark,
Chuck's at Charles W. Chuck Bryant on Facebook and at
Stuff you Should Know on Facebook. I'm on there too somewhere,
(51:10):
although I'm not sure where. You can send us all
an email, including Jerry J. E. R. I to Stuff
Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and in the meantime,
hang out with us at our home on the web
Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works
(51:30):
dot com
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.