Gardening Resources Courtesy of Sylvan Garden

Most of us don’t think of garden equipment as causing much air pollution, but the small engines found in lawn mowers, leaf blowers and weed wackers are actually a significant source of smog.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are 89 million pieces of lawn and garden equipment in the United States with engines rated at 25 horsepower or less.

Garden equipment engines emit high levels of carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides, producing up to 5% of the nation’s air pollution and a good deal more in many metropolitan areas.

A typical 3.5 horsepower gas mower, for instance, can emit the same amount of VOCs—key precursors to smog—in an hour as a new car driven 340 miles, say industry experts. To top it off, lawn and garden equipment users inadvertently add to the problem by spilling 17 million gallons of fuel each year while refilling their outdoor power equipment. That’s more petroleum than spilled by the Exxon Valdez in the Gulf of Alaska.

The solution is to turn back the clock. The push or reel mower first originated in England in the 1830s. It was the standard for all homeowners before rotary power mowers were introduced after World War II.

Push mowers available today are light weight at only 16 to 30 pounds versus the 40 to 60 pound models of our grandparents’ generation and feature metal handles instead of wood. Ideal for cutting small lawns, they are quiet, stored easily and require no fuel.

Reel lawn mowers yield greener grass because of the clean and even cut, according to Dick Crum of Purdue University’s Cooperative Extension Service. ‘Grass clippings should remain on the lawn to serve as a mulch and prevent evaporation while keeping the ground cooler,’ said Crum. ‘With a reel mower, you can leave the clippings on the lawn, which adds up to one free application of fertilizer.’

Horticulturist Joe Keyser with the Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection in Rockville, Md., agrees, saying that the clippings left by these human-powered machines are good for the lawn, eliminating bags of green waste disposal at the local landfill.

‘Mulching clippings into the lawn, on average, saves 25% to 30% of the time spent with conventional mowing,’ says Keyser. ‘Most mowing time is spent dumping clippings and dragging around plastic bags. Returning clippings to the soil’s surface increases biological activity and helps earth worms till the soil below the surface, supporting drainage. And mulching saves resources and conserves water.’

Since Keyser started a major grass recycling program in Beltsville, Md., in 1994, 27,000 tons of grass has been kept from the local waste stream and are now left on lawns. ‘I’m a fan of gas-powered rotary mulching mowers,’ added Keyser, ‘but I think it’s crazy for anyone with a lawn less than 7,000 square feet to cut it with anything but a push mower.’ ¹

Organic Fertilizers & Pest & Weed Control

Sylvan Garden uses no synthetic chemical pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers. Keep reading to find out a bit more about the reasons for our decision to go the organic route.

Pesticides of any kind, whether a food pesticide or home-use pesticide, are poisons designed to kill living things. Two of the most dangerous classes of insecticides—organophosphate (OP) and carbamate chemicals used as both food pesticides and home pesticides—disrupt the nervous system of insects, leading to death. Unfortunately, these nerve-damaging, or neurotoxic, chemicals work exactly the same way in mammals, including pets and humans.¹ What is more, synthetic chemicals & their haphazard application can cause serious damage to the populations of beneficial species.

Organic pesticides are usually considered as those pesticides that come from natural sources. These natural sources are usually plants, as is the case with pyrethrum (pyrethins), rotenone or ryania (botanical insecticides), or minerals, such as boric acid, cryolite, or diatomaceous earth. Organic pesticides are largely insecticides.

Biopesticides are an important group of pesticides that can reduce pesticide risks. Biopesticides, in general:

Microbial insecticides are one kind of biopesticide. They come from bacteria, fungi, algae, viruses or protozoans. They suppress pests by:

An example of a microbial pesticide is Bacillus thuringiensis, or “Bt.” Bacillus thuringiensis is a naturally occurring soil bacteria that is toxic to the larvae of several species of insects but not toxic to nontarget organisms. Bacillus thuringiensis can be applied to plant foliage. Bacillus thuringiensis, as discovered, is toxic to the caterpillars (larvae) of moths and butterflies. Several strains of Bt have been developed and now strains are available that control fly larvae. These can be used in controlling mosquitoes and blackflies.²

When considering organic pest control, natural pesticides are not the only option. One of the most elegant & effective means of controlling garden pests is the use of beneficial organisms.

Attracting and maintaining a population of beneficial insects are important to managing insect pests in your garden with a minimum of pesticide sprays. Tiny parasitoid wasps are aggressive beyond their size when it comes to pursuing aphids and caterpillars. Lacewing larvae and ladybug larvae and adults make inroads on aphid populations. Ground beetles prey on a variety of ground-dwelling pests.

These various beneficial insects consume large numbers of pest insects, but their diets are not limited to other insects. In fact, many of the beneficial species have periods in their life cycles when they survive only on nectar and pollen. Therefore, planting a variety of insectary plants will ensure an adequate supply of nutrients to keep beneficial insects going strong. Insectary plants also include those plants that provide shelter for beneficial insects, another critical requirement.

At one time, hedge rows that separated one field or garden from the next provided an ample supply of insectary plants to feed and shelter a variety of beneficial insects. The wide variety of plants in a hedge row, including small trees and shrubs as well as perennial and annual weeds, typically leaf out and bloom earlier than most crop plants, providing beneficial insects with an early food supply.

Most gardens today are too small for a hedge row. An alternative is to plant a border of dwarf fruit and flowering trees mixed with flowering shrubs and perennials. Such a border could be a landscape feature and screen the vegetable garden from view. At the same time, it would provide many of the benefits of the traditional hedge row.

Plan an insectary border for successive bloom from early spring through fall, providing nectar throughout the season. This will not only satisfy the needs of many beneficial insects, but also provide color in the garden. Avoid vigorous chemical control of pests found in the insectary border; after all, you don’t want to kill beneficial insects. Also, any pests in the border may become hosts for beneficial insects should prey levels be low in the garden you are trying to protect.

Including plants of different heights can be very important. Ground beetles require the cover provided by low-growing plants. Lacewings lay their eggs in shady, protected areas, so providing such places near crop plants is a good idea.

Selective weeding can encourage beneficial insects by leaving potential food sources in the garden. Allowing certain volunteers to remain in the garden is somewhat like random companion planting. Just know what weeds or volunteers are helpful. Not all blooms are equal—large, nectar-filled blooms actually can drown tiny parasitoid wasps. Tiny flowers produced in large quantity are much more valuable than a single, large bloom.

Many members of the Apiaceae (formerly known as Umbelliferae) family are excellent insectary plants. Fennel, angelica, coriander, dill, and wild carrot all provide in great number the tiny flowers required by parasitoid wasps. Various clovers, yarrow, and rue also attract parasitoid and predatory insects. Low-growing plants, such as thyme, rosemary, or mint, provide shelter for ground beetles and other beneficial insects. Composite flowers (daisy and chamomile) and mints (spearmint, peppermint, or catnip) will attract predatory wasps, hover flies, and robber flies. The wasps will catch caterpillars and grubs to feed their young, while the predatory and parasitoid flies attack many kinds of insects, including leafhoppers and caterpillars.

Of course, you also may plant species that are not noted for harboring beneficial insects. There is no rule that says an insectary border must be limited to insectary plants.³

The same things that are true of pest control are true of weed control. Synthetic herbicides toxicify the soil, harming beneficial organisms that help to maintain the health of the soil, thereby further abetting weed growth & weakening the overall condition of your garden.

Weeds are simply plants growing in places you don’t want them to—plants that you consider undesirable, but that insist on growing in your garden anyway.

Weed seeds exist in the soil of all gardens and can be spread by wind, water, animals and even by the soil amendments we use to help our gardens grow. Here are some ideas to consider for organic weed control:

There are some basic assumptions about growing plants by which the horticultural community has operated. We first assumed that plant nutrition is a relatively easy process. That if we add chemicals at the right time, the right place and in the right amount, we can supply all the nutrients plants require and at the rates plants require them. However, we were wrong. Our second assumption was that we understood plant nutrition well enough to supply these needs. We know now that plants are much more complex than we originally thought.

We had presumed that plant growth requirements were placing just enough nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium for the whole of a plant’s growth in the soil at one or a few times. We had forgotten that plants require many other nutrients throughout their growth cycle. Before we decided that we had plant nutrition figured out, plants thrived without our help for millions of years. We started selectively breeding plants for more color, more fruit, bigger and more abundant flowers, etc. for our benefit. Plant physiology and plant nutrition did not change through this process.

Plants obtain almost all of their nutrients through the help of beneficial organisms working in the soil around the plant’s roots. This is referred to as the “soil foodweb.” These organisms are beneficial by supplying nutrients in plant-ready form, retain nutrients in the soil and not allowing them to leach, compete with, inhibit and consume disease causing and plant parasitic organisms, decompose plant residue, toxic materials and pollutants that kill plant roots, form soil aggregates that improve water infiltration, root penetration and the water-holding capacity of soil and improve plant quality and increase the nutritional and aesthetic value of plants through the above listed benefits.

So what are beneficial organisms? This group comprises certain bacteria, fungi, root-feeding nematodes and arthropod herbivores. Fixing bacteria and fungi immobilize nitrogen, potassium, sulfur, calcium, magnesium and other soil nutrients in their own biomass. Once nutrients are immobilized, they are transferred into plant-available forms through the process of mineralization. This allows the plants to take in these nutrients at the time and place they need it. All of these compete with pathogens for food. In doing this they either inhibit or kill off the pathogens, lessening the potential for plant injury caused by diseases. Also, the beneficial organisms influence soil structure by helping to produce soil aggregates, soil pores and channels. These aid in root penetration and water infiltration.

If the beneficial organisms are killed, we lose these benefits. Pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers (with a high salt index) can directly impact their populations. Generally, all organisms, beneficial or pathogenic are affected. However, there are some basic differences in their makeup which can hurt the beneficial organisms even more. Pathogens tend to have short life cycles (they usually kill their hosts), produce many offspring (increased odds at finding a host) and have a wide genetic variability (so a response to a change in the host’s defenses can be overcome). Pathogens can adapt quickly to their environments and can develop a resistance to chemicals. On the other hand, beneficial organisms don’t work the same way. They have long, complex life cycles, have fewer offspring to compete for food and the habitats they prefer get divided among other competing organisms. They need time to recover from chemicals. Their defense is to compete. When pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers are used in small amounts with applications spread out, they are not very detrimental. Beneficial organisms require time to return and control pathogens.

We also need to understand the effects of cultivation on the soil. Every time the soil is disturbed during cultivation, some of the soil aggregates are broken allowing for organic matter to mix. This allows for bacteria to predominate, as compared to fungi. This tends to drive the soil pH more alkaline. As bacteria dominate the major form of nitrogen will be nitrate due to the nitrifying bacteria. Nutrients will be pulled from the soil by the turf not being replaced. This will start to reduce the bacterial populations. With reduced numbers of fungi and bacteria, the cycling of nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, magnesium, etc. drops. Traditionally, these nutrients are replaced by manures, organic fertilizers, and compost.

Once synthetic fertilizers became available, they were easier to spread and had more concentrated nitrogen. The response was reliable and everything seemed to go well for the plants and the microorganisms. However, we assumed that ‘if a little is good, more is better.’ Fertilizers in high concentrations started killing the beneficial microorganisms due to salt content. Salt removes water from a microorganism causing death. Once synthetics were increased and natural fertilizers were decreased, there was a downward spiral in soil health. Organic matter decreased and all populations of all beneficial organisms began to decline. Our dependency on synthetics increased. The more fertilizer used, the more beneficial, pest suppressive organisms died and damage to plants increased.

Next came quick fix petroleum-based pesticides. These helped control insect pests, fungal diseases and weeds. However, we don’t know what the long term effects of these products are on the soil. We do know these products stay in the soil, so pesticide resistance can develop in the pathogens. Natural biological control was lost due to these applications. Beneficials were killed off along with pathogens. Next, methyl bromide came along. Through continued applications of methyl bromide on crops and plants, there are now resistant strains of fungal diseases, nematodes and insects. Methyl bromide totally wipes out the soil foodweb. There are no beneficial organisms left in the soil to retain nutrients. Excess fertilizer cannot be retained in the soil causing yet another problem with leaching into the groundwater.

How can we get soil health back and reestablish the soil foodweb? Diversity in the food resources provides for a diversity in beneficial organisms. Use of organic materials is the easiest way to build up a population of beneficial organisms and to strengthen them. They naturally will compete with pathogens, and in most cases, will win. There may be times a chemical pesticide or fungicide may need to be used in moderation. We need to pay more attention to beneficial organisms in the soil and reduce our dependence on synthetic, short-lived solutions to turf health. When the foodweb is in balance, the plants will fully utilize nutrients available in the soil and ultimately, the plant will become the best it can be.⁵

Permaculture

Permcuulture is a notoriously hard concept to pin down. But this interview with Bill Mollison, the father of the philosophy, offers an excellent insight into what it is all about.

Permaculture: Design for Living
Permaculture is more than a new way of gardening—it’s a sustainable way to live on planet Earth
an Interview with Bill Mollison, by Alan AtKisson

Bill Mollison is a living legend. He’s known as the genius of permaculture, “the David Brower of Australia,” or a crusty old curmudgeon, depending on the source. But whether it’s glowing admiration or sneering dismissal, reaction to Mollison is invariably strong. He is clearly one of the most interesting specimens of the human species—which he has spent years studying from a naturalist’s behavioral perspective.

He passed through Seattle recently with a film crew shooting a documentary about the far-flung successes of permaculture, a radically new (or, some have said, radically old) way of gardening, designing, and living sustainably by cooperating with nature. Ironically, we met in a downtown hotel room—filled with traffic noise—as we stalked a definition of permaculture and considered the eeriness of modern life. For a more detailed exploration, see Mollison’s book Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual, available for $34.95 (plus $3 shipping) from Permaculture Drylands, PO Box 27371, Tucson, AZ 85726, 602/824-3465.

Alan: Permaculture is a slippery idea to me. But from what I read, it seems that not even those who actually do permaculture really know what it is.

Bill: I’m certain I don’t know what permaculture is. That’s what I like about it—it’s not dogmatic. But you’ve got to say it’s about the only organized system of design that ever was. And that makes it extremely eerie.

Bill: There’s no other book about design for living. Don’t you think that’s eerie? I mean, how can we possibly expect to survive if we don’t design what we’re doing to be bearable?

Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don’t just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong. For example, if you let people loose in a landscape and tell them to choose a house site, half of them will go sit on the ridges where they’ll die in the next fire, or where you can’t get water to them. Or they’ll sit in all the dam sites. Or they’ll sit in all the places that will perish in the next big wind.

but then, at least half of every city is wrong. From latitude 30 degrees to latitude 60, say, you’ve got to have the long axis of the house facing the sun. If the land is cut up into squares, that makes half of all houses wrong if they face the road. Even houses way in the country, and way off the road, face the bloody road. And from there, you just go wronger all the way.

One of the great rules of design is do something basic right. Then everything gets much more right of itself. But if you do something basic wrong—if you make what I call a Type 1 Error—you can get nothing else right.

Alan: When you say “we,” do you mean humans in general, or Western humans especially?

Bill: Human beings in general. There are a few societies that show signs of having been very rational about the physics of construction and the physics of real life. Some of the old middle-Eastern societies had downdraft systems over whole cities, and passive, rapid-evaporation ice-making systems. They were rational people using good physical principles to make themselves comfortable without additional sources of energy.

But most modern homes are simply uninhabitable without electricity—you couldn’t flush the toilet without it. It’s a huge dependency situation. A house should look after itself—as the weather heats up the house cools down, as the weather cools down the house heats up. It’s simple stuff, you know? We’ve known how to do it for a long time.

Bill: And that we don’t design the garden to assist the house is much more eerie. That we don’t design agriculture to be sustainable is totally eerie. We design it to be a disaster, and of course, we get a disaster.

Alan: Let’s get back to permaculture. What’s your current best definition of it?

Bill: You could say it’s a rational man’s approach to not shitting in his bed.

But if you’re an optimist, you could say it’s an attempt to actually create a Garden of Eden. Or, if you’re a scientist, you could liken it to a miraculous wardrobe in which you can hang garments of any science or any art and find they’re always harmonious with, and in relation to, that which is already hanging there. It’s a framework that never ceases to move, but that will accept information from anywhere.

It’s hard to get your mind around it—I can’t. I guess I would know more about permaculture than most people, and I can’t define it. It’s multi-dimensional—chaos theory was inevitably involved in it from the beginning.

You see, if you’re dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can’t connect them. We don’t have any power of creation—we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.

Alan: This reminds me of John Todd and his work with artificial ecosystem assembly.

Bill: There are lots of words for it these days. But the day I brought out my first book, Permaculture One, there was no word for it, though that’s what it means: artificial ecosystem assembly. I would agree with anyone who said that if Permaculture had to be written, I wasn’t the person to write it. I’m sure the John Todds and Hunter Lovinses of this world would have done a far better job than I. But it had to be written by somebody sooner or later, and historically it was just bad luck that it was me.

Bill: I’d come into town from the bush—after 28 years of field work in natural systems—and become an academic. So I turned my attention to humans, much as I had to possums in the forests. Humans were my study animal now—I set up night watches on them, and I made phonograms of the noises they make. I studied their cries, and their contact calls, and their alarm signals. I never listened to what they were saying—I watched what they were doing, which is really the exact opposite of the Freuds and Jungs and Adlers.

I soon got to know my animal fairly well—and I found out that it didn’t matter what they were saying. What they were doing was very interesting, but it had no relation whatsoever to either what they were saying, or what questions they could answer about what they were doing. No relationship. Anyone who ever studied mankind by listening to them was self-deluded. The first thing they should have done was to answer the question, “Can they report to you correctly on their behavior?” And the answer is, “No, the poor bastards cannot.”

Then I sort of pulled out for a while in 1972—I cut a hole in the bush, built a barn and a house and planted a garden—gave up on humanity. I was disgusted with the stupidity of the University, the research institutions, the whole thing.

When the idea of permaculture came to me, it was like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I couldn’t write it down fast enough. Once you’ve said to yourself, “But I’m not using my physics in my house,” or “I’m not using my ecology in my garden, I’ve never applied it to what I do,” it’s like something physical moves inside your brain. Suddenly you say, “If I did apply what I know to how I live, that would be miraculous!” Then the whole thing unrolls like one great carpet. Undo one knot, and the whole thing just rolls downhill.

Alan: At this point, permaculture is not just a way of designing things—it’s a movement. What have you started?

Bill: Well, anything that’s any good is self-perpetuating. I’ve started something I can no longer understand—it’s out of control from the word go. People do things which I find quite amazing—things I would never have done and can’t understand very well.

For example, one of the people I had trained in 1983, Janet McKinsey, disappeared with a friend into the bush—two women with children. They decided they could cut down their needs a lot, and they made a very scientific study of how to do that in their own houses. They’ve now started something called “Home Options for Preservation of the Environment”—HOPE.

They point out, for example, that there are only four things in all cleaners—whether it’s shampoo, laundry detergent, whatever.You buy them in bulk and you mix them up properly, and they all work. It doesn’t matter if they call the stuff ecologically friendly or have dolphins diving around on the label—it still has these damn four things in it. Anything else is just unnecessary additions to make it smell good or color it blue when it goes down the toilet.

Bill: Oh, I don’t know what you call it. But they got there after a permaculture course. When they first came to town—Benala, in Australia—and lectured, all the women of the town said, “Oh this is marvelous, we’ll all do it!” The women started to order these bulk canisters—so then the shops in the town had to change, because they couldn’t sell them that other crap anymore. Then the Council had to change, to institute recycling.

So the women—and women spend the money of society on its goods—examined every item they bought in relation to its energy use and its necessity, and just eliminated those that were energy expensive and unnecessary. Simply by women learning exactly what to buy and how to buy, the whole thing can be brought back to sanity. That’s spreading like mad—like every good idea does.

So my students are constantly amazing me. Here’s another story: I gave one permaculture course in Botswana, and now my students are out in the bloody desert in Namibia teaching Bushmen—whose language nobody can speak—to be very good permaculture people.

Bill: Gardening. Because the Bushmen can no longer go with the game, and the game have been killed by the fences put up by the European Commission to grow beef. Just like the Australian Aborigine, 63% of what they used to live off is extinct, and the rest is rare now. You can’t live like a Bushman or an Aborigine anymore, so they’ve got to rethink the whole basis of how they’re going to live. Permaculture helps you do that easily.

Alan: So permaculture seems to be as much a change in perception as anything else—a change in where one begins to look at things from.

Bill: I think that’s right. For me, having suffered through a Western education, it was a shift from passive learning—you know, “this is how books say things are”—to something active. It’s saying (and this is a horrifying thought for university people) that instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.

Now, they may teach sophisticated physics at the university. But they go home to a domestic environment which can only be described as demented in its use of energy. They can’t see that, and that blindness is appalling.

Why is it that we don’t build human settlements that will feed themselves, and fuel themselves, and catch their own water, when any human settlement could do that easily? When it’s a trivial thing to do?

Bill: Well, I don’t call that wealth. You want a definition of wealth from Eskimos, the Inuit? Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world. I think Americans are so poor it’s pitiful, because you don’t understand the natural world at all.

Alan: If you want to do permaculture, and there isn’t a teacher around, where do you start?

Alan: I read somewhere that you’ve said, “You start with your nose, then your hands . . . .”

Bill: “. . . your back door, your doorstep”—you get all that right, then everything is right. If all that’s wrong, nothing can ever be right. Say you’re working for a big overseas aid organization. You can’t leave home in a Mercedes Benz, travel 80 kilometers to work in a great concrete structure where there are diesel engines thundering in the basement just to keep it cool enough for you to work in, and plan mud huts for Africa! You can’t get the mud huts right if you haven’t got things right where you are. You’ve got to get things right, working for you, and then go and say what that is.

Bill: Oh, I put it another way. I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher. But I could never teach people to be philosophers—and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don’t grow their own vegetables, in fact they’re not deep ecologists—they’re my enemies.

But if you get someone who looks after himself and those around him—like Scott Nearing, or Masanobu Fukuoka—that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand. People like that don’t poison things, they don’t ruin things, they don’t lose soils, they don’t build things they can’t sustain.

Alan: Everything you’ve done suggests that turning around and going another direction is really not that hard.

Bill: I think mine is a very rich life. I probably lead a very spoiled life, because I travel from people interested in permaculture to people interested in permaculture. Some of them are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so on. I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they’re all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.

Alan: Permaculture involves tampering with nature, but how far do you think we should go? Should we be doing genetic engineering, creating hybrids, etc.?

Bill: The important thing is not to do any agriculture whatsoever, and particularly to make the modern agricultural sciences a forbidden area—they’re worse than witchcraft, really. The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor. “Should we tamper with nature?” is no longer a question—we’ve tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.

If you let the world roll on the way it’s rolling, you’re voting for death. I’m not voting for death. The extinction rate is so huge now, we’re to the stage where we’ve got to set up recombinant ecologies. There are no longer enough species left, anywhere, to hold the system together. We have to let nature put what’s left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.

At the same time, anything that’s left that’s remotely like wilderness should be left strictly alone. We have no business there any more. It’s not going to save you to go in and cut the last old-stand forests. You should never have gotten to the stage where you could see the last ancient forests! Just get out of there right now, because the lessons you need to learn are there. That’s the last place you’ll find those lessons readable.

Alan: How has permaculture been received? What do reviewers say about your books, for example?

Bill: The first time I saw a review of one of my permaculture books was three years after I first started writing on it. The review started with, “Permaculture Two is a seditious book.” And I said, “At last someone understands what permaculture’s about.” We have to rethink how we’re going to live on this earth—stop talking about the fact that we’ve got to have agriculture, we’ve got to have exports, because all that is the death of us. Permaculture challenges what we’re doing and thinking—and to that extent it’s sedition.

People question me coming through the American frontier these days. They ask, “What’s your occupation?” I say, “I’m just a simple gardener.” And that is deeply seditious. If you’re a simple person today, and want to live simply, that is awfully seditious. And to advise people to live simply is more seditious still.

You see, the worst thing about permaculture is that it’s extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.

Bill: Anybody that wants to extinguish it. It’s something with a million heads. It’s a way of thinking which is already loose, and you can’t put a way of thinking back in the box.

Bill: No, anarchy would suggest you’re not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate. You can’t cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things. You won’t get cooperation out of a hierarchical system. You get enforced directions from the top, and nothing I know of can run like that. I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.

References:
Reel Mowing:
1. http://www.aqmd.gov/monthly/garden.html back to article
Organic Fertilizers & Pest & Weed Control:
1. http://www.thegreenguide.com/organic-pesticide/ back to article
2. http://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheets/HGIC2756.htm back to article
3. http://www.ext.vt.edu/departments/envirohort/factsheets2/insectpest/jan94pr1.html back to article
4. http://www.cdcg.org/weeds.html back to article
5. http://www.naturesafe.com/content/newsletters/08-98-1.htm back to article
Permaculture:
1. http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC28/Mollison.htm back to article

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