An Ethic of Planning

A few weeks ago, I completed a Permaculture design class at Inwood Hill Park in New York City. With the exception of one other course taking place in the city this summer, it was the first full PDC class held in New York in some 30 years, since Permaculture originator Bill Mollison taught one himself in the early days of the movement. The fact that the city had two courses in one summer is a sure sign that Permaculture is gaining traction even in unlikely places.

However, in spite of Permaculture’s claims to be applicable at any scale, there are obvious constraints on teaching such a course in the city, where open land is at a premium. As intellectually stimulating as it was, several of my classmates and I left the class feeling a need to find places to apply our new knowledge. With that in mind, a few of us went upstate this past weekend to volunteer on a Permaculture farm.

My wife and I had expected to camp with the kids near the farm, but due to a combination of procrastination on my part and some miscommunication with the work-party organizers, we ended up making last-minute plans to stay at a nearby campground; traveling with two small children, one can’t just arrive somewhere and hope there’ll be a place to stay. Meanwhile, Thursday night and Friday I spent the day rushing to make sure we had enough food and camping gear to pack.

By the time my wife returned from a busy, stressful work meeting on Friday afternoon, we were both frazzled and upset. I was close to suggesting we abandon the trip. “Oh no, we’re going!” said my wife. After all of the effort and trouble, there was no way she was turning back at that point.

We ended up leaving at dusk. The kids fell asleep in the car, but woke up in time to help us put up the tent in the dark, running around with flashlights to make sure there was enough light. I fell asleep angry at myself for having mismanaged the trip so far.

A common saying in Permaculture is that while pre-industrial agriculture is labor-intensive and conventional agriculture is energy-intensive, Permaculture is design intensive; and planning is just another aspect of design. It occurred to me that my own failure to adequately plan the trip was actually characteristic of our entire society—a widespread symptom of a cultural failure to embrace a design process and ethic.

Modern society is set up to be very forgiving of short-term planning failures, at least if you have access to a credit card or a bank machine. But in an energy-scarce future—when 24-hour gas stations are harder to find, when there is no guarantee of a nearby, full-shelved grocery store, when a person can’t just travel anywhere, confident that in a worst-case scenario he could just stay at a motel—planning may begin to seem like a much more important virtue.

On Saturday we went to Regeneration Farm, the site of a Permaculture CSA run by a young couple named Kevin and Sarah. The cultivated part of the land was small—more like a giant garden than a small farm. I was surprised to learn that it provided enough produce to supply 20 CSA shares, and that Kevin and Sarah planned to double the amount in the next year. I was also surprised to learn that they had only been farming there for one season—a testament to how much can be accomplished on a small-scale in a short time.

In the morning the kids picked cherry tomatoes, until the sun got too hot, and my wife took them back to the campground for a swim. I stayed on the farm with a few of my fellow students. Together we dug swales, shot contours, shoveled chicken manure, drank water, ate delicious food, took breaks, talked about anarchism and community land trusts and the corruption of the word “organic” by corporate agribusiness. It was a thick, hot day; a dreamlike, gauzy haze hung over the valley.

When she left my wife had asked me if I would be okay. “Five hours is a long time,” she said, “and it’s hot.” I assured her I would be fine, of course. The last thing I would do was admit that this was hard work for me. A few minutes after she was gone, though, I found myself struggling to dig my shovel into some rocky soil and tough masses of weed roots.

“It looks like you’re having trouble there,” said Kevin. He took the shovel and tore forward, quickly turning the dirt. I nodded and tried again, feeling the shovel get stuck in the roots in front of me, frustrated with my lack of strength and competence. Kevin told me I was trying to dig too deep. It was not a major error but it triggered old self-doubts—about competency and strength and dependence—that had been growing ever since I learned that the future might be very different than the one I had been brought up to expect. What was it about the threat of peak oil that brought up these kinds of feelings? What was I trying to prove, and to whom?

A member of the most highly educated generation in history, I, like many, grew up ignoring or dismissing skills that my parents and grandparents took for granted. Higher education for my generation was geared toward white-collar specialization; “vocational” training was lower status, something left over for the less academic. Learning how to do simple things seemed like a waste of time, really, given how much someone could earn in a an hour compared to the price of 1,000 calories of food at the local McDonalds. Who learns to sew when the price of a T-shirt made in China is less than a few bottles of water?

But what is to be made of the kind of work I was “trained” for—pixel pushing, cubical work—in light of peak oil and the coming energy decline? Was I alone in feeling a vague unease in such a job—a feeling that my work, however well compensated, is ultimately superfluous to the true needs of society? And how much worse for the modern working-class poor, so frequently reduced to employment in “service” jobs consisting of little more than shelf-stocking or burger flipping? Deprived of even the basic peasant competence of growing food, making clothes or building furniture, what will these people do, where will they go, when those superfluous jobs slip away?

Even more unusual in the present age is the idea that one can be both competent with simple tools or growing food as well as broadly knowledgeable in science or the humanities; yet it is precisely this synthesis that Permaculture seems to insist on. If I had come to the farm to dig ditches for ditches sake I would have been missing something critical. The reason to volunteer on a Permaculture farm instead of taking a job as a industrial farm hand is that while Permaculturalists doesn’t shy away from hard work, their work is never rote or thoughtless. The most valuable lesson of the day was watching as Kevin and Sarah took note of each stage of the work as it was ongoing, and explained how each phase was an experiment to be evaluated. The ultimate resource they used remained the human intellect—the ability to observe and learn.

On Sunday we went to a farm festival at Camp Epworth, a nearby retreat center, where the children touched oxen, took a hay ride and learned how yarn is made from wool—activities which only a few years ago seemed merely quaint to me. Now though, people who knew how to care for and work with animals on a human scale for human needs seemed like precious repositories of skills and information on the verge of being lost—at just the moment when they will be most needed.

The future will not be like the past, of course; at least not exactly. But in light of energy decline, it’s not hard to imagine that a great many of those activities which were been mechanized or outsourced to places out of sight and mind may come much closer to home again.

But if the weekend really taught me anything it was that the most important skill of the future will be the ability to calm down, reflect and think through one’s actions—to plan carefully to achieve desired ends. Unfortunately, modern society doesn’t seem to be even able to articulate reasonable goals worth striving for, much less planning ahead to achieve them. Let’s hope that changes soon.

Comments

[John]

Sounds like you and your family had a really great experience. Being a city dweller, with some knowledge of farm work, I can farily say it is quite daunting and humiliating to fumble or not even know what some of the equipment is used for, no less trying to work with them.
You go, trek man. And as sages of old have stated, "Live by example." OM

[Traci]

I really loved this post - so thoughtful. I just finished Omnivore's Dilemma and am thinking about these ideas of work and the price of nourishment. Thanks for this...

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