commentary by: Scott Gallant
permaculture designer and educator
co-founder of Porvenir Design, Costa Rica

P E R M A C U L T U R E D E S I G N

I grew up playing in the woods. Building forts, making trails, catching turtles, stashing treasures. My best friend Joey and I would spend hours running the streams between our houses, blocking the flow of the tributaries, watching how the water moved, exploring changes after a big rain. It was our own little world.  We were landscape engineers, shaping the environment to create habitat for more frogs, encouraging blackberry bushes, and expanding deer trails to accommodate our slow footed rubber boots.

There is an idea in permaculture that “everything gardens”, that we all shape our environment to meet our needs. Rabbits do this. Microorganisms do this. Willow trees do this. And of course humans do this, sometimes intentionally, sometimes less intentionally. As a child, growing up in rural Ohio, on a little clump of forest on a small hill, cut on one side by the Little Miami River and on the other by corn and soy fields, my friends and I shaped our environment so that we could run and hide and climb through the forest as if it was our garden.

At the age of 32, with a decade under me working deep in the world of permaculture design, I thought back to these moments in the woods as to why I am here today.

Permaculture design looks to imitate ecological patterns and principles so that we can design buildings, farms, water systems, communities, and so forth, that actually enhance the life-giving forces of this planet, instead of degrading them. On a practical level this looks like a waste treatment system that imitates how a wetland filters water. It is a farm that works with perennial plants, the natural topography of the landscape, and employs practices that cycle nutrients in the same way as the forest. It is a chicken system that leverages the full vibrancy of being a chicken to clear weeds and eat pests, thereby reducing work.

OBSERVE & INTERACT

As a child walking through the forest I learned the first principal of permaculture design: observe & interact. We would creep through the leaves hoping to find a black rat snake that we could follow through the undergrowth. We would build small rafts out of leaves and float them down the river watching how the eddies and bends pushed and pulled the rafts around. Observation of nature is the bedrock of permaculture design. It is something that you can practice every day and for free! This “practice” as a child supports me today as I seek to help clients determine the best ways to stop erosion, to encourage wildlife to return to their properties, to site their homes in the most comfortable location on the property. 

With this perspective in mind, we can think of permaculture as the design arm of the larger global sustainability movement. It provides us a tool box, usually starting with a set of ethics, principles, and patterns that guide us as we decide how to best manage the finite resources around our planet. How you actually apply it to your life, your work, is up to you. Permaculture is a decentralized design field. You can use it to design your balcony garden, a community farm, a forestry project, a co-op business, really anything that fits within the foundational ethics of Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share.

Being decentralized means that what the permaculture field does best is that it gives you permission to start. It says that you don’t need a university degree, you don’t need to pay for a course, you can just take the information that widely exists and start your garden, your chicken tractor, your greywater system. For me personally this is very empowering. You might fail in these projects, but if you abide by the principle of Starting Small, then your risk is low. 

For me permaculture has become about reskilling, learning how to become a useful human being in my community. This is what motivates me everyday as I go to work; the desire to have dirt under my fingernails, to work with my neighbors, to build a fluency with my body, to get to know a piece of land in an intimate way.  

My week ahead: starting a new ginger beer, dehydrating turmeric, starting a nursery for a client, doing a design for incorporating ducks into a cacao orchard, laying out a kitchen garden for a client, taking drone images of a small lot to create a base map, and so forth. These activities are all part of larger permaculture designs, set around specific client goals. They are both how I achieve my livelihood and how I maintain the quality of life that I desire. 

I still love to walk in the forest after a big rain. Now it just happens to be the rain forests of Costa Rica where my permaculture journey has taken me.