A permaculture framework to create a regenerative water movement

The permaculture framework allows for many people to learn about the ways of working with nature to align with its cycles. One of the reasons the permaculture movement has spread is because of its the Permaculture Design Course (PDC). Thousands of students go through these courses that happen around the world each year. The Permaculture Design Course happens either as a three week intensive, where students come to live and stay on a piece of land, or it is spread out over a longer many weekends, with students commuting in. In the course students learn about soil, water, growing food, forests, ecology, natural housing, and building community.

Many ideas forms the core of permaculture thinking, its exemplified by a number of notable slogans. ‘Waste=food’ is one. We are so used to think of waste as being something we don’t want in our society. But in nature things work in cycles. So for instance the poop of an animal becomes the fertilizer for the soil. Or compost becomes a vital ingredient for our gardens. Another permaculture slogan is ‘stacking functions’. As an example placing wood chips over your garden play multiple functions, it can protect the soil below from drying out, it can slow water, and over time it can break down to form soil. Our modern industrial agriculture system often has products which are designed to maximize one variable, but the problem is they often mess up another variable. The permaculture agriculture system looks with a more whole systems thinking approach, it looks for roles components play that stack functions, that simultaneously improves multiple variables. Another core concept of permaculture is that of ecological succession, so you plant cover crops which enriches the soil for the next round of vegetation can come in. There are a series of 12 permaculture design principles that teach about the core of its whole systems thinking.

Permaculture also teaches about importance of water, and restoring its natural flows. It teaches the idea of how to ‘slow it, sink it, spread it’, and how to use and dig earthworks to slow water. Earthworks are ways of working with the land, to mold it to better guide the flow of water. For instances swales are ditches dug into the land, so water flows into it, and is held longer for the plants. Terraces are flattening of the slope so that water slows down. Ponds can be used to capture water for use, and/or to help fill up aquifers.

Permaculture also teaches about other processes which influence the water cycle. So for instance it teaches how to enrich the soil through processes like worms, composting, mycelia, and hugelkultur. When there is richer soil, the soil can hold more water. This is a key to lessening floods, and a key to hydrating the land longer into the dry season.

In PDC course the final project is to make a permaculture design for it. Sometimes these designs involve water, so for instance a design for how to mitigate floods on a piece of land, or how to design a natural wastewater system.

One of the visions I see is to include a climate water permaculture component of the PDC course. In this component students learn how restoring the water on the land, influences when and how it rains, influences heat patters, influences wind patterns and influences the both local climate and global climate. It may even connect students with climate modellers, if they want to do more analytical work in the future to see how they can influence the climate. Or climate scientists may be brought into teach that component of the PDC.

Once people go through the PDC course, some of them figure out how to go onto become permaculture practitioners, others however, may flounder. They want to do something further in permaculture, but do not know how to get there.

What would be helpful is a trellis, a framework that graduates could plug into that helps them find a graded series of projects that develops them into permaculture practitioners, or into better stewards of the land, or whatever their goals are in permaculture.

I see this framework as an online network where PDC-graduates can log on. There they find mentors, and also a peer pod they can check in with regularly, say weekly or fortnightly. They can find projects to work on. These projects can come from people in the local area who have land. So for instance a landowner may want a food forest in their backyard, or a farm might want to figure out how to hydrate its land better. Or a bigger project for a group of students and mentors might be for a town wants a way to increase its groundwater to lessen wildfires. In this way we can get thousands of permaculture graduates working on projects to restore water cycles around the world. These projects could be free, sliding-scale or paid. It can become a way for permaculture graduates to find a career in restoring water cycles, or for whatever other paths in permaculture they are interested in.

This online network framework could also be a way post-PDC students find a catalog of hundreds of course offerings- soil workshops, cob workshops, passive solar workshops, mycelia workshops from around the world. They can be funnelled to water workshops, and longer trainings like the Water Stories course. In this way this online network catalog forms a kind of networked university. In this way students come from around the world into the PDC, and then are branched out into a global network of workshops, and projects.

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The Restoring Water Cycles and Climate workshop by Alpha Lo and Nick Steiner, will be Jul 7th Sun noon-2pm est. To register email me at climatewaterproject@gmail.com. Workshop is free. For more info see previous article in this newsletter with flier.

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