Permaculture: Tools for Making Women’s Lives More Abundant

The Chikukwa Project, Zimbabwe

In the rural Shona African community in Zimbabwe, five villages of 7,000 people have joined together to form the Chikukwa Project, named after their local chief. Twenty years ago their land was deforested, barren, and nothing would grow there in the summer months. When the rains came, they washed down the slopes taking the soil with them. The springs had dried up and the people were poor, hungry, and suffering from malnutrition.

The Shona decided to do something about it and sought advice from permaculture pioneer, John Wilson. Slowly, a field at a time, they built water-retaining landscapes: terracing the slopes and digging swales (ditches on the contour) to hold the water in the soil. They began making compost and adding composted manure to the terrace beds to build soil and grow food. They planted hardy leguminous plants. They zoned cattle grazing and foraging for firewood in the gullies where the springs rose and planted native trees to hold the moisture in the soil. They stopped untethered grazing of goats on the hillsides, allowing trees to regenerate. Over a period of several years, trees became part of the landscape once more, retaining water, building more fertile soil, and increasing biodiversity in a positive reinforcing process. The community also learned new skills: specifically permaculture training, conflict resolution, women’s empowerment, primary education and HIV management.

Within three years, the springs began to reactivate. The farmers saw that the yields from the plots with swales were bigger than the plots without them. This provided the greatest incentive among the community to ask for the same techniques on their own land. Twenty years later, where there was once eroded soil and over-grazed slopes, there are now reforested gullies with flowing water, terraces full of vegetables, grains and fruit, and high ridges lined with trees for firewood. In the villages, there are home gardens tended by the women, pens for hens and goats, water tanks to catch rainfall runoff, and a culture of cooperation that values people skills as much as horticultural techniques. The landscape is verdant and biodiverse, and the gardens and farms produce crops for the families and for market, bringing an economic yield back into the region. Having a surplus to sell at the local market also enabled the children to stay in education longer. All these changes occurred in one generation.

Gillian and Terrence Leahy, filmmakers, were invited to make a film about this transformation at Chikukwa. They saw how the Shona had pulled themselves out of hunger and malnutrition, using permaculture farming techniques and bottom-up social organization. They understood that this could be replicated anywhere in the world. ¹

Tamera Ecovillage, Portugal

A few years ago I visited a project that opened my eyes to how radically effective earth restoration projects can be. This was not a big UN or inter-governmental programme, but one run by a small ecovillage community with the help of a relentlessly confident and visionary Austrian man, Sepp Holzer. ² I had heard he was building lakes in the arid Iberian Peninsula in Portugal. I imagined that they would be reasonably impressive after the winter rains. I had even watched a webcam of the first lake filling up last year. I had no concept of the scale of the restoration work, however. Sepp and the Tamera community had literally dammed a valley and stopped the rain and topsoil rushing down the valley and into the sea.

Ever decreasing yields in this depopulated, rural region have driven poor farmers to try and extract more from the land than it is capable of bearing. Sheep are stocked at such density that the pasture is destroyed. Nature responds to the overgrazing by growing a ‘scab’, the inedible rock rose, Cistus spp, often the first pioneer after wildfire. It is estimated that 90% of the remnant cork oak forests are dying due to soil compaction that destroys soil mycorrhiza. The rest are being felled as cork falls out of favour, replaced by eucalyptus, hungry exotics in a fragile, arid landscape. With each oak dies a unique, biodiverse habitat and the Iberian lynx and Bonelli’s eagle are threatened with extinction.

Sepp and the Tamerans have reversed this process in their valley. They stopped the overgrazing and ploughing, focusing the community’s food production on fruit and vegetables. There are raised beds everywhere full of annual and perennial vegetables. Fruit and nut trees line the banks of the lakes. The winterbourne stream is dammed and there is an interconnected system of lakes that flow into each other as the slope falls down the valley. It is almost unbelievable that in such an arid landscape, so much water can be collected. This is living water too, with rippling surfaces, filled with frogs and fish, to keep the balance between mosquitoes and humans healthy. Sepp cups his hands and tells us, God gives us enough water. All we have to do is find a way of holding it in the landscape.

What has been achieved in just a few years is impressive. Early morning mists arise out of the lakes and leave their dew on the surrounding plants. Swallows swoop and drink. Otters have returned to the lake. New springs rise in the surrounding hillsides. The younger cork oaks are seeding and growing. Even a Bonelli’s eagle has visited. Perhaps it will return with a mate. The hydrological cycle of a whole landscape is being regenerated. My heart opens in the knowledge that earth restoration is not only possible, by implementing some basic principles, it can happen very quickly in under a decade.

The Loess Plateau, China

The Loess Plateau, an area the size of France, was similarly regenerated using water retention landscapes using hand tools and a willing population. John D. Liu documented the process in his film, Green Gold. ³ Again this was a landscape in which the hydrological cycle had collapsed and there was catastrophic loss of topsoil due to decades of destructive agricultural practices. The gullies and ridges of the hills had been deforested for firewood and overgrazed by livestock, the soil had been tilled and left uncovered to wash away in the rainy season or be blown away in the wind. The people were reduced to a life of subsistence. With little opportunity to prosper, the young had been forced to the cities leaving the majority of older people behind in the village. Few babies were born there and every year agricultural yields continued to fall. The spiral into ecosystem destruction, depopulation, disease and poverty seemed irreversible.

It is human behaviour over thousands of years that has created ecosystem destruction. The patterns are usually similar: Catastrophic loss of topsoil, the collapse of the hydrological cycle, loss of vegetation and desertification. Yet within a few years this wholesale destruction can be reversed by ‘making a hat on the hilltops, a belt around the mountainsides as well as shoes at the base’. The ‘hat’, the top of the hills, is replanted with trees. The belt consists of hillside terraces that trap the soil and nutrients, creating higher yields. The shoes are the dams at the base of the hills that capture the rainwater in the landscape and help regenerate the hydrological cycle.

Once we understand how ecosystems function we can restore agricultural productivity. This allows women in the community particularly to tend home gardens that are more productive and produce surplus for the market. The improvement to the local economy also enables children to stay in education for longer. Woodlots for firewood save hours every day in foraging and enable the hillsides that are not cultivated to revegetate. This in turn reregulates the hydrological cycle, the weather and the climate. By regenerating damaged ecosystems and planting agroecology systems (trees mixed with pasture, arable and home gardens) we not only improve quality of life, we are also able to sequester carbon in the soil and biomass. Eric Toensmeier, in his book The Carbon Farming Solution ⁴ describes just how effective this can be: ‘Silvopasture and other pastures with woody plants sequester up to three times as much carbon as ordinary pastures’.

It also doesn’t take long for these systems to establish. ‘Based on an extensive review of recent scientific literature … agroecology, if sufficiently supported, can double food production in entire regions within 10 years while mitigating climate change and alleviating rural poverty’. ⁵

Village Farm, Devon, UK

These projects are not only suitable for arid climates. In 2014, Tim Green and Rebecca Hosking moved to a 170-acre farm in East Portlemouth in Devon. The land was overgrazed, compacted, with little topsoil and the hedges almost flailed to the point of extinction before they set to work. They started by planting 100,000 fruit and nut trees, native species for windbreaks, animal fodder, pig pannage, repaired the ancient stone walls, and planting up the banks at the edge of the fields. They seeded the agrarian land, once used to grow cattle fodder, with wildflowers. Their hardy sheep, a Nordic Shetland cross, do not require additional winter fodder and this frees up the land for wildflower meadows that can be selectively grazed. Their sheep produce lambs with little difficulty, can survive on arable weeds and pasture, and are ideal to kick-start the ecology of the land.

Rebecca Hosking describes how the farm pushes the boundaries of regenerative agriculture, and is more than a farm in the conventional sense. It is an ecosystem with a mixture of wild and domesticated species: ‘to keep the domestic species healthy and happy we need the wild ones … giving equal importance to all because, as we all know, to have a healthy ecosystem you need great abundance and diversity of life’, she writes. ⁶ We are a species that can cohabit the land rather than strip it of resources. Better than that, Rebecca says, we can act as a ‘keystone species’ and replace the ecological benefits of an animal that is locally extinct (like the beaver, eagle, lynx or wolf). ‘A keystone plays a crucial role in maintaining the structure of an ecological community, affecting many other creatures in an ecosystem’. Keystone species are usually predators that we have eliminated at the top of the food chain, regulating the species below them and therefore having a profound effect on their surroundings. In the short term, the human population needs to act like them: ‘We, like the beaver, can dig ponds, create streams and slow water down, allowing it to penetrate the soil. We can and are working currently like a wolf; our form of grazing called “Holistic Planned Grazing” means we move our flock around our land as if they were on migration. Suddenly from herbivores (namely sheep in our case) damaging the soil and creating greenhouse gases, our sheep become part of a symbiotic relationship that locks down carbon and builds topsoil, a system that’s worked for millions of years’.

The lynx, she says, pushes herbivores away from wooded areas allowing woodland to re-establish. Gardeners and farmers can also have the same effect as smaller animals, planting nuts like jays and squirrels, sowing seeds like song birds and encouraging wild flowers to flourish through our management of cutting or grazing. To me, this idea is deeply insightful. I can now see the pattern behind regenerative agriculture and understand why these techniques are so effective. In my own small way as a gardener, I am the lynx that enables the trees to grow, the beaver who makes ponds, the songbird who sows seeds, the squirrel who buries nuts … I am a part of the land, rather than its steward. I have always felt this intuitively, but the ever-expanding team at Village Farm has given me an ecological context. They show how we can become a force for good, holding a niche until the time comes for the keystone species to reinhabit an ecosystem, at the same time still growing food, fodder, fuel and medicines, merging conservation with farming and placing the human being within the ecosystem.

There are many more stories from all over the world where permaculture and other regenerative techniques have been applied to barren lands. Earth restoration is not only possible, it is already happening. We need to build capacity and find ways to take this work wherever it is needed, helping people to lift themselves out of poverty and rebuild broken communities. John D. Lui calls this ‘the Great Work of our Time’, work that not only restores whole ecosystems but also brings dignity and wellbeing to our fellow human beings.

Separation from Nature

In the course of researching these projects, I wonder how the human race has become so out of balance with nature, not only in the industrialized nations but also in the developing world where we have exported our agricultural practices as well as our belief systems. I have always been at variance with the Christian idea that we hold dominion over Nature symbolized by our casting out from the Garden of Eden or indeed that we are self-appointed ‘stewards’, maintaining a sense of our own separation that I am sure does not exist.

Let us briefly examine the role of the snake in this matter. Joseph Campbell can offer us cultural insights. ⁷ He writes about the snake from the perspective of the Bassari people of West Africa who also have a legend for the snake in the garden eating fruit. To Buddhists the Serpent King is akin in spiritual power to Buddha. To Native Americans, it is sacred and represents the power of life engaged in the field of time, and of death, yet also eternal life and the interplay of human beings and nature.

By being thrown out of the garden – a symbolic separation of ourselves with Nature – Nature symbolized by the serpent has become something to be feared, a corruptor of the flesh, and we experience our spiritual lives in conflict with our natural physical instincts and impulses. This is a great symbolic dance of separation, one where we find ourselves in need of forgiveness from the status quo of the Church, our Ecclesiastical Masters.

Campbell goes further and writes about the serpent as the seducer and says this image ‘amounts to a refusal to affirm life. In the biblical tradition we have inherited, life is corrupt, and every natural impulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised or baptized’. The serpent is the one that brought sin into the world and the woman is the one who handed the apple to Adam. Woman isn’t recognized as the one who brings life into the world through birth. This is a male dominated religion that displaced the religions of the Goddess who neither derogated sex or the power of nature ‘in the religious systems of the Near East, you identify the good and fight against the evil. The biblical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all speak with derogation of the so-called nature religions’.

The snake is the symbol of life throwing off the past and continuing to live. ‘The power of life causes the snake to shed its skin, just as the moon sheds its shadow. The serpent sheds its skin to be born again, as the moon sheds it shadow to be born again. They are equivalent symbols. Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That’s an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents the immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time’.

Thomas Berry, the theologian, describes this severing of inter-relationship between human beings and the natural world as a break in the ‘great conversation’:

We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe. All the disasters that are happening now are a consequence of that spiritual “autism”.

The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. And listen to this: The human is derivative.

The planet is primary.

– Thomas Berry

We need to restore this great conversation in the many, various and personal ways that are open to us. We need to (re)member – to reintegrate with – our traditional understandings and place them within the context of future generations. We are derivative – something that is based on another source – and our planet (the source of our lives) is primary. It is time we lived this understanding fully, in every part of our consciousness.

In so many ways, how we treat the earth and its natural resources reflects our consciousness and our understanding of where our place is within the planet’s ecosystems. Agriculture, the first step in the foundation of culture, has become an indicator of our unsustainable global culture. To change how we farm is not only to adopt a new set of techniques, it is also to re-examine who we are, our attitudes to materialism and what we think is appropriate behaviour towards other species. Ultimately, it requires the re-examination of a materialistic culture driven by resource depletion and the necessity of never ending economic growth.