Compost in the Center
I started re-reading the Permaculture Designers Manual this weekend. The starting point for the book as a code of ethics, which I’ll talk about in future posts. I want to point out the centrality of design even in the first few pages. This might seem counter to the idea of self-organizing systems, but systems don’t organize by themselves too frequently. More often, they devolve into chaos. I see this a lot in my current tech job: if we lay off 35% of our IT staff, the rest will figure it out- it’s a “free market”, after all.
Also, right off the bat, Bill Mollison starts talking about computers, and using them as design aids. I’ve said for at least ten years my ideal job is building these types of tools. For example, Mollison mentions H.T. Odum’s Emergy concept. There’s an open source Emergy modeller now available.
One of the way’s systems self-organize is through a random process, and one of the things computers do well is random number generation. One strongly emphasized aspect of Permaculture design is selection and placement. I saw an example yesterday that I hadn’t thought about. I was at the studio and only had about an hour and thought I should walk up St. Paul and see what I saw. I found an urban garden next to a church and they had a compost bin pretty much in the center of the garden, just behind the corn, a little north of center. This is counter intuitive to me, from a “look and feel” perspective, but makes perfect sense from a work and zones perspective. I usually put the ugly compost in a corner somewhere. They prettified it by making the bin itself pretty, painted it pink and put big wooden painted bugs on the side.
Later in the walk I found wild turkeys, pioneer species (sumac, some type of artemisia I think- looked like mugwort, poplar) starting to work on an abandoned parking lot, and a path down to the river’s edge. Pretty productive for an hour downtown. This is all in the heart of a very urban landscape.