Permaculture and whole-systems design are based on the idea that people are smart, but nature is smarter. How we can make our systems, from food to the layout of our towns, mirror the intelligence of natural systems?

The term was first developed in Australia by Bill Mollison and David Holgrem, but the concept is nothing new: Traditional societies have been practicing “permaculture” by living in harmony with their surroundings and their resources for millennia.

So here it is: Permaculture strives to apply the intelligence and long-term self sustained productivity of nature to human systems, creating abundance, zero waste and fundamental sustainability.

The truth is, we don’t live in a vacuum. I think we can all agree that in the world we live in, everything has an effect of some sort on something else. In permaculture, we strive to look at the whole system and how each part is affecting all other parts of that system. If you put things in the right order, you can create a closed loop, where the “waste” of one part of the system is a resource instead of a pollutant to another part of that system.

Let’s say there is a river people have always loved to swim in and boat on during the summer. Over the last few years, the river has started to be choked out by reeds and the water has become completely useless for recreation. One solution the town council comes up with is to spray the reeds with herbicide to get rid of them. This will further damage the ecological diversity in the river, making the water more mucky and filled with algae. The reeds will come back next year, needing to be sprayed again. The result is a lot of money spent, more pollution and destruction created, and the problem keeps coming back.

If you take a step back, you can see the whole system that is creating the problem with the reeds. A few years ago a commercial pig farm was built upstream. Every time it rains, the nutrients from the pig manure are running into the river. Just downstream from them, there is a flower farm that fertilizes their flower crops. Again, we have excess nutrients, soaking into the river water. The reeds are thriving on all of this excess nitrogen and have started to grow rampantly.

What if we use the manure from the pig farm as a compost fertilizer for the flower farm? The flower farms excess foliage could even be used as supplemental feed for the pigs. We save the money, resources and even the gas for transportation for both fertilizer and pig food. We don’t have pollutants entering the water allowing the ecosystem to keep itself healthy. We no longer have so much excess nitrogen going into the river, either. The direct result is that the reeds will not continue to overgrow and the people can enjoy the river for recreation once again.

By using permaculture’s alternative perspective and common sense, we look at the entire system, what your resources and wastes are, and how you can restructure them to create the least work and the maximum benefit. This whole-systems approach naturally creates a lack of pollution, harmony with our environments, localized systems, is less expensive and gets our needs well met.

On Saturday from 1-3 p.m. at the Alpine Earth Center, HC3 will be offering a workshop on the basics of permaculture and whole-systems design and how to apply them to your garden. To RSVP to the workshop, contact the High Country Conservation Center at (970) 668-5703. There is a suggested donation of $10, and special guest Britt Basel will be the instructor. For more information, visit www.high countryconservation.org.

This column of Eartha Steward is written by Britt Basel as a guest of the High Country Conservation Center, a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to waste reduction and resource conservation in our mountain community. Submit questions regarding permaculture to Britt at britt@brittbaselphoto.com and all other inquiries to Eartha at eartha@highcountryconservation.org.

It was hot. So hot that all I could do was lie still in my tent, waiting for the heat of the high sun to have a little mercy as the afternoon slowly rolled on. I was with a group on students, fresh off the thrill of safari, staying with the Maasai of Esilalei in Northern Tanzania.
From a Landrover in a national park, this landscape is the stuff of childhood fantasies. For the Maasai, it is a harsh reality: here the land teems with animals that can gore, maim, or trample you. For much of the year the land is covered by dry grass and scrub, both inedible to humans. The few pools of fresh water are stagnant and uninviting.
With incredible ingenuity, the Maasai adapted to this harsh environment: the goats and cows of their herds eat the grasses that people can’t, making something inedible into meat that humans can eat. The animals can drink from the stagnant pools of water so that, instead of putrid water, the Maasai drink the blood and milk of the animals. Not quite the traditional diet of the Western world, but the perfect way to survive in this hostile environment.
My students and I had come to this unique corner of the world to learn about the Maasai first hand; talk with them, learn from them, and at least get a taste of what it is like to live they way that they do.
After much discussion, we decided that this included having a barbeque.
A few days after we were arrived, our host Mzee took me to the market to buy the goat.
We arrived early at the market.  The vendors unpacked boxes of shoes made from used tires, thick enough to walk on the vicious thorns that cover the ground, knives covered with red hide sheaths, and shukas, the traditional dress of the Maasai, now made in China and sent back for them to buy.
Buying the goat was a quick exchange, Mzee knew the animal. It belonged to his brother-in-law and he could tell by looking at it that is was healthy.
The way Mzee picked up the goat and shoved it into the back of the SUV was anything but ceremonious.
I started to think about our separation from the food we eat the Western world. We have to go out of our way to think about where the meat in the cellophane package comes from and remember it was an animal, just like this goat. In contrast to the inhumane factories that our meat is raised in, this goat at least had spent its life grazing the fields under the African sun.
There was nothing easy about watching Mzee and a few of the other men slaughter the goat, though we all stood on the sidelines in solemn silence. Shortly, pieces of meat, no different than most of us see everyday, were skewered onto sticks and put over the fire to barbeque.
The traditional world of the Maasai is ceasing to exist all around them. They are boxed in by towns, agricultural areas, and national parks. But they are adapting. Some have changed drastically, abandoning their traditional shukas for jeans and looking for cash income in Arusha, the nearest city and the safari capital of Tanzania. Others have taken just as much as they need, like the three young Maasai warriors that joined us at our feast, whipping out dated cell phones that have to be charged in town, since there is no electricity out here. A few, like Mzee, are looking for ways to adapt while preserving the heritage they come from. Mzee chooses to bring in respectful outsiders so we can learn about this beautiful people and the rich traditions they have.
One day I was walking with Mzee. He stopped me, pointing out nearby tracks and a spot where the earth was disturbed. “A giraffe slept here last night,” he said. We were just a couple hundred feet from my safari tent where I waited out the afternoon heat earlier that day and had slept the night before. The same rush flooded over me as when I saw that first elephant out on safari. This was a world where lions hunt, elephants roam, and giraffes lay down for the night so close to where you, yourself, slept. This reality is romantic as it is harsh, just as it is in danger of vanishing. More than anything, though, at this very moment and on the other side of the world, it is real.

Excerpt from KVNF interview of Britt Basel by Daniel Costello on May 20, 2010:

Are there specific issues that you try to expose your students to on a trip? Right there you were talking about getting them in a place where they are going to be tested a little bit. What about circumstances where they see just completely different ways that people live?

It really depends on the focus of the program. Like I said, there are so many different types of these programs around, and there are the personal levels of what I bring in. I have a background in permaculture and sustainability, so I definitely want to expose students to those possibilities and responsibilities. It’s unavoidable to see the difference between the way that the typical north American lives in contrast to the places we go to. Even in areas, after all the traveling I’ve done, that I see as very affluent, I’ve had students get into a van with me during the first couple days, have their head out the window and say, “Wow, people really live this way?” I think, it’s not about, in any way shape or form, going out and saying we’re so affluent and we have so much stuff and these people are so poor, at all. It’s showing that there’s a different way to live. Largely showing that these people who “have so much less than we do” lead really rich wonderful lives and so many of them are so much happier than the average person that you see here, running around in circles, trying to get stuff done, trying to be “successful”. And it brings up a big question about what life is really about. How much community and family and the simplicity of really being where you are bears into how we want to live our lives. In no way am I trying to tell students what they should believe, what they should do with their lives or that they should “see things this way”. It’s just to get them to question things on their own. That, in further answer to your question, everything is a dialogue with the students about what they think. Like in the meetings, we’ll sit down and we’ll come up with a question like, “So today we had a really intense experience going to this small village and x,y,z and so-and-so was talking about this and what do you guys think about that?” And we get into some very interesting conversations where students bring their diverse backgrounds in, their thoughts, and they get to really critically think about these issues and consider other perspectives. It’s really students learning how to think for themselves while having more information on hand.

Something that we definitely get isolated from here are the basic mechanics of survival. Most of us don’t produce our own food, even with plumbing, you go to the bathroom, you flush the toilet and it’s gone, where in some of those areas, I assume they have much bigger issues with maintenance of their sanitation facilities. Maybe they’re digging outhouses or whatever they’re doing. Is that something you try to show? That people are closer to issues of survival, elsewhere in the world?

Survival to come extent. More in terms of simplicity.

Survival is more of a stretch, I was thinking more in terms of just the mechanics of living. A lot of stuff, we have so streamlined, that we don’t have to think very much. You can’t survive without eating, but yet we don’t have to go out collect our food, we go to the grocery store.

It’s very, very true.

You know, if you eat meat, most of us don’t go out and kill it.

It’s very true. It depends again on the experience. All groups wind up experiencing the simple things of daily life. In you’re in East Africa, most of the toilets are squat toilets or for your food, you go to the market. There’s no big, pretty grocery store. One of my last trips was to East Africa with Carpe Diem International Education. It’s a semester trip and it’s a phenomenal experience. It’s 13 weeks long and we go through Uganda and Tanzania. My group chose to do a side trip to Rwanda to experience the Genocide Memorial.  So for part of out trip, we had the incredible experience of staying with the Maasai for about 10 days. The Maasai are one of the few fairly traditional peoples still in that part of East Africa. Of course they’ve had substantial change happen as well, but traditionally they’re herders and they live in this extremely hostile environment. Most of the water that is available is surface water and it is stagnant. There is very little edible food. Their survival strategy is brilliant. They have herds of goats and cows that can eat all of the inedible grasses and drink that stagnant water. The Maasai’s food is then the blood and milk from these animals, as well as, occasionally, the meat. So here I am with a group of students, from North America who, like you were just saying, tend to be so separated from their food, in a place where it’s traditional to do things in such a different way. So after group discussion, going back to that group dynamic and letting students go through the process of making decisions, we decided as a group that it would be a really powerful experience, while being with the Maasai, to trying eating like they eat. So we made the decision that I was going to go buy a goat and bring it back. Myself and my group, with everyone able to participate or not participate, as they felt was right for themselves, went through this process of slaughtering this animal with some of the Maasai men. It was probably one of the most profound experiences of most of our lives because most of us are meat eaters and go to the store to buy our meat in a little cellophane package. There is little connection to where it came from or the life that went into it, whereas it takes on a whole new significance when you actually see that animal when it’s still alive and then afterwards are getting the life, the nutrition and our ability to continue living that came from it sacrificing its life. All of us, myself included, developed that much more respect for it and came to treat it more as an indulgence than something to constantly eat. We don’t need as much as we eat in this country anyway. The amount of protein, of meat, that we consume in this country has skyrocketed in a very short period of time and it’s far more than most countries consume, because for us it is so convenient and we don’t actually see where it comes from.

Now you’ve done with National Geographic and worked with photography for them. Now sometimes I think people look at photos in National Geographic just for the photography, the art, the beauty that’s in them. Do you see any parallel between the work that you do with the international education and the students with what you’re trying to do with photography?

Definitely. For me everything boils down to education. I think education is the most powerful tool we have and the more information we have, the more empowered we are to make good decisions about our lives and to live as happily as we can. With photography…in addition to international education, I’m a photographer and I do travel writing, and all of that is, again, to bring back these stories, these lessons of being out in the world and share them with people. Photography, and especially images like you see in National Geographic, I think do the same thing that these trips do. They show people the other realities that exist and challenge them to think about them and realize that just as we’re sitting here in Colorado, that on the other side of the world, my Maasai grandmother is helping to care for a baby in a boma in Tanzania and that world is just as real.

Now with your photography, I was looking at your website, and you have some stuff there that I would call more art photography and then there’s stuff that leans more towards journalism. Is there a type that you prefer in photography or do you just feel that you want to be in all different genres of photography?

I started out doing a lot more “art” photography and I still love it. I love the creativity of it. However, since my experience in South America, my photography took a turn toward a more journalistic style. It’s partially a product of what I’ve been doing and what I’ve been seeing and I feel this personal responsibility to bring back these experiences, like we were talking about, to bring them back to the masses that may not have the opportunity to see them first hand. And that’s my passion, my voice…it is about educating and empowering people.

Excerpt from KVNF interview of Britt Basel by Daniel Costello on May 20, 2010:

You’ve done a lot with international education. Can you explain what international education means?

In the context that I refer to it, it means bringing students out on trips. They can be either high school or college students. They can be accredited semesters abroad or three week trips during the summertime.

So where do you get students from? Is this a formal program?

There are many organizations. I work with two organizations. In the summer time, I work with National Geographic Student Expeditions teaching photography. They do trips all over the world based on National Geographic themes: so photography, filmmaking, archeology, etc. Then in the fall I work with Carpe Diem International Education. They do accredited programs that are a semester long for gap year and college students. They’re based out of Portland.

So gap year being between high school and college?

Exactly.

And so what are you trying to achieve in those kinds of programs?

It’s to get students out: challenging themselves and experiencing new things. Most often, especially when you’re dealing with that age group, students have their high school friends, the people that they’ve always known, and living in their parents home. It’s really the chance to get them out in a really safe environment to challenge themselves, have new experiences, make them really question how they want to be in the world.

How did you get interested in international education?

When I was 15, I was a photographer; I had started to get into photography.  I was sent as a youth photographer to Ecuador. At that point in time I honestly barely new where Ecuador was on the planet. I knew it was somewhere in South America and that was the extent of it.  I went and it completely changed my life.  Everything that I’ve done since then came from that experience. I saw the impact it had made on me…and then did some other traveling as a teenager and in my 20’s. My last semester of college was also abroad. I studied in the Southern Cone of South America. I was based in Buenos Aires and studying politics, economics, social movements, and human rights in Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil. I finished with that and realized that it is an incredible tool for students to really consider all aspects of life and to get a more holistic view on what the world and life have to offer.

What do you think they’re missing when they come into the program?

Well, you think about the things you experience on a regular basis being a high school kid. You’ve got, maybe your sports, your same teachers, the same friends. It’s probably been no more that 20 to 30 people that you’ve been around on a regular basis. It puts you into a different environment with two leaders who you can look up to and respect, who you need to respect entirely. But they’re also closer to you so you’re probably not as shut down to them as you are to what your parents have told you year after year. They’re cool enough and they can share things with you, get through to you. The other thing is that you’re with a group of student that are usually very unlike students you would typically be with. It’s not that you’re in a school of 200 kids and there’s a group or 10 or 15 kids that you are automatically drawn to be friends with It’s a conglomeration of all types of different people. So you’re with this group of people in a very intense experience, learning from each other and supporting each other and you create friendships that you probably wouldn’t have created, you’re exposed to ideas that you probably wouldn’t be exposed to and, one of the largest things, is that I find that in the states, there’s not much sense of community, there’s not much sense of communication, there’s not much sense of sitting down and just being real with each other: talking about your needs, your experiences. Intense experiences that you want to sort out and discuss and understand that other people that have had a similar experience are having those same thoughts. So many of us live in our own heads of thinking that “we’re different and we can’t really talk about things and we’re feeling x, y and z so I’m just going to be quiet and keep going.” Well, in all the trips that I lead, we have regular meetings together where we sit down and we really dive into it. Students, many for the first time, are given a forum, to really be part of a group and really be completely real, express all those things and grow and learn from each other. While there’s so much that comes from the international component, obviously, of being exposed to such different realities than students typically see here, I think one of the largest aspects of growth comes from that interaction with that wonderful community that has developed.

So you said that your international experience as a young person really changed you. What do you think you would have been otherwise? What direction were you headed before that?

I was a lot more selfish (laugh). Like I said, I got into photography at a really young age. I guess I just didn’t really realize how big the world is, as cliché as that is to say. I saw the realities that were directly in front of me working with x, y and z organization in the same town that I was living in or maybe moving to New York or San Francisco and maybe trying to do a lot more studio photography, which was my focus at the time: primarily art photography and black and white. Though my experiences abroad, I realized…probably one of the biggest lessons was how much responsibility we have in the world. How, especially being citizens of the states, how much impact little choices we make have on the rest of the world.

When you say that we have more responsibility is it because we have more power or what do you mean by that?

Because the politics and the economy of the States has so many fallout repercussions everywhere else. For example, my thesis for university was on GMO soy in Paraguay.  It was the end of my experience in Argentina. I was working with the Guarani who are the indigenous of Paraguay, studying the impact of genetically modified soybeans being grown there and it’s devastating what it has done to the country. The deforestation at that point, and that was six or seven years ago, was 85% of the country, largely due to soy production. So I was working with how it was impacting the Guarani who, until the 70’s, had remained very traditional. For the most part, their medicine, their food, everything, had come from the forest. With this new influx of soy agriculture, the deforestation has caused them to have to look for cash income. What was going on down there was insane. They were being taken off their land and thrown in jail so their little villages could be razed and the forest around them cut down. They come back and have nothing else so they wind up building these shantytowns around the cities.

GMO soy, what it does, is they can essentially throw it into the ground and dump tons of a specific pesticide/herbicide on it, which basically kills everything except for the soy, so it’s a very low-maintenance crop. In addition, they usually spread this chemical by plane and, according to one statistic, 80% of the herbicide drifts from the area of cultivation into the remaining forests, soaking into the water supplies, and through villages. I was talking with the leaders of these villages and they were telling me about clouds of this chemical that would come through and how sick all the kids would be for weeks and weeks afterwards. So all of these things are happening. The reason this ties into your question is because GMO soy, in addition to GMO canola, are the primary source for vegetable oil in our country and it’s used in everything. Nobody has any idea of where it comes from. We don’t think about it. It’s just the cheap oil to cook all of our food. We don’t think about the fact that, by us, unknowingly, using this product, it’s causing all this fallout in this country that most of us don’t really even know exactly where it is.

So it’s kind of like our economic buying power is influencing the people who are supplying us with those things around the world?

Hugely.

When you have kids in a program and you bring them somewhere, do you see changes in the kids during the programs, in that semester?

It’s incredible. With some students, there’s lag time. I can probably safely say that every student I’ve worked with has had incredible shifts go on, even if it’s not apparent to them until a few years later. Even with me, when I first went, I didn’t realize that I had changed until several years later, looking back. Some of the changes are profound, change in confidence, being global citizens, being so much more aware of their surroundings and how they want to be. Even in terms of walking into and realizing they’re impacting other people by being in the space or listening and being curious about what other people have to say and realizing that there are other ways to look at things. Probably the most profound change in students is their confidence level, because they’re called, time and time again, to challenge themselves. Whether it’s in the group dynamic and talking about how they’re actually feeling about things and analyzing issues from many different sides or whether it’s being challenged to do a hike to Machu Picchu that lasts 60k over a couple of days. Once you start out on the trail, there is no way to go except for forward, there is no way out, so you find those reserves in yourself.  The confidence that students get from that and can carry on into the rest of their lives is phenomenal.

A bumpy dirt road led us away from the two-lane highway. We were in northern Tanzania in the lands of the Maasai and bomas, clusters of earthen homes, protected by circular fences of vicious thorn bushes, flanked the road.

After a few dusty miles, we arrived at the boma of our host, Mzee, and our home for the next two weeks.

The night we arrived, Mzee’s wife had a baby. I had seen her earlier that evening, tending to the herds. She was thin and severe, with a small pregnant belly. I never would have expected that later that night, with the help of local women, she would give birth to a perfect baby girl.

During my time in East Africa I had learned a few things about interacting with people. For one, when you’re speaking in the lingua franca of Swahili, people appreciate being called by their title, instead of or in addition to their name. It is a sign of respect and familiarity.  As a young woman, I would call other young women Dada (sister), men my own age or younger Kaka (brother), older women Mama and older men that I wanted to establish a friendly repartee with, Baba (father). Mzee, how we referred to our host, literally means “respected elder.” I also learned that when you meet an elder you should say, “Shikamoo” to show them proper respect.

The next morning an elderly woman was standing with Mzee. Beautifully adorned with the beadwork and earrings that all Maasai wear, she had fiery eyes that made me like her immediately. I greeted her as respectfully as I knew how, saying, “Shikamoo, Mama.” She smiled at me broadly, and we attempted a few difficult exchanges, using a mixture of the meager Kiswahili I was learning, gestures, and her rapid fire Kimaasai. Mzee helped with the translation. She was Mzee’s mother. Apparently, she took a liking to me as well and decided that I should come and hold the newborn baby. I began to call her Yeyo, which I was told means “grandmother”. Yeyo brought me to the small house on the other side of the boma, smiled and gestured me inside.

The modest room, walled with earth, was dim, light softly filtering in through a small window. A cooking fire with three hearthstones burned in the middle of the cramped space. I carefully moved between the fire and two beds made of stretched hide to where Yeyo pointed for me to sit down, pantomiming holding a baby. As I sat down I saw Mzee’s wife lounging in the shadows on that same hide bed. She smiled, pulled a perfect baby girl from her breast and handed her over to me, a complete stranger whose name she didn’t even know.

Every day, Yeyo would approach me, signal that it was time for me to hold the baby and wait for me to drop whatever I was doing.

I would wash my hands and follow her to the little wattle and daub house into the darkness.
I still don’t understand why she came to me that way each day, but I do know that it was an honor.

One afternoon I was walking with Yeyo. Through our comedic combination of hand-signals and broken Kiswahili, she said, “That house right there. You can live there. You can come and work as Mwalimu (teacher) at the school. I will find you a good man, dress you in pretty clothes and jewelry, and cut off all you hair.” She had accepted me. I could stay. But I couldn’t.

I romanticized the traditional life of the Maasai, with the simple rhythms of daily life, the rich sense of community, and the freedom from the chaotic pace and demands of life back home, but I had to realize that I could never really be at home here.

I knew Yeyo didn’t really understand. Often, when we travel and immerse ourselves in the lives of other cultures, the people welcome us warmly, though they usually don’t quite understand why we came, and much less, why we leave.
I thanked Yeyo profusely and tried my best to explain that I couldn’t stay.

She said, “Okay, when the baby is this high, maybe you come live here then.” She unwound a copper bracelet from her wrist and, taking my hand, wrapped it around mine. I haven’t taken it off since. It stays as a reminder of the choices we have, the different realities we all live in, and Mzee’s little daughter, right now strapped to her mother’s back, as she is calling in the herd.

Britt Basel is a photographer and travel writer focusing on cultural and environmental sustainability. She leads expeditions and teaches photography for National Geographic Student Expeditions and leads university semesters abroad for Carpe Diem International Education. She privately mentors photographers wanting to learn how to better express a story through image and consults with a variety of entrepreneurial  and humanitarian projects, both domestically and internationally, on whole-systems strategy.

britt@brittbaselphoto.com

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