EARTHKEEPING NEWS A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY Volume Fourteen, Number One January/February 2005 Permaculture: The Sustainable Option From the Hudson River Bioregion By Greg Todd With Christianity facing ever greater challenges in connecting with the progressive segment of our population, it is the opinion of many that we need to find new ways to explain the work of Christ if His movement is to stay vital and relevant. One of these alternative ways might be found in the permaculture movement. Permaculture is a theory of land use and sustainable agriculture invented by the Australian horticulturist Bill Mollison. While not overtly a spiritual approach, permaculture shares many of the characteristics that we as Christians espouse. Foremost, it looks at nature as a profound act of imagination, something to be examined, reflected upon and more importantly, learned from. Rather than putting our human concerns first, Mollison asks us to observe carefully the beauty in the connections that exist all around us. Permaculture's goal is to create a sustainable means of feeding ourselves that requires a minimum of human input. In PERMACULTURE, A Designer's Manual, Mollison points out that scientists often fail to understand that they themselves are part of their own experiments. Their interactions with the subject influence the experimental data in subtle and often unnoticed ways. He suggests that in addition to manipulating it, we can also learn much about our environment by simply observing it. Mollison believes that all intelligent land use conserves energy. As an example, he suggests that manure, rather than being simply as fertilizer, might better be used to create methane gas in a biogas digester for cooking and heating, with the liquid effluent being sent to the fields and the solid sludge by-product converted by earthworms to rich horticultural soil. Finally the earthworms can be fed to fish and poultry. The NACCE Hudson River Bioregion team is now working with a local environmental organization, Green Phoenix Sustainable Communities, to develop a permaculture training center. For further information, please contact us at gn.todd@verizon.net. Home     Table of Contents