News How Permaculture, Worms in Your Kitchen and a Crown Heights Chicken Coop Can Save the World
Crown Heights resident Greg Todd believes that the practice of permaculture is the key to building a sustainable future.
“A lot of people talk about sustainability. It’s very much a catch phrase: ‘Oh it’s sustainable, it’s sustainable.’ Well permaculture took that and figured out: well, that’s cool, but how do we actually do that?” he said in an interview that ranged from how a sustainable agriculture community garden in Crown Heights will save us from descending into chaos when the oil is gone, to why everyone should have a worm composting bin tucked into their apartment.
Todd will give a free lecture on the subject at Brooklyn LaunchPad tomorrow.
“Permaculture is just another, more precise way of doing sustainability. It’s kind of like sustainability on steroids," he said. "Permaculture is a systemic approach to sustainability. ”
Todd, a native of Michigan, who moved to Brooklyn in 1976 and to Crown Heights in 2002, became interested in the subject of sustainable agriculture after reading about the trends of global climate change asking himself what will happen when fossil fuels run out.
“These are the kinds of things that when you start reflecting on them ... you get really depressed ... So at about the time we hit the very bottom of this realization ... That’s about the time you’re ready for permaculture.”
Permaculture?
Permaculture, a portmanteau of “permanent agriculture” and “permanent culture”, began as an agricultural movement in the 1960s and '70s, led by the writings and teachings of two Australian field biologists, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren.
Mollison and Holmgren observed how natural systems evolved in the wild, especially how plants formed symbiotic clusters that promoted the survival of the whole group. Their approach produced a new way of thinking (or perhaps a return to an older way of thinking) about agricultural land management that took sustainability as its starting point.
Putting theory into practice, they grew radically innovative – and astonishingly vital – food production ecosystems that required little maintenance to yield significant results. All while conserving resources and replenishing the soil.
While permaculture techniques have been used to literally “green the desert” permacultural ideals aren’t limited to agriculture. It is also an approach to architecture, design, ecology, economics, and human social systems.
With a starting point of using the least energy input to produce the greatest output – more bang for the buck – one of the key tenets of permaculture is that there is no “waste”. Everything produced by a system has a purpose, and can be recycled or reused to serve another purpose.
“It’s figuring out what plants work together," said Todd, giving the classic example of "The Three Sisters," from the Native American tradition, of beans, corn and squash. Corn provides a stalk for beans to grow on. Beans put nitrogen back in the soil and squash covers the ground to prevent weeds.
"They all bear fruit, of course. So the benefit for us as the consumer is the minimal inputs, we don’t have to do anything," he said.
Permaculture in Crown Heights
In 2006, Todd c0-founded the non-profit Green-Phoenix Permaculture, to encourage the spread of permaculture projects. One of them is Camp Epworth in High Falls, New York, which conducts classes and has demonstration projects such as “forest gardening” and cultivation of “food forests.”
About four years ago, Todd helped organize The Imani Community House Garden, a pilot permaculture project at Schenectady Avenue and Dean Street that includes a working chicken coop, an egg CSA, and cultivated plots for growing.
“We now have 45 chickens in the garden – the biggest chicken coop in Brooklyn," he said, adding the the garden has an egg CSA, aka Community Supported Agriculture Program, where people pay an average of $110 for 22 weeks of fresh eggs.
Todd is currently trying to set up a program to increase community involvement at the garden getting residents at Weeksville Gardens across the street to contribute compost to the garden in exchange for a dozen eggs each week.
Making changes, even at the local level, can pave the way for better systems in the future, Todd said.
“There’s a lot of very simple things, the most obvious, is just recapturing the resources in your household. Not wasting them. I mean we – New York City sends out approximately 12,000 tons of municipal solid waste every day. And not one ounce of it is retained in the city," he said.
According to Todd, about 15 to 20 percent of our garbage is compostable and there's no reason we can't all be composting, right at home.
"Use worms, they’re like mad-efficient at converting organic waste into good compostable soil. Everybody can put a worm bin under their stairs, somewhere.”
But when we run out of fossil fuel, will tiny projects such as the Imani Garden make a difference?
Todd thinks so.
“I heard (a talk) about seven or eight years ago by a Christian theologian by the name of John Cobb, who foresaw all of these problems resulting from peak oil. And he said, 'you know our only hope is to build, what he called ‘soft-landing pads’ so that when the crash hits, there are already enough small-scale projects in place that we can just ramp them up and make them a large enough scale to make the crash less painful.”
Todd's lecture, Intro to Permaculture, will take place tomorrow, Jan. 29, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. at Brooklyn Launchpad, 721 Franklin Ave.
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