Keith Johnson Interview

In September, 2007, I had the wonderful opportunity to work with Keith Johnson and a team of other designers on a 25-acre property near Hamilton, Ontario. Keith and I, together with one other designer, walked a section of property designated to us to design. It was a tremendous learning experience for me. Working with Keith is extremely easy to do – he finds the humor in any situation, making everything more enjoyable. After our preliminary designing was finished, Keith graciously agreed to the following interview.

Douglas: Who are you and what do you do?

Keith: I’m Keith Johnson. I teach permaculture design with Peter Bane. I help him on the Activist mostly as the web guy but occasionally, if I ever get enough energy, I do a little bit of writing maybe a little bit of reviewing. But it’s been a while since I’ve done that now. (Laughs) But I love doing the web-work. And we also design and consult together with our company Patterns for Abundance. And I am the gardener at home. I’ve now got about a half acre garden almost and we’re putting in a forest garden. So we are slowly developing our base in Bloomington where we’ve been for about a year and a half now.

Douglas: You also mentioned some other places earlier as well. California was one.

Keith: Well yeah. Prior to Bloomington, I was 10 years in North Carolina outside of Ashville at Earthhaven Ecovillage where Peter and I lived for six years in a clay straw home we built for ourselves. And prior to that, I was in California teaching permaculture and I had started Sonoma County Permaculture. And I was landscaping for about 10 years all together all through the Bay Area. I had to get away from that. It was too crazy. Although, when I left I cried because I have so many dear friends there. And it was my friends I missed rather than the place itself, although, it’s pretty lovely despite eight months a year of no rain.

Douglas: How did you get your start in permaculture?

Keith: I discovered Permaculture One in about 1978 or 79 when I read about it in the Whole Earth Review which was also known as Co-evolution Quarterly. And also I am pretty hip to gardening and natural things because when I was about five years old I learned via my grandmother, who was doing lots of genealogical research, that I’m related to Johnny Appleseed.

Douglas: Oh wow! (Laughing)

Keith: So, I thought that was cool. And he was always an early inspiration to me.

Douglas: You aren’t dropping seeds out of your pocket as you go around are you?

Keith: I do! Sometimes I drop them into people’s hands but it’s very common for me to have seeds in my pocket. Very, very common. I don’t specialize in Apple’s, by any means. I’ve been a big seed saver for the 34 years I’ve been gardening. I guess I got started gardening really when I was about 25. My first gardening books were Organic Gardening Magazine and Ruth Stout’s book How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back and Gardening Without Work - all about mulch gardening. I am also a big fan of medicinal and edible plants. My dad is one of the last of the hunter gatherers. He grew up in Northern Michigan, where I also grew up for my first nine years. Wild foods were always high on the list of things that got us excited - collecting mushrooms and wild fruit and so on. Any time I go and see my folks my dad always a few places he wants to take me for wild food – get grapes or raspberries or juneberries, or take me fishing on the beaver ponds.

Douglas: It sounds like you didn’t find Permaculture, it found you. It was the thing to come waiting to happen.

Keith: Yeah.

Douglas: Maybe about four years ago on the Australian scene, permaculture "tipped" as Malcolm Gladwell would say. It’s basically a mainstream now. How would you say it’s doing in North America?

Keith: It’s coming on a little slower. But in just the last half a decade, there’s been a big shift. More people are tuning into it. More people are writing about it. I have read at least five different science fiction novels in which the word "permaculture" showed up.

Douglas: Really?

Keith: In one case, it was permaculture in an artificial environment in orbit around the earth. Kim Stanley Robinson recently wrote a trilogy of books about climate change. In one of the books, he used the word permaculture at least a dozen times. So, word is getting out.

Douglas: I hadn’t heard anything about that!

Keith: Read Kim Stanley Robinson, anything he’s written is very, very good.

Douglas: I’d love to but there’s so many things I need to know, and I guess I’ve always been like this, but I always read nonfiction almost exclusively. People always ask me why, and I always say “It’s not real.”

Keith: Well, you watch television don’t you?

Douglas: (Awkward, guilty silence.)

Keith: No?

Douglas: (laughing) No. (laughing)

Keith: I’ve never owned a television. My parents have television, people I visit have television. When I meet them in front of one, it’s sort of like an anthropological study, really. (Laughs) Cause I’m just kind of curious because seeing what people are watching is interesting feedback about the culture. And so, that’s always intriguing to me.

Douglas: I’m having flashbacks of Japan now and the culture of there. Anyway, that’s another story.

So, what we’ve been working on this site, Ian Graham’s property – designing it up with a whole bunch of people together – I’ve found it to be extremely productive to bring people together. It’s a great learning experience. There’s so many things I’ve learned, and I hope other people maybe picked up something from me as well. What advice do you have for people who are getting their feet wet with permaculture?

Keith: Read a lot. Start collecting the seed and plant catalogues. Study them. They are an enormous source of data. Get yourself a good library. Shop at the Permaculture Activist catalogue online.

Douglas: Of course. (laughs)

Keith: (Laughs) Permaculture Activist dot net. You’ve gotta put in a plug there.

Douglas: (Laughing) Of course!

Keith: And don’t waste any time is the next thing I’d say. And get help. Don’t try to do this by yourself. Start small, gain some mastery. Take care of zone 1 - that area 50 feet from your kitchen door all around the house. Get some greens and herbs going and start seeing what it takes to take care of oneself and family. Learn to live on things that don’t travel a great distance. Find your entertainment nearby so you don’t have to travel all around. And then when you do travel, it’s all the more valuable. You’ll make much more out of it. And when you do travel, go to people who are doing something intelligent – people who have gained some kind of mastery –and learn from those people. And they are all over the place, you just have to start looking for them. Start connecting yourself up to them and help them connect with others. Basically, we just have to let each other know we are there. This is one of the reasons why for the last 10 years, I have emphasized the Planetary Permaculture Directory where I try to keep track of all the permaculture contacts that I can, so that others can be found.

Douglas: Excellent advice. Thank you very much!

Keith: You are very welcome!

Rhizobium Symbiosis with Woody Plants: Leguminous Nitrogen-Fixing Trees

Rhizobium Symbiosis with Woody Plants: Leguminous Nitrogen-Fixing Trees
By Douglas Barnes

As mentioned in the previous article in this series, beneficial partnerships are the way of nature. In particular, some microbes (Frankia and Rhizobium) form associations with certain plants allowing them to fix atmospheric nitrogen into a form that plants can use. These symbiotic partners can help us to rehabilitate damaged landscapes, preparing the soil for a succession of more long-term plants.


This piece focuses on woody plants that associate with the bacteria of the genus Rhizobium. We can see from the diagram below that there are 3 subfamilies of the family Fabaceae (AKA Leguminosae). These families are Faboideae (AKA Papilionoideae), Mimosoideae, and Caesalpinoideae. Note that not all the trees in these subfamilies are nitrogen-fixers. Among the Caesalpinioideae, 23% are nitrogen fixers. For Mimosoideae, the figure is 90%, and for Faboideae, 97% are nitrogen-fixers.


As the diagram shows, Mimosoideae contains the nitrogen-fixers Acacia, Albizia, Calliandra, Enterolobium, Leucaena, Mimosa, Paraserianthes, and Pithecellobium. Caesalpinoideae's nitrogen-fixers are Chamaecrista, Cordeauxia; and Faboideae has Cajanus, Dalbergia, Erythrina, Flemingia, Gliricidia, Pterocarpus, Robinia, Sesbania, and Tephrosia.

To rapidly revegetate a damaged landscape, be sure to include plenty of these species to help quickly build up the soils. In areas of very problematic soil, such as arid, tropical and subtropical regions, make 90% of your initial planting of trees nitrogen fixing, pioneer species (associating with either Frankia or Rhizobium), and 10% of species your long-term canopy overstory species. When the system reaches maturity, the proportions will be reversed with 10% nitrogen-fixing, support species and 90% canopy species. The same formula could be followed for humid temperate regions, but the soils in these area are not so fragile and can stand a lower percentage of nitrogen fixers. A 70/30 or even lower may suffice in these areas, as the seasonal cycles of death and regrowth feed these soils well.

As the diagram below shows, the nitrogen-fixing support trees can be pruned (coppiced, pollarded, shredded or sacrificed) to provide mulch, fodder, fuel or fibre. As this is done, the roots of the tree self-prune, releasing nitrogen into the soil.


The highest concentrations of nitrogen are to be found in descending order in the seeds, the seed pods, the flowers, the leaves and then the woody parts of the tree. Inter-planting with fruit or nut trees naturally provides more soil nitrogen. But interplanting also makes the job of chop-and-drop mulching that much easier.

Species of the Month: Comfrey

Species of the Month: Comfrey
by Douglas Barnes

Comfrey (Symphytum officinale). What better plant to feature as Species of the Month than this herbaceous member of the Boraginaceae family?Description

It grows up to 150 cm tall and 60 cm in diameter in warm climates. The optimum growth is in climates where day and night are equal (i.e. the tropics). There, production of 100 to 200 tons per acre (roughly 250 to 500 metric tons per hectare) is possible! However, it will grow in temperate regions. It prefers full sun and soils rich in nitrogen and humus, so interplanting with nitrogen fixers and mulching is a good idea. You can expect to get at least 10 years out of one plant, and a well-attended plant might outlive you!

Animal Fodder

It is protein rich with reportedly 20 times the protein content of soy beans. It is used as a pig fodder successfully in amounts up to 80 to 90% of the diet! For poultry, it can reduce the need for other feed (be that your concoction or processed feed) by 50%. Egg quality will improve with yolks being brighter. Cows don’t bloat when eating comfrey like they do with clover. And too much clover can taint the milk – not a problem with comfrey. Also, mastitis is reduced in cows fed comfrey. Wilted comfrey mixed with straw fed to sheep at a ratio of one part comfrey to one and a half parts straw increases the digestion of the straw. The flowers make it useful as bee fodder. It is used in zoos as fodder for many (expensive) animals. Its tremendous production rates make it a great elephant feed.

Soil Improvement

Comfrey has deep roots that help it to draw up nutrients from subsoils. This characteristic makes it a valuable nutrient cycler. It accumulates nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, calcium, zinc, manganese, magnesium, copper, sodium, sulfur, chromium, molybdenum and lead (the latter might make it useful in cleaning roadside soils contaminated by the use of leaded gasoline). It can be used as a green manure, and its ability to be cut right down to the ground a few times a year helps in this respect. It can be used as a compost activator.

It can be made into a liquid plant feed:

Place harvested comfrey in a sealable bucket
Weigh down the comfrey with a stone
Wait 1 or 2 weeks
Drain out the juice and dilute it 10 to 1 with water and water your plants with it

You can also use it to fill niches to suppress weeds.

As Food

Traditionally the whole plant has been used. Young leaves can be added to salads in small quantities to boost nutrient uptake. The stems can be blanched and eaten like asparagus. It is the only known plant source of vitamin B12.

As Medicine

Contains allantoin, which assists in the repair of damaged tissues. It is used as a poultice for cuts, scrapes, burns, skin conditions, ulcers, broken bones, strains and aches. It can help with digestive problems. The juice from leaves can be rubbed into the coats of dogs with mange.

The full catalogue of uses is:

Vulnerary (wound healer)
Astringent (contracts tissue making it useful to treat bleeding, peptic ulcers, diarrhoea, shrink mucus membranes, etc.)
Expectorant (dissolves mucus making it useful in treating phlegm)
Emollient (smoothes and softens skin)
Demulcent (treats inflamed, irritated tissue by coating it – e.g. treating a dry cough)
Antiseptic (helps treat or prevent infection in wounds)
Nutritive (along with its protein and minerals, it contains vitamin B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B12, C, E and 28,000 IU of vitamin A per 100g)
Tonic
Styptic (helps stop bleeding)
Antioxidant (from the rosmarinic acid it contains)

Pest Control

Slugs go for comfrey, so you could use it to attract slugs away from plants. If you really want to go all out against slugs, grow a ring of comfrey around your garden, separating the garden with an electric fence. The comfrey will attract the slugs from the garden. Then run pigs in the comfrey. The pigs will love both the comfrey and the slugs. And the pig urine and manure will attract in even more slugs, hopefully depleting your local population for a while. In place of the pigs, poultry could be run as well.

Caution Needed?

Comfrey does contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids which have the potential for liver damage. There have been warnings put out against the use of the herb, but evidence of incontrovertible documented toxicity is lacking. In the book “The Safety of Comfrey,” J.A. Pembery found no reported cases of pyrrolizidine poisoning from comfrey. He did find one case of pigs in Germany being poisoned by nitrates in comfrey, but not by pyrrolizidine. Lab tests on rats suggest that to cause harm to humans, one would have to eat about 20,000 leaves. Certainly from anecdotal evidence, many people have eaten comfrey without reservations for decades and been very healthy. Still, to err on the side of caution, limit consumption. Also, drying the comfrey reduces the amounts of alkaloids.

The Goals of Permaculture

The Goals of Permaculture Design
by Douglas Barnes

What are the goals of permaculture design? What are we trying to do? The goal of any design is to provide a solution to a problem. The problem permaculture addresses is the maximization of human welfare achieved in a sustainable way. To put it another way, we are trying to ensure long-term survival in a way that does not make us all miserable.

When the term “sustainable” is used, we are really talking about energy budgeting. In a closed system like the Earth (or even in our finite galaxy) there is a maximum amount of energy available. To be able to survive long term means not spending more than you save. A designed human environment is sustainable if, over its lifetime, it captures more energy than was required for its manufacture, implementation and maintenance and provides a surplus for human use. Considering the current industrial model for food production, in which one calorie of food energy is created at the expense of 10 calories of input energy, this definition shows us that our food systems are not sustainable. Similar accounting for other human activities shows that sustainable activity is actually the exception these days.

Solution?

With the problem defined, we can work out a solution. Keeping sustainability in mind, we can set a guideline for design: Design action around energy, not the other way around. A given bioregion has a limit to how much energy it can capture and store for our activities. To go beyond this limit is to push the costs of those activities off onto others and future generations. We are not interested in a sociopathic approach to design, so we want to avoid doing this outcome.

One way to design around energy is through the permaculture technique of setting up zones for activities. Activities that require regular, daily attention should be located in a place close to where the people are. While I am always pleased to see people producing their own food in gardens, those gardens are unfortunately usually located at the farthest point in the backyard from the backdoor. Incentive to trudge all the way out there is reduced by its relative distance and it requires more human energy to get out there. How likely are you to go out to the garden to pick fresh herbs for your breakfast if it’s raining and the garden is 10 metres or more from the door? Not very likely. As the attention required by the elements in the design decreases, their distance from the most trafficked areas increases. Animals, if they are incorporated into the design, are a little farther out, perhaps with fruiting perennials. Nut and timber trees are farther out still. With elements placed geographically according to frequency of use, the energy required to tend to them is minimized.
To maximize energy efficiency, we can also mimic nature. Living and nonliving elements in ecosystems are interconnected, so should the elements in our design be. While the approach of compartmentalizing each element makes for simplicity in the minds of men, it is unnatural and creates more work than is necessary. One could set up an area for one set of crops, then another set of crops, another for trees, another for poultry, and so on. It looks simple – everything in its place. But to do this is to simultaneously ignore beneficial interactions between elements and to create more work for ourselves. If crops such as onions and others from the lily family are planted with apple trees, for example, they would provide a non-competing groundcover (unlike grasses) and flowers to attract pollinators and a host of other beneficial insects that show up with them. Compartmentalized, however, this mutually beneficial arrangement is lost. Poultry let into the garden in a controlled manner provide pest control, weeding and fertilization with minimal losses of garden vegetables. Poultry under perennial fruits clean up fallen fruit, breaking pest cycles. Separated and compartmentalized, these elements cannot mutually interact and start to generate waste. This means more work is left up to the people on site. We can match up these elements by noting their characteristics and matching them with other needs. Chickens love scratching, for example. Pigs love rooting. If you have either animal, why damage soil life by cultivating the ground with an expensive and unsustainable machine in preparation for a garden when you can pen these animals in to the future garden site to do a better job without hurting the soil life and fertilize the soil at the same time?

We can also make note of harmful interactions as well. For example, some plants, like sunflowers, are allelopathic, meaning they put out a chemical that suppresses the growth of most other plants. While they might not make a beneficial companion for your other plants, they could be used as living barriers to prevent the spread of plants you are growing but don’t want to invade other parts of the garden. Ignoring this use of the characteristics of allelopathic plants means that the gardener must now expend energy to put in some sort of artificial barrier – one that has its own embodied energy cost.

Inorganic elements on site are also a consideration. A sun-facing rock will store heat, for instance, making it sometimes possible to grow plants in the microclimate around it that would otherwise not survive or thrive in that climate.

Returning to the goal of permaculture design - creating sustainable environments to meet human needs – we need to look at just what human needs are. Fortunately, we are the most studied species on the planet. There is plenty of information available on the physiological, social and psychological needs of the species to make a very detailed set of species characteristics. Furthermore, the area of happiness has also been studied showing us what makes us genuinely happy and what does not.

Our physiological needs include clean food, clean water, clean air, warmth, and shelter. The physiological does not stand alone, however. The social and psychological are also a part of the requirements for physical health, though they themselves are intangible.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a pretty good model for determining human needs, and the diagram below is patterned in large part, though not exclusively, from it. I’ve put together some of the needs that I’ve seen have empirical evidence to back them and avoided the influence of spiritual, political or economic ideology as best as I could. For simplicity’s sake, the needs here are not meant to be an exhaustive list of human needs, just a sampling of important needs.

Next, we can ask what the aim of the current status quo system is.

Is the aim of our society long term sustainability/survivability? Not by any stretch of the imagination. We are living well beyond our needs with the dream that some wondrous technology will come and solve this problem for us. There is no better recipe for collapse of civilization than that.

Is the aim of our society personal or community happiness? Again, no. We have data consistently showing that while personal wealth has, on the whole, increased, happiness has decreased. Communities, too, are becoming less integrated and interdependent than they once were. This is not a good outcome for a tribal species.

Is the aim to maximize human potential? No. The concern of our society is not to get as many people as possible to experience the maximum personal growth possible. National funding on mental health is enough to indicate that this is not a serious aim.

Is the aim simply to meet material needs for clean, healthy food, clean water, clean air, shelter and energy for warmth and cooking? The food we eat holds less nutritional value now that we’ve industrialized food production. Furthermore, biocide use contaminates not only the food, but more importantly and more severely the farmers and environment that produced it. There is no clean air unpolluted by man-made chemicals anywhere on Earth. There is no clean, uncontaminated water left, save for what is available in glaciers. Shelter is available, to some at least. Looking at homeless populations, it appears that over-priced shelter is available, provided you are both mentally fit and gainfully employed or with sufficient financial reserves to provide you with a roof over your head. And energy to stay warm and cook food? The same conditions seem to apply as for shelter. So, no, this is not the aim of the current system. If it were a serious concern, it would meet these needs better, assuming we are not all outlandishly incompetent.

Looking at the outcomes, it appears as though the aim of the current system is to accrue and secure financial power to those clever enough, educated enough, lucky enough and/or devious enough to get it and hold on to it. Again, I base this on observation, not ideology. I am not making an argument for or against markets here, I am only looking at outcomes. I know of situations where markets work brilliantly and others where they fail miserably. I am only interested in reality, not ideology, because reality always gets the last punch.

Knowing this, we can ask how well the current system works at delivering our identified human needs. Well, some are met, others are not; and those that are met are almost never done in a sustainable way. Our physical needs are not fully met and to the extent they are, the process of meeting them is eroding our capacity for survival in the long term. Our social needs are not met. The consumption of ever more gadgets is not strengthening families or communities, nor is it cementing real friendships. Too many home buyers are looking to move into a good marketplace as opposed to a good community – one with real bonds between people. Connection to a geological site is not an important factor anymore with many or perhaps most people. Our needs for connection and spiritual and personal growth are not met.

In fact, you can go through the needs in the diagram point by point and find that the current system does a poor job of delivering them and completely overlooks some needs altogether. So there exists a gap between what the system can deliver and what humans need. Filling in this gap is the task of design: identifying the needs and meeting them sustainably in the most efficient way.

Interestingly, the people who are doing this now and living in these designed systems are usually reporting increased happiness as well (happiness that can’t all be solely attributed to Mycobacterium vaccae, the soil bacteria that has been found to boost mood when in contact with human skin). And why wouldn’t they be happy? Their physical needs are getting met. They require less time to acquire food when compared with the need to work for money to then walk or drive to a market to pick out food to then carry home and unpack and load into the refrigerator. They require less energy and money to stay warm or cool in their homes. Their homes are designed around function and not architectural fashion. They are usually folks who are involved with establishing connections in their community. So, many of their intangible human needs are addressed by their systems.

That said, the work we are doing is not reweaving the threads of the tapestry of society. We are just tying up the first lengthwise wrap threads of the tapestry to be woven in the future. We have yet to find all the answers, and the real work is ahead of us. But the choice is sustainability/survival or adherence to a system that we know doesn’t meet our needs. Which path to take seems clear enough.