An interview with Permaculture Designer, Douglas Barnes

This is Part One of a series of articles dedicated to teaching our children how to become global citizens.

My first introduction to Douglas Barnes was a newspaper article describing his work in developing countries – setting up sustainable systems for community development. I immediately took note, and introduced myself via email. After seeing first hand, how important this work was in the third world, I knew this man was someone I had to connect with.

Douglas Barnes is a permaculture designer, consultant and teacher. He has designed and implemented permaculture systems in India, Japan and Canada as well as consulting on projects in Australia. He has taught permaculture seminars in Japan and Canada. He holds two Permaculture Design Course certificates and is a direct student of the founder of the permaculture movement, Bill Mollison. Douglas has been active in permaculture since 2004, and has been an educator for 18 years.

I’m so happy that he agreed to share his passion for creating sustainable environments. Read on to learn how permaculture can positively impact your life, and help you to teach your children how to be global citizens through environmental awareness.

Chic Galleria: What is permaculture?

Douglas: Permaculture is a system for designing sustainable human environments. It’s essentially the design and creation of an ecosystem in which people can meet their needs for clean water, clean food, clean energy and other material and non-material needs such as housing, financing, work, etc. On first glance, many people think that permaculture is some sort of organic gardening method. That’s only one aspect, though. Organic gardening is like a tool, whereas permaculture is the tool chest holding the tool.

CG: What sort of projects do you tackle on a daily basis?

Douglas: My clients are usually people interested in having a low maintenance garden system designed and implemented in their yard – something that will require little or no maintenance. This would be where the design comes in. I wouldn’t garden either if it involved watering every day and putting in hours of weeding ever summer.  I’ve only done about 30 or 40 seconds of weeding in my garden so far this summer, and it really wasn’t necessary for me to go after the weeds I did. The bulk of the work in the garden is planting and harvesting.

Other clients have been interested in tackling their energy usage. A client in P.E.I contacted me about a century farmhouse they have that required 20 cords of wood to heat (they have an outdoor furnace that provides heat and hot water). I made a number of suggestions that they implemented themselves, taking them down to just 8 cords of wood a year.

For the past year, I have been very busy setting up a homestead for myself in Tweed. Though it is just my wife and I and whomever I can drag in to help, we are now putting the roof on our new passive solar home. The design makes the building largely self-heating and self-cooling, with additional heat coming from a very efficient masonry stove.

CG: Why should sustainability be important to families?

Douglas: Firstly, it’s important to understand what sustainability really means. The word is thrown around so much that it’s in danger of becoming meaningless. A system is sustainable if, over its lifetime, it is able to capture and store more energy than is required to create and maintain the system. For instance, if you have a squash seed and prepare a garden bed for it, plant it, and care for it, it will supply more food energy than was required to bring it into being. Modern industrial agriculture, on the other hand, requires an average of 10 calories of energy to produce and deliver one calorie of food energy, and more to prepare it. If you use the metaphor of dollars rather than calories, you quickly see that this is a temporary arrangement.

So given a clear definition of the word, its importance is immediately apparent: Sustainability means survivability. I don’t mean to sound alarmist here. We are not going to starve to death this year or next. However, “conventional” agriculture has only been around for the last 60 years and we’ve only been spending more calories than we’ve been producing since the mid-seventies. The problem is the scale we are doing it on. We now know that our energy supplies are reaching their maximum production rate; and we know that we are not discovering new sources to make up for our demand. We are also in the dilemma of being damned if we do find new sources. Look at what we’ve done to the planet in just 30 years time. Now imagine the mess we can make if we supply an increasing population with more and more polluting sources of energy. It won’t be too far into the future before we understand firsthand what a collapse of civilisation is like.

CG: What are some easy ways parents can teach their children about sustainability?

Douglas: Get them away from their computers for a few days in a natural environment where there is something fun to do like swimming or rock climbing. In other words, don’t make taking them into nature seem like going to a prison camp. Then take just half an hour and explain to them how plants grow. How they capture light from the sun and turn it into sugar. How the soil feeds them and how they feed the life in the soil with their sugars when they are alive and how the plants turn into soil when they die. Explain how the plants form relationships with fungi, sometimes even letting the fungal hyphae right into the cells of their roots, where the fungi and plants feed each other and help other plants of other species connected to the same fungi. Let them see how nothing is in isolation, everything is interdependent and thrives when it is interconnected.

And if that doesn’t work, send them to my farm for a few days.

CG: How can we make our homes more environmentally friendly without breaking the bank?

Douglas: Being environmentally friendly should be something that saves money rather than costing money. Sure, there is an initial outlay, but it should pay back over the medium to long term. Unfortunately, much of what goes on in the “green” industry is just trying to get people to buy more and more gadgets that aren’t really necessary.

Food is a pretty easy place to start. You may spend up to a few hundred dollars setting up a self-regulating garden, but it should provide you with at least the same dollar value in produce the first year. Every year after that is money in the bank. You will not be able to produce 100% of your food on site, but with an average back yard, you can take a large chunk out of the yearly grocery bill, while getting superior quality food at the same time.

Then look at energy. Where are you getting free energy (sunlight)? Is it possible to redirect that energy and get more? Can you do something to conserve more of the energy that you have by either insulating or using plants or trellises to block out harsh elements like cold winter winds or strong summer sunshine?

Is there a way to make the resources you have do more than one job? In my old apartment in Tokyo, for instance, we used to shunt the bath water into the washing machine when we were finished bathing. Similarly, our toilet had a faucet on top of the tank so that the water filling the toilet could be used to wash your hands. Greywater can be put to use, but it is important to understand greywater systems to avoid problems such as illness. Rainwater, however, is a resource that can easily be put to productive use with either a tank or barrels.

Finally, what is in your waste stream? What are you sending down the drain (that you will eventually wind up drinking later)? What are you sending to the landfill? The chances are that the more toxic things have replacements or are not really necessary.

None of this should be approached as a terrible chore, mind you. I am finding that the more sustainable I make my life, the more enjoyable it is. I’ve cut out things that I though made me happy but really didn’t; and I’ve been able to use my creativity in ways I never thought possible. Sustainable living is just great fun!

To contact Douglas Barnes, email him at dbarnes@ecoedge.ca or visit his website http://www.ecoedge.ca . For helpful tips and articles, see his blog http://permaculturetokyo.blogspot.com or follow on Facebook at http://bit.ly/EcoEdge-FB

Part Two: Introducing Your Kids to Conservation: An interview with Environmental Educator, Dan Orr

Part Three: The Family Table: How You Can Teach Your Kids About Sustainable Eating

Part Four: Empowering Your Child to Become a Hero

Bryna Jones is a writer, mother, blogger and humanitarian from Ontario, Canada. Formerly Creative Director for at a small branding company, she specializes in online communication and social media. She will soon begin her role as Advocacy Campaigns Coordinator for World Vision Canada. Follow her on Twitter @brynajones.