

Sustainable farming: interview with Bill Mollison - dpatru
http://www.motherearthnews.com/print-article.aspx?id=67440

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dpatru
Bill Mollison advocates intelligent farming or, as Larry Wall, the designer of
Perl, would say, farming that emphasizes the three virtures of a programmer:
laziness, impatience, and hubris. The following quotes illustrate this.

From Wikipedia's article on Larry Wall: Laziness - The quality that makes you
go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write
labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what
you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the
first great virtue of a programmer.

From the Bill Mollison interview: In essence, [permaculture] is an
intellectual exercise. Instead of wearing out our bodies in the garden, we use
our minds. For that reason, permaculture appeals to people who normally
wouldn't be interested in the hard physical labor of gardening — especially
double-dig gardening with compost — since the real labor of developing a
permaculture is not in doing it, but in thinking about what one is going to
do. One's major energy, then, is devoted to the initial designing of the
system, not to the maintenance of it.

From Wikipedia's article on Larry Wall: Impatience - The anger you feel when
the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just
react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.
Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer.

From the Bill Mollison interview: Here's an example I like to use: I call it
my chicken model. Take four separate elements: a hen coop, a greenhouse, a
pond, and a small forest. Now you can have these on your farm . . . and place
them wherever you like, in no particular relationship to each other. In that
situation each one functions individually, and they all consume energy. But if
you make the forest a forage range for the chickens by putting the coop in or
near that forest . . . if you attach the greenhouse to the front of the
chickens' shelter . . . and if you set the pond in front of the greenhouse —
as illustrated in Permaculture Two — well, then you've got a nice system of
interrelating functions, the familiar checks and balances.

Just look at all the ways you produce energy in this system: the chickens'
body heat, the direct sunlight that reflects off the pond and hits the
greenhouse, the radiation of the trees at the rear, the decomposition of
chicken manure, and on and on. If you sit down and sketch this system out,
you'll find that it's fantastically complex — with thousands of functional
interactions — and will run itself . Operating on its own energy, the system
automatically switches on and off. As the sun gets high in the sky, the
greenhouse absorbs more heat . . . so the chickens get hot and go out, thus
removing the source of animal heat. While they're outside, the birds forage in
the forest and leave their manure to enrich the soil. After dark, of course,
they'll go back inside to keep warm . . . taking their body heat with them.

Look at each chicken by itself and the variety of functions it's performing in
this one simple model: In the coop the hen operates as a radiator, an egg
producer, and a manurial system. In the forest the bird acts as a self-
forager, a tree-disease controller, a fireproofer, a fertilizer producer, and
a rake. One can use chickens to do quantities of useful work . . . in fact, I
don't know what you can't do with chickens, once you get started!

From Wikipedia's article on Larry Wall: Hubris - Excessive pride, the sort of
thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain)
programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the
third great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and impatience.

From the Bill Mollison interview: the system should be self-supporting . . .
that is, it shouldn't require the addition of any external energies to
operate. It should also be self-steering, requiring a minimum of input from
the designer after the design has been implemented. Finally, it should enrich
the people in it, and they should enrich it. In short, a permaculture should
be nothing less than a Garden of Eden. Now that may sound like a pie-in-the-
sky goal, but I really believe it to be an achievable objective for the whole
world . . . and the only things needed to reach it are human energy and
intellect!

