blog/monthly musings of an eco-designer.. 2008

It’s not the 1st when I’m writing this, but it might as well be. After some glorious Spring days, it’s snowing! None for Christmas, snow in April. it’s not the first time, of course; someone on the radio has just reminded us of the occurs back in 1908, or thereabouts. But my guess is that winters were generally colder then, and lasted longer. For us, this has been the first snow we’ve seen this winter, sorry, Spring. This could lead into a rant (or at least a dribble) about global warming, but I’m not going to mention that…

If there is a fool in April, it must be me. I spend my time doing my work with BioTecture (see last entry), thinking about sustainability, talking about it (too much, I’m told!) and writing, giving talks etc. And then I design gardens for wealthy people who don’t live lifestyles that are remotely sustainable (sorry if you’re one of them, this is a generalisation!). The sad fact is that few people come to me for a sustainable landscape as the centre of their efforts to lead a sustainable lifestyle. I guess that at the moment life’s just too easy and the threats are still (apparently) too remote for people to take things seriously. My partner and I met some friends in a cafe recently; he’s a pilot, and yes, I started talking about peak oil. I shouldn’t have, ’cause they’re nice people and like most of the population, weren’t ready to hear about it. I got told off afterwards, told that we’d have no friends left if I went on like that! The trouble is, as per the saying “It’s hard to make someone understand, if their job depends upon them not understanding”. Sometimes, having concern about the future make you feel like society’s outcast. No-one wants bad news.

There is lots of good news too, but you have to hear the bad first, for without understanding the problem, you can’t appreciate the need for a solution. When you introduce peak oil, it can be shocking, and people sometimes don’t hang around long enough to hear the possible solutions, so you get labelled a “doom and gloom” merchant. I’m not, honest…

The best solution is communal self-reliance; just how things used to be in the “good old, bad old, days”. We have some technology to help us though, if only we would use it wisely. And for all our material advancement and all our knowledge, we have very little wisdom. That’s because you can’t quantify wisdom, it doesn’t fit into an economic equation, so it is not valued. We don’t value the wisdom of our elders, as we used, and to be honest, they themselves have less wisdom than they might have had, and we, when old, will have even less. Is that pessimistic? Perhaps, but also i think that the generation to come will have to readjust their values to cope with their daily reality, even more than we will have to, and their wisdom might just be respected more as the generation that follows them grows up into a world of less, not more. The outcome of this could be that we rediscover communal strength and respect, that we perceive more clearly the folly of rampant materialism, that we place our values in things other than money and material things.  What do we need to be truly secure?  Warmth, shelter, food are the basics.  Others, less tangible, include love, laughter, happiness, respect, wisdom, music and hope.  Most of those need a very low level of material input to achieve.

One thing only is certain: the future will not be the same as the past…

Well, i think i could be going mad.. the last month has been an absolute blur and i’m still not sure if it’s all real (and was it REALLY January when I last wrote in here?!

At the end of Feb we (myself and Richard Sabin) launched our new green walling company, BioTecture Ltd (www.biotecture.uk.com) at EcoBuild, Earl’s Court, London.  First off, we won a “Dragon’s Den” style live event where we had to pitch our new eco-businesses to a panel of judges, chaired by Tim Smit, founder of the Eden Project.  After a dodgy start and a few gruelling questions, we came through to a flying finish, to win the top prize of £10k worth of cash and business support.  Thereafter (and in fact even before) we we inundated with architects, developers and councils wanting to talk to us about green walling projects they had in mind!

The sheer numbers amazed us, considering there is virtually no-one in the UK cabable of installing them - except us!  The size and range of projects was also amazing, ranging from Eden Project-style tropical biomes to multi-story carp parks, to shopping developments through to private gardens and small offices.  We also had an enquiry to re-build the only real attempt in the UK so far at a green wall, at Paradise Park, Islington.  This was a brave attempt to design a wall, but they got the system all wrong and if we get to rebuild it will be a bit of a coup!  Overall the enquiries have come from all over the UK, Europe, the Middle-East and even the Caribbean!

So we are rushing to put together follow-up information, arrange investment (lots of interest here too) and build the business in a rapid, but secure manner.

2008 looks set to be an intriguing year, full of contradictions. On the one hand, local business is booming and there is lot’s of interest and optimism, on the other, we have the US economy faltering, global financial systems faltering and energy prices sky-rocketing. The beginning effects of Peak Oil, for sure. Where will it end? Well for one, anyone offering relevant eco-solutions is going to be kept busy, at least for the next 5-10 years!

Hence sustainable landscapes, especially food-producing ones, will be of increasing importance - even if the world doesn’t realise it yet, it will soon. In the summer of this year, it is predicted that we will see big increases in the costs of basic food produce, as demand outpaces supply and the competition between food and biofuels grows! Madness! How can we even countenance growing biofuels when we have a soaring population and decreasing agricultural output?

We are all going to have to start using less fuel, to keep within affordable budgets, because our wages won’t rise as fast as our costs (witness N Power’s huge price increase) and this will impact upon everything we do. This pressure will grow year-on-year and it will not abate, so we have to get ahead of the curve now, and do something positive about it.

Gardens are a resource that can sustain much of our basic needs and we should increase the usefulness of what we grow and do there. In this respect, there is much to learn and experiment with, and that’s good fun! Hey, there’s a bit of light relief! I think the main thing in dealing with all these issues is simply that we have to re-adjust our thinking, using different values. When we look at the implications of peak oil with our old (current) values, we see everything to come as loss and chaos. If we look at things with new values we can see it as a return to sanity, better values, more harmonious living, reawakened community, better spirituality. A renew of forgotten knowledge and values, no less.

Yup, 2008, promises to be an interesting year…

Well, I wish it was like this; we’ve come reasonably close, but it’s not going to be a white one!

I’ve written at various times about “whole systems design”, only to find out recently it is a phrase in use in the permaculture world - there’s that word again! Not surprising really, I guess. I find the title of landscape designer increasingly unsatisfactory; perhaps “whole system designer” would be better except no-one would understand what it meant! If you want to know what I mean by this, read the following page: www.marklaurence.com/whole_systems.html

I was following a link via my webstats pages to see where my websites rank for various phrases (as you do, if you’re a bit nerdy about such things), when i came across another interesting US site called Whole Systems Design - www.wholesystemsdesign.com . This site is worth a look and their approach and philosophy seems very similar to my own. Damn, I thought I was unique!

Getting people to think about their gardens/landscapes in this deeper/wider way is not always easy, and even now most of my clients are requesting contemporary landscapes or water gardens and not really thinking beyond that level.  I guess such things take time…

I read an interesting site by an American permaculturalist, Toby Hemenway, (http://www.patternliteracy.com/index.html), specifically, his article “Apocalypse, not”, in which he denies that peak oil will lead to imminent economic collapse, and all that goes with it. This interested me, because i’m always on the look-out for better news, and he seemed to be offering it. And bear in mind, he is into low-carbon living and doesn’t deny that peak-oil will occur, just how bad the impact will be. I was discussing this with a friend and unfortunately came to the conclusion that he is wrong, mainly on the basis that a 2-3% decline is not a steady state progression but an exponential curve, in this case going down, not up. Sigh. I guess we’re stuck with the inevitability of economic and social decline and collapse.

Other articles on that site are still of interest, especially his tales of his move out into the countryside for 10 years to pursue the dream of self-sufficiency and independence. His conclusion may surprise you, that you will have a lower carbon footprint living in a city than in the countryside, plus better social cohesion with your neighbours. We have to bare in mind that in the US, distances are far greater, in comparison to the UK, where you are rarely more than 5 miles from a village or small town. However, i don’t doubt that the fundamental message he gives of “you can’t survive on your own” is true. Communities are where the future lies, of villages and towns, with cities or up to 1 million - and no suburbs. Suburbia is the most unsustainable method of living ever devised, and won’t survive in a post-oil world. If you live there, move out while you can!

The article on agriculture and its inherent unsustainability is also of interest and should be read. Here he argues that agricultural and industrial societies are inherently destructive in their land-use and social systems, requiring expansion to replace denuded lands (salination/loss of topsoil) and consolidation of power to store and secure surplus, both of which lead to aggression and war. On the other hand, Foraging and horticultural societies are not guided by such needs. A horticultural society is primarily one of gardeners, or perhaps for our modern-day world, or future world, it will be one of forest gardeners or permaculturalists.

Despite his rather over-optimistic view of energy decline, there is much to be admired in his work. It ties in well with my own thinking on local community action and economies, and of forest gardening. Harvesting the produce of perennial trees and shrubs, along with the cultivation of vegetables and small areas of grain, gives us a low-input, high-output system of food production which is not dependant upon large (or even small) inputs of fossil fuels. As soon as you have such inputs, you loose all the calorific gain of a system and you are therefore onto a net energy drain, which of course, is not sustainable.

Think about it…

Okay, it’s Sunday, and it’s been raining with strong winds, but my computer retired unexpectedly for a short nap (something to do with overheating), and i decided to do something in the garden. Weedy vegetable beds and a large unruly pile of “compost”, plus a large amount of cardboard from a recent delivery made me feel all permacultural. Solving two problems with one solution is always rewarding and is the old principle of “low effort/high returns” that the permi guru’s love. so on the weedy beds went the cardboard, followed by a thick layer of compost, consisting of old grass cuttings, copious leaves from our horse chestnut trees, old sawdust and guinea-pig droppings, you name it, it went on there! By Spring, however, it will hopefully have got rid of many of the weeds (perhaps not the docks and mallows which are rife around here) and I will have nice, enriched beds to plant up. of course, if I were organised, I’d be planting broad beans, peas and garlic now, though I fancy mice would eat them! Oh, the earthly delights of muck ‘n magic…

Permaculture was fresh in my mind as I’d just been writing an article on it for my website (http://www.marklaurence.com/sustainability/permaculture.html) and musing on how my principles for sustainable landscapes are slowly but inexorably merging with it. That’s because it deals with “whole system thinking”, something that is vital and quite central to a sustainable future. Such a process crosses all professional boundaries and disciplines and would be best expressed through the medium of pattern language. I have also just re-written an older article on this subject (http://www.marklaurence.com/articles/pattern_language.html). Hopefully, one will re-enforce the other. I’m also nearly ready to publish my newsletter on that site, after many absent months!

That’s me done for today, i’m off to make supper and sit by the fire; that’s when it’s actually nice that it’s rainy and windy outside…

Well, I’ve been wondering about a blog for some while, so thought i’d give it a go. On my other site, “Mark Laurence” (www.marklaurence.com) i run a newsletter - except, i don’t! It hasn’t been updated for ages because of time, and the fact it needs a few articles written on the site, etc etc. Blogs are immediate, aren’t they? Plus i have several sites now, and this might pull them together.

So, let’s start with a bit of a rant!! After 20+ years as a garden designer, I finally joined the Society of Garden Designers last year. You have to have your work vetted, to make sure you’re not totally crap. So far so good. I joined for one reason, because i heard that they had set up a sustainability advisory committee, which i got myself onto.

As i should have known, the SGD is not exactly forward thinking when it comes to these issues, even the HTA (horticultural trades association) seems to be way ahead, which is saying something! The sustainability group were asked to comment - or maybe requested to comment - on next year’s Spring Conference, which was supposed to be about sustainability. Except it didn’t mention it in the title, or anywhere else much in the proposed line-up.

The long and short of it all is that we proposed alternatives which were concise and necessary, starting off with peak oil. Well, dinosaurs is the word! And we know what happened to them don’t we? Complete denial (whilst denying the denial) is something i haven’t experienced in quite such a forceful way before! An eye-opener as to humanity’s incapacity to face the truth, i suppose it shouldn’t surprise me too much. Louise (Zass-Bangham) and I came away quite at a loss as to how such people come to occupy positions of power, and make judgments on subjects they are TOTALLY ignorant about.

I’m currently not sure whether or not to carry on battling, or quit the society and become a permaculturalist! Don’t get me wrong, confronting Peak Oil is not an easy thing to do, and everyone reacted negatively. it’s the second reaction that counts, and usually it is to shrug it off and carry on as before - hey, the sun’s still shining, isn’t it? Other secondary responses are deep depression o, what can i do to stop this happening/prepare fo it. This last is the only way to go, that has any chance of being successful.

So the question is, do i jump (the SGD) before the ship starts sinking, or stay on board and try to warn of iceburgs ahead, whilst we’re still sailing in the Mediterranean Sea?