great read...learn from the master... Where, When Why, How.

Don

----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Vlaun" <scott@moosepondarts.com>
To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, June 18, 2007 9:50 AM
Subject: Re: [permaculture] defining permaculture

> Charles, This might be the excerpt you mentioned. It is from my
> interview with Mollison in 2001. We cut a lot of trees and probably
> have more biomass standing in the forest now than when we started.
> We harvest the trees like any other crop and use most of it for
> firewood and building material and leave the slash for habitat. We
> are also opening up some land to grow grass for a draft horse and
> some chickens. You can link to the rest of the interview off our
> website below. It was rather epic and life altering for me.
>
> Mollison: Yes. Make the least changes that you need to achieve what
> you want. Don't cut a tree down unless you have to. . . and I've
> never had to since I've adopted that as a principle.
>
> Vlaun: You've never had to cut a tree down?
>
> Mollison: Never. I've never had to.
>
> Vlaun: But you said the first place you went to, you went to the
> forest and cleared an acre and a half.
>
> Mollison: Oh, now, this was before permaculture. I was hatching
> permaculture in that hole in the forest. In fact, I am a logger. I've
> logged forests as a profession and broken down the logs with Canadian
> twins and sawed them up into six houses every day, six days a week.
> So I've cut up a lot of timber for housing.
>
> Vlaun: What would someone in a situation like I'm in do? I live in a
> forest, more or less.
>
> Mollison: There are things I call type- one errors. The first one is
> I say is, for Christ's sake, don't move into a forest if you want to
> feed yourself because you're going to have to destroy the forest to
> feed yourself. That's a type one error. Once you make that error,
> error after error will follow. And the other thing is, don't put your
> house up on a high bluff or on a ridge. We find it impossible to save
> you from fire. We find it very difficult to get roads to you and it
> will cost you much more for your roads than your house. We can't get
> water up to you. We can't keep getting it up to you in emergencies.
> Don't go there. Don't make the error of selecting that site.
>
> Vlaun: In my case, this place used to be a farm 200 years ago. It was
> abandoned. Trees grew up in the fields. Somebody came and cut all the
> big trees and cleared a couple of acres for a landing. They left this
> huge mess, holes where the stumps were, piles of slash, piles of
> stumps. We're committed to restoring the forest ecology as well as
> producing our own food.
>
>
> 
> Mollison: I know what you're talking about. You want to farm there so
> you'll have to clear some of it and so you're caught in a bit of a
> bind. And you want to farm there so you'll have to control the
> animals. You're gonna have raccoons and possum and God knows what
> after your corn ears, aren't you? So you're gonna eat raccoon or
> shoot raccoon or set out wire fences against raccoon or something. So
> you've forced yourself into a situation where you're not sure that's
> where you want to be, you know, shooting deer and cutting down trees.
>
> The whole of the peninsula of northeast Australia runs right up into
> the tropics, it's called Cape York. When we first got photographs of
> it, it was solid rain forest. In Sydney, though, we're noticing
> little holes appearing in the rain forest all along the coast and in
> the end, they turned into quite large holes with buildings in them.
> So, they went to have a look, and the hippies were escaping the city
> by going to Cape York, finding a nice waterfall ten yards from a
> beach, cutting themselves a clearing, putting in a garden and
> building a house and then getting a bigger house and asking their
> friends to come. So the hippies were actually eating the rain forest.
> And they're the very people who turn up in thousands to stop all
> forests being cut anywhere. But they themselves, at home, were the
> main cause of the disappearance of a very uncommon tropical rain
> forest because they like to live in a beautiful place. What they
> don't like to do is build a beautiful place to go and live in. They
> like to go to a place that is already very beautiful. That's very
> typical of rich people and hippies. You'll hear hundreds of hippies
> say, "Oh, I've found this marvelous place. It's got a waterfall; it's
> got beautiful trees. It's got thousands of birds, you know. I'm gonna
> build there." It's right in a national park! You'll hear that a
> million times, right? And I think, "You stupid bastard. You're a type
> one error yourself!"(laughs) The hippy should go somewhere where
> there's no forest, like I did, where there's just cattle-trodden
> grasslands and build that beautiful place, which I did. I put lots of
> lakes in it with 50 good dams, so everywhere there's water, and I
> created paradise. It created itself even more than I did; I gave it a
> three-year start. It built itself amazingly fast.
>
> Vlaun: It's a frustrating thing for us. I never could have cleared
> that field where my garden is. It just never would have happened. It
> was a deep, dark pine forest. I never even thought about going in
> there. T,hen one day, it was gone, and all of a sudden, there was sky
> and a whole new vision occurred to us and we ended up buying the
> land. I'm trying to reforest a little part of the cleared area but
> the rest of it I want to keep open for gardens.
>
> Mollison: Yeah, that's a bind. If you look at America, there's more
> land cleared than will ever be used to grow food and maybe we need 2%
> of the cleared land that now exists to grow all the food we need.
> That's a fair estimate. Some people say 4% in England or somewhere.
> You could close 96% of the farms down or 98% depending on which way
> you're growing your food. Just reforest the whole thing again.
>
>
>
>
> Scott Vlaun
> Moose Pond Arts+Ecology
> Design Solutions for a Sustainable Future
>
> 450 Main St. Studio 2
> Norway, Maine 04270
> 207-739-2409 Studio
> 207-890-4099 Cell
> http://www.moosepondarts.com
>
>
>
> On Jun 18, 2007, at 12:31 PM, Charles de Matas wrote:
>
>> <<<<is permaculture/food forest adverse to cutting trees at all, or
>> is it
>> permissable to clear some for letting sunlight reach crops, or just
>> what
>> exactly
>> does the principles of "food forestry" consider to be permaculture?
>> I live
>> in a
>> very forested area and I have been clearing small plots and building
>> gardens. >>>>
>>
>> I once read the transcipt of an interview with Bill Mollison where
>> he said
>> that after he came up with the idea of permaculture he never had to
>> cut down
>> a tree. Amazing - not having to cut down any trees. I spent a
>> few hours
>> with some local permaculturists a few months ago helping one of
>> them make a
>> fire-break/terrace on a contour, and we certainly cut down a lot of
>> small
>> trees. I felt a little guilty about this when I got home.
>>
>> Charles.
>>
>> __________________________________________________________
>> Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's
>> FREE!
>> http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> permaculture mailing list
>> permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
>> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture
>> -go to the above link to subscribe to or unsubscribe from this list-
>
> _______________________________________________
> permaculture mailing list
> permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture
> -go to the above link to subscribe to or unsubscribe from this list-