For Haiti’s Sake: A Permaculture Relief Corps

Permaculture is a design system based on ethics and principles which can be used to establish, design, manage and improve all efforts made by individuals, households and communities towards a sustainable future.

There is a growing buzz on the internet and social networking systems about a “different” kind of aid effort: a Permaculture relief corps. There is actually a listserve devoted to this discussion and articles are popping up all over engaging in this theme. Why Permaculture and what would a “permaculture relief” team look like? Here’s one article I found helpful on Maddy Harland’s blog Permaculture Magazine Editorial. She points out how the principles of permaculture design lend themselves so well to healing the Earth following natural disasters, and by extension, the people living there, as well.

Co-developed by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren back in the good ol’ days of the 1970′s, Permaculture deals with the basic issues of sustaining life wholistically by dealing with what is in front of you.  If you need water, look at where and how you can collect it, reclaim it, clean it, save it; don’t wait for the USAID truck to drive down your road with plastic bottles shipped in. (They may not come.) You don’t wait for heavy moving equipment, you create smaller versions of your system with your hands or invent simple tools. And you don’t let anything go to waste. (Something most Haitians have more experience with than I ever will.)

But why is there such poverty and lack of infrastructure and why has it continued for so long? The people and the island of Haiti have endured several centuries of interventionism by the United States and European nations under the guise of “stabilization.” In this interview by Amy Goodman of Democracy NOW!, journalist Kim Ives discusses how this has crippled the Haitians from recovering more rapidly from natural disasters.

People trained in Permaculture understand and honor systems for working together, by developing the best approach based upon the resources–human and otherwise–available. Rather than utilizing a cookie-cutter approach to any situation, PC’s carry in a value system, a way of looking at a situation and developing answers based on what they see and experience hand in hand with the local population.

And while a Permaculture Relief Corps couldn’t replace medical emergency personnel, its practitioners would be able to get other life-saving systems underway like composting toilets and rudimentary sanitation systems, water purification, solar ovens, and of course, survival gardens. Rather than watching the defunct systems continue to implode day by day, the PC relief workers could guide and empower the citizens on the ground to regain some of what they have lost. Here’s an article by Cory Brennan, one of the movers and shakers for this idea, that relates how Permaculture  can help to re-structure and revitalize an area after a disaster.

Permaculture systems create sustainable, long term solutions that incorporate the needs of the local population and its culture while training its citizens to replicate these systems when the PC workers are gone. Permaculture becomes a way to reconnect the various components or threads of community no matter how tattered they may be.

My blog on “outrageous gardens” is a direct result of my own permaculture training. I took one principle– “the problem is the solution” –to its limits and learned that you can create a growing space anywhere, anytime from whatever you have available and it’s probably more effective than what you had before.

So just thinking about all the possibilities related to a team of PC’s going to Haiti brightens my day, and there haven’t been too many bright days since Jan. 12th.

For more information about the Permaculture relief effort for Haiti, go to www.permaculturehaiti.org. There, you can also sign up to volunteer, request assistance or offer materials and supplies.

To participate in the on-line discussion and dissemination of information on this endeavor, sign up for the PC Relief listserve here.

To read more about some of the Permaculture work that was already in place in Haiti prior to the earthquake, check out: www.oursoil.org

And here you’ll find just about everything related to permaculture on the web.

This is an idea whose time has not only come but is fundamentally necessary for rebuilding Haiti from within. There are Permaculture relief workers on the ground in Haiti today and we’ll keep following their progress on my “Haiti” page. If you know of other PC Relief sites, please send them to me or add in the comments for this page!

“Permaculture is that art of the possible”

Graham Bell ‘The Permaculture Garden”