Ideas in permaculture…
A landscape depopulated
A FOUR YEAR OLD article in The Guardian raises the idea that rather than being a demographic problem, the movement of people into cities can be a solution to human survival on an overpopulated and ecologically damaged Earth.
The article is by speculative fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR), whose cli-fi novels about climate change and environmental issues raise ideas for how we as a species could cope. KSR, who lives in the ecologically designed Village Homes development in Davis, California, is a proponent of the permaculture design system.
KSR’s article is based on the idea first put forward by biologist, EO Wilson. It is to depopulate large swarths of the Earth’s rural landscapes and wild lands and house people in cities with regenerative design components. The idea might come across as preposterous, but it isn’t. KSR acknowledges that it is already happening.
KSR: At a time when there are far more people alive than ever before, this plan might sound strange, even impossible. But it isn’t. With people already leaving countrysides all over the world to move to the cities, big regions are emptier of humans than they were a century ago, and getting emptier still.
The idea is to revitalise marginal and remote land with vegetation and wildlife. In doing this the landscape increases its carbon sequestration and, along with regenerative farming methodologies, plays a significant role in ameliorating the impacts of a warming climate.
The depopulated regions would not all revert to wilderness. They would retain productive capacity sufficient to support human populations. What would they look like? What might we find there? Let’s look at it through a permaculture design lens.
Permaculture’s zoned landuse model: is it applicable?
Permaculture’s zoned landuse model might offer a possibility for landuse design in KSR and EO Wilson’s depopulated landscape that incorporates the farming systems that sustain human populations. Let’s revisit permaculture’s model.
The model
The system envisions zones of different landuse centred around the home, homestead, town or city. From Zone 1 where frequently consumed foods like vegetables are grown in home gardens, out to the lesser-management-demand orchards of Zone 2, through the farm animals, commercial orchards and field crops of Zone 3, onto the rangelands/farm forestry of Zone 4 and into the natural and restored ecosystems of Zone 5, the zoned landuse system is arranged according to intensity of management.
The products of zones 1 and 2 are primarily for household use. This is what constitutes most home gardens. The outer zones, 3 and 4, are for commercial production on farms. Zone 5 on farmland consists of remnant and planted vegetation which, in the classic permaculture model are left alone for nature. In the cities it is the patches of remnant bushland that make up Zone 5. In actuality, the zones might not follow this concentric model because their placement is determined by topography, existing vegetation, water availability and soils.
The system offers a design solution to providing both the needs of people in KSR’s regenerative towns and cities as well as natural systems. It can be tweaked to combine the zones where a more intensive approach would be useful.
Agroforestry—farm forestry—is a Zone 4 landuse for the production of construction and fuel wood, the selective forage of tree and shrub products and beekeeping. Agroforestry can be combined with grazing in a silvoculture/grazing system. Grain production sits in the Zone 3 or 4 band in the permaculture landuse model.
The further out you go, the less the management demand. In a landscape of rural properties following the zoned landuse idea, Zone 5s abutting one another would offer habitat and movement corridors for wildlife. They could connect remnant natural systems and could be expanded with mixed revegetation, with not all of it native to the region and some of it dual use for both nature and people. The more remote territory would be largely-uninhabited wild lands much as we see in national parks.
With a mosaic of natural systems and rehabilitated and reforested land, permaculture’s Zone 5 might be the model we are looking for to create KSR’s landcapes of the Anthropocene. It is home to the wild and semi-wild places on the far edge of developed areas where natural processes predominate, native and introduced species mingle and where wildlife can find a home. It is home to remnant ecologies that include areas of uncleared bushland. Alternatively, it might be rehabilitated natural systems where select species are established so they can follow their own evolution but which continue to provide environmental services to humans, services such as water retention and landscape humidification, wildlife habitat, fresh air, windbreak, soil stability, carbon sequestration and the rest. I saw this when program manager for a food security/farming systems program in the Solomon Islands, where remote villagers planted fruiting and other tree species, including teak for the timber trade, in the hills behind the village.
They could also be areas for selective wild harvest — regulation would be needed because of the potential for foragers to overharvest and for exploitation by commercial interests. With adjacent farmland we would have a landscape of field, farm, forest and grassland.
KSR: These emptied lands would be working landscapes, some of them anyway, where pasturage and agriculture might still have a place. All those people in cities still need to eat, and food production requires land. Even if we start growing food in vats, the feedstocks for those vats will come from the land. These mostly depopulated landscapes would be given over to new kinds of agriculture and pasturage, kinds that include habitat corridors where our fellow creatures can get around without being stopped by fences or killed by trains.
KSR and EO Wilson’s idea brings up images of existing wild lands combined with depopulated lands in human-designed-and-managed landscapes that serve the needs of people and nature. This is a different type of landscape than agriculture and urbanisation have created and a different one to what nature, left alone, would create. It seems a suitable landscape for the Anthropocene that we are in the early years of, a negotiation between nature and humanity that has the potential to benefit both.
We should keep in mind that the zoned landuse model is just that—a model—a way of imagining where we place the components of the agricultural landscape starting from the core of habitation.
New cities in old lands
The location of rural farmland using permaculture’s zoned landuse system in KSR’s largely depopulated world would presumably be as close to population centres as practically possible, with the intensiveness of landuse declining with distance from the centres. We already see this in the location of urban fringe market gardens, orchards and chicken production where travel distance to market is the primary locational factor. There still are market gardens in the suburbs of some cities and, like the urban fringe farms, they would require legislative protection from urban development.
What of the expanded cities where people would live in KSR’s model?
KSR: They “…will have to be green cities, sure. We will have to have decarbonised transport and energy production, white roofs, gardens in every empty lot, full-capture recycling, and all the rest of the technologies of sustainability we are already developing.
That includes technologies we call law and justice — the system software, so to speak. Yes, justice: robust women’s rights stabilise families and population. Income adequacy and progressive taxation keep the poorest and richest from damaging the biosphere in the ways that extreme poverty or wealth do. Peace, justice, equality and the rule of law are all necessary survival strategies.”
Some of the hard systems infrastructure for these new cities aleady exists. Urban food production in community gardens and city farms, home food gardens and rooftop mini-farms could be supplemented with the further development of hydroponic/aeroponic/aquaponic systems and vertical farms. Electrified public transport is already a reality and can be further developed, and the contribution of renewables to the national energy grid is increasing. Initiatives in housing reform such as housing cooperatives, cohousing and the adoption of new building materials and construction techniques such as prefabrication and 3D printed building construction would aim to reduce the cost of housing and time taken for construction. Retention and legislative protection from urbanisation of existing urban fringe market gardens and orchards would complement the urban food supply from regenerative farms producing renewable energy (agrivoltaics) as well as food.
KSR’s systems sofware—the soft systems—create the opportunity for these urban systems through policy. Governance can be democratised through ideas like Murry Bookchin’s municipal libertarianism and similar systems. Policy to simplify the establishment and operation of worker/consumer/housing and other cooperatives would enable people to start and join equitable livelihood and other initiatives. Land trusts could be established for affordable housing and for other landuses. Adoption of constructive problem solving techniques could reduce conflict within organisations.
Affordable access to housing would have to be added to KSR’s requirements. That is because we don’t have it now. Buying a small apartment or house is beyond the reach of many, both young and old. Rents consume too high a portion of incomes. One of the results is growing homelessness, especially with women over 50 whose relationships have ended and who have difficulty finding accommodation and paid work.
The value of speculative fiction to imagining and making the future we want
Should we listen to a writer of speculative fiction like KSR?
The short answer: yes.
The reason? The speculative fiction KSR writes is a means of asking where what we are doing now could lead and what kind of future we want.
Speculative fiction is projective as well as reflective. It is a way to think about the present. It is a type of futurism fresher than much that we find in thinking and writing that labels itself futurism. Sometimes, all that amounts to is an extrapolation of present trends that does not consider the reality that unforeseen developments disrupt systems after which things follow a different course. In other words, much futurist thinking suffers from path dependency.
Nicolas Taleb coined a term for those unforeseen developments that are significant enough to force a sudden change of direction in societies and economies: black swans. The term is about exceptionalism. In the northern hemisphere swans are white, unlike in Australia where they are black. A black swan would be an unimagined find that disrupts expectations in a white swan world. Are black swans a real thing? How about Covid19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the flooding of around one-third of Pakistan in August of last year thanks to glacial melting ascribed to global heating, Australia’s extensive and devastating bushfires of 2019–2020 and the 2022 flooding that inundated parts of Lismore? They were exceptional occurences that happened with little or no warning. Conventional futurism could imagine them, but as black swans they become the province of speculative fiction to explore them. The new authorship genre of cli-fi (climate fiction) provides an example of this. This is the futurism of KSR’s novels. And that is why we should listen carefully and thoughtfully to what he says.
Is it possible?
Can we do what KSR writes about, depopulating rural lands and building humane cities? With rural depopulation a trend over the past 40 years, he thinks so.
KSR: All this can be done. All this needs to be done if we are to make it through the emergency centuries we face and create a civilised permaculture, something we can pass along to the future generations as a good home.
There is no alternative way; there is no planet B. We have only this planet, and have to fit our species into the energy flows of its biosphere. That’s our project now. That’s the meaning of life, in case you were looking for a meaning.
Read The Guardian article:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/20/save-the-planet-half-earth-kim-stanley-robinson?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR2DLbWkO_0sV4iB4xoySSmgEomd43DBYpJI-Ub6Mg399j1zEmGjxiHaqq0
More provocation for a better future in Permaculture Journal…
Reading the landscape…
Ideas in permaculture…
Permaculture’s literature…
The big picture…
