Heather Jo Flores on the permaculture patriarchy and finding joy in the garden
Heather Jo Flores is a jack of many trades: writer, activist, instructor, permaculture lover. From an unstable childhood spent in urban areas on the West Coast of the US, she went on to join environmental activist communities, campaigning for the protection of forests and serving food to people in need with the global collective Food Not Bombs. That led her to permaculture, “a natural progression” in her mind. “When you’re serving food, you immediately start to think about agriculture: it makes sense to grow some of the food that we’re feeding. That was what started Food Not Lawns.”
She explains that the group got access to a space behind the park where it served food in Eugene, Oregon. “We jokingly called it the Food not Lawns garden because it was full of grass, which we removed to put in vegetables and fruits. It sounded like Food not Bombs. That name just stuck and that movement took off.”
Flores even wrote a book based on this idea, Food not Lawns: How to turn your yard into a garden and your neighbourhood into a community. And this is not the only time one of her ideas took off.
Permaculture Women
In 2015, after noticing that even the permaculture community was plagued with misogyny and ‘mansplaining’, she launched a Facebook group called Permaculture Women — a safe space for women to share and connect about their permaculture experience. Today, the group counts 11,000 members, and has spun off into a free permaculture course and a certified permaculture design course (PDC), the latter being taught, written and illustrated entirely by women.
“I couldn’t help but notice the permaculture world was very male-dominated, and most Facebook groups on this topic were dominated by rude and abusive guys. I felt so frustrated because permaculture is such a beautiful thing with all this potential, and I felt like it had been marred by random internet trolls essentially, who were co-opting the term. I felt there was a niche available,” she remembers.
To date, there are 8,000 people enrolled in the free, year-long permaculture course, and 400 enrolled in the paid-for PDC.
Less talk, more action
When asked how she has seen the permaculture world evolve since she started getting involved in the late 1990s, she is torn. “On the one hand, the notion of permaculture and sustainable living has become much more of a household term than it was in the 90s; most people know what it is. In general, it’s much more mainstream to care about the planet. But on the other hand if we look at the data and statistics, we’re way worse than where we were. Everyone’s talking about it, but the action really isn’t there,” she says.
Still, the permaculture community has grown and matured, and many sites now have productive food forests that have been yielding produce for close to a decade. “All over the world, people can see demonstrations now. So I’m really curious about what’s going to happen next, and it’s up to us to lead the way,” she adds.
Of course, the world we live in doesn’t make it easy to take sustainable action; in fact, many of us often feel overwhelmed and desperate about the lack of impact that our single actions have on our capitalist society. But for Flores, permaculture is not about saving the world.
“To me, the purpose of the practice isn’t so much about creating a sustainable world or trying to fix climate change or save our species. It’s about that day-to-day quality of life in the face of global cataclysm. Not only are we enjoying our lives, but we’re also perhaps doing something that is worth doing.”
Half way through our interview, she loses her connection and apologises for “getting distracted”: she went to pick up an orange in her garden, a lush permaculture paradise in southern Spain. This is one of those little moments of joy she just talked about. “It’s amazing and devastating how disconnected people are. I think there’s a trauma that comes with being disconnected from nature, and that shuts us down, and people go onto their computers and start trolling just to feel like they have a say at all,” she adds.
Top tips to take your permaculture experiments to the next level
Maybe you are already fighting this disconnect and trying to find joy in your garden. Maybe you’ve experimented with permaculture elements like composting, companion planting or seed saving, but you’re still not quite sure how to reach the self-sufficient food forest you dream of. Permazone asked Flores about that, too, and here are her top pieces of advice.
Cultivate your designer’s mind
“The bridge between a few experiments and a full-fledged whole-system permaculture garden is design, the design thinking,” she explains. “The first step is to learn about the design: that’s going to open a door in your mind and reveal opportunities all around you that you didn’t see before. For me, this is the most powerful part of permaculture and what sets it apart from other organic or indigenous practices: what Mollison did more than anybody else is he pulled it all together into a system. So cultivate your designer’s mind.”
Water as a gateway to whole-system design
Do you already have a vegetable garden, but you’re still using your tap to water it? “It’s not a hard sell to convince a straight lines vegetable gardener to change their irrigation systems, because those systems are a pain: you’re dealing with a lot of plastic, wasting water, it’s expensive, etc. For conventional gardeners, water systems are sort of the gateway drug into permaculture: they realise they can be catching it, changing the direction of where it goes and how fertile it makes the plots of land, and they’re hooked,” says Flores.
And of course… Plant trees
Trees are another gateway to permaculture: “If you have a vegetable garden and you want to start permaculture, plant trees that will live longer than you do,” she advises. “That will open the permaculture mindset, and then you’ll have to think about what goes in between the vegetables and the trees, what will live almost as long as the trees, etc. It’s an entryway to bridge the gap between a vegetable garden and a food forest.”
