(house by Hundertwasser, photo by Petr Svarc)
Gooood Morning SuperForest!
I’d like to tell you all about my plans for Zero One, the permaculture teaching center in Hawaii. I’d also like to tell you how this all came to pass, and hopefully, how you can recreate this scenario for yourselves.
But first, a quick trip to Japan! Yay!
When I was in Japan, I looked at the city around me, and walked the streets, and talked to people, and rode subways and trains, took baths, visited convenience stores, ate apples, and did a thousand little everyday things like that. Now, I was only there for nine days, but during that time one thought became very clear to me : 1. That we humans love to create elaborate living systems. 2. The design of those systems is entirely up to those that design it.
Japan’s system is similar to America’s in many ways, and completely opposite in others. Japan is a system that works well for Japanese people. America’s system works for Americans. They have cities and trains and malls just like we do, but they use and function within those spaces in a very different way.
Our different cultures dictate a different codes of behavior and as members of that culture we adhere to it. It’s what makes Japanese people behave like Japanese people. And Swedish people behave like Swedish people. They exist within a culture that they themselves chose and created.
I thought: Well, if you can create any culture you like, with any characteristics you like, and you get enough people to adhere to a shared cultural framework, then the living system that you create around yourselves, (as humans instinctively seem to do) will reflect those values, whatever they may be.
(Nahalal in Israel, image by gyoranovak.com)
So Zero One is the beginning of an experiment: To create a culture that values service to the community, the arts, and sustainability. To create a permaculture, if you will.
It will take physical form on a lovely petri dish of an island in the Pacific Ocean. Kauai, Hawaii. Kauai was my childhood home and I am now headed back to work on the very land where I first understood the concept of land.
(Japanese homestead via flickr user malleabis)
My dear friend, mentor, patron, and compatriot, SuperForester Jesse, has a parcel of land on Kauai. Two flat acres, with two small houses already built, plus a boat shed, and a few smaller outdoor sheds. The land has fruit trees and coconut palms, and wild chickens run around in packs. I am moving to Kauai to caretake this land and work with Jesse to develop it into an intentional permaculture community. The main aims of this are firstly, to develop the property into a completely food and energy independent system, capable of supporting many families with a minimum of labor. (Such is the miraculous nature of permaculture. Get the system running and it begins to run itself, producing massive abundance with very little human intervention.)
Next, it’s vital that Zero One produce not only it’s own food and energy; it must also produce copious amounts of media about what it is doing. Especially before and after photos. “This was the house before, and this is what it looks like now with gardens and grape vines, and chickens and goats. Here’s how much it all cost to set up, and here’s how much food and energy it is currently producing. Show people how the system gets set up, and explain it to them in a way that they totally understand. Inspire folks to look around at their own “systems” and see what they’d like to change about it to make their lives more sustainable, fun and healthy.
And thirdly, Zero One will be a teaching and outreach center. I personally believe that a working knowledge of permaculture is going to be very valuable in the coming years, SuperForesters. Get some books from the library, or amazon’s used section, or search online, and soak up all you can.
So we’ll work to get two acres of land off the grid, growing food, and supporting X amount of people, while showing you the whole time how we did it. The idea being that permaculture is a living system that can be applied anywhere you have a few key ingredients, and we’ll begin in Kauai and move outward from there.
(the Eden Project, image by Peter Wardley-Repen)
Permaculture is currently being applied in many places around the world, as a quick google search will confirm. There is a family in Pasadena, CA that live on a tenth of an acre, and use that tenth of an acre to produce 6,000 pounds of food a year.
My main agenda is to help spread the message that permaculture, positivity, and patronage can help us achieve sustainability and independence on a massive scale. Conceivably, a growing number of people could live in permaculture communities like Zero One and be free to do as they pleased, having all their needs met by the system they themselves created.
My primary goal at this stage of my life is to create as many sustainable living systems for as many of my friends as possible.
So, I’m off to explore what those systems look like, and how I can fit into one myself. Being a relative beginner at the whole permaculture/sustainability scene, I’m thinking that we can all learn together. It will be an interesting journey, and I hope it inspires many of you SuperForester reading this to ask yourselves:
How do I feel about the system around me?
Does my current living system (aka, my daily life) feel just and equitable?
What would I like to do to change it?
How could I make it better?
(Hayao Miyazaki’s Ghibli Museum, by Banzainetsurfer)
Let’s all work together to create a new culture. One that values people, and life, and science, and exploration, art, and love, and dancing. And let’s use the internet to spread pictures and videos of the new culture, and thus inspire others to try it themselves.
Reality can look and feel like anything we chose. All we have to do is make up new culture and behaviors and share them with each other, which the net facilitates so freely. It’s a brand new world, y’all.
Love,
-Jackson
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