at FANJ again

Our meeting today was quite good as I discovered that, in essence, Roberto has been on the same track as us when it comes to design. He as been involved in FANJ since the early days. Likewise he also was at the airport when the first permaculture expert came from Australia in September of 1993. The Aussie's were invited as an 'educated' what to tackle the food and urban agriculture problem. For many years the programme was sponsored so training was free of charge. The group from FANJ absorbed as much as possible and now trains many others. To date they have trained more than 500 people in Permaculture techniques.

It should be mentioned that Permaculture has not been a cut-and-paste solution to th food problem, nor to and of the other associated problems. One example that Roberto gave me was of mulch. One of the permaculture long standing traditions is deep mulching. Early work here found that in a tropical climate the mulch started to break down so quickly that the N was actually being used up and made unavailable as it leached away and therefore was NEVER available. A good study of the workings showed that plant mulch would have to be extremely deep to be effective. So deep that plants would not be able to grown up through it. It was found that a simple thin layer of cardboard with holes punched through it for the plants to grow would actually work best. A solution that is not elegant, but yet very effective and making use of a excess cardboard. Roberto emphasized several times how PRINCIPLES are transferable, but exact solutions are not always.

One other topic that we spoke about was the status of Permaculture itself. For Roberto there is no question about its efficacy no its base principles, but it does often have its share of hippies and strange-os. Working in Cuba, Roberto was unaware of this bias. He applied for funding from OXFAM Canada to do work in another country (possibly Haiti). The OXFAM people balked at ths word Permaculture. They would be happy with Organic, Biodynamic, intensive, or urban, but they had done some independent checks on Permaculture and were scared off by some of the people who were associated with it. The movement in Canada is yet very small and I would imagine mostly made up of 'back to the landers' left over from the 1960s and 70s. Roberto pointed out that permaculture has had a very different status in Cuba, as association with established designers and planner from the very start. It was also a very urban and design associated craft, with the first rural project only starting just 3 years ago.

[Left out a bit here for privacy sake]

The details of Permaculture aside, there lies the big issue of DESIGN. Roberto called design the 3rd dimension that was missing and that Permaculture has helped fill this gap.

The special period magnified the existing un-sustainability in Cuban society. Resourcefulness began to close the gap but design was needed to see the picture. The 'Vertical Dimension' if you will (stolen from the cover band). One of the challenges that faces and frustrates designers is working with existing conditions. He says a major flaw with designers is the desire to start with a clean, white, sheet of paper or a well drained site with a nice south-facing view. Sometimes we have to deal with the 'ugly' remnants of past designers. Sometimes these are beautiful but painfully un-sustainable. Sometimes nature gives us a swamp or a productive apple orchard/onion field. One is easy to build on, but an important source of food, the other is hard to build on and an important wildlife area. Economics side with the cheap. Who knows what planners say? A designer needs to be able to look at the situation and ask some important questions. The first one might be 'Why?'. Can the development be done within existing structures? Why do brown fields exist?

ANYWAY... A few other good points Roberto touched on were how designers must be adaptive, especially in considering what is there. Also, as in sustainable, natural system, change is cumulative not dramatic. Dramatic change is usually a sign of instability.