The more I do face to face work, facilitating courses and permablitzes and working outside, the less time I find to update this blog, and while I regret that, damn do I feel lucky to be surrounded by so much generosity and eagerness to learn and share out there in the unpixelated world.  We recently celebrated our 50th blitz in Melbourne (see photos) and elicited some wonderful words of encouragement from four of my superheroes, who happen to have surnames starting with H: Rob Hopkins, Richard Heinberg, David Holmgren and Mae Wan Ho.

Background

For those who haven’t been to one, a permablitz is a kind of one day permaculture-styled backyard (or frontyard) makeover, with free workshops, fun and food — all based on volunteerism and a model of reciprocity.  Anyone can come, and for many it’s their first experience with permaculture design or food gardening.  If you come to three or so, we can help organise one at your house.

Our “ultimate aim is to make the suburbs edible enough such that should food become unaffordable, we don’t even notice”.

Many of us think that permaculture — an holistic system of ecological design — currently provides the best available framework for organising our activities for ‘energy descent’ — the period post the peak in global oil production in which we’re now probably facing less and less available energy each year.

So a permablitz is a really simple concept but it seems to tap into veins of enthusiasm, and they can be fantastically good days helping people on the road to some serious food production, and some beautiful gardens can result.

The permablitz concept started here in Melbourne in 2006 through a collaboration between permaculture student/teacher Dan Palmer and a South American community group in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs.  I was lucky enough to be involved in the first one thanks to my friendship with Dan.  Since, we’ve blitzed all around the city, with renters, in housing estates, on big properties, on tiny ones, in community gardens and schools.  For more background, read more at permablitz.net.

Before and After

Here’s some during-and-after shots of permablitz in the hilly suburb of Eltham earlier in the year, then six months later.  The home owners didn’t have any experience growing vegies, but had been to a few blitzes and reckoned they were ready to throw themselves into the deep end.  Two designers worked with them before the blitz to work towards something that suited.  On the day we built mulched paths, put in lots of vegie beds arranged along the contour of the slope for maximum water infiltration, plus we planted fruit trees and dug, lined and planted out a fairly large pond.

The blitz:

Six months down the track:

Nice work Rachel and Brent who’ve put so much time into their place, and Erin and Mike the designers, and all the blitzers who turned up and helped.

There are 54 and counting stories in the Melbourne permablitz annals, this is just one of them.

Words of Support

Below I’ll outline a few developments in the world of permablitz.  But first, here’s some words of support from our global H-heroes, which makes us feel most honoured!:

“Permablitz the world! That’s the path to survival, sustainability, and cultural renewal. Your lawn will kill you if you don’t kill it first, but a vegetable garden with fruit and nut trees will support you from cradle to grave.”
– Richard Heinberg, author Peak Everything and other essential books.  www.richardheinberg.com

“…What you guys have created is more powerful than the gardens you have made, it is the concept of the permablitz… the idea that landscapes of lawn, shrubs, concrete and dog mess are not the pinnacle of human achievement, but are an odd manifestation of an age with more oil than sense, and the idea that we can change them, and we can change them fast. Out with the lawn and in with the salad!”
– Rob Hopkins, Originator of the Transition Network, see www.transitionculture.org [read full article]

“The  permaculture movement began in the suburbs of Melbourne and other capital cities in the late 1970’s, but by the mid 1980’s, the action had moved to more remote rural areas as the culture of consumerism and greed in mainstream Australia made the suburbs a toxic environment for permaculture. Informed and strengthened by its experience in the geographic and social hinterlands, permaculture activism is now ready to reclaim Australian suburban landscapes and culture as the Energy Descent future of resource scarcity and climatic instability turns consumerist culture to compost. Permablitz is on the frontline.”
– David Holmgren, co-originator of permaculture, www.holmgren.com.au [read full, thoughtful article]

“I love permaculture: saves effort in sowing and tilling, restores ecosystems to their wild, biodiverse and natural states as far as possible, good for putting lots of carbon in the soil to fight global warming, and the food harvested is really the best possible for health.”
– Mae-Wan Ho, Director of the Institute for Science in Society

Dandenong Development Board collaboration

Permablitz is running a project with the Dandenong Development Board called the Edible Gardens Project and we recently had a visitation from former AFL star and current Victorian Planning Minister, Justin Madden, who came down to a blitz and although at the time he apparantly seemed more interested in the lamingtons, he did have some quite decent things to say in a subsequent press release:

“At the heart of any town or city is the community and the more people help and interact with each other, the stronger the community. This project brings people together so they can help one another, and learn from each other in a relaxed garden setting. In a time when food costs are on the rise and our waistlines are expanding, the edible gardens project couldn’t be timelier.” — Justin Madden

See: dandenong.permablitz.net

Courses

We ran our 8th two-day Introduction to Permaculture Course this weekend. We’ve got a good core teaching team, and had anywhere up to six teachers on a single course (or as little as two), and each course evolves from the last, with lots of feedback and refining. We get great feedback, like: “Energetic, informative and empowering. And entertaining.”

It’s a super fun way for us to spend a weekend and for participants too.  Many write to us afterwards with stories from their backyard, or letting us know that they’re going on to study permaculture design certificates, or other ways of taking the knowledge to the next level.  We take people through the ethics and some permaculture design principles.

Some come expecting something more like an organic gardening course — although we don’t advertise it as such, and get more than they expected, but they are almost always grateful for this.  We don’t tone down our act much.  We get great people attending willing to come with us as we go well beyond the basics of companion planting, composting and mulching (we do that too), and touch on historical framings of permaculture, quite sciencey bits, and issues like energy descent, urban animal integration, weed ecologies, composting human manure, radical plumbing, guerrilla gardening, and an urban strategies brainstorm encouraging folks to think outside of the backyard, all threaded together and presented via our own fusion of permaculture design principles.  While some of it is challenging to people used to soft green lightbulb-changing approaches, I think we’re authentic and just intelligent-sounding enough to not come across as nutjobs, and actually inspire quite a few.

The Most Well Respected Grand United Melbourne Permablitz Designers Guild

We have about 65 local people with Permaculture Design Certificates on a mailing list, with the above arguably pretentious title.  Every permablitz has a pre-design visit by at least one designer.  The design is important — we are not making symbolic gestures, we want food producing systems which suit the skill level, time of the maintainers and are physically suited to the location.   Through this process young designers get experience and build confidence and have access to feedback and review.  Guild members can get some teaching experience on our courses too.

We occassionally get together, to share things we’ve learnt, give feedback on designs.  Last week ten or so of us spent the evening with Pamela Morgan with the theme of ‘permaculture and crisis’.  Pam is one of the key permaculturists who spent a lot of time in Cuba after the Soviet Union collapsed, celebrated in the must-see film The Power of Community, How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.  She shared her thoughts on a visit to Argentina to investigate how urban agriculture and other projects functioned during the peso collapse, in a capitalist context. There was much to learn as we enter into some troubling financial times of our own.

So who organises this this and who funds it?

Nobody funds us — so far our efforts organising and administering blitzes (except working with the Dandenong Development Board, and running courses) have been entirely voluntary.   There’s an evolving loose knit crew of people who chip in.  We’re looking at incorporating as a non-profit soon though so some of this will be a bit more formalised soon.

Manual

We’ve got a short manual for people wanting to organise blitzes elsewhere.  Email us permablitz@gmail.com if you’d like a copy.

Blitzes elsewhere

Blitzes have been happening or groups are forming in  Alice Springs, Bega, Bundaberg, Sydney and elsewhere.

Newsletters

The newsletters come out fortnightlyish.  Since I accidentally wrote a funny one a while back, now I feel compelled to keep it up which I do with mixed success.  If you’ll excuse an indulgence, here’s some of my favorite snippets:

~~~ Dirt is the New Prozac ~~~

Have you heard of the humble soil microbe Mycobacterium vaccae?  It was first found by scientists in a pile of cow dung.  Perhaps they thought they were ‘civilising’ it, elevating it above the depravity and ignorance of its fecal home when they taught it the ways of the petri dish?  But was M. vaccae fazed or embittered by their neo-missionary condescension?  Not if it’s subsequent behaviour is anything to go by.  When the scientists injected it into various rodents they found it released serotonin in the brain — the very same chemical boosted by anti-depressant pharmaceuticals.  Subsequent research has shown that it gives humans a happy buzz too.

And where do you get exposure to this microbial friend, also linked to reducing asthma and skin allergies?  Walk down Smith St Collingwood on a dark night and look for the jittery guy in the cap with the plastic bags of well composted soil?  No.  Just get out there in to the garden… Which you can do at one of the very exciting upcoming blitzes!

~~~ Blitz? Yes you can! ~~~

Have you ever tried smiling to make yourself feel happier?  It may take a while, but once you force your cramping and convulsing cheeks through the pain barrier, it can really work — perhaps in a not dissimilar way that a mystic finds enlightenment through fasting in a cave.  Somehow expression manifests attitude which manifests reality.

And out of what gestural seed did the permablitz network arise?  Why from little more than one man and a particular can-do expression.  I give you Dan Palmer and the can-do-dan:

On its own it’s a very powerful expression.  But get two fellows doing it while facing each other, and you have yourself what scientists call a mutualistic can-do excitation feedback complex.  No one yet knows what would happen if a larger crowd got together and did it.  It may go non-linear, and then it’s anyone’s guess.  But I’m willing to try it if you are… at one of the next two exciting permablitzes this month…

~~~ Get on the Frontline.  Of Love ~~~

Five simple steps to dealing with the modern world:  1. Find the abyss.  2. Approach the abyss.  3. Stare into the abyss. (Firmly, but compassionately.)  4. Hold the abyss. And gently caress the abyss.  (Don’t take advantage of the abyss’s vulnerability at this point.)  5. Feed the abyss soup.  Lots of soup, obviously, it being an abyss.  The abyss will be tame now, but take it out of the house regularly to experience the wondrousness and fantasticality that is Life. Like, for the sake of example, a most exciting permablitz event…

~~~ Sheep are Back! ~~~

My brother and I spotted these sheep grazing on grass growing up from the cracks in the concrete in an abandoned petrol station, in downtown Moe last summer.  As an allegory of peak oil, urban decay and the renewal of agrarian sources of sustenance, however, I found the the symbolism a little heavy handed.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/grubr/2281431576/in/set-72157603955116165/

We even get some relevant information about blitzes in there sometimes too. You can sign up on the permablitz.net homepage.

Futures

Some of us are establishing a business we hope can compliment and ultimately help fund permablitzes.  We’d like to see more local blitz groups form, so the concept can spread nodally.  The command and control alternative sounds like too much work anyway.  We want to make some software to help formalise our follow up process for past blitzes so that we are learning even more as we go, and have those lessons accessible.  There is a lot of generosity and opportunities opening up around the network, and many directions we could head.  For now we want to focus on doing what we do even better, and making the process easier for others to set up elsewhere.