Paul Kearsley: Permaculture and Gardening by Nature’s Rules

“I was on the out­side,” says Kearsley, who lives in Bellingham, Wash. “I’d be ask­ing, ‘Do we need a 2012 Honda Civic? What’s wrong with the 2011 Civic? Do we need more phones? What are the resources going into this? Where are they com­ing from? Who is this action hurt­ing?’ A lot of the dia­log stopped at ‘make it look cool,’ and I wanted to know more.”

Then, after grad­u­a­tion, some­one lent Kearsley a 1,200-page tome that changed his life: Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual. As he read about a school of design devoted to cre­at­ing pro­duc­tive, regen­er­a­tive land­scapes and resilient sys­tems that “sup­port life in all of its forms,” he knew he’d found his calling.

Seven years later, he owns not one, but two businesses—one focus­ing on per­ma­cul­ture design in his home­town, another con­sult­ing inter­na­tion­ally. Along the way, he’s spear­headed the con­struc­tion of Bellingham’s com­mu­nity gar­den, con­sulted on an eco-village in Costa Rica, and recently returned from Peru where he and a busi­ness part­ner shared per­ma­cul­ture prin­ci­ples with Amazon natives.

We caught up with Kearsley on a recent rainy day to talk about the rela­tion­ship between ethics and food, intel­li­gent design as he sees it (hint, it has noth­ing to do with God or Darwinism), and what goes well with venison.

Q. What, exactly, is permaculture?

A. Permaculture is a per­spec­tive, not a pre­scrip­tion. It’s how we address prob­lems. My work con­sists of stream­lin­ing things and mak­ing more ele­gant sites and sys­tems that not only meet the needs of the peo­ple but also improve the over­all eco­log­i­cal health.

Q. Sounds vague … how do you pay the bills?

A. I design land­scapes, but unlike a tra­di­tional land­scape designer, I design sys­tems to save energy and use min­i­mal resources.

Q. For instance?

A. The con­ven­tional approach to turn­ing an exist­ing land­scape into a gar­den is to haul out every­thing that’s there before start­ing. My busi­ness part­ner and I use a tech­nique called “sheep mulch,” where we smother exist­ing grass with card­board, manure, straw, and mulch, and build the land­scape on that. We’re using waste and card­board to accom­plish what would have been an inten­sive task of tak­ing away sod or other plants, and we’re leav­ing the soil biol­ogy in its place.

Q. Spreading manure on a gar­den isn’t exactly rocket sci­ence, is it?

A. But cre­at­ing the gar­den to oper­ate as a sys­tem in con­junc­tion with other systems—like using a rotat­ing cast of ani­mals to work the land in suc­ces­sion before planting—is. Permaculture is more than one spe­cific tech­nique. In every job, we min­i­mize the use of fos­sil fuels required to build that landscape.

Recently, a client’s gar­den had a wet spot, and the tra­di­tional approach would have been to drain the whole thing and fill it above the water level. That would have required a lot of heavy equip­ment using a lot of resources to force the land into our notion of how it should be. Instead of that, we decided it made the most sense to expand the exist­ing wet spot and mak­ing it a sea­sonal pond.

Q. That sounds like the path of least resis­tance. Is that permaculture?

A. Again, per­ma­cul­ture is as much a phi­los­o­phy as it is a prac­tice. The pond exam­ple isn’t rad­i­cal in terms of land use, but it is out of the box in terms of busi­ness. We would have made more money with the tra­di­tional solution.

Q. Do you often make busi­ness deci­sions that cost you money?

A. I want to empower clients to main­tain and even install their own gar­dens. I’m lit­er­ally teach­ing myself out of thou­sands of dol­lars of work, but the big­ger goal is to get more peo­ple in the com­mu­nity involved.

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