Anne-Laure FelixA finance professional in search for purpose, is taking us on her sustainability journey and tells us all about the permaculture design course she attended.
Last summer, I traded my financial proficiency and city life to enroll in a permaculture design course (or PDC as the insiders call it), organised by the French association La Graine Indocile[1] in the Corrèze region, a twelve-day immersive experience to learn how permaculture is applied in the garden (but not only there) within a self-managed community, living the outdoors at its purest through camping.
As a perfect city dweller, and experienced risk manager in my job, I identified two areas of concern in this plan: insects and camping. Not fan of the latter, pretty scared of the former, I was the perfect candidate you (I) never imagined would have embarked on this journey!
And why not after all? I actually see no contradiction between being a city person and a nature lover, or working in a bank and caring for the environment. I was lucky enough to be raised in a house with a garden, where my brother and I picked raspberries for our summer dinners, and listened to hedgehogs at night crawling in the leaves of our alleys. We would buy our vegetables at the local farmers’ markets and cook seasonal food. Although living in a city, nature was part of our lives and we were living an eco-friendly life without even knowing what it meant.
What is permaculture?
I first thought of permaculture as a gardening technique, as I had tried to grow some herbs and small vegetables on my balcony, without much success. Thanks to the PDC, I quickly understood that permaculture goes well beyond the garden. It is an ethics that encompasses caring for the earth, caring for the people and sharing resources fairly, aiming at developing regenerative and self-maintained ways of living which will not damage the environment. Permaculture includes plants, animals, water systems, energy efficiency, communications, resource and waste management. And rather than considering those elements individually, it focuses on the relationships between them. In practice, permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that imitate the relationships found in natural ecosystems. These definition and approach were developed by Bill Mollison[2] and his fellow student David Holmgren and evolved to form the cornerstone of the PDC, an educational credential aiming at promoting the creation of natural ecosystems. Since 1981, more than 300 000 persons became PDC certified, and me now[3].
A challenge for me, a concrete project for others
Clearly, this was not a holiday. But no complaints here: I was eager to learn something new, and the prospect of growing my very own vegetables was my biggest motivation. More problematic though, was my ability to live in a self-managed-campsite-community, especially referring to the camping part, which turned out to be the most epic challenge of this experience.
We were a group of 15 people, all ages and backgrounds. On our arrival, we introduced ourselves and shared our individual expectations for the course. Some had a concrete project to become professional greengrocers, or to start self-sufficient vegetable productions. Others, like me, wanted to improve their gardening knowledge and technics through a sustainable lens. For me it was as well an opportunity to be doing something radically different than what I had been doing so far in the city, and in the office, where, dare I say it, purpose and tangible results are sometimes sorely lacking.
These very ambitious aspirations plummeted precipitously, when, on day one, reality unveiled in the form of quite (very) impressive-sized spiders. Also, we were in the middle of a heatwave, and going to be living outside for the next two weeks. I seriously questioned my mental but also physical abilities, and genuinely wondered whether I was going to make it to the end of the course at all.
Life at the camp
Our group quickly settled into our daily routine, which revolved around the camp’s logistics and the courses. The location was originally 4 or 5 hectares of meadow, part of which had remained untouched to become a wild area, while the rest had been transformed. The wild area was composed of one portion which remained as grassland and was home to two donkeys and a horse, and of another one, designed around a wetland, which had been preserved from any activity to serve as a biodiversity sanctuary. The transformed part of the site was split into the vegetable garden - both outdoors and under glass - and our designated campsite area, which featured a camping area for tents or vans, and a community area, organized around an open-air kitchen and showers. The kitchen was resting on a barn, which we used as food cellar as it was a fresh place, and which was also hosting the only electricity point, coming from a solar panel. This was enough to charge our phones and have some light on the terrasse and in the barn at night, but not to have a fridge! Our diet was vegetarian though, and it turned out a cool box with ice cubes was more than enough for the few products we needed to keep cool. Water, sourced from an on-site spring, was filtered daily to make it drinkable.
Two shower cabins were located at the rear of the kitchen – perfect to have a chat with the team in charge of the dishes on the other side while showering - and water was heated the whole day in solar water bags. Dry toilets, located in the barn and behind the greenhouse, completed the sanitary facilities. Sustainability was the guiding principle on the campsite, evidenced in our waste management strategy: toilets were producing their own specific compost, used water, including shower runoff and dishwashing residue (aka grey waters) was treated through a phytodepuration system[4] Of course, shampoo and washing-up liquid had to be organic. Kitchen waste was composted and fruit stones were thrown all around to grow new fruit trees. Our sustainability strategy was very clear: optimizing available resources and minimizing our ecological footprint through repurposing and recycling.
Each day, one of us was appointed responsible for a specific area in the camp - water, toilets, animals, cooking, etc. - assisted by volunteers. It wasn't long before everyone was volunteering for just about everything, lightening the load of chores for all in the end. The highlight of our daily organisation was the collective preparation of our dinners. The fruit and vegetables, from the garden or from local producers, were delicious (differently put: tasty). The eggs were supplied by the hens and ducks from the garden, and the dried foods by local organic grocers. The idea was to prepare a dinner from all this combined with leftovers, if any, of our previous meal, and the challenge was to cook something different every day. I'm not a vegetarian, so I'm not very inspired when it comes to meat- or fish-free menus, but I was really impressed by our collective creativity and ability to cook something different every evening without those ingredients, with everyone throwing in their cooking tips and recipes.
The permaculture design course
Logistical matters aside, the days were organised around courses - permaculture fundamentals, botanic, water, ecological corridors, design, to name but a few - given in the barn, the vegetable garden or in the shade of the forest when it was really too hot. Then came the practice: training in fruit tree grafting, making of thermal compost, collecting seeds, planting seedlings, earth and straw construction and so on. The second week, a little more expert than the first, we were given the mission to craft the land design for three project holders. Three teams were formed, each working on one of the projects, and were asked to present the designs to the project holders and the other teams on the last day of the course. One group did it in songs and costumes, another built a 3D model, another yet presented a powerpoint with some memes. Creativity was unleashed, making the exercise a fun one, yet we worked non-stop that week to deliver what was expected from us, and always in a friendly and relaxed atmosphere – after all, isn’t permaculture the interconnection between all this?
A true revelation
I could never have imagined that this course would be such an enriching experience, serious and fun at the same time, both intense and relaxing, difficult and also liberating. It was somewhere between a summer camp and an ecological think tank.
I learnt (spoiler: breaking news) that a simple floor mat is by no means adequate material if you intend to be sleeping on the ground for two weeks. As expected, the heat was hardly manageable during the day, but we were lucky that temperatures dropped enough at night to give us a break. I thought about giving up a hundred times in front all those arthropods (eight legs, lots of eyes, see who I mean?) that lived with us right up to the privacy of the toilet bowl (thank the universe, I only discovered that the last day). In the end, not only did I find in this course what I'd come for – a training in sustainable gardening - but much more than that.
What I was already convinced of but was confirmed during the course is that permaculture is far from being a passing fad reserved to ‘eco-terrorists’ or hippies, as some detractors who know nothing about it would have us believe. It's just the basics. It's learning to (re)observe nature and reproduce what it has taught us. It's about (re)creating links with people you never thought you would meet, who in this immersive experience have turned out to be extraordinarily kind. It's about (re)finding yourself and rediscovering sensations and abilities you had forgotten about, or thought you had lost. And, above all, it's a wonderful breath of fresh air, because it's giving us a glimpse that regenerating the earth- and human relationships – is actually doable, and that some people are already taking concrete steps in that direction, with real results to show for it.
While it might not be the only and ultimate solution given the ecological challenge our civilization is now facing, it does bring a spark of happiness and hope. So, what will you grow now in the garden of your own sustainable journey?
[1] http://www.lagraineindocile.fr/
[2] Australian researcher, author, scientist, professor and biologist, known for developing and promoting the theory and practice of permaculture, a form of permanent agriculture, with his student David Holmgren.
[3] Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture.
[4] Phytodepuration is a natural treatment technique using plants. It uses the bacteria present in aquatic plant root systems to purify the water.