Truly Sustainable Systems

What is sustainability--really?

One of the hardest battles I kept fighting in landscape design (never mind landscape architecture) was explaining that sustainability was NOT merely having a system that was less destructive than the ones that came along before: the system had to be proactively REPARATIVE, and to such a degree that it could continue to repair and even grow in reparative effectiveness without further human intervention. Geoff Lawton quantifies it far more clearly: sustainable systems not only produce more energy than they consume, the surplus energy produced can maintain and replace the system's components over its lifetime. Ya know, when a landscape or architectural project can boast this, then I can agree that it deserves the label of "sustainable". So how on Earth do we get a system that produces so much more energy than it takes to make it? Think of all the energy it takes to design and install a system (from the human perspective): it needs to be worked up, analyzed, re-worked, materials brought in, the land worked and shifted, materials installed, then the materials modified and worked until the system runs itself. Well, that's how many permaculture systems are put in place, in any case. How do you get enough surplus energy OUT of that system you've just made to cover its component parts for that system's lifetime?

Illustrated by April Sampson Kelly of Permaculture Visions Online Institute

Happily, on Earth, we have energy from the Sun. Through energy from the sun, plants work in harmony with microbes to produce energy. They produce this energy not only for themselves, but for other plants in the system, and more. Plants also produce energy for creatures that eat them. Then they produce energy for the creatures that live off of their eventual decay (fungi, insects, some animals, other plants). Those creatures in turn feed more creatures. So long as the initial design was conceived and executed using the principles that nature itself has always used to ensure her own abundance, it's got a fair shot at producing more energy than it needs to maintain itself, until it reaches an energy equilibrium. However, that equilibrium is another matter entirely. 

Photo from the Sustainable Vision Gallery

For now, dig this: sustainability in a design that includes humans in any way also has to design around mankind's somewhat demanding needs and quirky habits. So that system has to include ways to provide food and raw material abundance in certain zones so that human needs are met without the need for exploitative and damaging practices. In fact, that system has to ensure greater abundance than what exploitation could achieve to ensure that the humans in the system don't fall back on such measures. Permaculture provides exactly this: more food and human-useful material goods than exploitative practices have ever been able to produce in the same area and especially over a given period of time. Permaculture also excludes the need for reliance on far-flung resources in order to survive; necessary resources are kept very close, and most commodities aren't far off, either. Truly sustainable systems: permaculture's got them covered.