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TOWARDS COMMON GROUND; PERMACULTURE AND THE VEGAN WAY

By Graham Burnett

(This article has been reprinted from the Land & Liberty website)

Graeme Sheriff's recently published 'Edible Ecosystems In Sustainable Agriculture', a survey of Permaculture in Britain (http://www.edibleecosystems.care4free.net//) has highlighted a polarity that exists between vegans and those who use animal products or integrate animals into their systems. Whilst I think most of the time both sides of the debate co-exist (reasonably) happily together, it's an emotive topic, and when it does come to the surface can leading to raised passions, often resulting in hurt all round. The following is extracted from a longer work in progress, and is an attempt at exploring this divide, and hopefully moving towards a more positive and constructive resolution...

The current epidemic of Foot And Mouth disease seems to be the latest in an onslaught of meat and animal product related health scares; BSE, E Coli, Salmonella and Swine Fever have all had high profiles in recent years. In this light, the vegan way can seem an attractive path for health reasons, never mind considerations of compassion or the environment. Yet some permaculturists have expressed views stating that "veganism is illogical and is unsustainable other than in a high
energy use society¹ " and that "principles of animal rights are... fine on a personal level, but fail when presented as a prescription for curing the ills of society ² ". Further, in the Permaculture Designer's Manual Bill Mollison states that "...animals represent a valid way of converting inedible vegetation into protein", and many of his designs incorporate them into their systems as essential components. So does veganism have anything to do with permaculture, and can it be sustainable in a cool temperate island situation such as the UK?

In fact Bill does talk about vegetarianism on page 28 of the Designers Manual- as one might imagine, the old curmudgeon is not overly in favour, and does indeed make many valid comments particularly regarding the limitations of the trophic food pyramid model as opposed to actual complex cyclic food webs, and the dependence of the typical vegetarian diet upon large quantities of monoculturally grown grains and legumes such as soya (though he doesn't mention that this is equally true of the typical Western omnivore who also consumes such quantities (indeed vastly more) when used as feed and converted into animal proteins), however on page 30 he states;

"Vegetarian diets ARE very efficient, providing;

1. They are based on easily cooked or easily processed crops grown in HOME GARDENS (his emphasis).

2. That wastes, especially body wastes, are returned to the soil of that garden.

3. That we eat from where we live, and do not exploit others or incur large transport costs".

He also goes on to say;

"We should always do our energy budgets. Whatever we eat, if we do not grow any of our own food and over use a flush toilet (sending our wastes out to sea) we have lost the essential soil and nutrients needed for a sustainable life cycle"

With which I couldn't agree more. In fact Bill's above description of sustainable vegetarianism (which here I take to mean true vegetarianism- or veganism ³ ) is virtually indistinguishable from the philosophies of Movement For Compassionate Living and their vision, eloquently expressed in Kathleen Jannaway's 'Abundant Living In The Coming Age Of The Tree'⁴ , of a UK broken up into sustainable self reliant communities, mainly meeting their needs from tree crops and garden scale vegan-organic food production.

The essence of permaculture is it's attention to energy flows and cycles as well as personal accountability- it's as easy to lead an unsustainable, unaccountable vegan lifestyle based on imported, fossil fuel hungry, monoculturally grown, over packaged and over processed soya convenience foods, as it is to live as an unsustainable and unaccountable omnivore supported by the intensive factory pharm and the supermarket freezer counter. What's important is that we all develop an awareness of our own 'energy budgets' or the 'ecological footprints' of how we are living, and begin to work in our own ways to steadily reduce these.

Whatever we might think about veganism, I would suggest that if we are to create a sustainable future, we will all need to at least lessen our dependence on both animal products and the inputs they entail (at present some 85% of agricultural land use) and intensive monocultural farming in general, and start thinking about major re-afforestation programs and a movement towards a far greater percentage of our needs being met from home, market and forest gardens as well as the yields of trees.

On page 183 of the Designer's Manual, Bill quotes Colin Tudge who, in New Scientist 86, reckons ('highly conservatively') that 60% of the British Isles could be given back to nature. This is without "letting go of the misconception that it is agriculture (not individual and market gardens) that will provide the future food we eat (a common fallacy). John Jeavons estimates (on the basis of GARDENS) that we could return 94% of land to it's own purposes".

Either way, that's alot of space left for trees and wildlife, and not a bad goal to aim for- nor is it unachievable when we creatively harness our human ingenuity and skills, and build upon our common strengths!

¹ Wesley Trotman, posting to 'alt.permaculture newsgroup', 2001

² Anonymous respondant, 'Edible Ecosystems In Sustainable Agriculture' survey 1999 (pub. 2001)

³ What bill describes as 'vegetarian' sounds to me closer to 'vegan' as he talks about a diet based on 'direct herbage to people' without being passed through other stages of the food chain (such as being converted to dairy products via cattle, etc). He also says that; "In the urban western world, vegetarianism relies heavily on grains & grain legumes (eg, the soya bean)", but he doesn't mention dairy products which often constitute a large part of the vegetarian diet.

He also seems to me to be talking about an animal free home garden system (where fertility is largely dependant on humanure and garden wastes being returned to the soil)

⁴ Available from MCL, Burrow Farm, Highampton, Beaworthy, Devon EX21 5JQ, UK. price £2.31 inc P&P, web address http://pages.unisonfree.net/mcl/