Better Living Through Permaculture: Building a Permaculture Society, Part One
A few posts back, we started exploring the question “What is permaculture?” The answer I gave was that it was engaging in a dance with the natural world. Let me be clear that this is by no means a definitive nor final answer — I think that everyone exploring permaculture should develop their own answer, and mine will likely change and evolve over time.
But if we’re going to explore this question, it inevitably leads to exploring what a true permaculture society would look like, and perhaps even more importantly, how we can get there. The only thing we can state for certain is that our current society — the modern, industrial society — is NOT a permaculture society. It is a highly inefficient and wasteful one that seeks to control nature in order to strip-mine it of useful assets instead of one that fully respects and seeks to integrate as just a part of it. In my Permaculture Design Course (PDC), we have looked at this question and one of the closest parallels that could be drawn were the Native American societies on the eve of European exploration. I haven’t read it yet, but one of the books that several other participants in my PDC mentioned was 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus by Charles Mann. Mann describes these societies as incredibly complex, and rather than living off of the wilds as hunter-gatherers, the natives consciously “tweaked” their natural environment to their advantage, acting as a true keystone species.
I think that there is much that can be learned from this as well, but at the same time we can’t instantly go to living that kind of life in the midst of an industrialized society — both because the dominant institutions of the society won’t allow it (more on that later), and because those of us who have been born and raised in an industrialized society really aren’t equipped to carry out such a project.
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This last year, I've had the good fortune to meet people who introduced permaculture concepts so that I could start a food-bank garden.
I'm fascinated with the concept. The first year blew lots of people away in terms of what we could do just by choosing what to do after amending the virgin soil. I'm looking forward so much to the second year.
I hope I see more comments here about what can be done in like fashion, We raised 500 lbs of produce and gave it to the food banks. How can this be a bad idea? And, what a wonderful (though long term, painful on me) experience.
Thanks for the OP. 
It was in a backyard that had gone wild to milkweed for 2 years, and it was full of earthworms when I got it. I didn't want to screw it up by tilling, so I started an Emilia Hazelip-style mulch bed of about 4 inches of dead leaves spiked with compost here and there, and 2 inches of straw on top. I sprinkled the mulch with liberal quantities of a 'natural nitrogen supplement' (ehem...) before the snow fell, so hopefully things are cooking down there under the tundra.
I already put in some garlic and shallots below the actual soil last fall in a few areas of the garden. Next spring, I'm going to drop some wide planks across a few places to create some paths, then make up different seed balls of complementary plants to grow different clusters of vegetables in different places in the garden.
Can't wait to get started!
I have a friend who's been trying to get an aquaculture system set up (which includes her chickens), but unfortunately, she lost her entire first crop of fish. 
Sometimes, trial and error leads to errors, so I'm not going to pin my hopes in a huge crop the first year.
If I take pictures of a garden in progress, does that make me a garden-nerd?
Here's what the space looked like when I found it. It's a long, narrow city lot, and seemed like a little paradise when I first saw it, since it was full of dozens of monarch butterflies. There's a pear tree on the left, and a plum tree on the right.
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I cut down all the milkweed, and laid it down to start sheet mulching where I'd harvested the weeds. I covered that a few weeks later with sheets of cardboard, then a bit of old compost that I found in the back along with a smattering of straw.
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Now that I look closer, I think it's probably more like 15x25 feet. I think the backyard is about 35 feet deep, so...it's something like that.
After the pear harvest.....
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And eating a lot of these...
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...I laid down rest of the mulch bed, a few inches of dead leaves then a few inches of clean straw on the top. I applied daily nitrogen supplements (actually, nightly...I didn't want my neighbors to see me...), and now am looking at this, but it's covered with snow right now.
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I promised my wife that I'd leave half the yard for grass so that the grandchildren had somewhere to play, but at this point, it's mostly creeping charlie, not grass. I'm going to try to take care of that in the Spring.
It's on a diagonal street, and South is toward the far right hand corner. The left side of the backyard gets a fair amount of sun, and I'm thinking about doing some vertical gardening or some grape vines along that edge of the yard.
There are some smaller garden spaces behind the pear tree where there are already some wild raspberries growing. There were little copses of different wild plants, like echinacea and comfrey, that I'm planting on encouraging here and there.
There are also 3 rose bushes in various states of health, and a lilac bush that seems to co-exist happily with the mint.
I left a clump of wild milkweed along the edge of the yard and in the far corner behind the pear tree that went to seed as butterfly attractors, and I plan on seeding the 'lawn' portion of the yard with a goodly amount of white clover to attract bees (plus to get the nitrogen-fixing).
Since the yard is really narrow, I've been looking into things like espalier for fruit trees along the south-facing edge, too. It kind of goes against the 'nature knows best' idea (and I'm sure Fukuoka wouldn't approve), but it makes a lot of sense, space-wise.
I put a few cuttings of comfrey around the pear tree to start a guild system around it. I'm not sure what to put around the comfrey, though. My future seed-ball choices have been driven both by complimentary groupings, and what I like to eat (or know how to preserve). I had to race against time making pear pies to use them all before they went bad. I don't want to end up with 300 pounds of something I don't like to eat or know how to keep. Tubers (and regularly harvested greens) have been figuring heavily into my choices so far.
I'm trying to be careful, though. I'd rather slide relatively unnoticed into this thriving urban micro-environment than bend it forcefully to my will. 
