Permaculture [ pur-muh-kuhl-cher ] verb
A systems design science whereby regenerative actions are taken to build human habitat within a natural context rather than opposed to it.
Peregrination [ per-i-gruh–ney-shuhn ] noun
- travel from one place to another, especially on foot.
- a course of travel; journey.
Children recognize more commercial brands than they can name plants and animals.
83% of children between 5 and 16 can’t identify a bumblebee.
I suppose that I am not particularly surprised that during a recent permaculture session with a group of high school students when I asked them how to “Care for the Earth” the only two responses among the hundreds of possibilities that they could come up with were recycling and decreasing or eliminating carbon emissions. Among them the recycling response was generally knocked down as practically no value. I believe what this shows is that these students understand that the way humans live is detrimental to natural systems, but they have been provided with almost no solutions. It reminds me of the scene in the movie Tomorrowland where the instructors in the high school are all talking about how bad things are. They just leave the lesson at how bad things are. There are no conversations about how to solve the many complex problems that are coming to a crescendo. How can we expect the problem solvers of the future to be able to solve those problems if we aren’t actively showing them what kind of actions can be taken to regenerate the very things that have been depleted?
Asking about “Care for People” garnered nearly the same type of response. Grasping what people care entails is foreign to these students. One student, in an attempt to understand, asked if I was speaking of mindfulness. While that can be a part of people care, the bigger picture is that there are hundreds or thousands of ways to care for people. Is this a result of living in an individualist society? Perhaps a consequence of the loss of community?
I was very excited to be invited to do 5 sessions about permaculture with a group of high school students in one of our rural high schools. This is an elective science class and is a mix of 9th through 12th graders. I was delighted to find that their diversity didn’t stop there, with a good balance of male and female students and with a spectrum of skin colors. Usually what we find in rural areas is that the people there are predominately white. In science, predominately male.
Over our time together I covered several key permaculture topics. Five sessions is surely not enough to be exhaustive about the subject. I started with the ethics and Holmgren principles. By our second session, about a month later, they could remember almost nothing we talked about, the trouble we have with today’s short attention spans. I was quite disheartened. In the second session we talked about the design process and did a short interactive activity that included what they learned about zones of use and how planning makes sense. They grasped this easier and over the subsequent sessions when I asked about zones at least some of the students in the class could explain what they are and what happens there.
We went over water systems, and trees and soil, with a worm activity that made somw of them groan and others take the lead with my squirmy friends.
By the end of the last session they were finally beginning to grasp some of what permaculture is. I knew going in that 5 sessions was going to just be overview, but I had hoped for more. I can see that students want solutions. They believe that each one of us can participate on a personal level to create change, they just haven’t been taught what tools are available that can help them implement those solutions.
Hopefully this is just the beginning for them. Perhaps 3 or 5 or 7 years from now there will be a remembrance for one or more of these students and they will begin to explore more deeply what permaculure is and can do.
For now I just have to trust that my time with them created a new spark in the way they think about the world we live in.
Well said, Jayme. Lifting up the young to permaculture is challenging. You took it on and did a good job, even though it was difficult and perhaps disappointing. Think about sharing this with John Wages at PC Designer. Others may have more to share and certainly would resonate with these issues.