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Here’s another group of notes from the permaculture course I took. These notes concentrate on the concepts, rationale and philosophy I picked up; we got lots of practical and how-to information, too.

This set of notes has lots about water and soil, recurrent themes throughout the course. (See Part 1 of my online notes here.)

• Fun fact: the composting toilets at RDI don’t stink. The reason for this is that the urine is separated from solid waste…there are two seats in each outhouse; you pee in one and defecate in the other. Mixing the two causes the anaerobic reaction that causes the foul odor. (Personal note: I really liked the outhouse system in practice; I would personally rather dump a shit or pee bucket every so often rather than constantly trying to keep a porcelain throne clean in my house. A composting toilet never clogs. A well-placed outhouse is quite private and pleasant to use. And the more I know about living systems, the more absurd it seems to flush our waste into our water supply.)
• The Arcata Marsh and wastewater treatment facility rocks. I need to get up there to visit this; this constructed wetland is a well-known birding destination.
• Flow form fountains - allow the water to meander in a natural way; can help with water cleaning. These are beautiful; I’ve since seen one in action at OAEC and it’s mesmerizing.
• There is a pattern of civilization collapse related to topsoil depletion. Deforestation leading to desertification is also very typical in civilization collapse. The 1955 book Topsoil and Civilization by Vernon Gill Carter and Tom Dale laid this out in detail.
• Soil: Starhawk gave us an amazing introduction to this rich topic. Highly recommended for further reading: Elaine Ingham. The Klebsiella planticola controversy is scary and hard for me to understand completely; This page seems to give both sides a voice.
• Starhawk: We inoculate children with reading, writing, arithmetic, but they grow up not understanding ecology. Bill Mollison: “Evil is stupidity rigorously applied.”
• Water: 70% of the surface area of the earth is water. By volume, only 3% is fresh water. Less than 1% of the earths water is available to us and not locked up in ice in the poles and glaciers, or in extremely deep groundwatner. Half of that 1% is currently polluted. There is a finite quantity of water, but you might say infinitely available because it’s cyclical.
• Basins Of Relations: A Citizen’s Guide to Protecting and Restoring Our Watersheds written by Brock - great booklet.
• What is a desert? If evaporation is greater than precipitation, it’s a desert. (If these two are equal, it’s a Mediterranean climate.) If we use water in a way that evaporates it (or manage soil with the same result), we create deserts.
• California is the most hydrologically engineered place in the world.
• Ogallala Aquifer - underlies the Great Plains; filled by the Pleistocene glaciers (last ice age; studies of water samples have indicated that some of the water has been here for 20,000 years). Being depleted at an alarming rate.
• The Green Revolution could only happen with a corresponding and silent “Blue Revolution” — we’re mining our fossil water. At current rates, we’ll be asking for twice as much water as we do now.
• Desalination methods are typically petroleum-fueled. We must think in terms of Appropriate Technology.
• Andy Lipkin, Tree People, and Los Angeles: there’s enough rainfall to provide 50% of their water needs.
• Water testing: there is no overall test for everything. When you pay for a water test, you have to specify what you’re testing for.
• Usually get about 600 gallons of water on 1000 square feet with 1″ of rainfall.
• When you cache water off your roof, the materials of the roof will contribute to what’s present in your water supply. Vinyl or plastics? Wood shingles with fire retardants. Heavy metals like cadmium? Baked enamel on steel very good; expensive but long-lasting; glass also very good (cache off greenhouse?)
• Water tanks might be used as thermal mass to hold heat. Ferro-cement tank has very high embodied energy (every pound of portland cement requires three pounds of carbon emission to produce), but might be a very high use of this material.
• Adapting demand. How much do you need? 50 gallons per person per day?
• 20% of the electricity we use in this state is used to pump water. 30% of all natural gas is used to heat it. “Watergy”
• Strategy for caching water on the land: Slow it, Spread it, Sink it. If you want to save a watershed, start at the ridge line. Swales can help put water into the well. Ponds for short-term water storage, swales for long-term.

I’m about half-way through my notebook now…