The Power of Permaculture | Ryan Harb | TEDxUtica

there is poverty of ambition if you don't believe you can make a difference in the world I am going to say again there is poverty of ambition if you don't believe you can make a difference in the world in February 2012 I got a call on my cell phone and the ID of calls said blocked. I was with two of my colleagues at the time and I had this weird feeling so I said hello hello is this Ryan

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yes who is this is Ronnie Joe calling from the White House Ronnie hey how you doing? I looked at my two colleagues and whispered that it's the White House, so a few months before this, I entered a contest put on by the White House, it was called Campus Champions of Change and I was looking for the top. projects from colleges and universities across the country that were changing the world for the better, so Ronnie told me that our project was chosen in the top 15 out of over 1,400 from across the country and we now had a week left for the public voting period. if our project received the m The majority of the votes from our entire team would go to the White House.

We will speak about our project before a national audience and we might even meet the president. We only had a week to get those votes. So you want to know what happened? well i will tell you but first i want to tell you about our project and why we chose it so as many of you probably know the temperature of the earth is rising and rapidly this is one of the biggest problems facing humanity today today: climate change and threats. our quality of life and our very existence on the planet and no one knows exactly what the future will look like but here are some things we do know we know the ten hottest years on record occurred in the last 12 years we know 2014 was the hottest year on record recorded and NASA recently released data showing that temperature and rainfall patterns will likely continue to change dramatically throughout the century and what this means is that we expect major disruptions on our shorelines.

There are disruptions to our cities and disruptions to our global food system and this worries me a bit, we have a very unstable global food system and what we need is to reshape and redefine our food system to be more sustainable and more resilient than it can withstand some of the extreme weather patterns that are becoming the new norm, what we need is a food system that is more localized and more community oriented and that's what our project was about to create a sustainable, replicable local project that can also do right here in Utica in the early 1970's for Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren coined the term

permaculture

that word is actually an acronym it's a combination of two other words permanent farming and farming as you know it's a science and practice of agriculture and permanent in this case means being able to live sustainably on the planet generation after generation indefinitely and if we want this if we want to continue to live here for a long time and have a good quality of life for all then we need to create a sustainable and fair food system first and foremost one that works for all people not only for those of us who have privileges.

Permaculture is a vision and a design system to create a truly sustainable system. culture or a permanent culture and there are three guiding ethics that can help with that and the first one is called caring for the land caring for the land in creating a sustainable food system and a sustainable culture we need to think about our relationship with nature and work with nature. Nature Is Not Against You One of the underlying beliefs in

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is that we should do everything we can to imitate nature and I personally believe that it is when we have separated from or placed ourselves above nature that we have gotten into the the biggest mess we are in by imitating nature so much and to do that, we need people to work together and that's the second ethic of permaculture: caring for people, permaculture has to involve people and some of the The best projects are helping to solve social problems, as well as environmental problems, things like access to food, as well as many of the ju Times the Black Lives Matter movement is drawing national attention.

Permaculture is not just about food it's about helping people in the world right now as well as thinking ahead for future generations food I think is a great place to start because we are all so connected to she. The third ethic is called fair share and it means sharing of the surplus and again it is about helping. people in the world right now now I want to talk about a permaculture project permaculture in action so here's a project located near here that can be replicated here in Utica in 2010 at the University of Massachusetts we started implementing one of the first public university permaculture Gardens in the nation directly on campus, the vision was for students, faculty and staff to grow food right outside the Dining Commons where everyone could see it where the food is collected, then returned to the Dining Commons and served to students every day.

I was hired to manage this project and oversee a passionate team of student leaders. We call ourselves the UMass Permaculture Committee which is us and our mission was to transform. a quarter acre of grass on campus in a garden using permaculture as a guiding framework and we use a process to do this called sheet mulching and this is where you might want to start taking notes or you can watch this talk again later for Whenever you're starting a garden, there are a few things to consider: first is to get approval from your city or town, next is to get a safe dig so you know what pipes and utilities are underground, and third, very important, is to do a soil test making sure your soil is healthy enough to grow food so once you do these three things you can start applying sheet mulch and here's the fun part so the first step is going The thing to do is to cut the existing grass or vegetation as low as possible, then you need to aerate the soil with digging forks to reduce compaction now, Depending on the size of your site, this can take a lot of energy from people, but that's exactly why we did it. to create more volunteer opportunities so sheet mulch is also good for the soil it's much less detrimental to soil structure than rotary tillage so that's land care and plant care people after you have finished aerating the soil you can start layering in the first layer what you put right on top of the turf is a layer of freshly finished compost about three inches plus any other soil amendments as recommended by your test of soil and this is called your soil remediation layer right on top of that you put a layer of cardboard so the cardboard or newspaper acts as your barrier layer against weeds and prevents existing grass and vegetation from re-establishing for at least a few months.

You need to make sure that there are no holes in the cardboard. d and overlap it a good six inches on top of the cardboard layer put a layer of mulch and we used three inches of fresh wood chips because the campus had a lot of them but you can also use grass clippings or straw or shredded leaves and then just you let it sit so we mulched it during the fall and then during the winter we couldn't be outside anyway and in the spring we planted it in it and when you plant in mulch in leaves you actually plant through the mulch through the cardboard and in that layer of soil remediation now as the soil rests for the winter is a good time to decide what you're going to plant so that's what we did next we hosted a community design workshop where over a hundred Stakeholders, students, faculty, and local community members came forward to help us brainstorm what we're really going to do.

We were going to put them in this garden, so by the end of this four hour workshop, breaking everyone into a small group, we had over 40 different designs that we reproduced that day and then it was our job to take those 40 designs, find patterns and put them on. into a holistic design that looked like this so now we knew what we were going to plant and that would be even more volunteer opportunities so this is what it looked like after we finished sheeting just a sea of ​​wood chips and this is what it looked like in the winter and lots of snow that year this is what it looked like in the spring when we started rolling it out and this is what it looked like after pretty awesome so even more awesome than it looked I think it's the community that created on campus, so we had our team, the UMass permaculture committee, but we had hired over 1,500 volunteers to help on the sheet, cover the design and planting phases and they created quite a stir, so e we were planning fruit trees, berry bushes, nut bushes, vegetables, flowers, herbs, you name it, people were very excited about this, it created a buzz both on campus and off campus and that's when we started calling the national media attention.

We were writing articles in the Boston Globe and the New York Times. The Huffington Post and you remember that phone call I told you about, so now we're in the running for this White House contest and we've got a week to get as many votes as possible, so they've been pretty patient. This is what happened at the end of that week. We got almost 60,000 more votes than any other project and we were named the top college project in the country that is changing the world for the better a few weeks later we were in the White House and I was sitting on a panel next to President Obama and you'll see in a second and said a few words to our group that day really resonated with me and they still do to this day so I'm going to share that with you now the president said if you ever lose that sense that you can score a difference that can bring about positive change that's not just about you but it's about something bigger than yourself if you ever lose that sense then i think you've narrowed your own horizons there's a poverty of ambition if you don't believe you can do a difference in the world this particular project involved a campus wide effort but permaculture can also be done on an even smaller scale at an even higher level lime it's something you can do at home right here in Utica so here's an example of home permaculture this is about a 5,000 square foot lawn and it's in Amherst Massachusetts so the climate is very similar you can plant pretty much the same things here and this was actually a lawn that i had to mow maybe 15 or 20 times a year and i really didn't like doing it so i decided i'm going to transform this lawn at my house in a garden using permaculture as a frame of reference and I had two goals in mind: one I wanted to meet my neighbors I wanted to do something in my local community that would strengthen it and I wanted to get to know the people who lived near me and I thought that a beautiful front yard garden would be a great way to go second, i wanted to try this whole thing about mimicking nature by creating sustainable ecosystems so i did the reed mulch process.

I called a bunch of my friends and I said hello, I'm turning my lawn into a garden, you want to come help me, so they came and we did a lot of things, but we didn't finish, so I called him next weekend. was like, well I'm doing that again half way through at the time so I had to finish it myself but no hard feelings but it was the leaf shredding process so this is what I'm going to ask you questions everyone so i hope you guys are taking notes before so after i get your city or town approval and run a soil test as well as get a safe dig i mow as low as possible and then what is what it does before placing the layers?

What does he do next? I heard aerate the soil so that's what we're doing in this picture aerate the soil after that you know the next one what do you put compost just three inches of finished compost and on top of the compost yell what's the next carton you guys got it and then after the cardboard the mulch layer and then let it rest so we did this in the fall and then this is what it looked like that first winter a little bit of snow and this is what it looked like in the spring so that's a white clover that we put in to help build the soil and then here's some of the food that we extracted in that first year, less than a year, from a lawn to a garden, so this particular process that transforms a lawn into a permaculture garden is hugely

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ful to me on two levels, one is just the fact that we can put plants in the ground and with just alittle bit of care they will grow and become these sustainable ecosystems which is so cool it amazes me that we can help facilitate that and to add an even deeper level for me is the personal transformation I experienced while doing this as well as a garden come to life after winter.

I came alive during this process. My whole perspective on the world changed. I went from thinking I'm just a human making a detrimental impact while I'm here and I call that my guilt for environmentalism to realizing I can actually have a beneficial impact while I'm here and you can too so we can literally transform our world and help solve some of the biggest problems facing humanity and turn them into solutions. what we are capable of you, we have the

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to literally make everything around us better every day and I have found permaculture to be an invaluable toolkit for me and how to live my life with integrity and authenticity and purpose , so this is how I live my life this is my truth and it is the gardens that are really just a reflection of me and how I want to be in the world a resilient, diverse, healthy and prosperous individual now I don't know if this is you tr Uth only you know but if anything I said here today resonated with you if you felt a little bit of excitement during this presentation and you haven't tried this before then I encourage you to just go out there and give it a try , use a layer of mulch and plan for something other than just vegetables, maybe plant a fruit tree, you can plant an Asian pear that they can grow here in Utica or plant some raspberries which are easy to grow also grow here in Utica and I think it will be surprise and em you will be able to learn how the reed mulch process can help establish your garden and can even assist you in your own personal transformation and life journey if there is one thing from this talk I hope you walk away with is this always remember that you can make positive change happen in this world every day that's what permaculture showed me and that's what i think you are you are me we are the true power of permaculture thank you ok