Permaculture in New Zealand

Permaculture in Brazil, by Gary Williams

PERMACULTURE IN BRAZIL
Brazil is a vast country (of 8.5 million km2), taking up almost half the land area of South America. It is the low lying naturally forested land to the east of the Andes, with a predominantly hot climate, but with a wide diversity of biomes and eco-regions.
The forest over much of this vast land has been cleared since European occupation, over 500 years ago. Now it is the Amazon jungle that is being cleared, but before that it was the Atlantic margin forests, the central savanna forests and the north-east steppe woodlands.
The cleared land has been used for agriculture, both cropping and livestock, but large areas have reverted to scrub or light grazing because of the rapid loss of natural fertility following the forest clearance. Most of the 170 million Brazilians live in cities, including one of the largest metropolis in the world, São Paulo, with around 20 million inhabitants.
The large cities are mostly surrounded by sparsely inhabited land, with no obvious supporting hinterland. As elsewhere in the world, millions of trucks carry goods, from all over the place, into, through and out of these large conglomerations of people. The people live either in tiny apartments in high rise buildings, or in shantytowns with minimal services, and one is cheek-by-jowl to the other.
It seemed to me that masses of people were going round and round in ever tightening spirals servicing each other, and with no connection at all to the land around them. In this land of unrestrained capitalism, where there have been no socialist parties or unions to speak of over most of its 500 years of European history - until recently - there is no welfare safety net, or quality public health and education services. In rural areas, poor farmers struggle to make a living, and from their meagre income have to pay for health care and education.
Why Brazil should have such a lack of public services and enormous disparities in income and wealth, I don’t know, and I couldn’t find any Brazilian who would give me even a half-baked reason why! Brazilians seemed to be relatively easy-going, if hard working. They are much more likely to go-with-the-flow, and wait or let people in than New Zealanders. Perhaps it is this live-and-let-live attitude, plus a greater emphasis on family and not society, that is part of the explanation for a lack of a wider social conscience and active social or community groups. Welfare support seemed to be very much based on charity and the good fortune of being selected.
Brazil has a well developed economic infrastructure, particularly in its transportation (roads not rail, and air), electricity, telecommunications and urban services. From my perspective, it is not a third world country economically, rather one of extremes of wealth with vast numbers of poor people. A country of gross inequities, with similar extremes between city and countryside, and of cement jungles and destroyed environments.
In this context of social extremes and environmental despoliation on a vast scale, a permaculture movement has gained a foothold. It started as recently as the mid 1990’s, but now has some very active people and a country-wide network, linking groups in the different bio-regions of Brazil. They are certainly small in number compared to the population of Brazil, and may be even more marginal than permaculture in New Zealand. However, there is a very good magazine - produced at varying intervals since about 1999 - and a number of ‘institutes of permaculture and eco-villages’ are building permaculture based eco-communities from scratch.
Over a period of two months in Brazil I visited people at “Instituto de Permacultura e Ecovilas” of the Pampa in southern Brazil, of the Cerrado in central Brazil, and of Bahia in north-east Brazil, as well as the magazine editors in Brasília. At the same time, I visited organic and biodynamic farms, meet people from organic certifying agencies and at organic produce markets, and went to the 5th World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil.
The IPEP institute of the Pampas was on the outskirts of Bagé, near the Uruguay border. Here the rolling to flat land goes on forever, and is now mostly dry grassland with very few trees. At the institute property, they were regenerating their 8 hectares back to the natural cover of a low pampas woodland forest, with forestry gardens, and more intensive mixed gardens and rice paddies along the small stream valley. There were maybe 30 people on the property, including families, couples, single people, volunteers and local employees. Over the next few years they intend to build an eco-community with about a dozen more houses. The buildings were all made of local materials: timber, straw bales, adobe earth, pressed (not fired) bricks with straw and mud cover, and with thatch and turf roofs. There was a main building, with bedrooms on the top story, a number of family homes, and a lodgings nearing completion for guests and course participants.
Many of the buildings had earth walls, mostly pressed brick with an earth plaster cover (tinted with natural dyes) and earth floors covered with baked tiles. Plaster covered earth bricks were also used for water tanks and methane storage.
They have compost toilets, biodigesters and wetland treatment systems, and did lots of composting and mulching. Water shortage in the dry summer season is their main constraint. They regularly run permaculture design courses as well as many other courses on a wide range of subjects, and generally seemed very active and enterprising. They made some very interesting timber and mud shelters for the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre.
The IPEC institute of the Cerrado was not far from Pirenópolis, west of Brasília. Here the rolling hill country has some forestry, especially along the ridges and the river margins, but has again been mainly cleared for livestock grazing. The Cerrado forest is extremely diverse and productive, with lots of human food, but in the form of fruits, nuts, birds and small animals, not beef cattle! An agroforestry place nearby had an area of virgin forest, as well as a highly diverse food forest and some mixed grazing areas.
The IPEC place was more a training centre run by three families, with about a dozen people working on site including local paid employees and a few volunteers. They had a very interesting range of buildings, made of different materials (including earth, superadobe, straw and wood) and they were all very nicely finished, with lots of mosaic work. The lodgings were made of curved earth walls to a very interesting and efficient design - two S shape walls abutting each other to form four bedrooms. Here the roofs were mainly tiles on timber supports.
They had very pleasant compost toilets - with wonderful views! - and greywater wetland treatment again. The kitchens and bathrooms were semi-open, and very appropriate for the hot climate. They had solar panels and a micro-hydro for electricity, but insufficient for the whole property.
There were interesting agroforestry areas again, if more organised, with very intensive gardens, that were also more conventional. The place had a more business/training feel, oriented towards teaching ecological farming and building practices, rather than people developing an eco-community for themselves, as at IPEP in Bagé.
Instituto de Permacultura da Bahia is the oldest institute in Brazil, created in 1992, and works with communities in diverse and wide ranging ways. They have developed very successful techniques to regenerate the Atlantic forests, by sowing a mix of species from colonisers to mature species, and allowing nature to do the selection and succession. Such large areas of forest have been cleared in Brazil, and so completely, that natural regeneration has been severely inhibited. Vast areas remain scrub land as there are so few seed sources or birds and insects to spread the seeds. However, once an area is seeded it bursts into life, and the forest rapidly re-establishes. The permaculture people are then setting up diverse mixed species forest-based agriculture, rather than row crop and grassland agriculture.
The food sources in these forests, even the dry land forests, is both extraordinary and mostly ignored. As one example, there is a palm tree that produces an abundance of very nutritious fruit - that tastes like a cross between corn and potato - that is cut down young for the soft trunk matter, to be served as a delicacy in high class restaurants!
Another project of the Bahia group is the establishment of polyculture farming in the semi-arid steppe lands of the north-east, by working with the small family farmers in the region. They had recently won an environmental award for this work in the “Implementing Sustainability” category. Meanwhile vast agri-business irrigation schemes are proposed for the region, by taking water over long distances from the San Francisco River.
Members of the Bahia group were developing diverse gardens at their homes, at schools and on small blocks outside of the cities, where again earth building techniques were used as part of building with local materials. The thermal mass of earth walls, with large ventilation openings for through breezes, makes earth building an ideal technique for the hot climates of north and central Brazil.
One measure of the natural diversity of the Brazilian environment is the range of herbs that are sold in shops and market places throughout Brazil. There are masses of both medicinal and culinary herbs, with the list I obtain from one shop giving over 400 herbs. A knowledge of herbs is one legacy from the indigenous people, who became virtually extinct mostly because of European diseases.
The permaculture people in Brazil demonstrate very clearly the stark contrast between modern urban industrialised living and a sustainable way of life integrated into the environment, and how different this lifestyle necessarily becomes in different environments. In a land of large densely populated cities and vast clearances of forests for industrial agriculture and livestock grazing, they are building eco-communities in tune with their environments, using local materials and a diverse forest-based agriculture. The warm tropical forests are highly productive and have abundant sources of food and fibre, if different to the highly selected and modified food and fibre crops of present industrial agriculture.
In New Zealand we do not have the same population densities, but we have also destroyed much of the natural forest cover - and for the same purpose of livestock grazing. Our forests are not so productive, and our temperate climate is more conducive to grasslands, although the steep hill country grassland is very prone to erosion because of high intensity rainfalls.
The practice of permaculture in Brazil raises questions about the type of agroforestry that would be appropriate to NZ conditions, and the place of communities in the permaculture lifestyle. The introduction of new plants and animals by Europeans has had a more profound effect on local eco-systems in NZ, and any sustainable harvesting of food and fibre in NZ will now necessarily involve introduced species.
We can learn much by comparisons, of similarities and differences, and seeing something of Brazil was a great learning experience for me.

Gary Williams January 2006

Entered by Gary Williams