Permanent Culture
Could a return to natural infrastructure save South Louisiana?
His cheeks are shaven and rosy, his hair parted, and his heather gray polo tucked into light-wash jeans. Alan Booker is not, at first glance, the face of a revolution. But he’s just kicked off his white sneakers, and his voice coarsens with near disgust as he invites the Zeitgeist Theatre audience to do the same: “We’re not meant to wear shoes.”
Some in the theatre giggle, but most oblige. This enmity for footwear is the latest in a string of stirring pronouncements Booker has made against the world as it stands (so to speak): Shoes imprison feet. You should be hiring chickens, not people, to till your land. And pesticides, he declares, are a slippery, sludgy slope to soil death.
Booker has taken the stage at the Zeitgeist, in New Orleans’ Central City, at the invitation of Southbound Gardens’ Jordan Bantuelle. Booker hails from Huntsville, Alabama, a city whose high concentration of engineers has paved the way, naturally enough, for conversations about ways to improve modern life. To that end, Booker, a systems architect and engineer, founded the Eldenbridge Institute, which hosts workshops and classes that advocate for forging healthier human communities through deeper connections with nature and offer training in the outdoor design philosophy known as permaculture.
A carefully considered manmade strategy that aims to mimic the efficiencies of natural processes, permaculture holds strong attractions for earth lovers and engineers alike. “It was described to me as a methodology for producing food, providing for human needs, and restoring ecosystems on the same piece of land,” said Bantuelle, who along with Ian Willson heads Southbound Gardens, an organization that maintains a network of urban garden plots scattered throughout New Orleans and has a mission to educate adults and schoolchildren on permaculture’s power to sustain modern communities. [Editor's note: Southbound Gardens has since split into two entities, Hot Plants NOLA, run by Willson, and Bantuelle's new permaculture education center, All You Need Institute.]
Worldwide, the philosophy’s successes scale from suburban gardens meticulously plotted to curb energy waste to a ten-acre tract of desert in Wadi Rum, Jordan. Once appearing as a location for the 1962 film epic Lawrence of Arabia, the acreage has recently been restored to its ancient fertility through the establishment of water-trapping swales, succulent ground covers, and a canopy of shade-producing, evaporation-limiting date palms (GeoffLawtonOnline.com). So what do permaculture advocates prescribe for flood-and-hurricane-prone South Louisiana? Read on.
The Good Earth
“Stormwater has become a derogatory word,” said horticulturist Joseph Evans, whose ecological systems designs are built to integrate stormwater flow into landscapes throughout Louisiana. He’s happy to use the milder term “rainwater,” if you’re more comfortable with the idea of rainwater coursing through your regenerative landscape once he’s done with it.
Evans can convince even the most flood-averse listener that rainwater flow can be a good thing. Rather than concrete pipes and ditches to divert rains, or flat surfaces like driveways and parking lots that generate runoff, he and his New Orleans-based landscape architecture firm Evans + Lighter will outfit a client’s home with rain gardens—shallow depressions in the earth which absorb water and thrive on regular inundation. “When water hits concrete pipes, pollutants wash into it, including petrochemicals in the parking lot, pet feces, etc. Then it’s accelerated into pipes and canals before it’s pumped out in one of the great fisheries of the world, Lake Pontchartrain. But there are mimetic ways of dealing with these systems,” explained Evans, whose firm’s projects range from single-family residences to master plans for entire threatened coastal communities.
Like Booker and Bantuelle, Evans is permaculture certified. (Permaculture design certification [PDC] courses are available around the world; Evans will be spearheading his own at Southbound Gardens early next year.) He confesses that what he'd really like to do is recapture a little of the world he grew up in, hiking and canoeing—a world that the young Evans began to see unraveling in human hands, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
Correspondingly, it’s those decades of social evolution and earth-churning industry that gave rise to the development of codified permaculture practices around the world; Australian researcher Bill Mollison coined the term after seeing promise in the self-sustaining agricultural systems of Tasmania’s aboriginal communities. “The technology behind permaculture is common sense, observation, and ecologically sound ideas that our ancestors figured out,” said Booker.
The word, as Mollison and his protégé David Holmgren envisioned it, initially implied “permanent agriculture,” a sustainable antithesis to the short-term, maximum-yield practices that had come to define the agricultural industry at large. Now it’s understood to mean “permanent culture.” A healthy natural environment is more than just a pretty backdrop that relies on human restraint to remain verdant, the philosophy argues; it is the key to the long-term viability of our communities. “Without natural infrastructure, humans begin to miss something,” said Evans.
[Read this: A Field Trip to Mozambique: Similar latitudes, worlds apart.]
Between 2014 and 2016 Evans + Lighter Landscape Architecture took part in the Natural Disaster Resilience Competition—an initiative presented by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that challenged organizations to design resilient housing and infrastructure projects for communities impacted by major disasters. Evans + Lighter crafted a resettlement plan for the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw peoples of Isle de Jean Charles, a particularly vulnerable piece of Louisiana’s disintegrating coastline. Working with the Lowlander Center and the tribe itself, Evans + Lighter developed sustainability/resilience strategies and master planning documents that resulted in an award-winning entry.
Occupying a narrow ridge of land in low-lying Terrebonne Parish, the tribe’s homeland of more than two hundred years is all but gone, with an estimated 98% lost since 1955. Isle de Jean Charles' location—it lies outside of the Morganza Spillway, unsheltered by the levee system—leaves the tribe's ancestral lands essentially indefensible. But aided by a $48 million federal grant from HUD, the resettlement plan crafted by Evans + Lighter preserves the tribe's culture and traditions, even as the island is lost.
[You might like: Isle de Jean Charles: A Photo Essay: Even when land is lost, lives—and lifestyles—endure.]
Now funded by the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Evans + Lighter has thus focused its current, concrete efforts on relocating the tribe’s cultural landscape away from the coast. It’s a consideration that more and more Louisianans will need to make as coastal erosion and sea level rise continue to reshape the state’s southern outline. “When we look at coastal retreat, we’re looking at the loss of ecosystems. We need to think about how to repopulate all the species as we move in,” said Evans. A seed bank will accompany the tribes from Isle de Jean Charles, and Evans + Lighter aims to reestablish wetlands to coax back hundreds of species of flora and fauna once common to the region. “[The native species] are moving into areas that are agricultural; it’s not good,” said Evans, citing smothering monocrops, chemicals, and pesticides found inland. “But if you set up the correct conditions for species to thrive, including the right hydrology, they’ll come back.”
A healthy natural environment is more than just a pretty backdrop that relies on human restraint to remain verdant, the philosophy argues; it is the key to the long-term viability of our communities.
“We’re looking at migrations all over the world, some caused by land loss,” added Evans, “and we’re trying to codify a methodology of cultural and ecological collection of information.”
The Human Element
Before launching into his lecture at the Zeitgeist, Booker asks for a show of hands. Who knows what permaculture is?
As it turns out, most everyone in attendance. They’ve read the reference books Booker has helpfully put on display—Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers' Manual is front and center—and some have even spearheaded their own permaculture projects in the New Orleans area. Today, they’re here to meet like-minded individuals and unite to fight the most destructive practices of modern agriculture. Having friends on the same soil helps; Booker’s sternest message for the Zeitgeist audience is that permaculture hinges on careful observation of specific landscapes. Bantuelle too warns against “toolbox permaculture.” “People will reach for whatever plant they think will work well for their site without considering the ecology of the region,” he explained. “They use invasive plants without even realizing it.”
[Read this: Air Potato Vine: The highly spreadable, not so edible, invasive.]
For centuries, mankind has been engaged in an uneasy dance with nature, and as our populations and our technological capabilities have grown, the consequences of our actions continue to be better understood—clearer too are the roads back to a certain harmony with the elements.
In New Orleans, Evans dreams of renaturalizing the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain. “We have sea walls, but there used to be cane, cypress, and beaches—there’s maps that show this. Even if you kept the floodwall, you could still have a natural interface with the lake. It would improve water quality, and you could have fisheries and more opportunities for recreation.”
The value Evans and his firm place on preserved landscapes extends further than you might expect. “There’s talk of tearing I-10 down throughout the city,” said Evans. “That’s all fine and good. But it’s become a cultural and iconic piece, even though it devastated the neighborhood. It would be devastating again to pull it back down. How about we plant forest on top of it and put high-speed bus routes or a light rail? We can utilize the structure that exists.
“Plus have you ever heard a second line move under the bridge? The acoustics are killer."
Further reading: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual by Bill Mollison