Sensing within our global society a growing dissatisfaction in quality of life and witnessing the gradual erosion of political, economic, and environmental stability I have become increasingly concerned about the methods we employ to develop and maintain those systems that support human settlements. How many of us know precisely how or where the power we use to heat and cool our homes is generated? How many of us know precisely where the food we had for dinner last night was grown or what methods were used to grow it? How many of us are familiar with the processes of manufacture used to produce the materials we build our homes with, or how far those materials had to be transported? By the way our global population continues to grow we are obviously not experiencing a crisis of diminishing resources. By the way our quality of life is diminishing, however, we are faced with a crisis of resource management. If we are to achieve any modicum of stability in the way we conduct our affairs, be it peace between nations or the legacy of a healthy environment for future generations, then it is our moral imperative to develop a methodology of resource management that holds sustainability as its standard.

The notion of sustainable development, though seemingly new in its contemporary context, is not entirely unfamiliar to us for we have been living within the bounds of a mostly self-sustaining system for tens of thousands of years. This system, of course, is the greater ecosystem of the Earth's biosphere. The Earth is arguably our greatest example of efficient energy and resource conservation for it has undergone 10 million years of evolution in the perfection of its design. It is clear that the world is a vast repository of unknown biological strategies that could have immense relevance should we develop a science of integrating the stories embedded in nature into the systems we design to sustain us.1

Currently we are experiencing a renaissance in ideas and methodologies that promote sustainable design. The wisdom of our ancestors that allowed them to live in place for centuries is being coupled with the virtues of today's science and technology to create a design science that provides for human needs without compromising the environments integrity. Sim Van der Ryn, an environmental designer, refers to this design science as Ecological Design - a science which seeks to draw from nature a model for sustainable development. In nature can be found examples of architecture, food production, energy and resource distribution, waste management, education and learning, and countless other attributes relevant to the task of creating sustainable human communities. The role of ecological design, then, is to extrapolate from nature certain principles of design that can provide sensible guidelines for future development. Pioneers in this field include those such as: Australian ecologist Bill Mollison, Jack & Nancy Todd, architect William McDonough, and economist Paul Hawken. It was through their wisdom and insight that I began understanding the applicability of ecology in all forms of design.

What follows is a story about reading the social and environmental landscape - about observing the political and economic forces that determine how we manage our natural resources and how those resources respond to being managed. Foremost, however, this is a story about bringing the forests back into the farmlands - about learning to read nature's patterns in order to borrow from her design. Not being content to stand and stare, it has become my intention to investigate a model of sustainable land management that provides for local needs from locally available resources. By rethinking how the resources inherent to a conventional farm are utilized, I am seeking a model for how a farm can renew itself as the purveyor of more materials than simply food crops. If nature achieves stability and produces abundant yields through the diverse interactions between its many elements, then so should a farm be able to achieve a similar sustained productivity if designed in nature's image.

In the fall of 1996 my sweet and I moved from Olympia, Washington to the Wild Thyme Farm (WTF) overlooking the Chehalis river valley in the SW of the state. I was to take on the position of caretaker assisting in the management and further development of the nearly 200 acre family owned farm and plant arboretum. That same year I founded Permaculture West as a research and education cooperative to lend formality and a name to the design work I had already begun in the urban sector. The farm offered a unique and vastly expanded arrangement of resources in the guise of an old dairy operation that had not been used as such for nearly 20 years. The infrastructure of the existing facilities, consisting of old barns and numerous outbuildings, had been wonderfully renovated over the past 10 years by the present owners. Equal attention had been given to the landscape, gardens, and old orchards thereby giving them a new lease on life. I had entered the farm at a unique time in its history - a transitional period between the renovation of what was, to the design and development of what could be.

Certainly in the early stages of my tenure my thoughts and plans evolved much like an immature ecosystem. Initially my ideas were many and scattered, and time and energy were used inefficiently. Evolution and learning, however, saw the development of many ideas into designs and the process has indeed been instructive. Given nearly full latitude to use the farm's resources as I saw fit, I was able to define for myself what they presented to the field of ecological design and more so to the sustainability of my bioregion as a whole. It has taken much whittling of grand and elaborate plans to arrive at more pragmatic designs that better reflect the economy of conditions at the Wild Thyme Farm. The first lesson in design, as I have learned, is to take a careful inventory of existing resources and needs within a given site and situation. Utilizing what you already have more efficiently is much preferable to spending valuable energy and time on developing redundant or useless resources.

Upon further consideration of existing farm resources and the cumulative intent of peoples involved, the farm is being developed to perform or provide the following functions: family retreat, agroforestry research, wildlife sanctuary, sustainable forestry, educational facilities, and a model for sustainable rural economic development. Upon closer examination of the current and potential future needs of the farm it was concluded that it should be able to provide for itself: materials for fencing, animal forage, high-value timber, nursery stock, building materials, and food. Ecosystem protection and restoration have taken highest priority given the fact that sustained production is solely dependent upon environmentally benign management strategies - for as the old adage says, "never bite the hand that feeds you."

I have found that one of the first tasks in any design effort is to understand what has preceded it, for to design in the absence of an historical context is to ignore the lessons learned by past generations. As I am hardly an old-timer in this region I have instead made myself a student of its economic and environmental history. European settlement in the NW was born from the timber industry, fed by salmon fishing, and knit together by family farming. A drive through the valleys surrounding our home still shows evidence of a vast agricultural community in the dilapidated behemoths of old hay barns and extensive bottomland pastures. On the forested hillside behind our house can still be found tree stumps greater in width than my arms can stretch - a mute testimony to the enormity of resources inherent to the ancient forests that once stood here. It is puzzling to me, however, to consider how a region once held in infamy for having unlimited and unrealized resources could be brought to its knees, it's people left to reminisce about yesterday while struggling to afford tomorrow. How could we, in hardly more than one hundred years, so drain this region of its natural resources that the economy must be artificially supported by economic subsidies sent from the nations capitol on the other side of the continent? Is it really that we've over-exploited our resources, or rather underutilized our human ingenuity?

Family owned small-scale farms were common for decades in the Pacific NW until economic pressures began weighing against them. None-the-less these homesteads still lie scattered across the countryside - some still in use, many in disrepair, most foreclosed upon. It's not hard to guess at the reasons that led to the demise of these family farms as similar factors were at play all across the U.S. thus leading to the widespread near extinction of family farming. Perhaps the most singular cause was the failure to diversify. For decades farmers were encouraged to expand their total cultivated acreage or rangeland in order to produce ever larger yields of limited numbers of commodities such as wheat, soybeans, or beef. The green revolution that began in the 1940's took the chemical weapons of the post war and applied them to the agricultural landscape thus creating a system of dependency for farmers on these external subsidies. The failure of single crops due to drought, pests, or disease would bankrupt whole regions of farmers as there was little crop diversity to fall back on in order to pay the debts incurred by land, fertilizer, or pesticide purchases. The economic pressures of the 1970's brought upon by falling commodity prices and overproduction forced what few farmers who survived to either cultivate or range ever larger expanses of land, or relinquish their proprietary rights to their land and yield to the financial sponsorship of agricultural corporations. Both scenarios have seriously compromised the economic and environmental integrity of entire regions of this country.

Though in many areas of the U.S. and indeed the world we have dramatically altered the face of the rural landscape, we are yet far from exhausting the Earth's ability to produce abundant resources for our use. The catalyst for a renaissance in rural economics lies, then, in the reshaping of our patterns of land use. Our crucible will be in how effectively we can adopt nature's strategies of conservation while still managing natural systems for abundant yields. In the midst of ecology's chaos there is process and there is principle. It is the process that we observe in order to understand the principles, and it is the principles that guide us towards sensible and efficient design.

Process:
Wherever a perturbation invades an existing ecosystem, be it a road-cut or a landslide, the process of colonization and regeneration begins again. In this newly established and immature ecosystem diversity is minimal and energy is wasted. The first objective is to stabilize the area and begin conserving all entering energies including sunlight, water, and wind. From the soil emerges the pioneer species - plants such as thistle, brambles, and alder. As these plants colonize the area they manifest over the soil an ever-increasing surface area of leaves capable of intercepting the sun's powerful energy while transforming and storing it within their community. In the process of stabilizing the formerly denuded area the pioneer species prepare the way for an increasing diversity of higher plants. These in turn invite the participation of insects, birds, and other animals and with these participants comes a new flush of nutrients, thereby setting into motion an increasingly complex panoply of interactions. As the ecosystem evolves, random distribution gives way to a mutualistic o Color rder as elements begin arranging themselves in proximity to the species and other processes that will support them. Eventually the pioneering plants absolve themselves and are replaced by those species capable of performing a wider range of functions. As the ecosystem matures the efficiency with which wastes are recycled and external influencing energies are conserved increases to the point where a steady state occurs and a climax condition is achieved. At this point evolution slows as maximum sustainability is achieved. In the words of Paul Hawken, In a climax system, the greater part of energy is devoted to the continuation of the existing plant and animal communities, since all of the ecosystem is, in fact, colonized and inhabited. All present agriculture, whether it is slash-and-burn or sod breaking, involves the reversion of a climax system to a pioneering one. We exchanged stability and sustainability for short-term abundance and production.2

It is short-term economic thinking and static design that is bankrupting our natural resources. We should be taking lessons from our European counterparts who are currently forced to change their methods of resource management as centuries of misuse have left them with little to call a natural heritage. From nature's example, as illustrated above, we can extrapolate the following principles as guide posts towards sustainable design: 1.) Systems should be energy conserving, 2.) Systems should be adaptable and evolve to greater efficiency by design, 3.) Systems should respond to and provide for local needs.

As we clear the natural forests and fields of the earth in favor of annual agriculture and timber production we assume a responsibility for stewarding the land such that the resources we use can also be available to future generations. There is an increasing doubt, however, in scientific, agricultural, and public communities whether or not our present methods of natural resource management are capable of sustaining themselves indefinitely. Indeed the Green Revolution, the methods of which were introduced less than 50 years ago, is already, in many parts of the world, fading to a barren reality as soils can no longer tolerate this mechanically and chemically intensive approach to food production. The potential for agroforestry systems, however, to provide for much of our food and materials needs on a sustainable basis has yet to be fully realized in the U.S. and other countries.

The International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) defines agroforestry as: A collective name for land use systems and technologies where woody perennials (trees, shrubs, bamboos, etc.) are deliberately used on the same land management unit as agricultural crops and/or animals, either in some form of spatial arrangement or temporal sequence. In agroforestry systems, there are both ecological and economic interactions between the different components. Agroforestry systems draw from a rich history of over 6000 years of human development. Numerous examples of plant and animal polycultures can still be found around the world today in the form of traditional farming systems in non-overdeveloped countries. In the book Temperate Agroforestry Systems (CAB Intl., 1997), Andrew Gordon and Steve Newman describe the origins of these polyculture systems:

The agroforestry concept was developed in tropical regions, within the context of developing nations, where initially, land shortages brought about by the rapid population growth of indigenous peoples, demanded that efficient productions systems be developed for both food and wood resources. As agroforestry systems were developed and refined, it also became obvious that the discipline had an important role to play in the maintenance of sustainability through its inherent resource, land and soil conservation properties. Indeed, in the tropics, because of the importance of organic matter in the maintenance of soil productivity, research efforts continue to compare agroforestry systems with traditional cropping technologies in an attempt to understand their ameliorative properties, system by system. Many researchers have concluded that agroforestry systems are more effective than traditional crops on eroded marginal soil and hence are suggested for inclusion in the basket of conservation technologies.

We are living in an age where conservation and agriculture must find a common ground. The degrading effect large-scale monocropping and livestock ranging have had on the landscape is well evidenced in sinking aquifers, eroded streams and rivers, and vanishing wildlife species; yet popular solutions to this dilemma reveal a polarity in the public's opinion. As the factors that contribute to environmental degradation become increasingly apparent the pendulum of resource management is beginning to swing from unlimited access to resources to a 100% moratorium on use in ecologically sensitive areas such as wetlands, riparian zones, and steep slopes. Neither approach reflects a sensitivity to both the ecological and economic needs of a given area and truly there is much work to be done to create policies that promote the development of best management practices that are regionally and, more importantly, site specific.

Agroforestry systems based upon ecological models present a middle ground between resource conservation and economic productivity. Short-term, mid-term, and long-term crops can be planned into a system to provide both immediate sources of revenue as well as to support the long-term economic stability of a small farm enterprise. Since the inception of ICRAF in 1977 they have found the following conclusions noteworthy: 1.) agroforestry can be more biologically productive than forestry or agricultural monocultures; 2.) agroforestry can be more profitable than forestry or agricultural monocultures (in some regions); 3.) agroforestry can be more sustainable than forestry or agricultural monocultures; and 4.) when components (i.e. crops, trees, and/or animals) are brought together in an agroforestry system, their performance cannot be predicted from their behavior in isolation.3 This latter point assumes greater significance when we begin examining the increased product diversity and yields of agroforestry systems.

Agroforestry systems can be designed as constructed ecosystems such that they mimic the diversity, resilience and productivity of natural ecosystems. By the careful arrangement of select plant and animal species within a given unit area, product diversity and total yields can be increased while keeping such functions as soil building, nutrient recycling, and pest management intact and inherent to the system. True agroforestry systems grow multiple high-yield crops of fruits, nuts, berries, timber, nitrogen-fixing trees and pulses, root crops, vining plants, herbs, fungi and animal species which all interact beneficially with one another. Bill Mollison describes these mutually supporting assemblies of plants and animals as "guilds" as they are often "made up of a close association of species clustered around a central element (plant or animal). This assembly acts in relation to the element to assist its health, aid in management, or buffer adverse environmental effects."4

Of the many forms of agroforestry being developed around the world we have begun researching three distinct models that best complement the farm in its current condition and will ultimately serve as resources to the surrounding community. Perennial food crops are being woven into the landscape amongst former orchards in order to research the production potential of a diverse arrangement of fruits, nuts, and berries. We have collected many varieties of bamboo to research their viability as an alternative food, fiber, and pole crop in NW agriculture. And we have begun developing a mixed-use riparian buffer along either side of a salmonid supporting tributary flowing through our bottom fields in order to show how ecosystem restoration can support a sustainable economy.

Conclusion

As I continue to develop agroforestry systems I have realized that they must serve two fundamental functions in order to be useful resources to the surrounding community: 1.) they must respond to existing local needs, and 2.) they must evolve. In nature a pioneering ecosystem develops responsively to the economy of conditions in a given area. As inefficiencies in energy and resource usage are resolved the system matures until a state of relative equilibrium is achieved. If we in turn can provide for most of the needs of a community through the resources provided by local forest farms similar to the Wild Thyme Farm we will pass the first hurdle in developing a sustainable local economy. I have found four major benefits to providing for local needs with local resources: 1.) reducing transportation saves an enormous amount of energy in fuel costs as well as the associated burden on the environment, 2.) utilizing local resources more efficiently reduces dependence upon commodities produced outside a region, 3.) becoming more commodity self-sufficient increases the stability of local economies, and 4.) reliance upon local natural resources insures a better stewardship of those resources.

The ability for agroforestry farms to evolve dynamically also affords them an economic resilience not possible on farms where crops are grown in static singularity. Equally, by designing an inherent flexibility into a farming system allows the farm to respond to the changing needs of a community. Therefore the co-evolution of farm and community becomes as natural and mutually supporting a process as the evolution of elements and functions within an ecosystem.