#3 Permaculture Reframes Aging

"Permaculture (the word, coined by Bill Mollison, is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture and permanent culture) is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems." The concept of building a productive ecosystem includes how people interact with their environment and each other. Melissa Marts, Program Development Administrator for the Pikes Peak Area Agency on Aging, explains some of the permaculture principles and applies them to reframe aging. Melissa is a certified permaculture designer and has been practicing design for over 10 years. One principle states to integrate rather than segregate another to use edge and value the marginal. These principles speak to valuing our older adults (and younger too). Aging with Altitude is recorded in the Pikes Peak region with a focus on topics of aging interest across the country. We talk about both the everyday and novel needs and approaches to age with altitude whether you’re in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida or Leadville, Colorado. The Pikes Peak Area Agency on Aging is the producer. Learn more at Pikes Peak Area Agency on Aging. Transcript: This is Peak Community. The Studio 809 podcast collaborative. Cynthia Margiotta: Hello and thank you for listening to Aging with Altitude, a podcast series elevating the issues that matter. This series is produced by the Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments Area Agency on Aging. Today we have Melissa Marts, who works for Area Agency on Aging as the Program Development Administrator for almost a year. Welcome to Area Agency on Aging. Melissa Marts: Thank you. Cynthia Margiotta: Today she is going to talk about permaculture. She is a graduate of the permaculture design class and took that class 11 years ago. Melissa Marts: I did, yeah. It's hard to believe it's been 11 years. Permaculture is a huge part of my life and so much so that I have a fabulous certificate in my office that people ask me about it so I'm always excited to be able to share about why I love permaculture and why it is a part of my life, and how I think it matters to age in place. Cynthia Margiotta: Nice. Who started permaculture and why? Melissa Marts: Great question. It’s two gentlemen who started permaculture, and it was started in the 70s and it came out of Australia. The founder, his name is Bill Mollison. You can check him out online, learn a lot of great information about him. He was a wildlife biologist and so throughout his career he had really had lots of opportunities to observe and interact with nature and see how different species would thrive, others might not thrive. He looked at flora and fauna. He looked super intensely with the eyes of a scientist, and a biologist. Through that he started to realize that there were lots of principles that were happening in nature that if he applied those in his personal life, he would probably have a better existence, just kind of in his own life. The person who joined him on the quest with permaculture was one of his students named David Holmgren. The two guys got together and came up with this kind of way of existing in our world called permaculture. The term comes from the word permanent culture, kind of put together. Realizing that even though permaculture is an evolution in and of itself, the concept is that we're looking at creating a really solid foundation to grow and build from and looking at culture and creating something that really matters, and can be sustainable going forward. Cynthia Margiotta: Great, and so then why did you decide to get involved? Melissa Marts: My husband and I are really big gardeners. We grow a lot of food. The whole reason that we bought the house that we live in, in the old North End, is because the house was small and the yard was large. So without even realizing it we were kind of taking permaculture principles to heart back when we were in our early 20s and looking for a place to live and settle down. It was important to us to have a space that we felt we could interact with and be a part of it, and you know grow the right types of plants and food on our little piece of land, integrate water into our landscape, integrate sun, and just kind of have a space and utilize as much of our landscape as we could. We didn’t even know that were living and breathing permaculture. One of the things that my husband does that I just love is when it snows, he goes out. He doesn't just scrape the snow off the sidewalk and have it go haphazardly wherever. He creates little snow berms to kind of melt very strategically throughout our property so that we make sure that we utilized that snow as it melts, and that water and that's a permaculture thing. We didn't even know it, and so we were just kind of living and breathing permaculture. A person that I know in our community, her name is Becky Elder, and she owns Blue Planet Earthscapes. She is the perme goddess here in our community, and actually pretty much our whole entire state. She and I met through you know local food and gardening and she told me about thing called permaculture. I said I have got to take part in this. At the time I was actually working for Care and Share Food Bank and so it just was really a great kind of overlap of you know, how do we live in our landscape and do it in a way that's respectful? How do we grow more food? How do we feed people? How do we not produce waste? How do we utilize waste in a different way? So being at this regional food bank, it was just a perfect time to take the course. It was a nine month course and so I kind of laugh about it. It's kind of like you know cultivating a new family and starting over with a 9 month birthing process of this idea, these principles and cultures, and eventually you know, out they come and you just kind of look at the world in a different way as a result of permaculture. So that's why I got involved. Cynthia Margiotta: You mentioned principles. What are the principles of permaculture? Melissa Marts: Yeah, so there are actually 12 of them. I'm actually only going to mention 6, but I'm going to encourage listeners to check out permacultureprinciples.com on the Internet. You can see all 12 of them on the Internet there. You could also look at Blue Planet Earthscapes, our local leader here in Colorado Springs in the Pikes Peak region. She also mentions all 12 of them, but for the sake of time and interest I'm going to talk about six of them. These are kind of the ones that rise to the top for me. I think also mean a lot for the aging sector as well. The first one is called observe and interact. That's kind of what my husband and I were doing, but we didn't really realize it. When we bought our property, well it's not really a piece of property. It's a little lot in the downtown Colorado Springs area, but it is a larger lot than most which is what we were looking for. When we first moved in, we just kind of took some time and sat in our yard and sat in our house and said what do we like? What works? What doesn't work? How are we going to you know, make this our permanent place? So we just observed and interacted with our landscape in a way that was just kind of very natural for us. I think for some other people too, it's really natural, but for others it might not be. You might have the tendency to just kind of jump in and want to tear things up. You saw a picture in a magazine, and you want it to look just like that. With permaculture, you know, we kind of shy away from that and really want to say, you know, where does the sun come up in the yard? Where does the wind blow through? At Care and Share the wind was a huge problem. Care and Share Food Bank is located on the east side of Colorado Springs. The wind out there is fierce, so when we were looking at building gardens at the food bank we had to really spend a lot of time observing and interacting. And of course from an aging perspective, it's super important and just fine to sit back, slow down, observe what's happening in your space in your world, and then you know, slowly kind of take steps to interact. So I love that principle. Another principle is about catching and storing energy. Again as people grow older what do we want to have more of? We want to have more energy to do things so it's kind of fun to think about this principle. You know, from the perspective on aging of how can we interact in our landscape and actually catch more energy, store more energy, feel more vibrant, to be able to get involved in life. Which is one of the things about permaculture that's super important. It's not necessarily just about how do we interact and grow food, how do we create a garden or those kinds of things. It's actually also about how do we create a community and economy together. So catching and storing energy can also be about, you know, interacting with other people, creating community. It's not just about ecosystems or wildlife biologists or any of that. What Bill Mollison and David Holmgren did was create this way of life that is much bigger than just gardening. With catching and storing energy kind of garden perspective, is you do want to be able to plant your landscape so that you can catch energy, store energy, utilized it. So my husband's example with the snow berms is really important because instead of just letting that water melt off haphazardly, he would really direct it to go to certain places and really controlled it. So it's about catching and storing that energy. So kind of...