“Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material and strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its forms.”
— Bill Mollison
I drew this plan for my close friend and mentor Peter Light. His work of genius is a 100 acre, 32 family, permaculture ecovillage completely designed using permaculture principles with guiding text, and a 250~ page essay that details of all aspects of living a harmonious life with your community, nature, and yourself.
I remember when Peter first showed me his drawing of this mandala. I was in awe of its scope and beauty. We discussed in length the design and principles for not only the mandala, but the system he wrote to be lived with the ecovillage. At the time I was drafting for a sustainable building design company, and had the skills and means to replicate his drawing electronically, a long time dream of his, so it could be reproduced and distributed. Enjoy!
Peter raised his family completely off grid in the 60s & 70s. He built his own cabin and grew all his own food in a remote plot of land in the then-uninhabited Sechelt inlet. After many years of theory and practice he came up with his ultimate design and treatise for all areas of living. The plan can be scaled depending on the number of families involved.
Permaculture Ecovillage Mandala – Full Text by Peter Light
Permaculture Ecovillage Mandala – No Text by Peter Light
In the last email I got from Peter, shortly after a lovely visit where we discussed his ideas with myself and others, he sent me the preamble and table of contents for “2100 or Bust,” his essay that details all aspects of community and living. I’ve added the most recent and complete version of his treatise here to share freely, along with the mandala, as I know he would want, for the goodness of the planet.
Preamble to “2100 or Bust” by Peter Light
I left Vancouver, where I was born and raised, in November 1967 at the age of twenty-four and moved to an isolated – though not remote – bay on the Southwest coast of British Columbia. I arrived there – fifteen miles beyond roads – with my wife and our four week old daughter; basic hand tools; food – mostly bulk grains, etc – for three months; no money – last dime flipped into the wake of the boat as we left the dock; a regular income of only a six dollar monthly Family Allowance check – later, twelve; some rural skills and relevant knowledge; and both a total commitment to creating a self-reliant and sustainable lifestyle, and the self-confidence that I could do it. I do not recall being preoccupied in any way with thoughts of monetary means, yet somehow I had no doubt that we were going to live simply and successfully “in the woods.”
We did. For ten years. Eventually, our average annual income – the main measure of our involvement in the system – was about $4000, half of it “disposable.” The first few years were lean, with parts even, at times, almost mean, until a minimal income evolved naturally out of our lifestyle – as it did for others scattered sparsely around the inlet: some split cedar shakes, one fished prawns, a few grew a little pot, some were employed occasionally by family in the city, a couple were occasionally on welfare.
I built a 16′ x 24′ log cabin for $150 – mostly for nails – with a double-bit axe and a single-person crosscut saw, and had a productive garden in a clearing in the forest, building up the topsoil from nothing. We lived without want for anything – not even the frozen orange juice I thought I would miss – and yet were without electricity and therefore light bulbs, television, refrigerator, blender, juicer, toaster, microwave, power-tools, or hot running water. Neither did we see a daily paper, or have a telephone, bank account, pension fund, insurance policy, driver’s license, or ID. We did have a radio and/or a cassette player half the time, running off of a car battery charged during an occasional boat trip to “civilization.”
We even lived without a flashlight, a “candle lamp” or “bug” of tin can and wire serving us well.
Far from experiencing lack, we lived like royalty – home with our children in the middle of nature – the trees and the inlet waters – our garden at the door and the creek rushing by – the surrounding forest hush. We were blessed with the wealth of family and warm shelter. With healthy food and nothing but. With simple living. With leisure time and work we wanted to do. With the edible abundance of the low-tide’s “table-set” shore. With freedom from the rat race and commodity accumulation.
Our children were educated at home, following no curriculum, the lifestyle itself and every interaction with the world dictating opportunity for teaching and learning. I was with my wife and family throughout the week and the year. We hugged our kids ten times a day. We learned – as a couple, as parents, and as children – that the power of respect, agreement, caring, communication, and freedom created harmony within our home. I began to view what we were learning as a family – elementary things like not bumming people’s trips, paying attention, tuning in to the vibe, choosing one’s words carefully, acting like we really are all One – as a model that could then be taken out of that setting and applied to other relationships.
We also learned and extended the principles and practices of organic gardening and mulching. Particularly, we began developing a radical kind of agriculture that I later learned to call permaculture – coincidentally, at the same time as permaculture’s founder, Bill Mollison, was developing his ideas in Tasmania and Australia.
We were living a very simple but far from rude lifestyle in a very small space, starting at our doorstep. All human “waste” wasn’t, was recycled and used, including our urine and feces – our composting toilet an outhouse, a bucket, and an old-fashioned compost pile. Intensive vegetable gardens started at the doorstep of our little dwelling. Squash vines sprawled up and over the roof. The main path through the garden led to chickens a short distance away that ranged in one permanent “straw yard” and were rotated through three other netted runs. Vine crops grew on the fence. Beehives sat on the hen house roof. We planted an orchard of nuts and dwarf fruit trees in the small pastures, as well as an understory and ground-cover of clover, comfrey, and other herbs and multifunction plant species for hen and human. The bees pollinated the fruit trees and visited the clover flowers for honey. The chickens did not eat the bees or the flowers, but fed on the leaves of the clover, which was also adding nitrogen to the soil. The leaf-drop from the trees provided mulch and more richness. Food scraps went to the chickens that were fertilizing both the orchard and garden with their droppings, and helping with earthmoving, leaf shredding and pest control. Oh yes, they also provided eggs.
Everything was within a few meters of everything else. It was small and it was beautiful. It cost hardly anything.
We had built a simple sauna – of cedar boughs, plastic, blankets and sleeping bags – down at the mouth of the creek, just in behind the trees; had made a little dam of rocks to back up some water into a little pool; and had put an after-sauna bathtub out in the open a few feet onto the estuary above the high tide mark, warming the water with a little fire underneath. I vividly remember one time in the tub, warm and languid, dusk deepening, the line of dark blue hills and higher ridges drawn through a Venus sky, dead calm water showing double, the photo-moment utter breath-held peace made sudden movie by silent glide and pterodactyl croak of cousin heron – and, anchored in our little bay, across the way, a yacht, peaceful too: the privileged on vacation. Yet here we were – washed hippies, thank you very much! – poor as crash-pad mice, living in this idyllic place all year ‘round. The enormity of it swept through me almost like a rush of fear – that I might wake from dream or delusion, be busted for possession of forbidden magic secrets. The moment was a heady realization and a powerful confirmation that we really must have embraced some significant formulas for how to live simply in paradise. We were actually doing it, actually living the dream.
Before my move out of the city I had had a romantic notion of what our family lifestyle would look like. All during those years in our Garden of Eden it felt as though we were living in the midst of that romantic vision.
My daughter describes that time of her life as utopian.
I created it then; I know how to help folks do it again. Although things changed suddenly and I left that paradise, I have continued to live the very simple – some might say primitive – lifestyle I evolved during those years, bringing its essentials, flavours, and comforts first into city back-yards, then rural Roberts Creek, and soon, I hope – my personal preference – once again up the coast, into the woods and onto the land.
It is only for the incontestable truth of having lived this way for so long that I might claim any voice of authority. And it is due to this that I am often assailed by the feeling that I might have a powerful responsibility to respond to the plight of my brothers and sisters, squeezed by The System and facing the fate that is now rushing towards us all.
In short, that experience in Storm Bay in the sixties and seventies – part of the “back to the land” narrative of the time – as well as my vision of an intentional community design that I have been developing ever since, feels relevant now as never before: relevant for all those who feel helpless, despairing and angry, and who yearn for an elegant manner of existence that needs only one planet – a holistic alternative outside of the personal traps and social isolations created by a global corporate catastrophe.
Most modern societies hold up electricity and indoor plumbing as fundamentals essential for human comfort and happiness. Having neither is often touted as the epitome of poverty and deprivation. Yet I and my family lived comfortably for a decade without either, proving them not essential for well-being; in fact, having little to do with it.
During that period, we demonstrated a way of living lightly that makes achieving a viable lifestyle in a post-commodity and carbon-driven world both doable and desirable. In fact, climbing carefully down through society’s cracks now may be the only guarantee of not falling through them later – perhaps soon.
I have added a fictional prologue and epilogue to this collection of essays on community formation – both written by close friends – and one inspired by the other- both for variety and entertainment and because they paint a vivid picture of survival in a scenario where civilization as we know it has collapsed. The triggering mechanism is not important: here, it is a virulent flu epidemic; in the epilogue, it is biological warfare. I believe it will more likely come about both because of an economic disintegration brought on by the over-extension of capitalism’s “monster gobble”: wealth accumulation, unlimited growth, resource depletion, infrastructure breakdown, rampant, modern diseases and environmental degradation; and because of flood, fire, wind, heat, drought and famine brought on by global warming.
It should be remembered, however, that my motivation in yearning for intentional community does not just come from my detestation of the madness of the matric and my fear for a dire future inevitability but from a deep desire to create a simple and sane communal lifestyle now, far from, and outside of – in this case physically as well as psychologically – this monster that has destroyed face-to-face, vernacular, viable and convivial villages everywhere.
“Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.”
– Bertrand Russell
“All and every particular and individual man and woman that ever breathed in the world are by nature…equal and alike in their power, dignity, authority and majesty, none of them having (by nature) any authority, dominion or magisterial power one over or above another.”
– John Lilburne, 1645
“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness; the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
– Woody Allen
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