Are We Doing Enough? Not a Positive Blog

The landscape of Los Banos still has a lot of vegetation but on a larger scale, rapid urbanization is happening.

Our fourth publication on the topic of permaculture was released this month by Springer Nature. To those new here to the blog, our team has published in 2017, 2020, and 2021. So far we are on a 3-year mini-streak. There's still a few papers lined up for writing and revision, so hopefully we can release a new journal article or book chapter by 2023. It really depends on my motivation to write. But this got me thinking. Are we making an impact with these papers? Are we really helping the planet? And who reads them?

As I reflect from a posture of frustration, I came to realize that the people and places that we studied were way ahead in preparing themselves for self-sufficiency. We have these tiny patches of private lands scattered all over the country in which the values of the designer are evident on the landscape. It's like "this is what I want the world to be like but the world does not understand me, so I will just do this in my own space." I can relate because that's how I feel when I'm in the garden. We're making our own environments. Our own microclimates. Our own safe spaces. Our personal healing places. And there's a lot of these as we've seen on the permaculture map. But is it enough to reverse climate change? Is it enough to prevent another pandemic? Is it enough to restore our ecosystems? No, it's not enough.

There's a long list of solutions but permaculture is something very personal to me because it's a toolbox or a mindset that is accessible to everyone. And it produces results.

I stumbled upon Esri's World Imagery Wayback Archive on LinkedIn last month. Basically it's a satellite image timeseries from 2014 onwards that you can save as a GIF. Out of curiosity, I checked how our landscape in Los Banos has changed since 2014. Well, it's not good news, as expected. I did the same for our research sites as well (check out our Instagram account) though I haven't finished all of them yet. You can see from the satellite images that the permaculture sites really stand out from the rest of the landscape. I think there's no question about that. But the larger scale is what concerns me. The landscape is degrading.

I look at my garden and tell myself: "This is the only environment I can control."