“Make food, not lawns” is a key principle in permaculture design, which encourages home gardens and local agriculture.

Josh Robinson, the president and permaculture designer of the ecological landscaping company Eden on Earth, lectured on the basics of permaculture design and its agricultural systems that mimic the earth’s ecosystems at the Applied Research and Development building on Thursday, Oct. 9.

Ideas of permaculture design offer sustainable living techniques that are possible to achieve in Flagstaff. 

“If we begin to observe some of the patterns in nature, we can come up with a design that can be a lot more functional,” Robinson said.

The origins of permaculture design began with the idea of designing agriculture to mimic a natural forest, which provides food and energy to all its residents. Robinson said the ethics center around the care of the earth, the care of people and sharing the surplus. 

“Permaculture is about design and the interconnectedness,” Robinson said. 

Permaculture looks at integration. Regularly designed homes neglect nature by disregarding sun angles and wind directions. He said the lands in suburbs create deserts. For every 12 inches of rain in Tucson, one inch will soak in. 

Robinson said regularly designed homes have no relationship to where natural resources are coming from. Current agriculture can be destructive with the pesticides and herbicides that are used. He said the transportation in current agricultural processes is environmentally unfriendly. 

“Let’s look at the area we live in and try to produce these resources locally,” Robinson said. 

Permaculture design looks at construction that makes use of natural resources, such as locating water sources near ground spouts and planting trees to work with sun angles. A tree provides shade that can cool a house up to 15 degrees in the summer. The design makes elements of a lawn work together logistically. 

Examples of basic design principles include location and the image of nature. Robinson said lawn elements such as herb and vegetable gardens need more attention, and therefore should be located near the house. Gardens can be implemented to imitate the structure and diversity in a natural eco-system to minimize the chances of diseases. Pots and soil are an option to people who do not have a lawn large enough to house a garden. 

Robinson was involved with redesigning a lawn in San Diego. It is supposed to take 1,000 years to build one inch of topsoil, but the group completed the project in a few years by relating natural resources with the lawn design. 

Robinson said there are whole areas of the city of Flagstaff that could be redesigned with aspects of permaculture. Parking lots can be used for draining areas to water plants and trees. 

“We could quadruple average rainfall in these areas,” Robinson said. 

He said he has not watered his gardens with city water in the past 15 months because of the permaculture design of his lawn. 

Chuck McDougal, a local farmer and owner of Mountain Meadow Farms, spoke of his experience with permaculture design at his Flagstaff farm.

“We’re trying to show people what we do in all measures of sustainability,” McDougal said. 

The farm promotes techniques of sustainable living through tours and workshops. NAU classes have toured the farm in the past. 

“We try to reuse everything we produce,” McDougal said. 

The farmers feed produce scraps to their poultry and use the feces as a fertilizer. The farm harvested honey for the first time last year from their bee hives. McDougal said beekeeping is fairly easy and small; beekeepers have not seemed to have problems with the bee colony collapse of large-scale beekeepers. 

Alex Terry, a senior interior design major, attended the lecture because of her interest in sustainable and eco-friendly design techniques. 

“The permaculture system is interesting because it mimics nature,” Terry said. “It makes a lot of sense.”