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Chinese Translation of Introduction to Permaculture Book is Out Now

When in the graduation celebration of a PDC in 2009 with Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawton, I made a promise to Bill to translate his Introduction to Permaculture book into Chinese and get it published in China, the most populous country in the world. After teaming up with Pingping Li, a professor of agriculture and ecology in China, the Chinese version of "Introduction To Permaculture" has finally been published by Jiangsu University Press. The book is in Simplified Chinese, to suit the mainland Chinese readers.

China, the place that was heavily featured in the book Farmers of Forty Centuries, the place that gave us the sage Laozi who believes in the "trinity" of heaven (climate), land and people, the place where hundreds of mullions of peasants live, who derive most of their life-supporting nutrition for the whole family from 1/4 acre small-holdings, with a surplus. During my seminars in China, brainstorming permaculture, I found that many concepts in permaculture are very easily delivered because they are viewed as "common-sense", and the techniques promoted by permaculture seem familiar to the people, or are recoverable in memory. They already had a community agriculture network, and now a permaculture farm. Most of the bits and pieces are there — what I found was missing is better integration. And this is where permaculture, as a design science, comes in. Thus I sincerely hope the publication of this book fill that gap.

One of the members of my audience showed me a novel, just to show me that some of the problems and solutions understood by permaculture have also been understood by them. I was inspired by scanning the page and found it is very interesting, thus I translated it to English and am quoting it below. It is about a story that happened somewhere on the Shanxi plateau, the place where the ecological problems and restoration work has been documented by John D Liu.

… that data showed that 70% of the sand and soil particles of the Yellow River is from Shanxi plateau and the region across the river. Thus the river is called Yellow River. A long, long time ago, Shanxi plateau was an integrated, vigorously forested highland plain. Owing to deforestation, soils are lost to the water, and now it is a shattered landscape of ravines and ridges, gullies and ditches, thus forming new concepts of “fragmented plains”. The average precipitation in Shanxi plateau is about 300mm, but over 200mm of it is from a limited number of showers in summer. The heavy downpours compacts the yellow earth (Loess), quickly making them impenetrable, thus the water becomes a so-called "hill-attacking water flow", flowing down the hill, and the merging of hundreds of ditches or creeks form a slow moving mud river, which finally zigzags into the yellow river. After the rains have cleared, the hot sun scorches and bakes the land — the earth surface quickly dries up and cracks. Thus the hill-attacking water flow takes away from soil the slowly accumulated or artificially added fertility, and makes the barren land even more barren. Such land is not suitable for farming. Normally if you sow about 10kg of seed in the Spring, you can only expect about 30kg or so in harvest. If the local people cannot survive with this, they will cultivate the abandoned land or scrubby, thorny land, and sometimes even on slopes of 70 degrees — thus even an average cultivated land per person can be as high as 1 to 1.5 acres. But locals can still not produce enough food to feed themselves. Then what? Cultivating more land, and the result? More soil is lost to water and more the land becomes barren.

To solve this "vicious cycle", we must return the cultivated land to forest, or grassland, so as to change the status-quo of "planting a lot, harvesting a little". Increasing the unit output from the reserved part of the cropland by careful cultivation and adding resources, the goal is to produce enough crops to feed the local people — whilst planting trees, shrubs and even weeds or grasses extensively in the retired land, with the main purpose of preventing soil loss, but also providing three other advantages. Firstly, this creates a beneficial micro-climate — the vegetated areas have significantly more rainfall, and the climate is more humid. Secondly, trees, shrubs and grasses also have economical values, and if fruit trees are included, the economic output will be larger again. Thirdly, vegetation of land will stimulate husbandry, remembering that the Shanxi plateau region was at a junction between agricultural culture and nomadic culture!

Sound familiar? It is from a novel, and was first published in 1993.

The Introduction to Permaculture book in Chinese is available from: www.greetingsdelivered.com.au/cn-permaculture

6 Comments

  1. Hi Jeff,
    Well done. What an awesome achievement. I hope you are able to send a copy of this book to Taiwan so it can be transcribed into the traditional script. I am sure it would be well appreciated here as much of Taiwan’s coastal lands are totally degraded and in desperate need of permaculture.

  2. Hi Jeff
    Great to know about IP book traslation in to chinees language. i too got the same opportunity from Bill when i was in Jordan. Now the translation is came an end in to local language called Telugu, which is read come out with in few weeks. I am very happy to share this information with all our permaculture friends across the globe.
    regards
    mulch mulch mulch.

  3. Get into it Jeff! Forty centuries is too long a time frame from here.
    And the cheek of you to relay the suggestion that permaculture concepts are common sense!

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