Community Garden, Baltic St and 4th Avenue, Park Slope
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This article is the first part of an on-going series called ‘Urban Permaculture: An Ecological Design View of Brooklyn and New York City‘ by permaculture design advocate, teacher, and entrepreneur Andrew Faust

How can New York City citizens — living in one of the highest-density, oldest industrial corridors — live in more ecologically intelligent ways?

In Permaculture Design we look to our history to inform our understanding. As we learn the history land use and the communities where we live we begin to see what are the relevant areas of work to
address our real needs. In permaculture we define real needs as: high-quality drinking water, clean air to breathe, a vibrant and diverse local economy in which to participate, healthy food grown on healthy soil, biodiverse mature ecosystems, and a caring human community with low stress levels.

These basic needs are in high contrast with the perceived needs of invisible cultural constructs, such as: the value of the U.S. currency, GNP, and the obsession with lawns. Our economy reflects the exploitation and destruction of of stable ecologies and cultures as growth. Growth for growths sake is how a cancer works. Permaculture asks, “What do we want to grow?” True health and wealth is in our forests, soils, and cultural diversity; not polluted landscapes and fragmented, unhealthy cultures.

Another perceived need is “status,” and with that comes the use of fossil-fueled and nuclear powered devices. The pursuit of these generally jeopardizes real needs by contaminating them.

This can especially be said about the quality of water in the city and around the country.

In the U.S. our rivers caught on fire before we decided to create the E.P.A. and the Clean Water Act in 1972. The stated goal, at the time of the creation of the act, was to make the nation’s waters fishable and swimmable by 1985. Today we are dismally distant from such a goal. In fact, we are approaching pre-1972 pollution levels across the entire country.

Today the E.P.A. estimates that 40% of rivers and streams are unfishable and unswimmable and 50% of lakes and ponds are unfishable and unswimmable.

The record shows that in New York City the citizens are deprived of the right to swim in the apparently beautiful and potentially abundant waters which surround the city.

According to the NYC DEP, the waterways around New York City receive an annual total of 27 Billion gallons of raw sewage from combined stormwater overflows (CSO’s) — untreated water that is released by the sewage treatment plants when the amount of rain goes above the system’s capacity.

Newtown Creek sewage treatment releases over 125 million gallons of raw sewage a year. Newtown Creek also receives toxic leachate oozing into it from an underground spill left by Exxon which is bigger then the Valdez spill spreading daily under Brooklyn and making residents sick.

From a Permaculture Design perspective we need to shift our thinking culturally. This shift involves creating economies that have a triple bottom line: Is it ecologically viable? Socially equitable? Economically viable?

Any element in our economy needs to equally satisfy these three criteria to be ”sustainable” or preferably regenerative and abundant.

In this healthy growth economy we will manage air, water, and soil with sustainable agriculture and development are a sacred and inalienable public right. No individual, corporation, or government agency will be given the right to potentially cause the citizens to die from an environmental pollutant.

We are creating this healthy economy now, despite living in the midst of our current unethical system. We create ties and accentuate them with other ethically minded human beings.

The Permaculture Design perspective suggests a large number of ideas that we can look towards to make NYC a greener, more sustainable city:

• More green, diverse vegetation over the entire cityscape
• Rooftop gardens and green roofs where they make sense. Lush boston ivy green walls on buildings extends the life of the exterior, cools and helps insulate. Biodiverse native trees and shrubs have been shown to clean more pollution from the rain and reduce the heat-island effect. Biodiverse native plantings also perform more opportunities to integrate wildlife benefits
  and beneficial planting arrangements to create more self-maintaining plantings.
• Street trees everywhere
• Wildlife corridors along streams, parks, and community gardens
• Daylighting and reforesting streams
• Rainwater cisterns for gardens and integrated into buildings to reduce water demand
• More on-site sewage treatment in new construction of waste treatment systems. Rain in the northeast carries lead and mercury from coal burning power plants rendering all fish in the U.S. according to the F.D.A unsafe for human consumption regularly.
• Growing a lot more diverse food producing gardens. Grapes, Espaliered tri-grafted asian pears. Your own Arugula, Apricots, and fresh herbs

All this vegetation and diversity will be multi-functional, addressing the heat island effect, soaking up rain water preventing overflow from CSO’s into our waterways — giving our waterways back to communities as usable for recreation and eventually oyster production and fish consumption again.

The Biodiverse anthropogenic landscape — designed by people and for people — is our extended biofilter that moderates the sun, wind, and rain. A green city landscape filters out industrial pollution, cools the city, and saves energy.

My business, Edible Garden Design NYC.com, has been started to exclusively focus on providing professionally designed edible and native perennial gardens for a whole range of clients.

In our next piece at GBK, we will look into our equally problematic air quality realities and how to address them. Our design solution set for water issues will be integrated in our solution set for air quality issues.

Overall by surrounding ourselves in our biodiverse biological beneficial communities we make life easier, more comfortable, healthier, happier, and longer-lived with a high quality of life… Envisioning and creating a beautiful healthy world together. Till next time, Andrew Faust

This Urban Permaculture series addresses a range of ecological issues in New York City and Brooklyn and presents permaculture design solutions to these city-wide problems. For more information about Andrew Faust and his Permaculture Design in NYC classes, please go to The Center for Bioregional Living.

www.homebiome.com 917-584-4588

Tags: Air Quality, Andrew Faust, Biodiversity, Clean Water Act, Coal-Burning Power Plants, Combined Sewer Overflow, Edible Garden Design NYC, EPA, Flickr, Green Walls, Newtown Creek, NYCDEP, Park Slope, Permaculture Design, Pollution, Urban Reforestation

Category: Environmental Justice, Green Building, Green Business, Green Roofs, Green Space, Sustainable Design, Sustainable Education, Sustainable Food, Urban Environment, Urban Greening, Urban Permaculture, Water

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