If you search YouTube for the oxymoronically titled video “Greening the Desert,” you’ll find a 2007 mini-documentary about how an energetic Australian miraculously transformed 10 acres of hyper-arid Middle Eastern desert into a lush, edible paradise. The details are scant and the narrator doesn’t begin to explain his religion—that is, permaculture—but still, the video is responsible for converting at least one Calgarian, former oil-and-gas engineer Rob Avis, into a full-time permaculture crusader. If it were up to him (whose mantra, which you’ll also hear in the video, is “all the change in the world starts in the garden”), every resident of Calgary would one day, like him, grow a “food forest” on his or her front lawn. For a little help in spreading the good word (and the natural fertilizer), Rob and his wife, Michelle, are bringing to town this week agricultural visionary Joel Salatin, widely known as “America’s most influential farmer.” The term “permanent agriculture” was first used in 1929 by John Russell Smith, an experimental farmer who wrote about mixing trees and crops for more sustainable growing. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s, however, that the principles of permaculture (a contraction of Smith’s term) as they’re followed today were set out by Tasmanian researcher Bill Mollison and Australian ecologist David Holmgren. Their teachings and books about a system of eco-forward design that encompasses agriculture, horticulture, architecture and ecology became the sacred texts of the movement. More recently and closer to home, American activist-farmer Joel Salatin has become the face of this brand of beyond-organic agriculture that aims to “heal the earth” as it maximizes production. You may have already encountered Salatin in the documentary Food Inc. or in Michael Pollan’s bestselling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Salatin, who refers to himself as a “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic-farmer,” loudly criticizes conventional farming practices whenever he gets the chance. He’s written numerous books on the subject of sustainable food growing, including Everything I Want to Do is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front; and Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People and a Better World. But while Salatin is famous for his colourful, provocative talks (the farmer gives exactly 100 lectures per year), the Avises have invited him here to present something a little more intensive: three days’ worth of practical workshops for urban gardeners and farmers interested in growing food “the way nature intended.” In Calgary, as in most places in North America, permaculture is still a pretty fringy, young movement. Its practitioners employ a method of sustainable land-use oriented around three core principles: “take care of the earth,” “take care of the people” and “share the surplus.” The more elaborate version of the code outlines 12 design principles such as “observe and interact” and “use small and slow solutions.” (See page three for a diagram of permaculture principles.) In strictly agricultural terms, permaculture is about working with rather than against nature to produce smart, resilient, productive, integrated design that reduces waste and maximizes space. But the movement has an ethical/social dimension as well, which involves striving to strengthen relationships between people and communities and, more ambitiously, to relieve world famine.

Given that the North American permaculture movement has been spawned in an environment of eco-doom and gloom—Peak Oil, loss of diversity, species extinction, corporate conspiracy, oil spills, food insecurity—its message is surprisingly sunny. Permaculture tends to attract idealists and extreme optimists who want to show, as Rob Avis puts it, “that humans can be just as positive as they are destructive.” Rob himself, co-founder along with Michelle of the Calgary company Verge Permaculture, is walking, talking (and talking and talking—the guy is enthusiasm incarnate, he hardly takes a breath) proof of that proposition. Rob grew up in Edmonton, where his parents were part of the “industrial food complex,” churning out 25,000 factory-made cheesecakes a day. He met Michelle when they were both engineering students at the University of Alberta, and they wound up working together in Calgary’s oil-and-gas industry. The pair, in other words, are not the sort of crunchy-granola hippies that those skeptical of permaculture likely envision. But what moves an established oil-and-gas engineer to leave a six-figure gig and become a guerilla gardener, smuggling Honeycrisp apple trees into city parks to prove the notion that “food scarcity is just an artificial construct”? Well, Rob’s merely extracurricular interest in renewable energy sources (while still working in oil and gas, he “dabbled” in solar-thermal panels) became a full-blown obsession the day he found a link to the aforementioned YouTube video in his inbox. “Basically, that video tells the story of Geoff Lawton, who went to Jordan, to the lowest place on earth, and used some very simple design methodology to turn a piece of degraded land into a forest.” That story, he says, “was my epiphany.” While the couple had always dreamed of travelling for a year, Rob—galvanized by permaculture’s promise of debunking the prevailing myth that the world is inevitably going to hell in a mechanically woven hand-basket—suggested they focus their trip on learning all they could about “enriching life on Earth.” To that end, in 2008 the couple left Calgary for Denmark and Australia to work and study off and on for several months. When they came home, the Avises immediately put their permacultural education into very visible practice—in the front yard of their Forest Lawn home. In an instructional video on Verge’s website about how to “chop and drop” unwanted plants for mulch, Rob stands on the sidewalk in front of his house and gestures toward his neighbours’ manicured lawns, which he calls “monocultural crops in highly compacted soil structures.” It’s virtually impossible for a dedicated permaculturist like Rob to view such patches of cultivated grass as innocuous places to kick soccer balls around; seen through the permacultural lens, lawn is a colossal waste of energy and space. In his opinion, “a system like lawn or grass perpetuates the concept of food scarcity.” He’s disturbed by the fact that close to 40-million acres of land in the U.S. are planted to grass every year, and he estimates the Canadian number to be about the same per capita.

Since it’s hard to wrap your mind around those numbers, Rob offers some help: “To put that in perspective, about 45 million acres of land in the U.S. is planted to wheat.” By his calculations, 40-million acres of grass is enough space on which “to grow food for a 2,000-calorie diet for 300-million people for two years on one crop.” It’s a stat that once moved him to illegally dig a hole in a city park (in broad daylight, no less) and plant a young apple tree. He justifies his act of guerrilla gardening by pointing out that “we are surrounded by land that could potentially grow good, healthy food for people who don’t have enough.” By contrast with his neighbours’ front yards, the Avises’s is a miniature Eden, a soft tangle of little pear and apple trees, strawberries, rhubarb, comfrey and other companionable perennials—enough to keep the family of four in fruits and veggies for much of the year. It’s a highly engineered, low-maintenance, multi-layered “forest” of food, so called because, forest-like, it virtually takes care of itself (the Avises couldn’t live in a more aptly named ’hood). “Forests don’t have garden gnomes running around fertilizing and watering them, so why can’t our gardens be the same?” asks Rob, adding that his little forest requires no weeding at all. “Weeding is work, and work,” he says, “is a failure in design.” Of course, the original planning, designing and planting of the yard took many weeks of work. Following a popular system of edible landscaping, the Avises’ food forest is comprised of seven layers of plants of varying heights, which allows for a more diverse “community of life” to grow in a small space. As well, they use organic matter as ground cover, a gardening technique called “sheet mulching,” which attracts earthworms and improves soil by mimicking a forest floor. The technique makes Rob and Michelle’s dirt “crummier”—a good thing—and buggier—also good—than their neighbours’ dirt. Of course, to show you the proof of that, Rob would actually have to dig up their lawns, an urge I imagine he must often have to curb. As for the couple’s backyard, it features a solar greenhouse for three-season gardening and hail protection, an outdoor kitchen with cob oven and a community garden plot. Of the latter Rob says, “you are not sustainable if you do not have, and build, community.” The couple harvests all rain water that falls on their property; they use virtually no city water to keep their garden thriving. Until recently they also used grey water (that is, water from their bathtub and washing machine) to irrigate their food forest and garden, but in the fall of 2011, a visitor touring the Avises’ home reported their grey-water system to city officials, and the couple received a cease-and-desist order. The practice is illegal in Canada unless you live in a recreational vehicle. On the upside, says Rob, ever the optimist, “now I can talk about it all I like and get the word out on this issue. If Canada allowed grey water, as many parts of the U.S. do, we wouldn’t have a water-scarcity issue at all.” (Incidentally, the bylaw officer who delivered the order complimented Rob on his plumbing and told him the City of Calgary receives 10 to 15 applications for proposed grey-water use every week.)

The Avises’ Forest Lawn neighbours may not yet be “permies,” horticulturally speaking, but in terms of that other tenet of permaculture, community resilience, they already walk the walk. Michelle says that the time she and their children spend in the front yard allows her to “see neighbours coming and going and we get to chat often.” The Avises thus credit their gardens with solidifying symbiotic, first-name-basis relationships with a mechanic, a day-home operator and a tire specialist, all within shouting distance of their place. “We all look out for each other,” says Michelle. “It’s nice to have neighbours we can ask favours of and vice versa.” One woman recently told the couple that every time she walks by and sees all the bugs in their garden, “she wants to cry with happiness.” The first thing Michelle and Rob did when their crops came in was “get our neighbours on the zucchini train.” Since then, she says, there’s been nothing but praise of the garden. “The neighbours have come to expect the surplus veggies, which means they have a vested interest in the food forest.” As for the anyone who might feel sorry for the Avis children who don’t have a lot of room to kick a ball around, Michelle says life in a permacultured yard is nothing but fun for her two-year-old. “Because of all the trees and flowers, there’s so much life in our yard—bees and birds—and that’s fascinating for kids. Our son has so much more to stimulate him, and more to explore and play with than kids with a grass yard. He loves it.” Graduates of Verge Permaculture’s Design Certificate, a 72-hour program which uses Bill Mollion’s 1988 Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual as its primary text, represent a wide variety of people from all sorts of careers and with an eclectic range of motivations and plans for their new skill sets. According to the website, students learn “earth restoring strategies,” including how to turn their houses into “the greenest home on the block,” how to transform sewage into drinkable water with plants rather than chemicals, how to grow a food forest and how to build community. Most of all—and this, perhaps, is the heart of permaculture—Rob teaches students to create a “rich, meaningful life” by earning money in a way that aligns with their values. Verge’s grads have gone on to become permaculture designers, consultants and teachers, and everything from better window-box gardeners and beekeeping hobbyists to passionate homesteaders living off the grid. (For example of the latter, check out Rancho Relaxo Resort, ranchorelaxoresort.ca, owned by Juli and Jeff Gillies, who will host this summer’s 2013 Western Canada Permaculture Convergence at their Rocky Mountain House acreage.) Rob has noticed that while permaculture certificate programs in other cities attract a lot of “hippie-types,” his Calgary classes draw a surprisingly high number of what he calls “closet greenies,” including professional physicists, geologists, accountants and engineers. He has a theory to account for this phenomenon: “People in Calgary tend to put on a facade about how happy they are, but after a couple of drinks people will tell me the truth of their lives. That they want something more meaningful.”