Book Report: The Permaculture City by Toby Hemenway

I have decided to challenge myself to read more or mostly non-fiction books. I struggle with reading because it takes a lot of energy for me to actually focus on comprehending what the book is trying to get across, and this has always been the most difficult when it comes to non-fiction books. However, I’ve been inspired by the online creator Sarah Schauer to give non-fiction another chance by finding books that discuss concepts I am interested in. The first topic that came to mind was, of course, sustainability. So, I looked on Libby for some books in that category that would appeal to me and found the absolute gem that is The Permaculture City by Toby Hemenway. I’ve decided to call back to grade-school and write a report on this wonderful book based on my notes I took chapter-by-chapter.

This book was delightful. One of the biggest things I’ve learned in these early sections is that permaculture isn’t a strict set of instructions; it’s a framework that helps us design and use systems more sustainably. What surprised me most is how easily this applies to cities. We often think of urban areas as unsustainable, but cities are actually much greener than people assume. Their compactness and shared spaces make them less energy intensive and more productive in many ways.

In the first chapter, Hemenway introduces the concept of complex adaptive systems (CAS). This means they can’t be rigidly planned from the top down, but they also can’t exist in total chaos. This is why designing a city “from a plane,” as modernist planners like Le Corbusier tried to do, strips it of life. I found this idea fascinating and now want to continue my non-fiction journey with the works of Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander, who were critical in developing these concepts.

Chapter 2 was my favorite because it explained the permaculture design process in such a clear, satisfying way. This quote from this chapter especially resonated with me: “At its heart, design is about placing the right parts in useful relationships so that the desired processes can happen” (55). It’s such a simple explanation of such a daunting topic that I appreciate so much. The framework consists of some core principles: observe carefully, connect elements, catch and store energy, make each element serve multiple functions, and ensure that every function is supported by multiple methods. Other principles include making the least change for the greatest effect, starting small, optimizing edges, working with succession, and using biological resources before technological ones. Hemenway also writes to keep certain attitudes in mind: turn problems into solutions, get a yield, learn from mistakes, and remember that the biggest limit is a lack of creativity.

The design process itself moves through four levels: mission, goals, strategies, and techniques. Strategy is the central pillar; it involves diagnosing challenges, creating a guiding policy, and organizing coherent actions. Key design methods include sector analysis, zone analysis, needs-and-resources analysis, and my favorite, highest use. Highest use means completing the most energy-intensive or valuable use of a resource first, then using what’s left for less demanding uses in descending order of demand. Hemenway’s example of structuring his workday this way, from learning to creative work to administrative tasks to physical tasks to social engagements, felt so intuitive, and has inspired me to apply that to my own routine. The pillars of permaculture: care for people, care for the earth, and return the surplus, also really resonated with me because they make sustainability feel both simple enough to accomplish and unapologetically human.

The next chapters focus more on practical applications, especially gardening, which isn’t directly relevant to my own situation but still offered useful ideas. I loved the concept of edges, the boundaries between two conditions like sun and shade or regulated and unregulated land, which Hemenway points out tend to have the greatest diversity. Another takeaway is in his callback to sector analysis, which is to avoid troublesome sectors altogether rather than trying to fight them, which feels like good advice beyond just gardening.

Chapter 5 moves beyond the individual to community gardening, and here the ideas are incredibly powerful. The message is clear: individualistic culture is dead. Sustainability works best in a collective. A community. Sharing responsibilities with neighbors and creating common goals helps reduce pressure on individuals while strengthening connections. Zone analysis comes back here too—your garden is zone 1, your neighbor’s resources might be zone 2, and big-box stores like Costco are zone 5. (Hemenway’s diss on Costco did hurt a bit, though.) This framework makes it easy to understand why sourcing food and materials locally drastically lowers environmental impact.

Hemenway also broadens the idea of sustainability beyond ecology in Chapter 8, discussing livelihood and wealth. His advice is to reduce the need to earn by reducing consumption, supporting others in non-monetary ways, developing and maintaining skills that others will find valuable, diversifying your sources of income, generating and store a surplus, and using the surplus to support your lifestyle. permaculture designer named Larry Santoyo calls these strategies “reducing the need to earn” and I really love that phrase. Hemenway also stresses building other forms of capital, such as social, cultural, and experiential, not just financial.

The last chapters return to the heart of the book: community and resilience. Meet the people in your “zones.” Support each other. Resolve conflicts when they arise. Ultimately, sustainability depends on these relationships as much as on design techniques. The book closes by tying everything together in the final chapter, and overall fills me with a lot of hope.

Thank you for reading! I plan to continue reading on sustainability and hope to turn it into a section on the lessons side of this site. I think you should read this book, too, and be inspired by at least one idea from it. I hope you can apply at least one concept from it to your daily life. Every effort counts when it comes to rebuilding our communities and our environment.

Feel free to reach out using the Contact page if you want a certain topic to be posted about on the Lessons pages or on the STEM+log!

Don’t Mow Your Lawn

Hi all! I know it’s been a long time since I’ve been here and I truly apologize for that. I have been incredibly busy with university. However, I thought I’d quickly drop by to post a quick essay I had written for an application that I am quite proud of. The prompt was to discuss what I’d “un-invent” if I could. Of course as an engineering student applying for an engineering role, I was stumped on this question for weeks, but I came to a conclusion and completed an essay on the topic that I can stand behind fully. Here is my essay on why landscaping should be un-invented:

Landscaping is the act of making a plot covered in nature look more attractive by “cleaning it up;” in other words, taking away its original inhabitants and covering it in neatly trimmed grass and imported decorative plants. The practice gained popularity in the United States after World War II, coinciding with the rise of American suburbia. In 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act into law, also known as the G.I. Bill. This law provided funds for the college education, unemployment insurance, and housing of millions of veterans from the recent war. It decreased loan interest for these “G.I.”s, lowering the barrier to home ownership and increasing it from 44% to 62% of Americans between 1940 and 1960. Around the same time, White residents were leaving the US’s central cities in droves. They were unhappy with their living conditions and had the financial means to pick their lives up and leave. In doing so, they damned the cities to more struggle, as their tax dollars followed them to the more comfortable, more clean, and more White suburbs. On the other hand, people of color, mostly Black people, and other lower-class citizens were left to watch as the cities they called their homes deteriorated even further. The suburban houses the people fleeing the cities took residence in were uniform, with the same floor plans, the same picket fences, and completed with the same, tidy lawns. Abe Levitt, creator of the Levittowns, which are often considered to be the first suburbs, said, “A fine lawn makes a frame for a dwelling. It is the first thing a visitor sees. And first impressions are the lasting ones.”

What makes a beautiful lawn? The earliest lawns were just well-maintained grass. Grass isn’t special, of course; it grows everywhere. The grass on lawns, however, needs to stay beautiful. Otherwise, the owners will be perceived as unclean, neglectful, and worst of all, poor. To keep the lawn hydrated, approximately one-third of residential water use is put toward landscaping irrigation, totaling up to nine billion gallons of water used a day. Eleven times the emissions of a new car are produced by gas-powered lawn mowers in the same amount of time to keep lawns trimmed and tidy. To help them grow when needed, nitrogen-based fertilizer is sprinkled onto the lawn recklessly. The production of this fertilizer requires a process called ammonia synthesis, which, as of February 2023, was the fourth largest energy consumer in chemical manufacturing in the United States. Phosphate rock, another component of most fertilizers, needs to be mined from the Saharan region of Africa, which has raised concerns about land use and waste produced during the mining process. These environmental issues affect the countries which they are mined from the most, while they only benefit the economies of the producers of this fertilizer; the United States tops this list with 53 million tonnes produced in 2022. Once the fertilizer is spread on the lawn, nitrogen leaches into the soil and often into nearby waterways and reservoirs. This can induce algal blooms in water bodies, depleting them of their dissolved oxygen and killing their native animal inhabitants, and turning them into “dead zones.” But as long as our lawns look presentable to our fellow upper-middle to upper-class neighbors, these issues don’t make a difference to us. As the years went on, the idea of a beautiful lawn started to include some exotic plants to line the outer edges and give the original grass lawn some flavor. Plants like the purple loosestrife, Japanese honeysuckle, and the Callery pear tree were brought to the United States from Europe and Asia to line the lawns and neighborhoods in the suburbs. These species are all non-native and invasive, meaning they drain the resources from the soil that would benefit the native plants, causing them to spread like a disease and kill any native plants in their way. The Bradford pear tree, a species of Callery, has become infamous for choking out native trees and dominating previously diverse environments. It was praised highly by the New York Times in an article published in 1964, where its and its creator’s praises were sung. It was cultivated specifically to be smaller than the Callery pear and sterile, so, as the Times put it, “There is none of the objectionable littering common with other fruiting trees.” This also conveniently prevents the public from having access to the free fruit provided by the original Callery. In recent years, it has become the poster child for invasive species, and many have retracted their original opinions, including NYT who published an article criticizing them in 2021.

When I was brainstorming for this response, every possible un-invention I had come up with had a reverse side of the coin, a benefit that I had found too important to erase. Planes emit worrying amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, but they’re the reason I can get between my university and my hometown within a day. Single-use plastics refuse to biodegrade and are a large source of the microplastics that are plaguing our society right now, but they are far easier to manipulate into packaging. But landscaping is solving a problem that only exists because the rich, White residents of early 20th century American cities wanted to set themselves apart from those they felt were beneath them. In reality, native plants and biodiversity are beautiful, and if we weren’t conditioned to think otherwise, we’d find our naturally occurring yards to be wonderful decorations for our suburban houses. The Allegheny blackberry, common strawberry, and wild plum are all edible fruits that are native to the state of Minnesota, which would provide residents with free and delicious fruit they can find in their yards. The cardinal flower, harebell, and heath aster are just a few species of beautiful flowers all of different colors that could be adorning your lawn without selfishly depleting the soil of resources and requiring heaps of fertilizer to survive. The modern lawn is not a necessity; instead, I feel it is actually getting rid of the most beautiful thing about nature: its uniqueness, unpredictability, and biodiversity. 

URLs Cited:

1. https://www.history.com/articles/lawn-mower-grass-american-dream

2. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/servicemens-readjustment-act

3. https://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc32a.pdf

4. https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/www3/watersense/pubs/outdoor.html

5. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-09/documents/banks.pdf

6. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.2c02627

7. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/fertilizer-production-by-country

8. https://news.mongabay.com/2021/09/nitrogen-the-environmental-crisis-you-havent-heard-of-yet/

9. https://www.si.edu/stories/escape-invasives

10. https://www.nytimes.com/1964/01/05/archives/bradford-pear-has-many-assets-new-ornamental-fruit-offers-sturdy.html

11. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/us/bradford-pear-tree-south-carolina.html

12. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/rys/pg/encyclopedia.html

I hope you found this valuable and interesting! I’d love to expand on this topic in the future on the learning pages to continue backing up my more opinionated side.

Feel free to reach out using the Contact page if you want a certain topic to be posted about on the Lessons pages or on the STEM+log!

Welcome to the STEM+log!

Hello!

My name is Varsha Balaji and I am a university student hoping to provide helpful materials for students in high school (and possibly older as I progress) to aid in understanding.

I believe very strongly that education is the key to success and happiness and that we could improve our world so significantly if everyone had access to quality education, so I hope to contribute to that with STEMPlus.

This is the STEM+log! I will occasionally post non-educational or informative content here that I feel is still relevant, because I believe that the most important part of STEM education is to relate back to our humanity.

The materials posted as of today (Jan. 4, 2025) are all pieces I wrote during high school to help myself and my classmates better understand or master the topic at hand, and I intend to keep updating each course and adding new ones as I have the time for.

All illustrations on the site are created by me. All educational material is created by me. Any photos on the site are either taken by me or taken from the public domain.

I hope you find it helpful here! Feel free to reach out using the Contact page if you want a certain topic to be posted about on the Lessons pages or on the STEM+log!