LET’S GET REAL – if we are to be effective in what we do, if we are going to get thing done, we have to use our time effectively. And to do that we need some place to write down and schedule what we want to do.

There are many ways we can do this on our computers – in front of me here I have something called iCal and there’s also something called iGTD, and I can make entries into my mobile phone. These are fine pieces of software, but I don’t carry a laptop with me everywhere, nor even my mobile phone (horrors! I hear some say – isn’t the point of a mobile to be contactable everywhere at all times?).

A different solution, one that is easily portable, lies elsewhere. It’s a medium that is always on yet doesn’t need to be recharged, is organised as a temporal matrix, is searchable by date and has files called ‘days’ or ‘weeks’ nested into folders called ‘months’. It’s the Permaculture Diary, and it serves as a remote device that is a peripheral to the Permaculture Calendar.

Versatile devices, the diary and calendar are made of processed plant cells in the form of thin sheets manufactured from the pulp of wood or other fibrous material… what we call paper. Used in tandem with digital planning tools, the Calendar and Diary make up something we might think of as being akin to the idea of the ‘papernet’.

Michele Margulis gave me the Calendar and Diary at a TransitionSydney event which she and her partner, David Arnold, attended. They are partners in publication, being the instigators of these worthwhile permaculture products. I’ve already suggested that that the Calendar and Diary are complementary in use, however they can be purchased separately though I prefer to think of them as a set, as an information management system (to revert to the jargon) that can help you do with planning what you need to do to get things done.

Opening the Calendar at home, it dawned on me that there was something visually different with the 2010 edition. I realised it is this: the first of David and Michele’s permaculture calendars, 2009’s, had mostly photos from Australia. The 2010 edition is more global in its images.

Permaculture Diary

There are photos of cheese curing in vats, a sepia of two guys and a huge clydesdale ploughing a field that could have been taken any time after 1830, perhaps, but is, in fact, contemporary. Then there’s the permaculture design plan drawings for a rural smallholding, the Fanton’s (Seed Savers Network) image of an Afghani boy carrying a large melon on his shoulder, and one I particularly like of a work by mural artist, Ben Laycock. This shows two trucks passing while going in opposite directions; each is carrying a full load of bottled water that they are delivering to the place where the other had started. The caption sums it up nicely: “Bottled water is an extreme example of the stupidity of consumerism”.

One month, one photo. To me, the photo selection gives the Permaculture Calendar 2010 a somewhat different feel to this year’s.

Simple and effective design

Both the Calendar and Diary, the production of David Arnold and Michele Margolis, are designed by Richard Telford, in Victoria.
The design of the Calendar takes the form of one month to an A4 size page, with a photo occupying the facing page. There is space for brief notes below each date, notes that could be expanded in the Diary.

Each month is themed to one of the permaculture design principles developed by David Holmgren as described in his Permaculture – Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. These appear to have become the design system’s de facto set of principles and are a development of those described in David and Bill Mollison’s earlier work. An aside: as I don’t own land on which to implement a permaculture design, so I make use of these principles as a thinking tool for life in general.

February’s principle is that of catching and storing energy. The accompanying photograph is of milk fermenting into cheese in wooden vats. I thought on first seeing this image that it’s good that it is not in real time video. My interpretation is that milk is a relatively short-lived product that can be made longer-lived by converting it into cheese. The cheese is the storage media for the food energy first embodied in the milk.

Inside the front cover is a page-size, colour graphic illustrating permaculture’s principles arranged as a circle surrounding the design system’s ethics. It’s a neat, visual and accessible summary.

The facing page carries text in which David Arnold talks about how the increased prevalence of bushfire where he lives may necessitate his removing bunya and stone pines from near his house, on account of their flammability, and of the need to cluster housing rather than disperse it over the landscape amid flammable vegetation. He speaks of the growing need to more intensively manage environments and associated fire risks near settlements.

The Diary

Now that you have attached action to date on your Permaculture Calendar, the Permaculture Diary is where you schedule the detail of those actions. There’s plenty of room for this as the A5 size Diary carries a week to two pages. That done, you put your Diary in your briefcase or backpack and carry it with you.

The spread on Northey Street City Farm in the 2010 Permaculture Diary is just one instance by which the diary becomes somthing of a sourcebook on permaculture initiatives.

I could also describe the Permaculture Diary as a mini-book on permaculture masquerading as a diary. Why ? because there are a number of spreads with text and colour photos of permaculture-related initiatives: Brisbane’s innovative Northey Street City Farm (complete with the smiling face of permaculture educator, Dick Copeman); a story of Victoria’s bushfires; Perth City Farm; Permabitz; Transition Sunshine Coast; Crystal Waters village; seed saving and more. These are a celebration of the different ways in which permaculture is implemented.

A page on the Blue Mountains Food Security Network altenates with a diary page showing the generous space available for daily planning.

Distributed production and collaboration the solution

For some time I’ve believed that the networked, online world of computer-based communications to be a necessary part of any sustainable society because it enables localisation without parochrialism, collaboration without travel and access to a world of information. So it was that I was heartened to read David Arnold extolling similar values.

David writes that the Calendar was produced in a mudbrick room on a property on the edge of a rural Victorian town. Isolated? In a geographic sense, I guess, though not in any virtual sense for that mudbrick room is connected to the rest of the human endeavour via our global, digital communications networks. David describes how he and Michele collaborated though they are separated by 700kms, how the two of them worked with graphic designer, Richard Telford, who is 90km from David and 790km from Michele. As little as 14 years ago, this would not have been possible. The world changes, and changes rapidly, bringing the positive as well as the negative.

The images in the Permaculture Calendar and Diary were contributed by permaculture practitioners. This makes the publications something of an exemplar in that they are, unfortunately, all-too-rare examples of long distance collaborative projects in permaculture. Thus, they are the model for future collaboration in that they demonstrate how the product of the group can exceed that of the individual, and that geographic distance is no barrier to shared production.

The Permaculture Calendar (A4) and Diary (A5) are printed on matt recycled paper made in Australia and the printing, by Print Together, is claimed to be “environmentally responsible”.

Order from: http://permacultureprinciples.com/index.php