Interview with Reed Aubin

by Karen Olson

Reed Ellis Aubin—a designer, teacher, translator, researcher and performer—likes to make connections, cross-pollinate projects, and tell the story behind the story. So he feels right at home with permaculture.

Raised in Port Townsend, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula, Reed learned Spanish as a high-school exchange student in Southern Patagonia, Argentina. He went to college at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he earned a B.A. honors in Anthropology/Linguistics. In 2002, he took a Permaculture Design Course at Project Bona Fide in Nicaragua with Doug Bullock and Chris Shanks, and spent the next three years studying at various permaculture projects in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Argentina, and the USA. He served as a translator at some of those projects, which led to the creation of his book Field Glossary: Terms for Sustainable Development and Ecological Agriculture and the development of his “Spanish for Sustainable Living” classes.

Reed now lives in Minneapolis. He’s figured out a way to connect his diverse skills and passions through Understory, an organization he founded that weaves together a healthy mix of ecological design, language and communications services, theatre arts, and education to promote sensible, human-scale development in the Americas.

Reed worked as a translator on several permaculture projects in Central and South America.

How did you get involved in permaculture?

Jenny Pell, a permaculture visionary and organizer, was our neighbor when I growing up. Later, when I was at my folks’ house between trips to Latin America, Jenny approached me and asked if I wanted to take a Permaculture Design Course (PDC) in exchange for helping as a Spanish interpreter. She was working with the Bullock brothers putting on winter courses in Central America.

Even though I had grown up near her, I had never heard of permaculture. But I was familiar with the work of John Todd and the New Alchemy Institute, which I had come in contact with through theatre designers when I was in college in New England. I was also interested in design, and a long solo trip to Patagonia had reawakened a reverence and respect for the natural world which I had from growing up amid the majesty of the Olympic Mountains, Puget Sound, and other great wonders.

So I went to Project Bona Fide in Nicaragua for the design course, as half-student and half-staff. I worked hard, learned hard, learned a tremendous amount, really. Some great people were there, skilled and hardworking natural builders Will and Dulce Blackwell; Chris Shanks, who is a very talented designer and project manager; Rony Lec from the MesoAmerican Permaculture Institute; Andrea Calfuquir; and many more.

Just after my design course, I was offered a job, quite unexpectedly, teaching permaculture to a group of college students at Punta Mona in Costa Rica. As they say, you don’t understand something until you teach it—and I got to do so with a partially mature tropical food forest as a classroom.

A visit to the Luminescence Project in Bocas del Toro, Panama, opened my eyes as well. It’s one of the most advanced sites I’ve seen as far as hydrology, plant diversity, the extensive production-scale agroforestry systems, and the integration of elements. The footpaths they had built there were impeccably placed and graded. They formed dams and keyline swales all draining through a series of aquaculture ponds. Bruce Hill was there managing the implementation of some very impressive Chinampa-style growing systems; he is an amazing teacher who really models the practice of deferring to local knowledge.

What about permaculture interests you most?

I find it to be tremendously relaxing to be working within a system and a discipline that is reasonably well-defined and fairly proven. Permaculture is pretty well-defined by now, because there are sites, people, projects to look at. Soon after taking the PDC, I began to see that there are permaculture teachers everywhere, if you know how to look for them: carpenters, beekeepers, anyone who has a knack for developing systems for organizing things or tradespersons who integrate low-tech solutions in their work. I love learning from them. I mean, the world is full of examples, and permaculture is a lens that helps me to see and value what people are doing.

Another benefit of permaculture as a discipline is that the ethical dimension is included. If you’re doing permaculture, you’re already making sure that you are acting ethically, because it’s part of the process. There is always work that has to be done for money only; I’m transitioning away from that, or trying, anyway.

I really like designing, working with people to figure out what they want and what they want to learn. Design and education go hand in hand. I like the environment of constant learning that is part of permaculture. You can never learn it all, but you’re given permission to learn a little bit about a lot of things, in order to formulate a systemic, holistic view.

What did you discover in the process of translating for sustainable agriculture projects?

Working as an interpreter for these permaculture courses, and later for other sustainable agriculture projects and conferences, I found that many of the people involved, both English- and Spanish-speakers, wanted to learn the other language. They weren’t looking for an interpreter as a long-term solution, merely as a means of communicating in the moment. Almost everyone was trying to learn Spanish or English.

So, onsite, I began compiling a list of the words in my note pad. Then I went through books and fished for relevant vocabulary, and pretty soon started taking constant notes on the language around me. Those notes would have remained stapled in 8.5” x 11” sheets but for a graphic designer friend, Bryan Reedy, who came along and did a layout to create Field Glossary: Terms for Sustainable Development and Ecological Agriculture in 2005.

My hope is that people use the book and have fun learning another language while honing practical skills. I hope that people are studying with it—on buses, at lunch on a farm, in their backyards. I would like to see it picked up by larger organizations and better distributed. I maintain that it could be in the back pocket of at least 80 million people in this hemisphere alone.

What prompted you to start teaching “Spanish for Sustainable Living” courses?

I have taught Spanish off and on since high school. When I came back from a year in Argentina, my small public high school had no more Spanish to take, so I did an independent study as a community education Spanish teacher. But after writing the Field Glossary, I kept thinking to myself: This is a teaching book. It needs to be integrated into curriculum, whether a language curriculum or permaculture curriculum.

I figured the best way to do that was to start teaching again, trying it out, seeing what kind of lessons could be created. The classes have been great, bringing together people with similar interests, such as chefs, gardeners, and artists, as well as people who just want to learn Spanish and would rather do it in a practical, community context.

You’ve explored permaculture in different countries, cultures, and climates. What do you notice about Minnesota permaculture that makes it unique or unusual?

Seasonality. Like anywhere, there are certain things that are done at certain times, only here, it is really important that you are ready for spring, because things just start to go at full tilt, and the growing season is so short.

The long freeze kind of makes it easier to work than in places with more variations in temperature. Sure, it’s bookended by freeze-thaw periods, which are sloppy and messy and full of maple syrup, but there is that long period where we completely stop working with living plants, except maybe pruning, logging, and indoor salad greens or sprouts. It really highlights for me the opportunities with animals in systems here. Dairy, meat, eggs, and animal companionship get humans through the winter. Krista Leraas, a fellow PRI - Cold Climate Teachers’ Guild member, grew up raising animals. She has really opened my eyes to human-animal possibilities, how important it is to restore our practical connections to these amazing creatures with whom we have evolved.

We are in the heart of the USA and its culture. There is an incredible progressive community here, which is deeply committed to human equity, but there is also outrageous sprawl and extreme investment in the industrial economy, from farming to manufacturing to everything else. The back-to-the-land movement is smaller here than at least the West Coast, so that foundation is not as broad. You get 15-year permaculture projects like Mark Shepard’s or Lonnie Gamble’s, but there isn’t a network of sites like on the West Coast or in the Southwest, for example. The good news is that we can build it now, learning from of the mistakes that have been made in other places. And there is such a strong legacy of practical know-how here that hasn’t been completely lost yet.  So many people still know how to do so many things.

After living in Latin America, it is refreshing that here in the Midwest people expect things to work, and they do work. Things get done. You can eke by without a lot of shelter infrastructure in California or Nicaragua, but here you better have your structures in place once winter hits—and have plenty of fuel. It’s harder to get away with being flaky here, which I think is a good thing for permaculture. It has had its struggles with being perceived as less than serious.

I appreciate the work that is being done here with perennial & annual plant polycultures. Paula Westmoreland has pulled together an amazing plant database to help designers create guilds and incorporate functional diversity. I’m working with her on making that database available more broadly to PRI members; that's in the pipeline. We’re looking for some more programming support on the technical side, and also some volunteers to take on some less-technical responsibilities. This is one of the PRI research & demonstration projects, a program that is poised to take off as more people step forward.

I’m still puzzled by how few fruit trees there are in the Twin Cities compared to Seattle or Portland. I don’t get it. Why aren’t there apple, pear, apricot, and plum trees everywhere? Grapes and hardy kiwis? We’re working to fix that.

What is Understory and how did it get its name?

I launched Understory when I wrote the Field Glossary. My design guru Bryan Reedy suggested I broaden the scope of my “brand” to be able to incorporate the broad scope of my public action. So I—along with friends, family, an extended web—distribute the Glossary, stage puppet shows, put on classes, and help with other projects, such as highlighting the Farm School and Single Mothers’ programs in Nicaragua.

The idea of Understory comes from at least two places. One, the understory is the human level of the forest. Ecologically speaking, it’s where some of the best human habitat is, protected by the great trees of the overstory. Two, the understory is what goes on “below.” Such stories are ones that escape mainstream telling. Stories of land-based cultures getting uprooted and destroyed, stories of indigenous struggles, immigration, women’s stories—all these histories that have been pushed down and out of the way by the big White Dude stories. So the understory is very firmly rooted in theatre, language, and storytelling, as well as being a scientifically-defined concept in ecology.

As we seek ecological models for our design, what does the understory tell us? It’s not majestic, it’s more pedestrian and everyday. It’s not sweeping vistas, but it provides us with our needs, our food. It’s our home.

Editor's Note: The next performance of “Not a Kernel to Eat” is scheduled for the Northland Bioneers Conference at the University of Minnesota on Nov. 15, 2008.

What’s your puppet show “Not a Kernel to Eat” about and how does it connect to permaculture?

The show, which tells the story of a farmer and his corn, is essentially about food sovereignty—the right of people to define and control their own systems of food production. Permaculturally, it’s about diversity, system resilience, and human-scale solutions. The play came out of work I did with seed banks in Chiapas, Mexico and Guatemala. We would travel and distribute seeds on behalf of the seed banks. And there, just like here at the top of the corn belt, diverse locally resilient varieties are being replaced by standardized high-yield or GMO varieties.

Each strain of corn grown in Mexico, in Arizona, in Nebraska, in Minnesota is the result of careful breeding for thousands of years, based on the vicissitudes of the particular valley or hillside where they were developed. The farmers developed intricate social patterns of “corn marriage,” where one valley’s variety was periodically crossed with another’s, to maintain vigor and genetic diversity. Modern industrial starch corn--most of the corn you see from the highway--has been bred so that something like 60% of the plant’s energy goes directly into the kernel. This means that the stalk and roots are so fragile that the corn will fall over if not planted tightly together.

Dr. Kalidas Shetty from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has done some amazing research about how this skewing of the energy balance in the corn plant also affects our own human metabolism when we eat the grain. The basic gist is that when eating the kernels, we absorb some of the microscopic compounds that help the plants maintain their own metabolism, and these (or something very similar to these) appear to play some yet-to-be-understood but vital role in our own metabolism. Nutrition and metabolism are understood so poorly. Our science is barely scratching the surface of how it really works. And little to none of the nutrition research goes into the breeding programs at universities. Traditional seeds, on the other hand, have been selected under the watchful eyes of grandmothers who were keenly aware of the nutritional value of the food, because they were eating and serving it every day.

So the play is a jumping off point to talk about all these things, whether it’s growing practices or nutrition or what have you, depending on the audience. It’s fun, the puppets are hilarious, and it’s a great way to start this conversation with people of different ages and backgrounds, because it’s a good story.

What are your favorite sources of information about permaculture?

My hands-down favorite sources of information are real-life interactions with people who are doing land-based projects—visiting, sharing seeds, trading techniques and information. I have made it a priority to seek out and visit PC sites wherever I am: Mexico, Argentina, Wisconsin, Vermont, California, Washington. I find that if I take the time to collect seeds and other useful, portable stuff to share, I can show up as a productive, welcome visitor and engage with sites and people right away with lots of goodwill. The puppet shows and the glossary are good for that, too. So is food. I guess I could say that my favorite “source” of information is my own creativity and generosity, because when I remember to use that, doors open up.

Do you have any suggestions for folks just starting to learn about permaculture? What’s a good way to explore it and get involved?

Number one suggestion: don’t be intimidated. There are all kinds of permaculture projects and they don’t have to cost $50,000 and have solar panels and wind turbines. You can start by sheet mulching your backyard and transplanting some plants from a friend, for free. And if you mess up? No big deal. You learned something. I make mistakes all the time, and think it’s great, as long as they are not too big.

For theory, books and that kind of thing, I like Bill Mollison’s sense of fun and David Holmgren’s sense of responsibility. There are many first-class intellects thinking about permaculture, and more and more every day. I think we are approaching critical mass, with so much human intelligence thinking about this. And it’s growing exponentially. Permaculture Activist is a great, low-budget, information-dense periodical. I like what Toby Hemenway has to say, quite a bit. I’ve been reading his website www.patternliteracy.com lately.

Permaculture Research Institute - Cold Climate is becoming a strong organizing force and it will only get stronger if people join together. The introductory workshops are being very well organized by Dan Halsey and his cohorts. These are good opportunities to get a lot of information very quickly, and to get instantly connected to a lot of other people doing good things.

Volunteering is always a good idea, to get experience, be exposed to lots of ideas, projects, and people. There certainly are many opportunities to volunteer with PRI. I’m doing some organizing work with PRI now. There is a lot to be done, but the rewards are great. It is a common misconception that you can’t do permaculture if you don’t know a lot about plants or energy or construction or have esoteric skills. As Toby Hemenway points out, the greatest challenge we have before us lies in human organizing, and those skills are just as important as being able to properly space a tree or install a graywater system, if not more crucial.

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Contact Reed about booking puppet shows, getting a copy of the glossary, taking a class, or hiring him for design.

Karen Olson began studying permaculture recently and is very happy about that. The former editor of Utne Reader, she currently works on a variety of book and magazine projects as a freelance editor and writer. Her work often focuses on the environment, health and the arts.