Experiencing Regeneration

How does it feel to walk into a place that has been the focus of regeneration in the past 10 years or so? How does it feel to walk into a space where you have time to pause and listen to what wants to emerge? How does it feel to walk into a community where the intention is to live with and in service of Nature?

This place, this space and this community is Gaia Ashram. Located in Northeastern Thailand by the border of Laos and the Mekong River, Gaia Ashram is an eco education center on permaculture, ecovillage design and deep ecology founded by Om and Thom. I recently completed a 17-day Permaculture Design Course (PDC) at Gaia and it came just at the right time of transition for me. Another war, record breaking heatwaves, unheard of forest fires — sustainability is all the rage, but change is difficult in a system of endless growth. I arrived tired and weary but hopeful.

Permaculture is first coined by Bill Mollison in the 1970s as:

“The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems to benefit life of all forms”.

On one hand, it is a system of permanent agriculture comprising of multi-crops — “perennial trees, shrubs, herbs (vegetables and weeds), fungi, and roots”. But beyond that, it is also a system of permanent culture, rooted in:

• Earth Care
• People Care
• Fair Share

Having worked in connecting global supply chains for the past eight years, I rarely see systems that are diverse enough to provide stability and resilience in a highly uncertain world. I dived right into the teachings of our PDC master Ben with the space held strongly by Om who interspersed permaculture with aspects of community building and ecovillage design, while Thom and Toby ensured that we had plenty of hands-on practical applications. In these 17-days, we learned so, so much:

• Permaculturists or permies are all about efficiency. When we look at a piece of land, we focus on the relationship/connection between things and how they interact so that we can place them in relation to each other where the output of one element feeds into the input of another. For example, chickens are placed in relation to the market garden and kitchen where they can easily clear weeds and food scraps while replenishing the soil with their manure. Then you also have appropriate technology like chicken tractor, which is a movable chicken coop without a floor, placed depending on where you’d like the chickens to clear weeds and poop. What you find is each important function is supported by many elements and each element performs many functions.

Chickens at Gaia having a feast from our leftover food scraps and the nearly mobile chicken tractor that some of the chickens live in

• Design is a key piece of permaculture, especially the design of the space to make the most efficient use of energy. A permaculture farm is divided into zones depending on how many times you need to interact with it. The more often you need to, like a market garden (Zone 1), the closer it is to your house (Zone 0). Then as you branch out, you have food forests that you visit once a week for example (Zone 2), orchards every few weeks (Zone 3), timber forest every few months (Zone 4), and the rewilding area (Zone 5).

Source: https://www.inspirationfarm.com/

• Permaculture is also, of course, about self-sufficiency so this means not only growing your own food but how you capture water, generate electricity, and recycle your waste. Here, we had a ball learning about how Gaia Ashram captures rainwater from their roof structures and used earthworks to create ponds. They also process greywater and black water using vermicompost which creates heat that warms up the hot water shower!

Grey water flows into a banana circle

Left: A vermicompost system processes the humanure and any processed flurry flows into a mini food forest where this enormous papaya tree is flourishing! Right: Another vermicompost system generates heat that warms up the hot water for shower which I often take overlooking the stars at night :)

• A big draw of permaculture for me is promoting above and below ground diversity. Growing up in an oil palm plantation which is a system dominated by a single species covering millions and millions of hectares in Malaysia, a big passion of mine is to see the return of diversity on these lands. Permaculture advocates for small scale intensive systems stacked in time and place based on the plants’ growing cycles and succession level which creates different layers that occupy a forest in horizontal and vertical space. Using this principle, permies design food forest comprising of seven layers with species that benefit each other and the soil.

Here we dived into the world of soil organisms starting with root exudates that feed bacteria that feed fungi that feed protozoas that feed nematodes that feed arthropods like earthworms! WHOOOAA…

In addition, we also learned about natural buildings, animal systems, biochar, the eight forms of capital beyond just financial and so much more. What is most fascinating is seeing what we learnt come to life at Gaia and experiencing it albeit just for 17-days. When Om returned a decade ago to her village, this land was all paddy fields. She and Thom observed and interacted with the land for one year (first principle of permaculture) and started planting a lot of trees. Today, you can feel the cooling and calming effect of the forest from a mile away as you approach Gaia from the nearby village or town. Om shared that:

“To live in a place of beauty is a privilege but to regenerate beauty with Mother Earth is an honor.”

They have since built a safe haven that has given hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, the opportunity to experience what it feels like when we give back to the land as much as we take and the possibilities that arise from that space.

The beautiful trees at Gaia including a dipterocarp (right) that Om and Thom first saw when observing the land

When I go back to my family land, all I see now is rows and rows of oil palm plantation. My vision for the land coming out of this PDC is:

A more resilient and regenerative system of palm oil plantation where agriculture and nature co-exist and thrive together, rejuvenating the spirit of the land and the people, building a community of practice.

If you ask me if it is indeed possible to create a permaculture-based palm oil plantation, even those words together seem like a contradiction. What is possible perhaps is to start applying some permaculture principles that utilizes palm oil waste to replenish the soil and over time be less dependent on external inputs and circumstances, and to start bringing back diversity to the land, no matter how small…

It’s hard to describe how I feel after these 17-days — perhaps a great sense of expansion having been in the company of those who have taken the road less traveled and the fact that we all ended up in this place and space in this moment in time together — laughing and crying, learning and unlearning — that itself is a great source of regeneration!