What's Permaculture All About?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Stuff You Should Know

Episode Title: What's Permaculture All About?
Date: March 20, 2026
Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant

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Main Theme / Purpose

This episode dives into the concept of permaculture: its origins, design principles, ethics, and its real-world application, especially in contrast to conventional agriculture. Josh and Chuck explore whether permaculture can offer a sustainable alternative (or complement) to large-scale industrial farming, and what it realistically offers for individuals and communities today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Context: Conventional Farming vs. Permaculture

• The challenge for humanity: how to sustain a projected 10 billion people on Earth without destroying the environment.
  • Josh: “You can really see that same headbutt, that same push and pull between people who are saying we need sustainability and other people are like, we need to feed billions and billions of people.” (06:13)
• Contrasting philosophies:
  • Techno-optimists: "We humans are smart enough to invent our way out of any problem."
  • Sustainers: "We need to mitigate and manage our resource use for long-term viability."

2. What is Permaculture?

• A set of design principles for growing food in a sustainable, minimally harmful, and self-reliant way.

• Opposed to monoculture and industrial agriculture, which relies on intensive external inputs (fertilizers, fossil fuels) and results in resource depletion.

• Memorable analogy:

  • Josh: “Permaculture is the middle one, right?...You can walk past a dog...give it a wink, or...scratch it behind the ear...Permaculture is the middle one. You’re doing that by trying to create a system that’s sustainable, meaning it requires as few external inputs as possible.” (12:07)

3. History and Founders [(13:06–16:00)]

• Developed in 1978 in Australia by Bill Mollison (a professor) and David Holmgren (a student).
• Permaculture = “Permanent” + “Agriculture”
• Emphasizes a self-sustaining alternative to mass production of a single crop.
• Divergence in the movement:
  • Mollison: More dogmatic and charismatic, seen as a movement figurehead.
  • Holmgren: More pragmatic, open to revising ideas with evidence.
• The fervor and occasional criticism of being “cult-like” within the movement.

4. Three Core Ethics of Permaculture [(14:19–24:12)]

1. Care for the Earth: Not only plants, but animals, minerals, air—respecting all ecosystem components. (22:12)
2. Care for People: Value of community and universal access to basic resources. “The idea that everybody should have easy, cheap, if not free access to something like clean water. That’s a big one. That's kind of radical in a weird way these days.” (23:32)
3. Setting Limits (Population & Consumption): Reinventing surplus back into the system.

5. Design Principles of Permaculture

(25:08–31:53)

a. Zones

• Land is divided into concentric zones based on human activity, with the most intensive use (e.g., herb garden) at the center, and the wildest/distant uses (woodlot, wild habitat) at the outer edges.
• Chuck’s Urban Example: “We've divided our yard up into zones now…most attention would be closest to the center.” (25:08)

b. Sectors

• "Pizza slices" that radiate out; account for influences like sun, wind, water flow, pollution, or wildlife movement.
• Observational period: “...spend basically an entire year doing nothing but observing.” (27:22)

c. Relative Location

• Strategic placement so elements support each other (e.g., a crop planted downhill from a pond for passive irrigation).

d. Multiple Functions & Fail-safes

• Each element (pond, hedges, trees) serves multiple roles—water source, animal barrier, windbreak, fertilizer, etc.
• Redundancy: “You have all these different things serving multiple functions, but also serving backups to the functions that they share.” (30:44)

e. Energy Efficiency & Biological Resources

• Minimize external energy; use natural solutions (e.g., ducks eat snails and fertilize the land).
  • Josh (on pests): "You don't have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency." (33:03)

f. Plant Succession, Composting, & Diversity

• Understand and mimic natural progression (grassland → forest).
• Incorporate composting and nutrient cycling.
• Always promote crop and habitat diversity.
  • Chuck: “...if something comes along that is an illness to a crop, you’re not wiped out completely.” (36:57)

6. Permaculture in Practice: Case Studies and Critiques

a. Scientific Studies

• Example from Schumacher College (UK):
  • Permaculture plots yielded less food per area (2.3 kg/100m²) than conventional gardening (13 kg/100m²), but required less labor and were more resilient to poor weather. (42:08–43:38)
  • Main takeaway: Greater yield per labor and resilience, but not a panacea for global food production.

b. Home/Garden Application [(44:29–54:00)]

• Chuck’s Real-life Permaculture Yard:
  • Application of design principles for Atlanta urban home.
  • Installation of a cistern (large rainwater catchment system), new layout for shade, herbs, blueberries, etc.
  • Creation of a swale: a landscape feature to collect and slowly distribute water, recharging the ground and reducing runoff.
  • Chuck: “Instead of grass in between everything, or even mulch, we're doing ground cover...ground cover or mulch are the two most sustainable ways to treat your yard, period.” (53:05)

c. Criticisms

• Not enough rigorous scientific assessment and data-driven adaptation.
• Sometimes emphasizes exotic plants, possibly to the detriment of native ecosystems.
• Some adherents overstate its capacity to "feed the world."
  • Josh: “It’s not rigorously tested scientifically enough…there are people...applying science...‘this one works, let’s keep at it. This one doesn’t work—don’t waste your time.’” (54:03)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Josh: “Permaculture is the middle [ground]…you’re managing the land in a way that the land is happy with.” (11:47)
• Chuck (about engaging his own permaculture company): "We are making our small little piece of Atlanta a permaculture urban…habitat." (07:42)
• On Permaculture’s attitude:
  • “Mollison put the ‘cult’ in permaculture…There’s definitely an adherency to it that’s kind of fervent.” (15:09)
• On resilience through diversity:
  • Josh: “You have to diversify. And the more you diversify, the better off you’ll be. If something befalls, like if an avian flu wipes out your chicken flock…If chickens are just one part…then you lose your chickens…and that’s awful, but you still have…other things.” (31:16)
• On realistic adoption:
  • Chuck: “You're not going to undo conventional modern farming. You're not going to just completely supplant that…it's kind of too late.” (17:09)
• On permaculture at home:
  • Chuck: “No, we're just trying to create our own little sustainable habitat.” (54:00)

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Important Timestamps

• Origins and Tensions in Agriculture: 04:27–07:02
• Permaculture Defined & Founders: 13:06–16:00
• Permaculture’s Three Ethics: 22:08–24:12
• Design Principles Introduction: 25:08–31:53
• Ducks solve snail problems: 33:02–33:19
• Applying Permaculture at Home: 44:29–54:00
• Criticisms: 54:00–55:53

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Style & Tone

Light, conversational, and peppered with personal anecdotes (especially from Chuck’s home garden project). The hosts are skeptical but open-minded, balancing critique with appreciation of permaculture’s intentions and potential. There’s plenty of their trademark humor and analogies (e.g., comparing permaculture to petting a dog, the “middle path”).

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Conclusion

Permaculture offers a holistic framework for more sustainable food production and land management, focused on working with nature rather than against it. Its principles can be effective on a small scale, especially in urban and suburban gardens, and offer models for greater resiliency and resource efficiency. However, its potential as a full-scale agricultural replacement remains contested and often unproven at scale. The episode encourages listeners to explore permaculture pragmatically—embracing its best ideas while remaining honest about its limitations and the need for continued scientific scrutiny.

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For more details, recommended reading includes Charles C. Mann’s “1491” and exploring additional Stuff You Should Know episodes, such as their deep-dive on composting.

Transcript

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[Chuck Bryant]

Hey everybody.

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[Chuck Bryant]

Permaculture is a pretty great thing and it's, you know, if you don't know anything about it, this can, this can

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teach you all about it and it may just change the way you live your life there at your house.

[Chuck Bryant]

So give it a try.

[Podcast Announcer]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should know from howstuffworks.com.

[Josh Clark]

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chipper, Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Rowland. And we're all in great moods, everybody. Because it's stuff you should know. Time. Everything else just falls to the wayside when we record stuff you should know. It's just, it's the reason we love doing it. Still, after a thousand episodes, you realize

[Chuck Bryant]

every single listener right now is thinking, why are they in a bad mood? And why is Josh being so weird?

[Josh Clark]

I don't think I'm being weird. Am I being. Am I overselling it?

[Chuck Bryant]

I think so.

[Josh Clark]

Oh. Oh, sorry.

[Chuck Bryant]

It makes it sound like we all three were in a big fist fight. And then Jerry hit record.

[Josh Clark]

Right. She's like just jammed a Kleenex up her nose to staunch the bleeding.

[Chuck Bryant]

I am recovering a bit because we just got back from New York City.

[Josh Clark]

Dude, it has been a week.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know.

[Josh Clark]

So we did show a show Sunday, a show Monday and a show Tuesday, all sold out at the Bell House, traveled home Wednesday and are recording today. Thursday.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes. And I just want to say there's no way that people will ever hear Tuesday's episode because it was the filthiest thing we've ever done on stage. Seriously, man, I don't know what got into us. I think it was night three of three. So that is for the 350 people in that room. Yep. I hope they enjoyed it.

[Josh Clark]

It was fun.

[Chuck Bryant]

It was fun.

[Josh Clark]

And come on out. Whenever we do a live show, you never know if we're just gonna be like, this one's not getting released, let's just go crazy, you know, especially it was a 21 and up show, which is really.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, that's why we for sure why we did it.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. That's what took the feedback off, you know?

[Chuck Bryant]

Uh huh.

[Josh Clark]

Isn't that a saying?

[Chuck Bryant]

I think so. Put the feedback on. Take it off.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. It's not really. But we'll just press forward. How about that?

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's do.

[Josh Clark]

So, Chuck, I know that you know this, but not everybody knows this. I had a personal conversation with one Charles C. Mann, who wrote my favorite book of all time, 1491.

[Chuck Bryant]

That is correct.

[Josh Clark]

And I was talking to Mr. Mann and he has a. I was talking to him. I've got a show coming out on Existential Risks eventually, but. And he's going to be in it. It's just like interviewed for it. But he has a book coming out this January and it's Called the Wizard and the Prophet. Have you heard of it?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, but did you just say that he's going to be of existential risks?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, he's an interviewee.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, that's fantastic.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's gonna be pretty. I was really psyched to just be able to talk to him. And even better than that, like, you know, we were kind of rapping for a few minutes beforehand.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

And it was just as calm and casual as I had always, like, envisioned talking to him would be. Yeah, it was a really, really neat conversation. But he was telling me about the book he has coming out, the wizard and the Prophet. And it's basically about him trying to find out how we can possibly, or even if it is possible, sustain 10 billion people on planet Earth. Yeah. And not just sustain meaning, like, you know, keeping them alive, but how can we do it sustainably? And he goes back and starts digging in and finds that there's this long standing headbutt between the techno optimists, the people who are like, well, we humans are smart enough to invent our way out of any problem.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And the people who are like, no, we need to really, like, mitigate a lot of things that we're doing right now to make sure that we actually can keep doing this for the foreseeable future. And part of it is on Norman Borlaug.

[Chuck Bryant]

Is he the wizard?

[Josh Clark]

He is the Wizard. That's actually absolutely right. The Prophet is a guy named William Vogt, V O G T I believe is his name. And I don't know nearly as much about him as Norman Borlaug, which is similar. I know basically zero about him, but he's the Prophet, so I will know all about him when the book comes out in January. I'm psyched about it. But as I was researching this permaculture article, I was like, you can really see that same headbutt, that same push and pull between people who are saying we need sustainability and other people are like, we need to feed billions and billions of people. And that really comes together in the debate over permaculture and whether it works or whether it is just a pie in the sky kind of idea.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I have a little something to say.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

I am a bit of an. Well, not a bit. I'm an urban permaculturist.

[Josh Clark]

That's awesome.

[Chuck Bryant]

We have not me as like, I don't know much. Well, I do know about this stuff now after researching it, but we are redoing our front and back yards and we hired a permaculture company to do so.

[Josh Clark]

Really? The permaculture pros.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's not their name, but maybe it should be. Yeah, yeah. So we are like right in the middle of making our small little piece of Atlanta a permaculture urban.

[Josh Clark]

I know it's hard to say now that I'm saying it out loud, an

[Chuck Bryant]

urban perm habitat, if you will.

[Josh Clark]

Herb perm.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. So I'll be peppering, you know, little things here and there.

[Josh Clark]

I think that would help a lot because permaculture, as it turns out, and I didn't know really anything about it until we started researching this, it is a woolly idea. It's tough to pin down, which is really weird because it's actually a set of design principles meant to grow food for people in a way that's sustainable and not harmful. And it basically stands in contradiction of what you would consider like big modern agriculture, which is we grow one kind of food and we squeeze as much as we possibly can out of it from the ground we have, using as much artificial resources as we possibly need to increase our yield.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, and that's like people throw around the word sustainable or unsustainable and maybe people, sometimes folks don't even stop to think about what that means. Sustainable, or I guess we'll start with unsustainable. That means that you are depleting resources around you and you are depending very much on bringing in different resources to make that thing work. Like you're not just using what's available. That's what sustainable would be. You're using what's available at all. Works together to ideally sustain itself without saying, well, now I need to bring in this thing from way over here to make this, these 300 acres of corn grow.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I've got to go burn a bunch of fossil fuels to create nitrogen based fertilizer. And it's not going to attach to the soil very well. So a lot of it will run off and be wasted. And even worse, it'll end up in a pond which will create an algae bloom which sucks up all of the dissolved oxygen which creates a fish kill. And that's unsustainable. Yes. And it's weird because I hadn't really thought about that either, Chuck. But growing up as like kids who were sentient in the 90s, you hear unsustainable and it's just basically in your mind equated with evil, like almost intentionally malicious acts against the earth. And that's just not necessarily the case. And that's another thing about Like Norman Borlaug, the wizard, he had the greatest of intentions, but you can also lay at his feet a lot of the ecological problems we're facing right now because of agriculture and the agricultural practices he helped pioneer in order to feed a bunch of people. So there's this tension between unsustainability and sustainability, but it's also a tension between what's realistic and what's not, you know?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's definitely a little sticky.

[Josh Clark]

It is a little sticky.

[Chuck Bryant]

But permaculture basically is trying to create, like, a harmonious, holistic approach to farming. And whether it be a large farm or, like, in my case, like an urban. Small urban plot. And like I said, we'll kind of go over both of those through my lens and then through the larger ideas of the farm. And it's not like Robert Lamb wrote this article from Stuff to Blow youw Mind. He did a good job with it.

[Josh Clark]

Always does.

[Chuck Bryant]

He does. But he does point out that you shouldn't. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to go back to caveman days and, like, you have to live like Tuk Tuk and scavenge the earth. He said to think of it in terms of a river. Like, you're a boat floating down a river, and you're sustained by that river, but you're also navigating it as well with your rudder.

[Josh Clark]

And if you have to pee right now, it just increased tenfold.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

So, yeah, it's not like just passively taking from the land what it has to offer. There's still management of it, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But the idea behind that management of it is managing the land in a way that the land is happy with.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Kind of working with what you got.

[Josh Clark]

Like, you can walk past a dog that's just sitting there looking at you and maybe, you know, give it, like a wink or something like that and keep walking. That's passive. But if you stop and scratch it behind the ear, you're managing that dog in a way. Something like that. You're at least interacting with it more, and the dog likes it. You could also walk past the dog and, like, poke it in the ribs.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

That's interacting with it in a way that the dog wouldn't. Like, permaculture is the middle one, Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

So you're saying, hey, I want to get something out of you, like a good feeling, so I'm going to scratch it behind the earth. And again, like you said, you're doing that by trying to create a system, whether it's your little plot of land or a full scale industrial sized farm in a way that it's sustainable. Meaning it requires as few external inputs as possible.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

But sorry, I just need to point it again. It's still being managed. It's still being managed by you, just in a harmonious way.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I think there's a word for the other thing where you just. Just let everything do its thing. Right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's nature.

[Chuck Bryant]

Maybe like wilding or something or rewilding. Haven't we talked about that?

[Josh Clark]

No, we never did.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm probably wrong anyway.

[Josh Clark]

Although we also thought we didn't do a cat episode, so who knows if we've talked about it before or not.

[Chuck Bryant]

Alright, so this all goes back to Australia and see you in September of next year. Australia?

[Josh Clark]

Yep.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right?

[Josh Clark]

Yep.

[Chuck Bryant]

Get excited.

[Josh Clark]

Oh man, you just sold us a million tickets with that accent, buddy.

[Chuck Bryant]

And New Zealand.

[Josh Clark]

So you got it. You got to take it better than that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, no, I'm super excited about going to New Zealand.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

I didn't want to not mention that.

[Josh Clark]

You say and New Zealand.

[Chuck Bryant]

And New Zealand. So in Australia in the 1970s, there were a couple of dudes named Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. And imagine they were sitting around smoking a joint one night and the version that I have in my head.

[Josh Clark]

Oh yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

When they dreamed up the word permaculture in 1978, which is basically what we've been talking about. This is just put a word on

[Josh Clark]

it actually two words, permanent and agriculture.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right, yeah, good point. And they said, let's join those up. And he said great.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And that was it.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's how it went down. And it's a self sustaining alternative to like what you were talking about, which is mass production of a single crop. And there are three basic ethics to the permaculture movement.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Care for the earth, care for the people and then setting limits on population and consumption.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And so Mollison, I believe was a professor at the time and Holmgren was a student and they split within a few years. They had creative differences, I guess you could kind of call it. Oh yeah, they both like pursued permaculture, but through different ways. So Mollison is frequently accused, or was, I think he may have passed accused of being kind of a dogmatic, charismatic egomaniac maybe where it was like it's my way or the highway and that that extended to even principles of permaculture. Right. Like if he said it, it was just. That was just true. Whereas Holmgren apparently took A little more of a pragmatic approach to studying it. Finding out the best practices, discarding the ones that didn't work, even if they were like precious to everybody, including the entire permaculture movement. And movement is actually the right word because there is like this definite. Well, like Mollison put the cult in permaculture, you know what I'm saying? Like, there's definitely an adherency to it that's kind of fervent, you know, that the whole movement gets criticized for, rightfully or wrongly. Yeah, but they both kind of. I think the fact that they did split probably added to this field even more because there's two different courses of study or of thinking about it, at least, that we're able to develop in tandem.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And this stuff is nothing new. They didn't invent this idea because Tuk Tuk and the Gang way back in the ancient days did things like this. They worked with what they had. They didn't have 400 acres of corn. They did forest farming, they had crop rotation, they composted, they had multiple crops. And they were not just out to be leading pioneers in environmentalism. That was just the way you work the earth back then. And that's a lot of what permaculture is all about, is returning to this idea of just sort of doing it the smart, right way. And again, this is probably not going to be the thing that feeds the world. But that's not to say you can't have a permaculture movement and farms and urban permaculture going on.

[Josh Clark]

Well, that's one of the things that it gets criticized about, is that people who are big time adherents of permaculture do tend to say, like, yeah, this is what we need to feed the world. And if we don't do this, then there's not going to be people around to feed because we're going to wreck the earth and die from climate change.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I get that, but I think I come from the reality camp. And you're not going to undo conventional modern farming. You're not going to just completely supplant that anymore. It's kind of too late.

[Josh Clark]

I agree with you. I'm of the same mindset. I do think, though, that these practices, or most of them, should be incorporated as best as possible.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure, that'd be great.

[Josh Clark]

So I think there's a happy medium between big time monoculture agriculture and pure permaculture, just because they're both probably unsustainable for what we need, which is to feed a bunch of people in a way that doesn't wreck the earth.

[Chuck Bryant]

Agreed.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I'm with you, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

Should we take a break?

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. We're going to take a little, little pause for the cause and then come back. That was so corny. That sounded like a radio dj.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it was great.

[Chuck Bryant]

And then come back and talk about design principles of permaculture right after.

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Josh Clark]

Okay, you back? We're back. Are we back?

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm back.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, I'm back too. Jerry, you back? She's back.

[Chuck Bryant]

She's back.

[Josh Clark]

So like I said early on, Chuck, the permaculture is a little. It's woolly. It's a woolly idea. There's so many different definitions of it. And as a result it's image kind of suffers in the mind of rational skeptics, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

But I did find one one definition of it that I thought really got the whole point across hit me. The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems. That's a big one. There's a second half even. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people, providing their food and energy, shelter and other material and non material needs in a sustainable way.

[Chuck Bryant]

That is a great definition.

[Josh Clark]

I agree wholeheartedly. And I'm not sure who the actual person who said or wrote it was because it was misattributed to at least three different people. But regardless, it's a great definition.

[Chuck Bryant]

We should just throw your name in there too.

[Josh Clark]

Sure, we'll say I said it. So you said you brought up the three basic ethics, right? The care for Earth, care for people, and setting limits on population.

[Chuck Bryant]

Correct.

[Josh Clark]

I feel like we should kind of go over those a little bit in depth, don't you think?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Care for Earth is. It's not just like a lot of this is about plants, of course, but it's also animals and insects and how the air moves through the area and minerals in the earth. And it's basically respecting all of the things within the ecosystem.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

How's that?

[Josh Clark]

I think that's great. What about care for people? Right. So basically that's saying like that there's an importance to community. Every person isn't just an island. Right. And that this is a big one too. That access to resources is a human. Right. And it's easy to take that for granted, you know, where in places where you have easy access to land or water or something like that. But. But in places as diverse as Flint, Michigan or Central America, the access to good stuff like water is highly restricted or the water's just not good. So the idea that everybody should have easy, cheap, if not free access to something like clean water. That's a big one. That's kind of radical in a weird way these days.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And as far as limits on population and consumption, Robert puts it as recognizing how you have to reinvest money and surplus labor and energy into caring for the planet. Like it's, it's. It takes work.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So those are like the three ethics. That's not how you go permaculture. That's just kind of the basis for the designs to permaculture, Right, Correct. And I think you said that this is not new. Right. This is something that's been around for a very long time. Or some of these ideas or the sustainable practices are adopted from generations and generations of proven techniques, Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

Which is pretty interesting if you ask me. That's another thing too. If you have not read. Have you read 1491 yet?

[Chuck Bryant]

No.

[Josh Clark]

You have to read it. It talks about this kind of stuff where, like from just looking into it, they've found that there's all these sophisticated land management techniques that were just totally lost to time until archaeologists started discovering them. And at first they didn't even realize what they were looking at. And they'd be like, well, there's a lot of kind of weird hills in this area. It's otherwise pretty flat. And then they realized, oh wait, this is an entire system of berms that used to be planted. And in between the berms were aquaculture ponds where they raised fish. And they were just doing all this sophisticated stuff that no one had any idea. That book is just all about chasing that stuff down and figuring it out. So good, Chuck, one day you'll read it, right? Of course, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So before the break, I promised some design principles. And there are believe like 10 of these in our article. And it breaks down like this. And this is talking about a farm, but we have incorporated in this company that's come in is incorporating most of these same principles within like place as small as our backyard, for instance, zones. We have divided our yard up into zones now and basically in the case of a farm, it's a little bit different. They divide areas into zones based on, based on the. In all this stuff, it just sort of makes sense and it's all seems like it would be intuitive and how Tuk Tuk would have done it. So it divides into zones based on like how much attention certain things need on the farm and what does it require out of people in the different areas. And so if you think of it as a circle, you got your Farm in the center. So obviously, the stuff that needed the most attention would be closest to the center, where the people are. And then as you go out and out, the activity decreases, like the human activity, and things are allowed, like maybe trees to grow a little more wildly, Right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So, like, the zone is kind of like ripples in a pond or something. Right. They're concentric circles.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Radiating from the center. And I guess the center is the actual farmer, in this case, your house.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, so that's understandable enough. And then you look into something called sectors, and that's kind of similar, it seems like, but it's actually not with sectors. Again, the center of the whole. The whole permaculture land or whatever is the farm where the people live or whatever. And then it. The zone or the sectors radiate outwards. So the whole thing is one big circle around the center, but this time, it's sliced into, like, pizza slices, basically.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, I'm hungry enough.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, so. But with that. So that doesn't mean, like, you do sectors or zones. These are two different ways of looking at the land that will overlay one another.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

And I've seen a couple of places that recommend. If you're setting up a permaculture farm, you want to spend basically an entire year doing nothing but observing. Don't plant anything. Don't cut anything down. Don't dig a pond. Don't do anything like that. Just observe. Figure out where the sun is at different parts of the year. Where does the wind come from? Where does the water go? Are there pollutants that come onto the property that you need to, you know, manage? Where do the animals? Like, if there's deer that come in and eat the. Eat the garden, like, where would they be coming from? And so that's what you base the sectors on. And then that. That creates kind of like this underlying map beneath the zones. Does that make sense?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, I got that one right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I think so.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, I'm sure a permaculture expert would say, boys, right. Relative location is another important part of permaculture that is basically designing things. And again, in a way that makes sense relative to one another. So the great example that Robert gives is planting a crop downhill from a pond. That way it's downhill. You don't need to install a pump system. The whole idea is sustainability. And so if you can have the stuff you need to water downhill from your water, then you have just created a sustainable environment.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And that one is there's A. It's an actual design principle. Like David Holmgren came up with 12 of them. One of them was called integrate rather than segregate. And that one's definitely part of that.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

There's also having single elements with multiple functions. Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

So going back to that, like a pond example, a pond also not only serves as a source for irrigation, but it's also a water source for your livestock. And depending on where you put it, it also acts as a barrier between your livestock and the edge of your property.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So you don't even need a fence because cows aren't going to swim across a pond.

[Josh Clark]

No. Try to find one doing it. They won't do it. They're lazy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or a hedge. A hedge, lovely hedge can act as a wind block, things like that.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And it can also, like produce seeds that your chickens eat. Right, Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or shade, if you need shade.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And so all that, I mean, that just makes like total sense. Of course you want to do that. But when you stop and think about the fact that they don't do this on big modern farms, like, this stuff is not. That's just wasted area where you could be planting more corn. You know what I mean?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And they don't do. Most people don't think about this when they're designing their home backyards either. They want. They just say, this looks pretty, that looks pretty. And it may be laid out in such a way that it's completely unharmonious and working against each other at times.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like, why is that thing dying? It's so pretty. It's like, well, it's not where it should be.

[Josh Clark]

Another permaculture principle that stands in stark opposition to monoculture is having a single thing have just one function or have, okay, a bunch of different things serving as fail safes to one another. See what I'm saying?

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

So like, that pond can also provide water. Right. So it's a water reservoir, but you may also have rain barrels on site as well. So you have all these different things serving multiple functions, but also serving backups to the functions that they share with one another.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

And again, this is the idea that you're doing this if you take the time to diversify. Like, this is where the idea that you, you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket. It came from the farm.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And this is this, like some of these principles are just getting back to that very simple maxim, which is you, you have to diversify. And the more you diversify, the better off you're going to be. If something befalls, like if an avian flu wipes out your chicken flock. Well, it's. If all you do is raise chickens, you're ruined, your family's going to starve, you're gonna lose all of your money and the farm's gonna be taken from you. If chickens are just one part of a larger holistic farm you have going on, then you lose your chickens, and that's awful. But you still have, you know, you can cut off a cow's foot and chew on that for the winter.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know where the chicken and the eggs in the basket comes from, Right. Where little Bobby Joe going out to get the chicken eggs one morning, taking one basket, he says, pa, I got em, don't fret. Then he trips on the way back and breaks all his eggs. And Pa says, put all the chicken eggs in one basket now we ain't got no eggs. And then Bobby Joe says, well, then Pa, have more kids or get more baskets.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. And that happened in December of 1842 in Georgia.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

That's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Those are my relatives.

[Josh Clark]

That was a great. Were they choc tall?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no, no. This is from the other side of the family.

[Josh Clark]

The other side. Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

I was gonna say the redneck side.

[Chuck Bryant]

Energy efficiency is a big deal. Using energy efficient designs, whether or not you're straight up using like wind power or solar or you can just simply, like I said, build things in a way where you have natural windbreaks built in or places to allow the wind to come through and spread seed and stuff like that.

[Josh Clark]

Right. My favorite dude of all is the biological resources.

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's hear it.

[Josh Clark]

So it's just basically using nature to help solve the problems that you have. Right. So Mollison, one of the creators of it. What is his first name again? Bill. Bill Mollison. He had a saying, you don't have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.

[Chuck Bryant]

Which is to say that that was a great T shirt too.

[Josh Clark]

It was for a little while. Outsole gas grass or you know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, no one rides for free.

[Josh Clark]

Right. But the premise of it is that if you are overrun with snails, get more ducks because the ducks are going to eat the snails and it's fine. It's good to have ducks because they do other stuff too. Like they walk around and poop all over your property, everywhere, fertilizing it as they're doing it. Right. So just to kind of take a, take a step back and look at it like, okay, what, How Just say like, what Would nature do? That's a great way to solve your problems through permaculture. Another one is using pigs or chickens to till the ground and to actually rotate where you plant crops every year. And so this year's pig pen is next year's cropland because you can move the pigs on to another area and they'll turn it all muddy and turn it up and get it ready for planting, just like they did for this year's cropland that you're using now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Pretty great insects too. Yeah, very big thing to bring in the right kinds of plants to attract the right kinds of insects, to take care of the wrong kinds of insects.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

I love it.

[Josh Clark]

This raises an issue though too. One of the criticisms of permaculture is it's like, well, where are you gonna bring in those insects from? Right. So if, for example, if you order ladybugs online, it can actually be really bad for the ladybugs that live in your area. It can, because if they are lab raised or farm raised ladybugs, they very frequently carry a parasite that you're bringing now into your neighborhood and you can wipe out the existing native ladybug population. So what do you do? Well, the permaculture way would be to say, I need to attract more native ladybugs because I got aphids on my lemon trees. So how do I do that? Well, you just plant more high pollinating plants like sunflowers and voila, native ladybugs. Parasite free.

[Chuck Bryant]

Love it. I didn't know people bought ladybugs online. Yeah, that's a thing.

[Josh Clark]

I know that because I've had aphids before. I looked into it.

[Chuck Bryant]

You said, doc, I got aphids in my lemon tree. He said, come here.

[Josh Clark]

One in a million shot.

[Chuck Bryant]

Plant succession is another design principle. If you think about how land was before people were messing around with it. In a natural scene, things would just sort of grow and develop as they as nature intended. And fields might be barren and then grow into weeds and that might eventually grow into plants that may eventually grow into trees. And then what do you know? You have a forest.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So Robert makes the case like that's apparently the natural progression of a temperate area.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

That if you leave it alone for long enough, it's going to turn into a forest. I didn't realize that. I guess it makes sense. So this is basically saying, well, how can we do that? If that's the way the plant, if that's the way the area wants to be, how can we accommodate that while also getting food Staples from that too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

There's also nutrient recycling, which is basically composting. And I was thinking the other day, I don't answer enough when asked what my favorite episode is. Composting is definitely up there. Oh, yeah, that was a great one.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right.

[Josh Clark]

If you're digging this episode at all, go listen to composting if you haven't already. It's a good one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And finally, diversity. Raising multiple crops, having different kinds of animals. Like we said, we kind of been beaten up on corn. But that's the idea is to not have, you know, a thousand acres of a thing and have many different things. So like you said, the benefits there, if something comes along that is an illness to a crop, you're not wiped out completely.

[Josh Clark]

Right. You know, so speaking of wiping out, let's take a break for a second. Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Are you wiped out?

[Josh Clark]

I'm a little wiped. I need to regenerate here. Okay. Okay, we'll be right back.

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

Chuck.

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You know that feeling when you get an itch that you just can't ignore. You scratch and it comes back. And scratch again. Still there. If you have eczema, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

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[Josh Clark]

It's uncomfortable.

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[Josh Clark]

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Dupixent helps heal your skin from within. Talk to your eczema specialist about dupixent or visit dupixent.com to learn more. Okay, we're back.

[Josh Clark]

I'm feeling restored, Chuck.

[Chuck Bryant]

Good. Well, you took a nap on my shoulder, and that always helps.

[Josh Clark]

I know I got a little drool on your sleeve. I'm sorry.

[Chuck Bryant]

No big deal.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, so when you're talking about this, like, design principles are great and good, and they are really interesting to me. I think ecology is incredibly fascinating. But to actually feed people, you have to take them into action and, like, do something. And people have been trying this, right, to varying degrees of success and more importantly, to varying degrees of scientific study. I ran across a professor in, I believe, the UK at a place called Schumacher College. Her name is Bethan Stagg, and she. I get the impression Schumacher College is a little crunchy. I think they're the fighting granola. Little hippy dippy, just a tad. But one of the things they teach is permaculture. And so Beth and Stagg, one of the professors there, basically studied this permaculture next to traditional gardening plots that are the same size, everything's the same. The amount of wind and rain and sun they're getting. The difference is one is cultivated through permaculture methods. The other one's more just like traditional gardening, like, go buy fertilizer and stuff like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Who won? Who won?

[Josh Clark]

It depends on your definition of one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, which one was lying dead in a field afterward? The regular gardener or the other person,

[Josh Clark]

they both got a couple of good licks in on one another. Ultimately, I think most people would say that the traditional gardening or the normal modern gardening method won. The reason why it won was because for a hundred, for every hundred square meters of land, it yielded 13 kilograms of edible food.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

The permaculture one yielded 2.3 kilograms per hundred meters. So far, far, far less food was grown. But there's a couple of things you got to point out here. There was also far, far, far less time put into the permaculture plot, because that's one of the tenets of permaculture. It's just like plant this stuff and then just forget about it. You're not to mess with it again, except to harvest stuff. There's an emphasis on perennials rather than annuals. There's far less inputs that are meant to be made into it. It's just supposed to be like a little engine. You build and then start and it just keeps going forever. So far less time and far less effort on the permaculture side. So it kind of wins in that respect. Right. But then also there was over this three year study, there were also at least one year where the weather was really bad, and so the normal modern gardening suffered as a result. Whereas the permaculture one, which was more diversified, had about the same yield as the other years. So they both won. They're all winners. It's like a soccer game.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I think the idea too is it's not like that's the kind of test that should be carried out over 100 years. Almost.

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

And the whole point is, though, still that permaculture is not like they're not saying we shall create more yield than any other farm. That's not the whole point.

[Josh Clark]

Again, though, it depends on who you talk to. There are definitely permaculture adherents out there who think that anyone who doesn't use permaculture is an idiot who's ruining the planet. And this is the way.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I'm not saying that. But are they saying that they can provide more yield than conventional farming?

[Josh Clark]

I think if you back them into a corner, they would probably hedge that. But I think that when they're amongst themselves, they may. Yes. Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

You guys totally know we can't. No.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

We just won't talk about it.

[Josh Clark]

Shut up, Simon.

[Chuck Bryant]

So there are people doing this to varying degrees all over the world. Whether or not, if you have a full scale permaculture farm, then you are almost 100% likely to be a permaculture activist or an educator, it's not something you're doing lightly. You may also be someone who's like, well, you know, part of my farm here I'm doing in such a manner. Part of it I'm not. But there are things that you can do even at your own home, like a forest garden.

[Josh Clark]

Well, that's like what permaculture seems to really be best at is backyard gardening.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So tell them about the forest garden, because I found this fascinating, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, if you've got a. If you have a back lawn that is just a big grass lawn. And you know, during our grass episode, we, we didn't get preachy, but a lot of people will say, like, that's the worst thing you can do is just to have a huge flat thing of grass.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

As far as what's good for the earth. And that's a total. I mean, once in that. I think I remember we talked about that literally being just like an American creation and the 50s or something.

[Josh Clark]

No, it was even more than that. Yeah. But yeah, I'm pretty sure it was pretty American.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Maybe English.

[Chuck Bryant]

So a forest garden is a food garden that you build or plant. You build it out of wood and iron in your backyard that imitates a natural forest. So you're trying to sort of replicate what you might find in that natural setting in your yard. And this is gonna, like you said, make things a little easier on you because you're not gonna have to rotate crops or till like you normally would. And everything's just sort of working together. And Robert has sort of a four part example for layers, if you will, starting with trees, which are gonna. Obviously the biggest thing in that forest garden. They're gonna eat most of that sunlight, but they're also gonna let dappled light through, which can be great growing conditions for certain things.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So you're gonna grow things like blackberries or leaf lettuce or strawberries, any vines that are shade loving that produce food. But the point of this is like the tree isn't just like, well, here's a tree, isn't that great? It's like the tree also provides stability for the vine to climb up. Right, right. Like you said, it provides shade for these shade loving plants. And I guess the point, and I didn't really see anywhere explained why people do this. I know it's like an ancient technique from South America, I believe, like in the Brazilian rainforest. It's used to great impact.

[Chuck Bryant]

What, the trees?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Forest agroforestry basically is what it's called. But the. I didn't really see what the benefits of it are, especially if it limits you to shade loving food plants. Right. Because there's plenty of food plants out there that don't love shade.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Isn't that correct?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, well, I guess. Let me talk about what we're doing.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

So this lady came in and she's a company owner, and she takes a look at our yard and she basically, instead of saying, hey, let's plant a tree that will take 20 years to grow to provide whatever shade and then go. She's like, let's look at what you got now. Because Atlanta is an urban forest on its own, as you know, and there are trees everywhere. So we had existing trees and stuff. And she basically just sort of looks at everything, draws up a design, and then comes back to us and said, here's what we're going to do. And that she's working mainly with Emily because this was sort of her initiative and she knew more about it than I did. And Emily is more of the gardener in the family.

[Josh Clark]

Way to go, Emily.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, but I was on board, you know, and I was sitting in on these meetings going, this sounds great. This sounds great. So she would say, all right, you got shade over here. So why don't we think about this here, like blueberry bushes. This is where you might want to think about putting your herbs. And downwind from there, because of how the way the wind blows through your yard, you might want to think about this there. And we can move, like, we had certain things that we wanted to keep, like some azaleas and some roses and things. And she was like, we got to move those because they're not in the right place. So we'll put that over here, move this over there. And then before you know it, she's drawn a schematic for a sustainable backyard that all works together. And you know that the insects from the one plant are close to where they need to be to help kill insects that affect the other plant.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And, you know, I wish I. Well, it's probably great to get too wonky over my yard, but it just all works together in harmony. And we're doing it in stages. The main thing, big, big change that we've done, aside from rearranging and planting new things, is we got a cistern finally. So we have a big, huge. Geez, I don't even know how many gallons. I want to say, like 500 gallon. No, it's large.

[Josh Clark]

Wow.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, it's as big as.

[Josh Clark]

That's an above ground swimming pool, I think you're describing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Is it. Is it too many gallons?

[Josh Clark]

500. That's a lot.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know. Let's say this. It is as big as a. It's like half as big as a Volkswagen Beetle.

[Josh Clark]

Wow.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's large. So this is under our deck. So it's not an eyesore or anything. All the gutters in the house, all the water that falls onto our roof is fed into the cistern. And then that cistern has pipes that they trenched and they go all underground throughout the whole yard and just sort of leach water where it needs to be neat. And then there's also a couple of pumps. We didn't have spigots in our backyard. We still don't. It's been awful. You know, we haven't had a. We've had to run like hundreds of feet of hose every time we wanted to water anything. And it just feels wasteful anyway. And so we didn't have backyard spigots. And now we have these two posts with the little pumps. And it's sort of gravity fed in a way. Like if the cistern is full and you turn that pump on, water will flow some. But then we have an actual pump installed on the cistern to where we can actually use a sprinkler if we want to.

[Josh Clark]

But. But the. The pump is squirrel run by a hamster wheel, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

I wish.

[Josh Clark]

And it's. It's located in the. The chestnut tree. So it is going to attract the squirrels anyway.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, sadly, it does run on electricity. I wish it was hooked up to solar, but we're not that far along yet.

[Josh Clark]

That's pretty cool though. Man. That's a neat plan you got going.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is pretty awesome. And guess what? We have a swale.

[Josh Clark]

Oh. I was hoping we were going to be able to talk about swales. I love swales.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Robert didn't include this in his article, but I sent you a thing on swales. And we have a swale, which is to say in the back right corner of our yard now we have a. A tiny pond. It's only about 5ft across by 5ft across, and it is round and it has like a round berm around it. So, you know, it's like a little hill and a swale. The definition of a swale. It is a level ditch that is dug across whatever site you're in with the purpose of stopping the flow of water in order to make the water slowly filter into the land. Instead of rushing over it. And the idea there is that most people design their yards so water won't accumulate, and it will run. It's graded in such a way that water. Rainwater will just run off of it as quickly as possible. And that's, you know, that's very wasteful. And that's not how the ground. The ground is supposed to accept the water. I know that sounds so hippie, but in an ideal situation, the ground accepts the water into it, and it's not dry a day later, it is actually feeding the ground. And so this swale now has a runoff from the cistern. So when the cistern gets too full, the water will then run out into the swale and just sort of slowly leach into the ground around it. Or if we get just tons and tons of rain, obviously, the swale will collect it, and the water will leach into the ground around it.

[Josh Clark]

That is very cool. That is swale.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is super swale. But it was an important part, like when this lady came over, she's like, well, you gotta have a swale.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right.

[Josh Clark]

She's like, swales are my biggest seller.

[Chuck Bryant]

And right now, it's not the most attractive thing in the world, but over time, we're planting. Instead of grass in between everything, or even mulch, we're doing ground cover. I can't remember the specific variety, but ground cover or mulch are the two most sustainable ways to treat your yard, period.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that makes sense, because the mulch will break down.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

And degrade and become nutrients.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So it's.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's pretty neat. Like, we got a good scene. It's going to be years in the making.

[Josh Clark]

Well, that's another thing, too. I mean, like, you got to be very patient with this kind of stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. But we're in, though.

[Josh Clark]

That's great, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

We're lifeless. We're not going anywhere.

[Josh Clark]

There are. And I'm wondering, you seem to have a pretty realistic approach to permaculture, though. Like, you're not going to save the world with your backyard, it sounds like. But it's certainly not hurting some of the issues that the world is facing, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, we're just trying to create our own little sustainable habitat.

[Josh Clark]

So there are. There are. We should mention some criticisms of permaculture. A lot of criticisms of permaculture, we should say. But they, you know, we've kind of hit on a couple of them. But the big one probably is that it's not rigorously tested scientifically enough, that it's just kind of Taken like, oh, yeah, that would work intuitively, and then that. It's just left at that in a lot of ways. So there are people like Beth and Stagg, who I mentioned, and other people around the world who are starting to apply science to these things, to say, this one works. Let's keep at it. This one works better if you do it this way, or this one doesn't work at all. Don't waste your time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

And as long as they're doing that, permaculture deserves any respect it can get, because it really is. Again, intuitively, it makes a lot of sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's true, in fact, which is why you gotta study that kind of thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And the other thing that I saw in the Roberts article that did make sense to me was one of the criticisms was to Mollison himself, because he apparently had a stress on bringing in exotic plants. And that goes counter to everything that our lady for her company talked about. She is all about native plants, like, only native plants.

[Josh Clark]

And Mollison's response was, well, we've already screwed up the earth so bad that it. We're not trying to preserve ecosystems as they are specifically. We're. We're trying to make them better through management. It's like, actually, you just contradicted everything you said back in 1978. And I think that's a pretty good example of. From what I understand of that guy. He's like, well, this is what I'm saying now. So this is true.

[Chuck Bryant]

Gotcha.

[Josh Clark]

You know what I mean? That's just. And I've never met him, never heard him speak anything like that. Just from reading about him. That's the impression that I have.

[Chuck Bryant]

Gotcha.

[Josh Clark]

So, to the Molson family. Sorry if that's not right. You got anything else?

[Chuck Bryant]

Got nothing else. You have to come over in two years.

[Josh Clark]

I'll take you up on it.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't want you to see it now.

[Josh Clark]

I've been waiting for this invitation for 10 years.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, it's going to be 12 total.

[Josh Clark]

12 total. All right. If you want to know more about permaculture, you can type that word into the search bar. How stuff works. And since I said search bar, it's

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time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm gonna call this harrowing story from a fashion design intern. Yeah, it's a good one. And I got her permission. Hey, guys. Listen to internships. Wanted to say thanks for addressing this issue. When I was in college, I went to work or wanted to work in the fashion industry. And the internship process was very difficult and exploitive. I managed to somehow get an internship without any connections, which felt nearly impossible, and worked my first gig for a top designer and she did not name the designer. In a follow up email she did, but then said maybe don't read it, okay, but it's a top designer.

[Josh Clark]

Okay?

[Chuck Bryant]

Not only was the internship unpaid in one of the most expensive cities in the world, but but I was also expected to wear an all black fashionable wardrobe at all times. So I had to find housing in New York, buy all new clothes. Luckily my parents were able to help me out there, but I hated how prohibitive the whole thing was. While I was with that designer, the Conde Nast lawsuits were going on and I remember people saying the lawsuit was just another example of stereotypical millennial entitlement. That's obviously not the case because as you mentioned, it's a social issue. Because of my internship, I was able to get more experiences in the fashion industry and eventually a full time job in New York after I graduated. Everyone I work with now had unpaid fashion internships and almost everyone I work with is white, upper class and from a good school. Unpaid internships have led to bigger problems and diversity that I think really have hurt the fashion industry. You always hear about how retail and department stores are dying. Well, all the companies are run by old white straight dudes and we lack a variety of perspectives which prevents innovation. I'm glad I had internships and I learned a lot, but I think the internship market really needs to change. So thanks again for addressing this. Hope a lot of people listen to your podcast and re evaluate how they do things at their own companies. And that is from Gail.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks a lot Gail. Nice one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to get in touch with us like Gail did, you can tweet to us. I'm @SYSKpodcast, ormClark, Chuck's, Charles Wchuckbryant on Facebook and Tuffyou Should Know on Facebook. I'm on there too somewhere, although I'm not sure where. You can send us all an email, including Jerry J E r I to stuffpodcastowstuffworks.com and in the meantime, hang out with us at our home on the web stuffyou should know.com.

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