We have covered Geoff Lawton before and his amazing Permaculture Institute. Well he is back, with another sweet video (watch his previous video here)

What I really like about Lawton’s methods is that he doesn’t just bulldoze the area and then use petrochemicals to artificially build a giant chemically enforced mono-culture. He uses natural processes, in fact nature itself to repair and rebuild the landscape. It reminds me a lot of the ideas in Dune, when Frank Herbert talks about how you can trap energy in a system by increasing the amount of living things there.

So in essence if you get a couple plants growing that trap nutrients in the soil you can then get bigger plants growing, then trees, then animals, etc etc. You can bind up large amounts of energy in the system by increasing the biodiversity. Nature has evolved systems of interconnectivity over the eons, and when something happens to break those linkages things start to fall apart. Think about that the next time you go mow your lawn (a mono-culture), or see a field of corn (another mono-culture), or check out a massive parking lot (a mono-culture of nothing).

All this biodiversity needs water, the swale method is an excellent way of getting that water without substantially altering the environment.

(via)