Whole Systems Design, Inc. describes its work as “occurring at the interface of people and land --
where the built and biological environments meet.” Based in Vermont’s
Mad River Valley, Whole Design Systems integrates ecology, landscape
architecture, site development, construction, farming, education and
other disciplines. Founder Ben Falk holds a master’s degree in
landscape design and has taught at the University of Vermont and
Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Vermont Commons Editor Rob Williams
conducted this interview.

Q. I read a recent article you wrote in which you stated "Climate change happens. Design for it." What do you mean by this?

Ben Falk: We need to prevent climate-changing activities as much as
possible if we are to maintain a habitable planet, no doubt. However,
the climate’s already changing, it always has, and it will continue to
change, sometimes radically, even without human influence. How do we
design for this?
Our work involves employing ecological design and permaculture
strategies to develop buildings, landscapes, and communities that can
be resilient in the face of increased climate variations – longer
droughts, hotter summers, colder winters, more intense wind and ice
storms, increased pests, heavier precipitation events, etc. Our
site-design and development work buffers regional climates at the site
level (microclimate development); diversifies biological systems and
integrates them with built systems; holds water in the landscape;
develops the highest quality, most durable and passive building
systems; and employs many other techniques for dealing with the
challenges posed by Earth’s changing climate and society’s
hyper-dependence on dead-end resources.

Q. You’ve spent some time thinking about how we might re-design Vermont
in the face of what might politely be called our “carbon-constrained
future” – dwindling access to cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy.
What are some of the most immediate challenges Vermonters face as we
enter the 21st century?

BF: Start with the big challenges we face today: climate change, peak
oil, nukes in the hands of rogue organizations, a U.S. government
prioritizing war over all other endeavors, dwindling reserves of fresh
water and soil, etc. How might these problems play out in Vermont
during the next few decades, and how do we respond? Calculating your
carbon footprint is a nice exercise, but first take the 30-second
“will-you-survive-in-this-place” test.

Imagine your home in the following scenario:

The
electrical grid is down and it’s not coming back up because Vermont
Yankee had a major malfunction and Hydro Quebec pulled the plug after
deciding that Canada or states downstream needed more electrical power
(and could pay more for it) than Vermont. You’re out of heating
oil and the delivery truck won’t come – even if you could afford the
$5,000 fill-up. It’s January and an “Arctic clipper” is pushing
minus-20-degree air into Vermont. The fridge is empty but you
can’t afford the $10/gallon gas to get to the store. The septic system
is full and the truck won’t come.

Q. So let’s talk about moving forward. How do we think outside the box here?

BF: It’s silly that we’ve put ourselves in such a precarious position,
because there are a few simple and affordable systems that could, at
the home scale, fundamentally change this situation for the
better. One’s called a composting toilet. Another is a big
home vegetable garden, and gravity fed drinking water. Another is
20 fruit trees and a half acre of nut trees. Another is a root
cellar. Another, better insulation and a masonry heater, or at
least a wood stove. For the minority of us who can afford it,
there are solar hot water and electric panels.

At the macro
level it’s going to take investment by the public sector and those who
can tip the scales of affordability for renewable technologies, local
food systems, high-efficiency building systems, and the like: passive
refrigerators, solar thermal panels, high-efficiency wood heaters,
greenhouses, edible and highly productive landscapes. It’s going
to take substantial state incentives, private investment and
community/watershed-level initiatives to make the post-carbon systems
shift happen.
The nearly complete lack of readiness of our rural population to
provide themselves with a basic measure of food, water, shelter and
fuel is an urgent public safety issue, and is antithetical to
democracy. If our educational institutions address this
challenge, it will be through reorganizing their programs at least in
large part, to teach, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “the fine art of
making a living from a small piece of land.”

We also need to think clearly about how we ought to spend the
remaining petroleum in our fossil fuel savings account: We can
burn petroleum only to burn more, like we are now. Or, we can use
the remaining petroleum to establish energy, food, transport, and
manufacturing systems that will durably function with little to no
petroleum far into the future. Right now is the most affordable time to
develop a sustaining economy of the future; it’s only getting more
expensive each week.
The logical planning question is this: what does a more-localized
future look like, without the destruction and hardship involved in the
localization of the past? We need working examples of more
sustainable food, fuel, electricity, and mobility systems at every
scale in every valley and every village.

If our rural places are to support decent livelihoods into the
post fossil-fuel future, they will be organized to generate the most
valuable nutrient and calorie-dense foods and fuels per acre. This
would necessitate the third, and possibly final, back-to-the-land
movement. And this time it will involve everyone; it’s going to
take a lot more hands on the land to bring about a more productive land
use. Many people will again be employed in the northern forests
and fields. This shift requires unifying land preservation and
conservation approaches with use-based strategies such as hunting and
farming. It’s possible for forestry and farming to greatly
improve wildlife habitat and ecosystem health while offering abundant
livelihoods for people. The father of modern conservation knew
this; Aldo Leopold designed farms that ‘grew wildlife’ in the early
part of this century but we didn’t build on his work.

Q. So what role might Vermont’s landscape play in the development of a
more sustainable, more democratic society in New England and, perhaps,
the “Untied States” as a whole?

BF: I think there are four facts about 21st century U.S. society that frame our thinking here:

1. We are 80-percent urban (without significant
production resources in the form of farms, forests, mines, etc) and
20-percent rural.

2. We use almost of all of our resources remotely from their source.

3. These resources are produced and distributed via petroleum at every step.

4. These resources are ever more difficult and
expensive to obtain as long as they are remote and require
non-renewable resources to source and distribute.

Q. How do we turn this precarious situation into one in which our
livelihoods are sourced from a more self-reliant and renewably powered
regional and local economy?

Part of the challenge requires shifting from an import-based
consumer culture into a generative “producer culture.” This involves a
re-ruralization of the Vermont landscape, which will be producing not
only most of what our own citizens need to live, but also producing
many resources for larger population centers in our region like
Montreal, Boston, and New York City – places that due, to their
density, will continue to be sinks for most materials and energy
resources (but providers of nutrients, information, and cultural
resources). If we think ultra-dense urban centers will grow a
meaningful fraction of their calories on roof top gardens, we are
hopeful but not realistic.

If we imagine what a more regionalized and sustainable society
will look like in five, 10, or 30 years, we realize that rural areas of
this country are going to be pressured into performing the role that
non-industrialized nations are performing today. The future success of
rural societies is dependent upon the degree to which they develop
regenerative working landscapes: places that produce more resources
than they consume. Even Thomas Jefferson could not have realized
the true extent to which the rural landscape of America will be the
basis of its survival and success as a democracy.
I think it’s clear that a primary way to overhaul U.S. society’s
imperialistic underpinnings is through the redevelopment of a highly
productive rural land base that is organized at more regional and local
levels than the current global economy.

Q. So, are you suggesting that we view Vermont as one large
diversified, integrated, but decentralized farming/production system?

BF: Yes, with an expanded idea of what the word ‘farm’ can mean – farm
as sustainable production system; a renewing economic system.
Farming in contrast to mining. Today, even in Vermont, most agriculture
and especially most forestry, extracts more value from the land than it
cultivates; that’s mining. But this can easily change: Vermont is
positioned to become a leading example of a cold-climate rural
land-based economy. What kinds of planning and land use does this
entail?
Examples of such land use are already underway in parts of Europe where
there are states with 100-year land-management plans for everything
from nut-producing forests to aquaculture, to ecological restoration to
pasture land systems, so that the land offers the most value possible
to the citizens of the nation. Intergenerational land management
is a precursor to a sustainable democracy.
Vermont would provide leadership in regenerative rural economic
development by implementing a statewide diverse-yield planning process
based on important questions such as:

1. What is Vermont most suited to producing?
What are all the yields – from apples to venison, fish, freshwater,
biofuels, squash, plums, hydropower, slate, renewable-energy
technologies, chestnuts, tourist dollars, carbon sequestration,
hardwood, information, methane, education, furniture? These are
all yields that this state’s physical and cultural resources are
uniquely suited to produce.

2. What are the current and future markets for these yields – who and where are they?

3. How will we distribute these yields within the state and out of state?

4. Which region within the state is most suited to
each yield? We would sector-ize the state into zones of use and
production just like one would do with a profitable and well-managed
farm.

There are many global leaders in regenerative economic development
already working in Vermont. The state can get these players together to
help integrate the diverse aspects of a more abundant economy.

Q. Okay. So what kinds of projects would be most strategic in
transitioning Vermont into a more locally reliant, productive landscape?

BF: There are numerous initiatives that could be started tomorrow
with great success if the social and monetary capital was ready to back
it. Some of that capital is already emerging, as many of these
projects simply represent profitable business investment opportunities.
Whole Systems Design is working with several investors and two
foundations to begin to implement these and other similar projects.

Here are five tip-of-the-iceberg suggestions for projects that a
Vermont seriously interested in pursuing democracy, sustainability, and
profitability would explore.

#1: Re-centering our towns and cities

Reducing driving miles and roadway maintenance while increasing our
ability to share capital resources and production systems – tractors,
chippers, kilns, commercial kitchens, sawmills, and other light
manufacturing facilities, for example – is perhaps the most important
overarching strategy we can employ. This means resettling the
villages and town centers. Most Vermont town “commons” are today
virtually abandoned. If we’re here in 100 years, they will be bustling
again.
Rural landscapes can become highly functional through diversifying land
uses and yields, maximizing crop and product integration, and
minimizing input needs through increased efficiency, cycling of
fertility on site, and other basic measures. Suburban settlements
are much more difficult. Some strategies here are: reclaiming
lawnscapes by edible landscaping, planting perennial soil-building
plants, restoring stream and wildlife corridors, re-insulating
buildings, and developing the remaining common lands as
high-performance better-than-organic, bio-intensive, permaculture
systems. Whether we can continue to afford inhabiting the suburbs
or abandon them will depend upon their ability to transition from being
resource sinks to productive generators of food, community,
information, materials and energy. Such a shift will create
employment opportunities in each neighborhood that will also reduce
some of the need for the intense mobility demands of these areas.
Light, mass transit will still be crucial.

Q. What about the idea we discussed about planting the 300 miles of
Vermont’s interstate highway medians with edible and
wildlife-supporting nut trees?

BF: I’ve run some preliminary numbers on this idea, and the economic
yields are stunning. There are roughly 3,000 acres of crop-able
land between and adjacent to the interstate highways of Vermont.
This number, by the way, includes a safety sightline and snowplow
buffer immediately next to the roadway.

Currently, the state spends more money mowing these 3,000 acres
than would be required to plant and maintain an edible agroforestry
system on 30 feet of the median and on 10 feet on each side of the
roadway. Such a statewide perennial tree crop system would
support almost 1,000 trees per mile of roadway with about 250,000 trees
in all, sequester more than 5 million pounds of carbon per year, and
produce more than 5 million pounds of nutrient-dense nuts per year.

Those are remarkable numbers.

BF: This system would have untold wildlife-supporting benefits for
birds, bear, and other animals due to the nut-bearing trees. The
economic value of nuts alone would be more than $10 million per year
after the system matured in about 15-20 years.

Using currently low-value land like highway medians in such a
long-term way would generate more than $200 million of tree nuts at
current market prices in a 40-year span. Why we didn’t farm the
most accessible arable land in the state will be a hard one to explain
to our children.

Q. But won't planting median nutteries attract animals to the Interstate, causing all kinds of problems? Roadkill, for example?

BF: Yes, nutteries attract and grow wildlife. But the idea that we
shouldn't farm this or that landscape because cars could interrupt the
process is planning our landscape around the auto, which is not the
best strategy toward a more livable future. There are also a lot of
other valuable uses for this undervalued land: soil building and carbon
sequestration cropping, and/or perennial biofuel crop
production. Most of this land is an accessible grade and location
to mechanized harvesting methods.

Q. Other ideas?

BF: Why not increase the value of Vermont’s ski slopes by grazing Brown
Swiss, Jersey, and other alpine-appropriate cows, goats, and sheep?
They’ve been doing this in Austria for a long time. Why would we
mechanically mow the state’s steepest hillsides at an expense when the
same land can turn a profit instead?

Imagine our vast, public mown turf areas transformed into fruit
and nut orchards. We can generate 1,000 new high-quality jobs in
the state in the span of a year, as well as stimulate the local economy
and increase local food security by producing 100,000 pounds of fruit
and nuts per year on lands that are currently mowed resource
sinks. Part of a livable future involves replacing fossil
fuel-driven lawn mowers with human-powered shovels, seedlings and jobs.

Make the care, harvesting, and processing of these tree crops a
food bank program, F.E.E.D. program, corrections/rehabilitation, and/or
other local group program. Use existing funding streams to do the
planting by employing policemen and women in a direct public
service. Have them plant trees side-by-side with inmates: a
rehabilitation program for prisoners and a public service by our
uniformed officers. Have the National Guard and the Green
Mountain Boys join in. Police and soldiers planting trees, tending
public food gardens, installing solar panels – that’s homeland
security.
Why should we wait for another dust bowl or depression for
state-supported land development? Vermont is positioned to show
the nation what a New Deal for the 21st century would look like.
We have time perhaps for one more big push like we saw in the 1930s.
Imagine if the Work’s Progress Administration had established
tree-based agricultural systems that would now be bearing trillions
upon trillions of calories for use as food and fuel oils, carbon banks,
wildlife production zones, and beauty.

We could evolve the Current Use program to incentivize multiple
outputs of our complex forests instead of only saw-logs and
cordwood. We still call timber management plans ‘Forest
Management Plans.’ We’ve totally missed the forest for the trees and
have let simplistic silviculture dominate the management of complex,
multiple-yield woodlands. Whole forest management would promote
diverse-yields such as ginseng and other high-value understory
medicinal herbs, edible mushrooms, hazelnuts and other nut shrubs, and
tree crops including hickory, pecan, walnut, chestnut, and sweet acorn,
varieties of burr, white and English oak, and much more wildlife.
We can increase wildlife production by multiple factors through
increasing the caloric yields of the Vermont forest, stimulate the
hunting economy and value the 80 percent of our state as the abundantly
productive forest garden it could be.

Q. When Vermonters move to create an independent republic, I’m going to
nominate you for Secretary of Agriculture. How long will it take
Vermont to re-invent itself as an independent republic, do you figure?

BF: The degree to which we become more independent and free politically
is highly dependent on the degree to which we get the two primary
aspects of our inter-dependence in order: Economy and policy. By
“economy” I mean the basic needs: food, shelter, water, health care,
energy, some mobility. I think the economic foundation of any
place needs to be strong before a place can be its own polity. Can we
imagine a desirable independent republic without a vastly more
sustainable, more self-sufficient economy? Vermont imports almost
all of its basic economic resources. Vermont becoming more
independent politically would most effectively be preceded by Vermont
becoming more independent and generative economically.
Broad-scale regenerative land use is the foundation of enduring
personal and collective freedom.

There’s a lot of talk and some action about making this
happen. Take Pete’s Greens for example. This is a solid
model of local economic health; they produce enough vegetables for
about 1,000 people, I am told. Vermont has about 620,000 people. So at
some point in the future the market will support 620 more
season-extended, diverse vegetable farms. That’s fantastically good
economic news.

That’s an entire fiscal platform for a politician right
there. “I will see to it that this state incubate another 100
organic farms equipped with passive solar greenhouses, per year, for
the next six years.” I can hear it now.

Q. I can, too. But let’s not wait for the politicians to lead. It is up
to us to begin this work on our homesteads and in our communities. Any
last thoughts?

BF: With vision and planning, Vermont could manage the state’s
landscape as the first continental re-development project, in which the
colonial settlement methods we’ve tried since 1492 would be overhauled
and rebuilt to be more durable, more profitable, more collective, and
more democratic. It is clear that the development of a local living
economy is the most direct way to connect ourselves to one another, to
rebuild and reinvent our culture, to celebrate the beauty of this
place, and our lives within it.

Q. And economic independence can lead us to political independence.
Thanks for speaking with us. We’ll remind readers to find out more
about your work at www.wholesystemsdesign.com.

Ben Falk runs Whole Systems Design in Moretown, Vermont.