Thoughts on the future of Portland

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: Hi there, : My name is Jordan Fink. I’ve lived in East Portland my entire life except for the last four years while I’ve been in college up at Evergreen. My work up there has centered on the interrelationship between landscape and culture and has included ethnography, construction and sense of place, special/ethical patterning and initiation, perennial polyculture food systems, and Cascadian botany, ecology and plant physiology, and a PDC. I come back to Portland this spring ready to devote the rest of my life towards the City of my birth. : I am extremely excited about the reemergence of the Portland Permaculture Guild. Back in the ‘90s it was a great source of my personal drive towards Permaculture. I hope that I can attend the meeting on the 16th but, as it is evaluation week at Evergreen, there is a possibility that I may not. I wanted to share some thoughts that I’ve had concerning the areas of attention and possible needs for the city of Portland/Willama. : My interests center on an ultimate vision of Portland as multiple (12-15), dense pedestrian villages, with agroforestry and gardens separating them, connected by networks of public transportation. The work of Gandhi indicates that a redirection to village development begins by shifting production to village-scale: i.e. we must act at the scale we want to see. : In terns of site design, the City of Portland seems too big to be an effective permaculture site. Issues like water catchment, food production, and trade relationships with the Willamette valley watershed and greater Columbiana Ecoregion will often need to be coordinated on a city-wide scale. For the most part, though, our work as designers needs to been smaller. East Portland/ SEUL seems to be at a good scale for coordinated local projects, food, water, labor pool, and more. I believe that the neighborhoods are just the right size for projects like seed-saving and distribution, PC courses, and developing and maintaining strong community. : I have noticed a tendency in Permaculture guilds to crave centralization. I think that this makes sense, but we have to be free from dichotomies of one/many: It is possible to maintain networks that allow for coordination between multiple sites and projects. One symptom of over centralization among guilds is to focus on a single, educational, demonstration site. I believe that in the spirit of Mollison’s “Raise Potatoes, Not Consciousness,” it would be of greater benefit to our communities, to view our homes scattered throughout Portland as multiple Zone Zeros and view our neighborhoods as our sites. : This spring, I would like to find a spot to start a production nursery for low-maintenance, Portland-appropriate, food trees: develop my own site, begin propagation, grafting, cloning, and distribution through the neighborhood. The set up cost will be minimal and most can be taken care of through the incredible storage of embedded energy that the urban environment represents. : I worry about the dependency on international commerce that the city has developed and I believe that we can quickly lay down the minimum infrastructure that will allow the people of Portland to have the option of independence and local self-reliance. : There are a couple of other thoughts that I’ve had: : *Water- The city of Portland is considering selling Bull Run (http://portlandtribune.com/archview.cgi?id=15070) This makes me realize how fragile our water supply is: I don’t know what would happen if we lost such an amazing source of clean, gravity-run water. I think that there are a couple of scales that we can act on to encourage water storage and infiltration. : -At home: roof water catchment and storage, mulching, graywater/blackwater systems, SWALES! : -In the neighborhood: coordinated catchment, ponds and structures for storage, neighborhood-scale swaling and keyline planning for directing water run-off into water-table, install parking-lot style mitigation marshes next to storm drains. : -We also really should look at existing underground water: not for pumping, though. For example: on the Old Hawthorne Asylum there was a long series of freshwater springs. Starting at about 12th and Hawthorne and moving north to around Brookin Neighborhood there is a long chain of these springs. We need to care for these places, restore, and improve them: they will be important for our grandchildren. : *Food: : -Home: gardening yards, roofs, etc (we know the drill). : -Neighborhood: Zone 3-4/ orchards along parking strips in and parks, grafting of edible scions on existing trees, each neighborhood should have: a production nursery, a CSA or land trust farm, a seed bank. : *Information: : -Home: we need to really start and the doorstep and learn from the back yard : -Neighborhood: Courses should be offer on a neighborhood level, every part of the city has different microclimates that are unique so information must be caught on this level and applied. : -Portland: The guild can begin the process, we have libraries, colleges, the Audubon society, the City of Portland, Metro, Friends of Trees, local nurseries, the landscape itself. : I believe that there is so much to do and I hope that we find ways to really create a place that will take care of us. This are just thoughts, not certainties, and I am sharing them to spark discussion about where we may go, not define where we will go. I look forward to coming home soon and working with all of you. Please contact me if you feel inclined. : Jordan Fink : jordan@riseup.net : Praises to the holy Willama!

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