Permaculture’s Potential: Sharing the Bounty

Permaculture, the practice of cultivating an ecosystem-like farm, is spreading in Bellingham thanks to the work of community members like Paul Kearsley.

Story by Meghan Fenwick // Photos by Sydney Vasquez

June 8, 2022

Three-year-old Samson Campbell has many talents. He fills his days with singing, tire swing stunts, chicken-wrangling and even plant identification, thanks in part to the Lichen Early Learning outdoor school.

Fortunately, he can hone his skillsat home, too. As he strolls through the gardens, forests and wetlands of his family’s three-hectare Queen Mountain Homestead in Bellingham, Washington, he can’t help but appreciate every plant and animal.

His favorite stop is the lower pond, where he thanks the skunk cabbage for giving him his nickname at school, “Sammy Skunk Cabbage,” and for letting him yank one stalk out of the bank. Samson collects a cloud of yellow pollen in his hands and embraces the pungent, skunky smell as it wafts through his nose.

Samson’s parents, Paul Kearsley and Jane Campbell, as well as a handful of family and community members, built the first garden at Queen Mountain Homestead in 2016. This May, Kearsley will be co-instructing a permaculture design certification course through the organization Whatcom Permaculture; it will be the most intensive permaculture class taught at his home base yet. As a design instructor at Western Washington University and long-time permaculture enthusiast, Kearsley is excited to see this community grow and hopes that more students can learn from this homestead like his son has. 

The term permaculture, or permanent agriculture, was coined in the 1970s by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, two Australian educators and researchers. They saw the adverse effects of industrial agriculture on Tasmania and wanted to create a better solution for people and the planet. In 1978, they published their book “Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements,” cementing their legacy in the broader environmental movement.

Often, a permaculture farm will feature what seems like a mess of forests, orchards, gardens and bodies of water, but the design is purposeful. A permaculturist will use every element of the land for food, material and energy. The result is an imitation ecosystem that resembles a natural one, a more energy-efficient life and sometimes acreage that produces enough to share. 

Kearsley strolls down a winding path from his greenhouse to an empty field on a rainy April afternoon, patiently anticipating the days when the tulips will bloom along with other flowers, fruits and vegetables. On a bare patch of woodchips, he bends down and parts a valley with his hands to reveal topsoil and digs until he hits the parent soil 25 centimeters down. It took Kearsley five years to cultivate this fertile topsoil from lifeless dirt, bringing in his own worms, bark, plants and pigs to trample and turn it.

“We use so many of these different things as measures of how we're destroying the ecosystem. Loss of topsoil, loss of biodiversity, loss of amphibians,” Kearsley said. “We're obsessed with loss. How do we just start saying, ‘No, we made amphibian habitat. We're growing topsoil here’?”

On May 21, permaculture students learned about how to create their own topsoil, along with other permaculture must-haves like surveying and mapping, ethics and design principles and water management. Kearsley and his fellow instructors followed a curriculum long-established by the co-founder of permaculture himself, Bill Mollison, for this weeks-long intensive.

In 2008, Kearsley interned under Doug Bullock, who has practiced permaculture at his homestead on Orcas Island since 1981. Eight years later, Kearsley’s team was starting to gain momentum on their own property as they cleared the land, created irrigation systems and sketched out their plans on hand-drawn maps. After roughly five years, Kearsley can finally transition from building the homestead to maintaining it and spreading his knowledge.

In addition to the time commitment, the course costs $1800 with opportunities for scholarships and work trade. To secure this picturesque, living-off-the-land dream that Kearsley and his family have realized takes large investments in terms of land and further education. 

“It can be very intimidating,” said Anya Henning, a student enrolled in the course. “I think it's hard when you come into anything and there's a whole entire language, and there's jargon, and it can be really inaccessible.”

In the spring of 2017, just before graduation, Henning took Kearsley’s ecological design course at Western. There, her interest in permaculture bloomed, inspired by Kearsley’s passion. After maintaining a friendship with Kearsley and his wife, Henning found herself between jobs in 2021. Her favorite local permaculturists came to the rescue, offering her a part-time gig at Queen Mountain. Thanks to their generosity, Henning already has a basic understanding of permaculture, yet she’s still eager to learn more.

“I have a lot to learn regarding the theories and the practices of permaculture because this is more of a study of life,” Henning said. “Sometimes, that even includes just holding a baby for a little while, so somebody else can do stuff, which is probably my favorite part.”

Alongside Kearsley, Brian Kerkvliet is co-instructing the course. His homestead, Inspiration Farm, is six miles from downtown Bellingham and has been the go-to local permaculture showcase for two decades. Inspiration Farm has hosted design courses and offers shorter classes that focus on singular aspects of permaculture. Other farms in Whatcom County offer educational services, like Cloud Mountain Farm in Everson and Raven’s Roots Naturalist School in Mount Vernon. 

Barbi Smith, a teacher’s apprentice at Raven’s Roots, might not have found permaculture without these smaller courses. In 2020, she stumbled upon an advertisement for a Raven’s Roots ethnobotany immersion course. As a store manager at Whole Foods with experience selling supplements, Smith was looking to learn about herbalism, not permaculture. She remembers thinking the concept felt “culty.” 

She found the opposite to be true when Raven’s Roots introduced her to its two-hectare permaculture homestead and plant nursery, where students can purchase plants to take home and apply what they’ve learned.

Today, Smith splits her time between Whole Foods and Raven’s Roots as she chips away at her own homestead in Alger. At Raven’s Roots, she finds freedom from any snobbery, and unlike in the corporate environment, she feels little pressure to perform. She embraces mistakes, failed experiments and lessons learned the hard way.

“I think that's another myth, making it sound like there's anything that we're doing that can at any point get wrapped up neatly with a bow,” Smith said. “It can’t, and it shouldn't. That's the best part about it.”

Kearsley believes his design course represents a more accessible option for Bellingham cyclists like himself. Perhaps the most central permaculture project in Bellingham, however, is surrounded by busy streets, small homes and monkey bars. A forest garden, tucked into the corner of F and Irving streets at Whatcom Middle School, was built with the help of Common Threads Farm.

Common Threads is a non-profit that teaches gardening and food skills to elementary and middle-school-age students across 24 schools in Whatcom County. Sarah Wheatley, the garden program manager, helps provide equitable access to food and nature knowledge. Wheatley believes permaculture is an excellent way to holistically feed and educate children, and Common Threads allows her to nurture their curiosity.

“You go into one of our elementary school classes and you'd walk in and there are seven kids huddled, saying ‘I found a worm, his name is Harry. I love him. Don't hurt him. He’s my friend,’” Wheatley said.

Kearsley strives to show young, budding environmentalists how to tap into their innate connection with Earth. Sure, his students will receive a certificate, but he hopes to also provide a sense of belonging. From his years as a starry-eyed design student, spellbound by the promises of permaculture, he cherishes his lessons learned about how to have an unapologetic relationship with nature. 

“I think that comes from living so close to nature,” Henning said. “There’s not that many other kids I know who are able to really have a set spot and take in the amount of information and observations that their kids are able to do.”

Traversing Queen Mountain, roughly the size of eight football fields, is a walk in the park to Samson. As he skips his way past the flora and fauna, the ferns catch his eye. 

“Fern’s first form is furled, fast as a fiddlehead,” he recites.

Samson’s travels are not totally carefree, however. He makes sure to dodge the sharp thorns of the goumi bush. This bush, like Samson, stands only a few feet tall. He knows he could get poked. He also knows if he’s nice to the bush, it will return the favor with juicy red berries come spring.

Meghan Fenwick is a third-year student at Western Washington University who is majoring in environmental journalism.