Interview Transcript
Ben Falk
Eco-designer Ben Falk of Moretown, Vt., one of a new breed of designers, teaches how yield, function and the regeneration of landscapes are as important as aesthetics.

Q: What is the focus of your work?

Ben Falk: We focus on regenerative landscape development. I say regenerative as opposed to sustainable. Sustainable has become such a buzz word, but I'm not the first person to realize that the word sustainable implies sustaining something, keeping something going at a status quo, the way it is now, and we definitely are trying to focus on improving health. Health is a word I'll probably come back to because it's really all about health, at least that's how we view it. Health is really the baseline. We ask, what are we trying to sustain? Right now the current state, whether it's global environment or even local environment or local economics or local culture, are all fairly unhealthy, so we aren't trying to really sustain any of that but we'd like to help improve that. So the term regeneration, I think, really gets at that pretty well. We focus on regeneration in terms of land development, place making, places where people live and learn and work.

Q: These are younger generation concepts.

BF: Yeah, I guess they're common sense for a lot of my colleagues and me, and, I think, for an increasing number of people out there, but I wish they were totally common sense for all of us. I think we'd have a lot more chance to survive and thrive if it becomes common sense for everyone as a whole, if it is generally the sense of most people to develop in a way that's adding value and health and not taking away health from what is the land system or the economic system, the cultural system.

Q: What's your background?

BF: Well that's hard to sum up, but I've always kind of been interested in wilderness living, wilderness travel. For a long time I thought I was going to be leading wilderness trips for young people, and I did that for a number of years. I just really appreciate being out and away from large scale human hand, human manipulation, to be in that system. I guess Aldo Leopold calls it the base data — what nature has become without this kind of seemingly recent abhorrent hand of man shifting what evolution has created into sometimes less than ideal ways.

But it's interesting, because I've moved away from wilderness living, wilderness travel, as somebody who used to think I wanted to live in the woods, basically like Thoreau, into working within the world in a more direct way, to help bring, I guess, some of the aspects that I've noticed in the way the world can work in "natural" systems, nature. I don't even like to use the word nature anymore because nature implies that there's a non-nature and especially that humans are not natural. I think we'll probably be in a good place when there is no word for nature again. I think that's true of most indigenous cultures, that there is no word for nature because there is nothing other. It's just humans being an integral part of nature. So it would be a good place to work towards, to where there's nothing natural again. It's all natural and there's nothing artificial.

That aside, I think wilderness is kind of where I come from, living and working very much in what we think of as natural settings and then coming into the world of land development which seems so different. Like developers, development, land development is totally different from somebody who's based around wilderness, but now I really do seem them as the same process. I mean, if we develop our landscapes so that we really truly have wilderness and not just wilderness out there, but wilderness right here, nature working more than human nature working, with humans along side humans. So how can humans occupy the same landscape with all the other aspects of the living community? How can all of the other animals, creatures, plants make a living in the same space that I make a living? How can it really be a full community — community including not just people but all of the other non-human parts of the living community — and how can that happen both locally and globally? How can we live in such a way that that is an example of what can happen everywhere?

Obviously some places are more challenging than others. I think we have some things that are much easier about living in a rural area than an urban area. The cities are going to be the hardest places in some ways to really become regenerative and fecund and producing a net gain. They'll probably be net offering more in cultural aspects than necessarily soil or food or physical resources. More cultural resources might come out of a city, and we put more physical resources into the city. I guess it's kind of a roundabout question, but I come from having a lot of experience in wilderness and then in education, teaching. I taught in high school for a few years, and then now recently taught a course at UVM. I like to just keep all aspects mixed together at once and at least be doing kind of a hybrid gig, I guess you could say.

So now we do land development, that's what I do. Most of my every day focus is on working with clients, developing landscapes to be regenerative, but I'm still teaching. I still courses on the side and I find if I keep my hands in as many as different aspects that inspire me as possible, each aspect is optimized and my design work is better for staying connected with the classroom and students and fresh ideas. My teaching facilitation is also aided by working in the field for people, with people, so I'm always trying to keep it all mixed up in the same bag, mixing all together and doing a lot of different things at the same time. So I guess that's some of the areas, some of what I come from. It's a mix, a mix of different, mixed use.

Q: What is the difference between what a traditional developer does and what you do?

BF: Well, most landscape development as we know it now, obviously, is kind of what I would call parcel systems: going into a site, flattening out sites for a building. And this is, you know, a classic scenario, flattening out a site for a building and having people "live" there. I say live because they just spend the night there, but don't live there including all their resources, living there. So the classic landscape development that we see all around us, it's just make a pad, put a building there and people go there to sleep and maybe to grill out in their back yard. What we focus on is whole systems development. We look at how many of the resources that the people who live there need can come from as close to there as possible, how can that site produce as much as possible. It may be necessary to use various resources from off the site, off the property, but if that is necessary we look at A) how can we minimize that but B) how can we also have that site offer as many resources as possible back into the system. So there's an exchange, there are sites that are not just taking but also producing.

Q: What about the guy at home with his lawn?

BF: Yeah, well it can be challenging to do. There's a lot of reasons a lawn has become so popular, but we tend to turn lawns into edible landscapes. This has always been done throughout time, you know, people always grew food on their property. If you travel around the world, you see there's fruit trees in front of those people's yard. How amazing; wouldn't that be good if we had that in the U.S.? That's always what used to be. People couldn't afford to have land just to look at, you know, they had to be growing their sustenance in the landscape. I think that time is starting to come around again where we realize that a) we might need to be doing that, but also b) it might be better, it might be more fun, more enjoyable, to live in a working, producing landscape that is actually functioning as a whole system, as a living system.

So far, all of our clients are fully on board with that. We don't do any convincing. They know, oh, we've got half an acre of lawn here, we want it to be producing food, we want the beautiful trees that produce food there and we don't want to have to mow it constantly. We want some open air to throw a frisbee, but we don't need this lawnscape which is just input only and doesn't really produce, put anything out, produce anything. So, so far all of our clients are as into that as we are and they already know kind of de facto that that's what they want. I like to say they're pre-sold. I guess our business has been pretty self-selecting; we haven't been doing any convincing. People are just coming to us and saying we know we want an edible landscape, we want a permacultural home, we want a place that's producing and supporting our livelihoods and that's beautiful and also functional to live in. Just how do we do that? Help us, help us figure out how to do that, the details of that, but they already know they want that.

Q: What is permaculture?

BF: That's a big question, but I guess I like to think of permaculture as living systems land development. Permaculture comes from the two words permanent and agriculture. Bill Mollison and Dave Homgren are kind of credited with really articulating that age-old idea of just the contraction of permanent agriculture and permanent culture. So it's a way in living, a way of living in a landscape that can continue, that could perpetuate itself, that could be giving out as much health to the world as it takes. It could be truly sustainable in a good way. So right now, since we don't want to sustain all of the harm that's been caused today, we're in a position of needing to regenerate. Then when things might eventually be healthy enough to sustain, permaculture approaches will help move us in that direction. They're just productive landscapes, edible landscapes. I think of permaculture as plant-based systems. It's a body of knowledge in a field has gone, I think, furthest ahead in plant systems development. It has some strategies for building as well, architecture, but that's not really where it's most sophisticated. I think permaculture as a body of knowledge, a discrete body of knowledge, has gone farthest ahead in terms of integrated, ecological systems; you know, agricultural ecologies, food producing ecologies, as some people have put it before. Ecosystems that happen to also yield for people.

That's kind of an amazing idea, right? It's always been, I think, how people used to look at things, but for us now it's a real epiphany. Like, oh, living systems, like the way that forest works and that hillside across the valley where no one is works. It's just the way nature works, but that could produce a yield where we could harvest something from that landscape that also gives us livelihood. That's the virtue of nature just working day to day; it's producing a yield that we live off, so it's like the interest in the bank of the natural system we live off. And that can be done just by carefully, mindfully working with eco-systems. Kind of managing ecological development succession so that those systems are continuing to play the role they do for all the other components of the living community. The plants and animals that live on the site along with the humans, but also do things like produce food. So maybe pulling out a tree like a birch tree and putting in a nut-producing tree can have dual benefits; it can be totally mutually beneficial, trying to get multiple good results from single parts of the systems.

Permaculture has all of these incredible principles that haven't been developed. And they're all, you know, they all should be very much common sense. I think they all are to some extent, but activated in the landscape they just look like ecosystem tweaking, you know. So whereas the conservationist may look at landscape development as here's humans and we are just going to do our own thing, so let's just mitigate our impact and let's set aside this preserve. We like to look at it like, ok, let's live in the landscape, let's actually do good. Can we live in our landscapes, and add value, not just to ourselves, but can we build soil, sequester carbon, clean the water that flows through our site, produce more oxygen, take less food from off-site because we're producing it on-site, so we have less negative results of all of the need that is generated when we require tons of food to come in to our homes from far away.

So I've come, in some ways, not to believe in conservation, kind of at a basis, because it's kind of like what we do is bad, so let's just conserve or preserve. I do believe in wilderness, in places where we really just don't go — not that there's anything pristine, I mean there's mercury coming out in the precipitation around the world you know, in the arctic where no one's ever maybe walked. We've touched everything on the globe. So there's no truly pristine environment. I do believe in setting aside areas where we don't really manage heavily, or at all, but I believe the areas where we live, let's try to make positively beneficial. Let's help grow wildlife where we live. In rural areas, people have lived in such a way as to help produce wildlife, grow it, by virtue of the plantings we help promote. You know, let's live in the landscape, let's look at humans as potentially not bad actors, you know and trying to be less bad.

As Bill McDonough has articulated all of this and I may sometimes borrow here: instead of being less bad, let's just try to be really good. What would it be like to be positive actors in the ecosystem, what actions would we take to do that? There are some fairly basic things, like putting less energy into the system so I'm burning less, let's say fossil fuels, to run the system and helping the ecosystem produce more of a useful yield. So planting a tree, you know, a tree, like potentially a Norway Maple with a nut tree, that's just an action that results in more positive benefits for the whole system. Growing a little less lawn and a little more vegetables or more fruit trees or nut trees.

Q: What does a designer add?

BF: That's a good question. I think eventually, hopefully, no one will need us. Hopefully it will all just be so common sense that you won't need a specialist to come in and help you develop your landscape in a positively beneficial way. But what we do is help people site components of the system and determine what species can go where.We've got clients that want a pond, but it takes a little bit of specific knowledge to know, let's say, where to put the pond, where it's going to stay full or catch the water that one wants to catch as it's traveling through the landscape, or where to put a road so as to minimize erosion and be able to maximize access. Or how to orient, how to capture as much energy passively as possible. We work with people to help lay out components and then design them. We also help determine what species might go where, providing planting design.

Q: What's happening in cities?

BF: There's some amazing work happening in that realm, whether it's urban agriculture, farming on rooftops or getting young people involved in growing food or maintaining trees, you know, revitalizing abandoned spaces in cities. There's a lot of opportunity. There's a lot of wasted space in a city, even though we don't think of cities as having a lot of empty space. I think rooftops are going to be the new frontier in a city. They have constant solar access — most rooftops are always in the sun — so there's constant energy input and they're under-utilized. Most rooftops are not being used for much. I think of rooftops as the new frontier in an urban zone. You know, I was watching a movie the other day on Havana, on Cuba, and that movie showed what lessons can we learn from Cuba. It was titled "Rooftop Farmers." There's people in Havana and that's what they do, they farm on rooftops. We'll definitely have thousands of rooftop farmers in this country, but we're just, I think, realizing that rooftops are this high opportunity area.

Q: What about farmers?

BF: This project, our clients came to us and asked us to help them plan this farm system. They posed quite a few questions, and one of those questions was an over-arching question: what would a whole farming system look like? What would a farm look like if it generated its own power needed to process all of its production, grown in a sustainable and enduring way, while building soil and benefiting wildlife? All of its produce, whether that's fruits and nuts or vegetables, how to do that in a way that is not detracting from the landscape around it and instead actually benefiting the landscape around it? So not just like, how do we farm here and not disrupt the wildlife around us, but how can we farm here and help the wildlife around us? That's, to me, a much more compelling question than let's just try not to impact the bears or the other wildlife that may live around the farm, but how could what we're doing actually help them. How can we manage land to help ourselves and help all these other parts of the living system.

So we've helped plan orchards — you know, our focus is definitely perennial agriculture — so fruit and nut trees are kind of the basis of our agriculture development. We look at it definitely as an agricultural ecosystem, so what is the existing ecosystem and how can the development of that ecosystem be managed so that it generates as much of a yield as possible for the people living there and hopefully, for the people outside, because this is a very large piece of land. So ideally, our goal is to have this landscape support as many people as possible, generate as much of the resources that people need as possible, and consume as little as possible from off-site.

Q: How have you gone about connecting the elements here?

BF: Well, this property here had quite a few challenges and it's developing into a place that I never could foresee right when we moved here. Obviously, I've been watching it for a few years since moving in and realizing how wet it is and realizing exactly how the sun moves across the landscape and where's sunny and where's shady and what the soils are like. It takes quite a while sometimes to figure out those patterns and then design for those patterns. Water has become sort of an organizing element in the landscape here; where water flows, where it's wet, how to use that water for as many positive results as possible. So a big theme has been taking areas that are just kind of wet, generally wet fields, concentrating the water and creating open water systems like ponds which are a limiting factor ecologically, to the health of this part of Vermont. There's not a lot of open water in Vermont, and you produce, take, concentrate some water that might be in the soil, in some soggy areas, which there are a ton of in this part of the state, and dig a pond and then you have an open water ecosystem, a bit of a different ecosystem. All of a sudden, you're harboring a lot of wildlife that doesn't normally have a lot of support in this area, so you're creating like life niches. You're creating habitat opportunities for some species, like different groups of frogs and amphibians that are hurting, that are not doing so well (you know, amphibians are definitely doing poorly in recent years, partly as a result of humans, of the way humans are occupying the landscape), and so creating, turning a wet field into a pond, for instance, can be a very positive action.

That's one of the actions we've undertaken here, we've created three ponds, two of them are connected right now and the original one will be connected via flexible tubing to all of the other ponds. We're thinning trees, like red maples and birches, which are important, critical parts of the landscape, but we don't suffer from the lack of red maples and birches in Vermont as much as we suffer from lack of beech or different oaks that produce edible acorns or valuable mast for wildlife. So pull out a birch and put in a cold-hardy hickory or pecan or hican, a hickory pecan cross, or hazelnut or black walnut or other species that may offer additional value or fruit tree. There's only so much sun available on every site, so a lot of it is really about prioritizing, how to make the most of the sunshine that's falling on your property. That's the kind of prime question in ecological land development. There's only have so much sunshine landing, you only have so many square feet, depending on your aspect, you only have access to so much sun. If you're facing south you have a little more, if you're facing north you have a little less. We look at how to take advantage of that limited amount of energy available, because that's ultimately what we are trying to drive our incomes off, the sun.

Everything is a solar powered system, right? The plants are solar powered. Our food is via solar energy and we're just trying to leverage the sun as much as possible and all of these components of ecological design, whether it's a fruit tree or a pond or a creek or some stone work for thermal mass, it's trying to get us out on that lever of leveraging the sunshine as much as possible. Capturing energy and storing it and then distributing it when we need it is very important because we live in a cold climate. We have more energy than we need in some ways during part of the year, and we have far less energy than we need during another part of the year. So we need to store that energy as much as possible, and we're just really starting to figure out some of the ways to do that. Some have always been done, like passive solar and thermal storage mass, water and stone, but there's a lot of ways Maybe it's a hydrogen battery. Maybe it's other ways of taking what is at one period an excess and making it available at a different period when the energy situation is a lot different.

Q: What about microclimates?

BF: That's a good question. We're very excited about microclimates because in the face of climates changing rapidly — I don't even like the term global climate change because the climate on the globe has always changed — it's maybe global, more rapid global climate change than we've had. We get into the importance of thinking about how to make our own little climates to buffer this exterior climate that may be getting very intense and becoming more and more extreme every year, creating small scale climates. A microclimate is just any small scale climate. They occur at all different scales. The Mad River Valley creates a certain microclimate, then I have a pocket of south facing land that creates it's own little microclimate, but then within that pocket of south facing land there's a little dark stone that faces south, creating yet a microclimate within a microclimate. They occur like anything fractally; they're occurring at all scales.

Microclimates are important in that cold, the lack of heat, is a limiting factor to inhabiting a region like Vermont in a sustainable or regenerative way. We take a lot of energy to stay warm and keep things going when we don't have the energy input from the sun, so microclimates are particularly important in places that are furthest from the equator where there's a lack of energy available. Also, this gets into where I think the traditional field of landscape architecture and ecological design cross, which is where we like to stay on that line. Traditional landscape architecture totally focuses on the human experience — how fun is it, how nice is it to look at, how pretty is it — and ecological design is how does it function as an ecosystem. We think both are optimized when both systems are happening at as high a performance level as possible, so a landscape is as fun and as joyful to be in — traditionally the focus of landscape architecture — when it's functioning as a whole ecosystem, as a healthy ecosystem.

That's really what we're trying to model in this thing here in Moretown: not only how we can grow as much food as possible and use as little inputs as possible and sequester as much carbon as possible, build as much soil as possible, but how this landscape can be as much fun as possible, how can it be as joyful as possible. You know, a pond — what an amazing example — its thermal mass stores heat when the sun shines on it and distributes it later at night or later in the season when there's not as much energy. It's great to swim in; it's a source of fish, of trout to eat; it's habitat for frogs and toads and salamanders and other wildlife that need our help. It's all these functions, it's multiple functions for a single element, classic permaculture principal. It's producing oxygen; it's good for climate change and it's fun. We can swim in it or ice skate on it in the winter, so it's a whole human habitat. It's supporting all these functions.

Q: What about trout habitat?

BF: Trout like cool water, so it's a challenge in Vermont during the summer to keep the water cool enough, depending on how much flow you have. We're creating water systems, ecological aqua systems here on the property, without a ton of water. If we can do it here, a lot of people can do it elsewhere because we don't even have a perennial stream necessarily on this property year round.

So creating cool microclimates becomes really important below water lines while at the same time creating warm microclimates above water line. South facing sun catches above waterline and north facing steep slopes, you know walls of rocks under the water in the ponds, help keep the trout cool. So the trout have a lot of limiting factors and cool is one of them and so is oxygen in this climate.

Having water flow is important. You'll see some waterfalls and that's part of the reasons we have waterfalls, again, dual benefits from a single element. Waterfalls aerate the water, oxygenate it which is great for the trout and good for a lot of the other life in the system and they're beautiful. Who doesn't like to sit next to a waterfall? The soundscape generated by falling water has been shown to be very important for our own health and just joyful to be around. You don't need a study to know that. But they're having studies showing that actually the sound of flowing water and falling water is healing. It de-stresses us and so again that's where landscape architecture and ecological design totally cross, in a waterfall, in a pond, in water, in a tree. Our two lowest ponds are connected with a creek so animals can flow between them, amphibians can migrate up and down depending on the season and utilize both sources.

There's specific areas of the pond designed to grow certain aspects of what's needed for trout. We're really just, instead of making a trout farm that is designed to be fed with off site resources, like pellitized food, we're simply from the architectural end saying let's design the system so it designs its own food for the trout so the architecture of the ponds are aimed at growing, at supporting the food chain that the trout depend on. We're trying to actually grow the food for the trout instead of buying the food. We're trying to grow the lower life, gaffnia and gamerous that the trout feed on and that comes through design, through the architecture of the system, through shallows and deep areas and through what plantings get put in where and how it's related to the sun and the water flow and which was the waters flowing.

Connecting the ponds is just very important from a biological perspective, you know so the animals can move, like I said, between the ponds. Like John Todd is fond of saying, with a living machine, you develop a system, you make the architecture, humans kind of do the roughing out, like we make a pond and ensure that there's boulders in certain areas and there's complexity in the edge in other areas and there's shallows here and deeps here and we seed it with some life. We go to some wetlands and we put some muck and some trout and some other things that we want in there, but then it self-organizes. So a lot of ecological design work and working with living systems takes a lot of faith in evolution, in that life figures out a way and if we promote the right architecture, the right forms, the right vessel, then life figures itself out and develops on its own and that whole life source, on a fly wheel, starts happening if it has the right environment.

You know, the glaciers originally carved this landscape after the mountain building that happened here and then the glaciers sculpted this and now we, as humans, have the ability to do one kind of final sculpting or the latest sculpting to help promote as much life as possible. That's where, when I look at an excavator, I see like a mini glacier. We just happen to have what the glaciers left us and that creates certain opportunities and certain challenges, and if we go in with intention and say what if we shape the land like this, put some rocks here, stuff that's already on site, earth and rock, and then all of a sudden, we can make it so that the life opportunities go way up and that's what fossil fuel should be saved for.

We talk about "don't burn petroleum, save the oil, save the oil." There's a few things we need to save it for. Obviously we don't want to burn it in an SUV driving down the highway to get to work. That's not ideal. But making pipes to move water, that's a pretty valuable use of petroleum. We're not going to make pipes, you know water pipes, out of much else, at least not in the near term. Hopefully, we'll figure that out and I think people are starting to, but there's some things that petroleum can make that we can't make any other way and that's where a little bit of petroleum goes a long way, like in making nylon rope or mesh netting to keep animals where they need to be in a system to be optimized or pipes or to selectively run a combustion engine to move some large stones to make some water systems or dig a well. I've got a little list going of what we should save petroleum for, because we're going to need it. You know, when we need to use it for something, I don't think we should definitely just not use it.


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