PM BUSINESS

Maddy Harland tells the story of Permanent Publications, publishers of Permaculture Magazine, and describes the permaculture design thinking behind the company.

Article first published in 'Permaculture Magazine' No. 50

Tim and I started the publishing company that was to become Permanent Publications with two other partners in 1990. At that time the company inhabited a bedroom and downstairs room in our cottage. By the nature of its smallness and our shoestring budget it was fairly low impact. We wrote and packed up our own books, brought children into the world and gardened all in one place whilst our eyes gleamed with idealism and ambition.

PM and the company’s first temperate climate permaculture books arrived over the next two years, but the business was still a very small affair. The print runs could be squeezed under packing benches and we had far more fruit trees in the garden than titles. There was no ‘staff’ and frequently no wages either.

By the mid 1990s, the magazine had grown too big for the house and our neighbours became as restive as our noisy young daughters with business traffic and deliveries. It was time to move.
Synchronously, the opportunity arose to move the business to The Sustainability Centre, a new local council Agenda 21 initiative which we helped found. It was estab-lished at a redundant inland Naval site a few miles up the hill which was unfavourable for property development, being on a slope and covered in neglected plantation woodland. The Sustainability Centre gradually took shape and we moved to the site in 1998, the first occupants of the 55 acres. It was eerie at times but packed with potential – and many of its own special sort of groundbreaking problems.

We inherited a former dental surgery in what was the old hospital block, now commandeered as The Sustainability Centre’s HQ and visitor centre. It was a 1960s flat roof building with single glazed PVC windows and no heating. It was neither beautiful or ecological but it was somewhere to move to on a non-existent budget, and we dreamed the dream of helping to start a centre to demonstrate perma-culture and all manner of things sustainable. That is our history. Now for a permaculture audit of our current business.

Water
The Navy left some large water tanks on site. Very early on, these were hooked up to flush all the toilets in the building with rainwater (and there were loads of them – the Navy liked to separate male/female and officer/rating bottoms!). The centre imported low flush toilets from Scandinavia at great expense (you couldn’t pop into B&Q and buy one off the shelf for £70 in those days). The sewage goes into a tank, waiting for the day when the volume will activate the site’s sewage treatment works. We have plenty of rainwater on this hill.

Heating
We struggled for some years with a planning controversy over a wood/straw fired Farm 2000 boiler installed under our offices and as a consequence had no heating for five years! This boiler was eventually sold and the controversy solved by the installation and resiting of a biomass boiler, a Veto 120kW stoker-boiler, which is run on woodchip. The boiler heats both the visitor centre, where our offices and stores are situated, and the centre’s ecohostel, Wetherdown Hostel, which can accommodate up to 30 guests and volunteers. It runs on wood chip made on site from the soft wood plantation. After a few teething problems, it now works well. Currently we use 50 tonnes of seasonal wood per year. The estimated annual useful heat produced is 125,000kWh. The calculation is that 39 tonnes of CO2 emissions are avoided annually.

The boiler heats our water in the colder months and in summer we have a solar thermal system on the roof above us, installed with a grant from the Powergen Greenplan Fund by Southern Solar. The panels are four Filsol FS20 flat plate panels each with a surface area of 2m2 (21.5ft2). The estimated annual yield is 3,272 kWh, enough for three households.

The boiler and panels work reasonably well but we suffer from the difficulties of matching new solar technology with old hardware, losing a lot of heat through ancient large dia-meter iron pipes, an eco-renovator’s nightmare. Our building is Navy issue, circa. 1980s, built to withstand a bomb but poorly insulated.

Lighting
Like many other aspects of our offices, we inherited the lighting from the Navy. There used to be two fluorescent lights housed in every unit and we removed one of the tubes from each unit. We also have a few conventional skylights. We have a strict lights off policy and use daylight as much as we can. Yes, we’d love sun-pipes one-day when the roof is rebuilt.

The ecohostel has its own photovoltaic panels but the visitor centre does not yet and a wind turbine is out of the question due to 106 planning restrictions. We’d also love to do a full eco-renovation of the building in time.

Ventilation
We open the doors and windows!

Windows, Doors & Other Fittings
Our windows are still single glazed PVC Navy issue. One day the building will be refitted with double glazed lowE argon filled locally made units (like the ones at our nearby home) but this has to happen when the centre gets a grant, as with insulating the building further. The doors are wooden Navy issue. Our kitchen literally came out of skip, is solid pine and was refitted by John. Elsewhere we make shelves out of FSC timber or recycled materials. All of our desks are recycled, thanks to a county-wide office furnishing recycling scheme. It’s a case of reuse anything we can and never buy new unless absolutely essential.

Office Equipment
We haven’t bought a new computer this century. Almost all machines arrive thanks to eBay which has revolutionised PM’s graphic design capability. John builds everything from components. When machines become irreparable, they go for recycling.

Waste
Permanent Publications has no waste collection at all from the site and we set up as many recycling banks as we could. We reuse everything possible and try not to buy in much packaging. Cardboard boxes, book wrappers and padded bags we receive with incoming goods get sent back out with customer orders. If we can’t reuse it, we take it home and mulch our garden with it. As a last resort it goes to the recycling centre. Paper is either recycled in a bank on site (the centre gets paid by the tonne for clean paper waste) or shredded as packing filler. Glass, cans and textiles go in the appropriate banks. Stamps go to charity. We send our printer cartridges for recycling to the Royal Society for the Blind who use them to raise money. Any damaged books get sold from our shop at reduced rates. We like to offer our visitors bargains.

Our Garden
We started a small urban-style edible container garden, immediately outside our goods-in door three years ago, mostly using recycled materials. Kitchen waste is composted in two bins and a wormery and this adds fertility to our little office garden. The garden has an unpromising northern aspect but its advantage is that it is right on our door step, Zone 1. We grow salads and a little soft fruit for lunch and demonstrate how to grow potatoes in mail sacks.
We have a tiny Butler sink pond, a haven for frogs on hot summer days, and grow trees in containers (for later planting out) and flowers as well. As time goes on, we are planting more shade tolerant edible perennials.

We recently put up interpretation boards for visitors explain-ing the design of the garden. The garden demonstrates just how much you can grow in a small urban space with low light levels and how much compost you can make by a variety of methods to replenish the planters. It also gives us a lot of pleasure and is a great chillout zone in hot weather.

Travel & Sourcing Locally
We have a policy of trying to resource skills, services, materials and people as locally as possible. If we cannot, we open up the criteria a bit, for instance we chose Cambrian in north Wales to print PM because they have a good environmental track record. We do not print in Singapore and ship books in! We also try and find UK made products and components. This is not always possible in our global world but we do not sell products made from uncertified woods or from sweat shops. We also use Fair Trade products like tea and coffee.

The nature of the site is not public transport friendly – an acknowledged weakness – and so we car share as much as possible. We also try to use vehicles that are as energy efficient as possible; John for one drives a car which runs on LPG. The rest of us do not as yet have the resources to run electric or home-made biodiesel fuelled cars and we can’t buy biodiesel locally yet, but we do choose not to drive gas guzzlers.

We don’t take gratuitous trips out at lunch – we usually have to have at least three reasons to go to town (or anywhere for that matter!) – and we enjoy being on site. It’s a pleasure to walk in the woods, observe the changing seasons and the gradual regeneration of the woodland as plantation soft woods are replaced by native flora. The woodpeckers, buzzards, deer and hawks are our companions.

Nor do we live it large at conferences. We don’t have that sort of a budget and even if we did we wouldn’t want to. We also have a policy of trying to take the train to meetings and events whenever practical. Flying has been rare and is increasingly unlikely. Some members of the team refrain entirely. Personally, I last flew in 2004 and I haven’t flown long haul since 1998. It will have to be an important reason to get me back on a plane again.

Community
The Sustainability Centre with its staff, project leaders, volunteers and green business tenants is becoming a small community. We, the ‘Permies’ as we are affectionately known, do not have a great deal of spare time. We work flat out most days. Publishing, our families and tending our own plots make life a full time job, but we try to help out on site when we are needed, share skills and knowledge, participate in tending our small garden and support other initiatives on the site.

I think the most important aspect of our collective nature is that we try to treat each other with mutual respect. There are no hierarchies here. No one is better than another at PM – we all inhabit our own particular niche – and decision-making processes are by consultation and consensus. There is no boardroom elitism, only the director’s privilege of underwriting the company overdraft! No one is exempt from making tea or cleaning the toilet (with biodegradable cleaner of course), though there are occasionally some mild controversies about washing up – we are human after all.

We are not in each other’s pockets socially but we do look out for each other at work and in the wider world. This is a friendly and supportive environment. We share a common goal, to spread the word about permaculture – positive, life enhancing green living by design – and we certainly don’t do this for the money!

Our wider community is our friends, supporters, readers, trade suppliers, consulting editors and of course our authors. We owe our existence as an organisation to all of you. You are too numerous to list here – this isn’t an award ceremony after all and I’m trying not to cry! – but we do want to thank you.

As with the PM team, our relationship with our Permanent Publications authors is built on mutual respect, trust and friendship. Book publishing is a highly creative venture and we endeavour to work as co-operatively as possible. We are very fond of our ‘stable’ of wonderful authors. They are all world changers in their own right.

Wish List
There are, of course, things we would like to do better. We have for some years had to use ‘sustainably sourced’ paper because of the prohibitive cost of quality recycled. But with this issue we have been able to upgraded to a better compromise using paper which is 50% recycled and 50% from FSC certified virgin pulp (see page 2 for certification). As circulation continues to grow though, we will hopefully be able to improve the specification further.

We already swap plants and encourage each other to grow food but we’d also like to form a food co-op. We continue to try to buy ethically and support Fair Trade labels where possible, and would like to support more locally sourced sustainable products. We would also like a little more time to have fun.

Permaculture Design
As a business, we have always used permaculture principles to design every aspect of what we do. The obvious principles are resourcing locally where possible and cycling energy and turning waste (i.e. cardboard, paper, packaging, kitchen waste) into resources. With actual office design, the principle of relative location – discovering the connections between elements and putting things in the right place to save energy – is used everywhere. Our packing station is a great example of intelligent design. So too are our work stations. We fit a lot of elements into small spaces which minimises use of space (rent is charged by the square metre used) and saves energy.

We would happily say that we are a small scale intensive system and each human element performs many functions! We also use as many biological resources as possible – there are no plastic envelopes encasing your copy of PM or machines packing them. Obviously, we have to use machines (computers) to design but we minimise waste as much as we can.

There are other more esoteric ways of using perma-culture design principles in a business. For example, the principle of ‘Each Important Function is Supported by many Elements’ is used in marketing material. We are trying to create a supportive web of permaculture information for all tastes and talents so if we do produce a flyer it promotes PM, a new title, plus our catalogue and website, hopefully in a concise and simple way.

Besides using Bill Mollison’s original principles, we also are mindful of David Holmgren’s principles.1 These can be used as a philosophy of life as much as guidelines for designing a landscape. Obviously, 16 years of publishing affords the luxury of observation, feedback (from our readers, customers and suppliers – thank you) and creativity. It also demands the necessity of obtaining a yield and generating as little waste as possible. But it is the concepts of using edges, designing from patterns, and valuing diversity and the marginal that may seem abstract in terms of business, but they are of greatest use. It means that we have to be open to new ideas and criticism, to be constantly trying to improve our editorial and design standards and our services. Even if we are growing into more elderly dogs as the years go by, we still have to learn new tricks, especially technological ones. And we have to keep abreast of new thinking – hopefully even lead it sometimes. We can never sit back and be complacent, and nor would be want to.

Integrated Thinking
In ‘The Spiritual Imperative’, an article by Satish Kumar, published in Resurgence,2 he wrote “Business without spirit, trade without compassion, industry without ecology, finance without fairness, economics without equity can only bring the breakdown of society and destruction of the natural world. Only when spirit and business work together can humanity find coherent purpose.” These words resonate with me because they sum up what we are trying to do – to be self-aware, to serve others and be as harmless as possible.

I know that we use up finite resources – we move information in the form of paper around the world – and in essence that uses carbon. We try at all times to do this in as low impact a way as possible and within the tight financial constraints we face as an entirely independent organisation without external funding. We also run with the philosophy that the usefulness of the information we produce outweighs the carbon load required to create and transmit it – a form of transitional ethics. We are here to broadcast positive, small scale, solution orientated ideas and practices. The feedback we receive indicates that our work does change lives – for the better. We are also aware that we are of our time and one day we may well hang up our mice and head off in another direction. Or we may end our days writing and publishing... and snoozing in the sun as old dogs do.


¹ Permaculture – Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability; David Holmgren; price £19.95/ Subscribers’ price £17.95; available from The Green Shopping Catalogue, www.green-shopping.co.uk

² ‘The Spiritual Imperative’; Satish Kumar; Resurgence no. 229; www.resurgence.org

The fully illustrated version of this article appears in PM50 and can be purchased as a back issue.