The Radical Act of Staying: Defying Nomadism with Ben Falk

Exploring place-based living and stewardship for lasting environmental resilience.

Ben Falk is a renowned permaculture designer, author, and the founder of Whole Systems Design, based in Vermont. With over two decades of experience in regenerative agriculture and resilient living, Falk has become a leader in the field of ecological design and land stewardship. His work focuses on developing integrated, sustainable systems that support food production, water management, and energy efficiency, all while restoring ecosystems. He is best known for his book, ‘The Resilient Farm and Homestead’, where he shares practical strategies for cultivating self-sufficiency and environmental resilience.

At the heart of Ben’s approach is his belief in the potential for human systems to harmonize with natural ecosystems. His experimental farm in Vermont serves as a living laboratory for permaculture techniques, where he continually tests and refines methods for sustainable living. Ben’s efforts have been instrumental in spreading knowledge about regenerative practices and empowering individuals and communities to create more resilient, ecologically sound ways of life.

An excerpt from The Resilient Farm and Homestead, on “Fleeing”

The average American moves 11.7 times in a lifetime.

—United States Census Bureau, Geographic Mobility Report 2006

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

— Japanese Proverb

It’s not surprising that we North Americans still call this continent the “New World.” Relative to the first peoples in America, who have lived here for between four thousand and fifteen thousand years, we just got off the boat. It’s new to us, and so far we don’t seem intent on staying. I was taught in school that the American frontier closed in the nineteenth century, yet the same boom-bust cycle has continued into the twenty-first, shifting from the Appalachians to the Prairie to the West to the Rust Belt to Silicon Valley and the Sun Belt. Now—finally—we’re almost out of both places to live and places from which to extract our living. Our distant sources of labor, food, energy, water, and rare-earth elements are running dry. Africa won’t feed China for very long, nor can Canada and the Amazon feed and fuel the United States for more than a handful of decades—the land base simply is not big enough or productive enough by any measure to feed the surging populations. Though we fled from distant lands to America, we continue to live much like refugees, constantly moving from one place to another, never staying long enough to cultivate the richest values possible in a specific place. In doing so we’ve traded uniqueness for the generic, culture for commerce. Even those of us who can afford to usually don’t stick around long enough to harvest the fruits of our labor—nomads not seeking safety but “success.” 

We need the opposite kind of culture, a people that mean to stay. Strangely, running out of places to go and resources to plunder may be what we need most to convince us that a regenerative presence is called for. It’s easy to wreck a place when you know you can move on to the next; without another place to go, might we finally be forced to open our eyes to what’s at hand? To gaze not at a distant horizon but at the ground beneath our feet? Then might we ask, “What can I do here? What can I make of this place?” This transformation is inevitable and will happen whether we engage it or not; the earth is finite, and we’re spectacularly overshooting our resource base. This shift will not be just personal but cultural. 

“Staying” seems to be one of the key ingredients to a resilient and adaptive culture and to any civilization that can last beyond a few centuries, especially in the modern age. Rootlessness is simply not a viable operating system in a high-tech (high-footprint) world with billions of humans, and it begets a mind-set of conquest, a broken chain of cause and effect, not of accountability. Indeed, the concept of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” seems hinged upon close feedback loops between action and consequence. But true “staying” can only happen in a settled society, in cultures where “home” and community are central, where the individual is embedded in a long chain of generations, inheriting from those before, leaving for those who will come after. 

Fortunately, this pattern is hardly new. The instances in which human groups have sustained themselves in specific places for millennia occur where cultural and economic (resource) systems were organized not to maximize wealth for the individual but to grow and transfer value across human generations. Not moving to the next place has been the only way we’ve built wealth enduringly. This kind of value takes decades and centuries to develop: barns spilling over with the autumn harvest, apples stacked high to last through a winter, disease-resistant crops from hedgerow to hedgerow, towering groves of nut trees, abundant herds of game, lush pasture and sturdy animals, vigorous people mastering their work, and vibrant cultural memory. Human culture can create all of these conditions—even thriving ecosystems. But it takes generations of people skillfully committed to each other, and to a place, to do so.

Our task, then, at the dawn of the third millennium, is to transition from a society based on mining the most value as quickly as possible to a long-haul culture living not on the principal but on the interest. So how do we develop perpetual, interest-bearing systems from which we can live? We can start by looking at those places where human inhabitation has lasted millennia—and at those who dwelled and did not despoil their homes.

Whole Systems Design HQ by Mark Angelini.

This interview has been transcribed from audio, with some revised sections.

INL: What lessons can we learn from societies that have sustained themselves for millennia without depleting their resources or moving on to new lands?

Ben: Cultural examples going back many thousands of years, ideally before the historical period, if possible, are where we really need to start in order to uncover patterns and clues and ways of living and being that are viable to this planet and to having a positive presence here and hopefully to being here a lot longer, and in a beautiful, peaceful, joyful way. 

So I think in some ways, I don't want to say all the lessons we need to learn are there, are from past cultural examples, but I think most of them are. I don't think we really need to reinvent much per se. Today, so much of the emphasis, it feels like more than 99% of the focus in popular culture is on figuring out new things to solve problems. When I think it's pretty clear that nearly all the problems we have now, people have solved for in the past. Not that the problems are not more acute today, but that they're really of similar character, and they're maybe more extreme than certain problems in the past, but that ways of living and being in the past can solve most of them if we engage with them. 

The Edo period (1603-1868) in Japan offers valuable insights into sustainable living. During this era, Japan was largely self-sufficient, practicing sustainable agriculture and resource management.

Some of the specific lessons that we can learn from societies that have sustained themselves for millennia without despoiling their land base and having to move to new lands are pretty consistent, even from climate to climate. They have to do with conserving water, and always working to purify water (so not pooping in our drinking water), keeping our humanure (our solid waste) separate from our water supply, and recycling all nutrients—the idea of "waste is a resource misplaced". Removing the concept of waste from our psyches, if at all possible. That has been standard in any society thats persisted for thousands of years. The night soil cultures of Asia¹, for example, involved dense populations that recycled all of their human waste—it's not waste, but human nutrients—back into the food production system. We can't afford to dump our nutrients into the oceans and have the oceans become the repository for all the excess nutrients of the human project—all of our nutrients have to be cycled as locally as possible—so human nutrients, human effluent, is primary among them. No sustainable society over the long haul shunted their resources downhill off-site into the rivers and oceans; they cycled them on-site. So, human effluent recycling must occur everywhere, all the time. That goes for urine as well as solids, keeping those separate from our freshwater supplies. This is consistent from society to society

Covering bare soil is another one. At this point, we all know that such a common cause of societal collapse is topsoil loss: over-tillage, salinization of our soils, continual exposure of topsoil to the oxidation of the atmosphere (to sunshine)—that we know is a no-no; we can't keep doing that. Any society that's persisted in place for millennia has learned to cover their soils, has learned to perennially crop their soils, and use their precious soils in a way where erosion isn't a continuous high-intensity force. So, rebuilding topsoils and keeping our soils on the landscape, out of the rivers and the oceans.

Sustainable harvesting of the wildlife in the area is consistent from site to site, from region to region. It may include heavy harvesting of wildlife at times—pulsed harvesting—but it's using wild animal resources in ways where they can repopulate themselves (that goes without saying).

Those are some consistent examples from place to place, no matter where you are.

Perennial Allotments, Painting by David Inshaw.

INL: What role do you think modern technology and global commerce play in reinforcing the "nomadic" mindset of our society, and how can we shift towards more place-based, regenerative systems?

Ben: It seems to me that modern technology and global commerce are, in many ways, the cause of our nomadic mindset. Not only do they reinforce it, but our nomadism today and placelessness is really an emergent property of modern technology, of our commerce systems, and all of the pop culture (if we can call it culture) that sprung from an economy that has to continually make new things. It essentially seems based in novelty, in the feeling of "never enough." It seems that novelty itself is largely what's for sale because if people just had enough stuff at any point—got the latest whatever—and that was good enough, there would be less need to pump out the newest, greatest whatever it is, even when we have things that are totally adequate. It seems that novelty itself is really what drives so much of the modern economy. That sense, to me, is very connected to nomadism, because if we are bred, inculcated, and educated to be people that are always seeking something new—the next iPhone, the next car version, even when the last car version might have been better than the new one, which is often the case with vehicles—it seems, of course, we are going to be seeking new places all the time, too. Of course, everything is going to get boring and old. Of course, we are going to have a really limited horizontal view, and not a vertical view of our place itself.

Tulips blooming after a late spring snow.

And when the seasons change and we get uncomfortable with the place we live in because of the weather or whatever it is, okay, it's time to go spend a month where the weather's more comfortable for us—and we don't see the new textures in that place that the new season is there to offer us. Or it's not enough to sustain our interest or engagement, so, okay, time to move to another place, or move to another place fully when we get sick and tired of the old place.

It comes down to a lack of attachment that so many of us tend to have with places today, where it even is an option—a desirable option—to just pick up and go to some whole new region, landscape, land base, and start from scratch. Any example of place-based culture or even just families and people—think of farming families who tend to be very place-based as an example today. A lot of those people that I know in my own daily life, for instance, it's hard to imagine them moving to another place because they know their place so well. They are so embedded in that place, which comes through participation. It doesn't just come through riding bikes or skiing around or having fun in places, which to me seems like a very popular trend now—loving a place—but through recreation only. There's a stark limit there that keeps us from going deeper, which is only accessible when we're actually in participation with those places, when we're eating from the place, when we're tending to the plants and animals in a place, when we know that place sustains us directly, and we're in a reciprocal relationship with that place.

That can only come from people engaged in farming, in making a living directly from their land base—not just from enjoying the place, so to speak, in a more superficial way. Not that recreating isn't great—I love to have fun in a place and ski and swim and whatever else. But it's the participatory interaction with the place, where the place is actually directly feeding me, sustaining me, and my actions are directly contributing to the ability of that place to do that—that gets me less horizontal and more vertical in the place.

As far as how we can shift towards more place-based regenerative systems, I think committing to a place in an interactive, participatory way—starting to garden, starting to forage, starting to know the names of the plants and animals that live around us, and all the other beings that occupy and make their home here—those are ways in towards re-indigenizing ourselves with the place that we are in. All of us have indigenous ancestors; all of us are part of an indigenous lineage, truly indigenous to a place. If we consider ourselves today and ask ourselves, "Am I indigenous? Am I native to the place I live in?" we can come up with a lot of clues as to how to re-indigenize ourselves. It's easy to answer that question for many of us in the negative—no, I'm not native to this place for this or that reason. That brings us to, "How can I change that? How can I be indigenous to this place?"

A fawn on the permaculture farm.

Because I think that is all of our birthright—we all were indigenous to a place; all of our ancestors at some point were indigenous—deeply involved in their place. They were in a place or a region for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and had come to know a place intergenerationally, through intergenerational knowledge being passed down about the richness, layers, and subtleties of that place, which we can only come to know in a very deep way through an intergenerational relationship. How can we set on that path again ourselves? The clues that I've seen as to what that relationship is like tell me that that's an incredibly worthwhile place to try to get to again—that way of being in relationship.

I'm the product of nomadism too. I can't trace my ancestors back more than about three generations. I don't know what my great-great-grandfather did for a living, how he spent his days, or great-great-grandmother. I know very little even about a generation closer to me than that. Anything beyond three or four generations previous to me personally—dozens, hundreds of generations—I have no clue where they lived, what they did with their day, or what they knew. Little to none of that information has been passed down directly to me. Maybe some of that information is more subtle and is to be rediscovered in my own life; I do believe that's the case. But so many of us—maybe most of us in the world today—are part of a lineage that's been obliterated because of war, strife, the destruction of land bases, colonialism, and power plays that have caused people to move around, especially in the past few hundred to thousand years. If you go back long enough, that's not normally the case. There are indigenous systems all over the world where people spent not just hundreds of years but thousands of years in those places without moving on.

A big motivation for me is to try to re-indigenize myself to the place I happen to be in, and what taste I've gotten of that relationship makes it feel incredibly worthwhile. It is a long-term approach, and one that, if we haven't started on ourselves, seems worth starting now.

The Whole Systems Design Applied Permaculture Design Course in action.

INL: How can we reintroduce feedback loops between action and consequence in a society that often feels disconnected from the impacts of its consumption?

Ben: I think this lack of understanding of the consequences of our actions that's led to this hyper-unsustainability in our relationship with place and with Earth is a direct outgrowth of not staying in a place long enough to see—because we don't see those actions—the consequences of those actions come home to roost. We can mine a soil with corn and beans and wheat for a generation or two before we create a dust bowl or before the aquifer is so polluted that we see it making us sick directly in real time.

If you stay in a place for a few generations—five generations, ten generations—it’s much easier to see the consequences of what people have done in those places. I cite in my book that the average American moves 12 times in their lifetime. If we live 70 to 80 years, your average person in my country is living in each place for less than 10 years. You don’t even start to see seasonal patterns emerge very well if you’re in a place for 5 to 10 years max. You don’t really get to know the flow of the place. You don’t get to know the wildlife populations. What’s normal in a place? The pollinators? Who is supposed to be living in that place alongside you? What are the dynamics of their populations in relation to weather and whatever else might be affecting them?

So, because we move around so much and spend so little of our lives in any one place getting to know it, we don’t see the impact—not only of our own actions on the system but of society as a whole—of industrial society on our place, on the planet as a whole. Shifting baseline is our constant reality. Whatever is current becomes normal very easily because our concept of normal is in such a short time frame. It’s a snapshot view of a place, of what a place actually is. If our view is over a 30- or 50-year period, or intergenerational, we then can know, “This isn’t normal; this isn’t supposed to be happening,” or “Where is this butterfly or this insect or this animal? They’re supposed to be here now.” “What’s happened to this place? Wait a minute, we need to change our way of doing things because this is not supposed to be happening; this hasn’t happened in 100 years or in 500 years.” We all have ancestors who were in a place long enough to know when they saw aberrations like that. And that now passes below our radar because we’re moving around so much. 

So, as far as reintroducing those feedback loops, I think the biggest thing is to just start staying, start being a “sticker,” a piece of “sticker culture,” a culture that stays, not wanders through like the breeze. We can try to legislate these things, but as Bill McDonough² has often said in the past, “Regulation is a sign of design failure.” If we have to make it a law to do something or regulate something, that’s a cultural failure first and foremost, and it’s never really a good way of solving that problem. To me, the primary way of solving that problem is to stay—stick around in a place and deepen our relationship with it.

Ben’s farm in Vermont serves as a living laboratory for permaculture techniques.

INL: How do you approach understanding the natural systems of a piece of land to determine the most appropriate ways to “work” with it?

Ben:  The ways that we try to approach natural systems in order to derive our best strategies, our best actions—like, what should we do? As Wendell Berry³ says, “What is this place? How can I avoid destroying this place? How can I actually help this place? What’s this place discouraging me from doing? What is this place actually helping me to do?”

Those are the foremost questions in mind when we’re in what we call the site analysis phase. And not that that phase ever ends… we’re always doing site analysis. It should never stop. We should never stop listening to and learning: What should we do?

But in the beginning, when we’re on a new site, if we’ve moved to a place or we’re helping people as designers to set up the most appropriate land-based systems, those are the primary questions before we’re ideally making any actions at all. And those questions derive their answers from “What is on site?” “What are the elements of the site?” “What are the soils?” “What are the plants?” “Who are the plants?” “Who are the animals?” “And then also, what is happening here?” “So where are the winds in the summer?” “Where are the winds in the winter?” “Where do the storms come from?” “Zone and sector analysis.” “Where are the microclimates?” “Where does it get hot?” “Where does it get really cold?” “Where does it get super dry?” “Where is it often really wet?” “What are the water flows?” “Where is the wildlife corridor happening?” “Where do animals tend to move through?” It’s the same on the human end: What are the human circulation patterns, etc.?

Built elements, vegetative cover, and the direction a slope faces (aspect) compounded by the severity of the slope can often create atypical climatic conditions. These are called microclimates, and mapping them can be helpful in determining placement of new development or cropping systems. Illustrations courtesy of Whole Systems Design, LLC.

We’re trying to distill all of these patterns that are both on site and happening on site so that we may fit our actions—our own systems—that we hopefully don’t want to impose on the place but want to integrate into the place as part of the additional natural flows of the place. 

That’s how we tend to think of it. We’re not trying to add systems so much as integrate systems into the place that will help move the system towards offering more yields that we may need from the place, whether it’s food, medicine, fiber, fuel, wood to heat our homes, etc. The question is really one of how we can steer the succession happening in this place to have ever more valuable yields that we can derive our needs from.

This is one of the first permaculture principles because if we don’t obtain a yield—if we don’t derive our basic needs from the places that we live, at least our local land base or our local ecosystems—we’re going to require that they come from somewhere further away, where we don’t see the impact of that demand, and where there are other negative impacts simply from moving those yields from that place to our place. Moving stuff around is usually destructive. It’s very hard to make transport be anything other than negative. Whereas actual production of a resource doesn’t need to be negative at all. I’m gazing out at my cows grazing our sea berry alleys behind a wall of black walnuts and oak, in front of silvopasture, hedgerows of apple, pear, mulberry, and chestnut, and more oaks.

And all of that production of basic needs—fruits, nuts, meat, milk, fiber, topsoil, groundwater, infiltration, and filtration—is happening via doing good. Regeneration is an output— a side yield of producing those basic needs. Production can be incredibly synergistic and incredibly regenerative in itself.

But when I go to the store and buy macadamia nuts from Hawaii (which I do sometimes—I love macadamia nuts), every bit of those macadamias coming to me is destructive, and good luck trying to make it otherwise. Even if it was sailed here across the ocean and then moved by horse from the port of LA to here, it’s still arguably just a negative impact to transport.

The less we move stuff around, the better; that’s easy to say at the outset. The more we produce our yields in place, in synergy with the natural patterns of the place that build topsoil, filter water, and increase diversity, the more we’re moving towards a sustainable human culture.

A circular permaculture garden, known as a "mandala garden," uses a round layout with keyhole-shaped beds to maximize space and accessibility. This design supports companion planting, reduces soil compaction, conserves water, and creates a self-sustaining ecosystem.

INL: If we fully embraced a regenerative approach to land use, what do you imagine the world could look like in 50 years?

Ben: Well, that’s the question that I started asking myself 25 or 30 years ago. When I came across permaculture and ecological design, and the landscape that I live in, that I’m looking out through the window at here right now, is my attempted answer to that question. So, here, what the world could look like in 50 years is very easy for me to answer because I’ve been planting, and grazing, and installing infrastructure towards that end—towards producing that world. Fifty years isn’t that far away. We’re about 20 years there now. We’re talking about a three-dimensional ecosystem, which is also a farming system of walnuts, chestnuts, hickories, and oaks at the canopy, spaced widely in a silvopasture, a savannah mosaic. So, not as a forest, but as a woodland, where there’s a lot of sunshine coming in, but there’s also full canopy trees that are yielding nutrient-dense fruits and nuts. Apples and pears are the matriarchs of the fruit system, but also mulberries and a lot of berries in the mid and understory. 

So, then the mid and understory (the shrub layer) has the berries, especially a lot of medicinal fruits like currants and sea berries. In that layer and below, are the megafauna—the cows, grazing animals. They’re needed to cycle the biomass of the system because, without the animal ruminants, the system stagnates. We used to be in a place where megafauna moved through this part of the world. There was an eastern buffalo herd in New England and the eastern part of the United States. So, our reintroduction of the megafauna, the way we can have that function performed in this ecosystem, is through cow herds especially. It could be sheep and goats as well, but we choose cows at this scale. 

And then, below that level, we have the grasses, the plants that really hold the soil together and can do some of the most intensive soil building. All of this is predicated on turning as much of the inorganic layer of the earth that we’re farming into organic matter. 

So, if we started at 3% organic matter here, we want to be at 5% organic matter in 10 years, or 6% to 7%. And if in 50 years we want to be maybe at 8% or 10% organic matter—that’s a great metric as to how positive our presence is, our human presence is, on this place. It should basically always be going up. 

We have ponds and swales integrated into this landscape, so water—as it moves downhill—we’re slowing, spreading, and sinking that flow of water, so it’s being absorbed into the landscape, into the mountain that we live on itself.

We can ask ourselves how many new springs are popping up over the generations, over the decades here. So far, we’ve seen two new springs emerge in the last 22 years of our land use on the two sites that we’re working. Are the existing springs increasing in output, or are they drying up? They are increasing in output here, fortunately, which hopefully is a result of our action, but also potentially a result of this place getting wetter over time. It’s hard to sometimes suss out those differences. But it’s commonly known that when we slow, spread, and sink water in a place and depend more on perennial systems than just annual tillage-based systems, you will be reviving ancient, long-lost springs, and you’ll be bringing online, so to speak, new springs that may have never existed in the place to begin with. The emergence of water springs is a great example of regeneration in a place.

I imagine the herds of animals always growing in size, the wildlife herds that are here growing in size in 50 years. The trees that we planted 10, 15, and 20 years ago will all be mature in 50 years. So, the hickories, which haven’t yet started to mature and bear fruit, will be fruiting heavily by that time. The oaks, which are just starting to fruit like the swamp white oaks and bur oaks, will be in full production by that time. So, we’re talking about, just in 50 years, layers of fruits and nuts landing on the ground being the engine for both the wildlife of this place and the livestock that we are intentionally managing in this place.

And really, this place is designed not just for 50 years from now, but for hundreds of years from now. All of these perennial systems will just be activated that much more in 200 years than they are in 50 years. Most of these systems get better for hundreds and hundreds of years, the perennial systems.

As far as in 50 years, what do I picture the world looking like? You had asked what the world would look like then. I’m talking about this world right here, which is the world I have the most influence over, within my sphere of influence in a big way. As far as the larger world, I picture the diversity that we’ve helped sow on this site—all of the dozens of perennial shrub entry crops that we’ve established here—rippling outward into this neighborhood. Some of that’s already happening—I’m seeing white oak varieties pop up on the side of the road off of our property boundaries, so to speak. So, this diversity bomb that this landscape is designed to be is rippling out into the neighborhood, seeing more pears, apples, mulberries, oaks, walnuts, and chestnuts actually popping up and being part of the diversity mosaic in this neighborhood, in this watershed as a whole, and hopefully into the region as a whole.

That happens largely because people come here, pick up seeds and plants from me, and plant them in their area, in their neighborhood, in the wider region. That biodiversity is rippling outward, flourishing more and more in ever-larger circles from this area.

And then, in the larger world than that, what do cities—what could cities and other large towns look like even outside this region? I don’t really know, but if I’m imagining us being in a regenerative situation in 50 years, the cities are smaller. There are more small towns. There are more people on land. All of these depopulated rural areas have more people on them. There’s been a resurgence of rural-ification in the world. So, the cities have emptied out quite a lot into rural areas, and those people in the rural areas have their hands on the land.

So, rather than a million new farmers, what I picture in 50 years is a billion new gardeners, a billion new homestead small farmers, small-scale landholders who have intensive vegetable, fruit, and nut gardens, who are living within their own food forests, in relationship with each other. And definitely still small towns interacting, people sharing key resources like sawmills, threshing, and hay-making equipment—things that don’t make sense for us all to have. That’s a bit of what I dream of happening in this part of the world anyway, in 50 years. But I also do think, though, I do picture serious hardship on the way. I don’t picture all of that happening necessarily without some major hard stimulus getting us there.

Cows on the permaculture farm.

INL: Do you have ideas for how regenerative practices can be scaled up to have a significant impact on our global environmental issues?

Ben: My main idea for scaling regenerative practices is actually to scale them down. A friend of mine and permaculture teacher once said, “Go home and go small,” as a response to the “go big” classic adage of our society. I picture and see a multiplication of systems, a replication of systems happening across millions of people at small scale, being a much more potent positive impact than saying, “This is a great regenerative system here—let's try to make this work on 10,000 acres instead of just 50 acres.” “Oh, you have a really neat farm here and you’ve got two acres? That’s cool; how does that work on 1,000 acres?” To me, that’s actually not at all the trajectory. It’s more like: how can we get a thousand people—or a million people—to do what you’re doing on two acres? That’s more of the question that excites me because I see that as much more possible, for one, and much more of an empowering and synergizing result, like better for both land and people, to say, “Hey, let’s just get more people doing that.” How do we have more people engaged in that way? And also, it’s much more reliably producing that beautiful outcome, which makes us excited about that two-acre or ten-acre model to begin with.

What I’ve seen is when we try to scale up that amazing regenerative system, it isn’t that amazing regenerative system anymore. That scale is a key factor, and eyes per acre or hands per acre is a huge part of it. Humans are often the limiting factor in how regenerative a system can be. 

I know that’s flipping this whole kind of nihilistic sense of “We’re just bad. We’ve got to do less” on its head, which is intentional. Actually, it’s the human element that’s super key. And what do we need more than that in today’s day and age? I don’t think there’s anything we need more than more people to be on land, more people to have a home that’s not just in a high-rise or in a cramped, polluted space. But how do we get more people outdoors, engaged in their ecosystem? Not only is that needed from a land use perspective, but all the best, most regenerative land use systems I’ve seen are very high people per acre. There’s much less acres per person than the classic modern farm model—which has been a project of how to have the fewest people manage the most land—which is what has gotten us to where we are today. And not making that mistake with the regenerative agricultural movement and saying, “How do we do that too for regeneration? How do we scale that up?” because we’re going to make the same mistakes. We’re going to end up in a similar place if that’s our model.

So, I would flip that on its head and say, “How do we actually keep everything as small as possible, just make as many examples of them as possible?” 

Ben sharing hands-on permaculture knowledge with students.

INL: What has been the most rewarding experience you’ve had on your farm?

Ben: The most rewarding experiences that I run into in my day-to-day on the farm here, and the homestead, are the surprises, the outputs and happenings, the life happenings, emergences that I didn’t expect—that I didn’t design for—like a really special plant that we didn’t know could live here but is amazingly valuable, like persimmon or pawpaw or a type of white oak, or whatever it may be. Not only is it nursed along and living here, but then it starts sprouting up in a place I never planted it. This plant actually could be at home here and native to here, so that re-indigenizing—like we talked about earlier—not just of ourselves, but of the species that we’re assisting and living with and partnering with.

Then also seeing the rippling of species outward offsite, as I mentioned before, is really neat to see. The diversity ripples move outward from just impacting this particular property—which is kind of a limiting term—but the land that I pay taxes on, moving beyond those invisible boundaries to affect the ecosystem in a larger way.

Also, in the last six or seven years, since my son has been with us in our lives, seeing him integrate with the system and seeing him grow up in this living polyculture that is our home and gaining a literacy and fluency with the system that has only come to me in my late 20s, 30s, 40s—some of those things are already his own. His own literacy is already within his ways of seeing and interacting at age 3, 4, 5, 6. That’s really heartening to see that this doesn’t need to happen just for adults—we can accelerate not just the succession of our landscapes in a diversity and ecological way, but we can accelerate the cultural succession, the cultural remembering, and the cultural relearning and reskilling through this type of interaction and engagement. You really see that when you see children know that “This wild Monarda is food.” My son came back one day from his preschool program and said the teacher told them not to eat this mint, and he knew it was edible. She said, “No, no, you can’t eat that,” and he said, “No, I know that’s food; it had a square stem, it was a mint. We can eat that.” My wife and I were like, “Yeah, that’s true. That is an edible food.” To see your child have a clarity of understanding that many adults often don’t is really inspiring. That’s not the best example because most of us adults don’t have a lot of fluency with the system, but to realize that your child can get where you’ve gotten when you're 45 by the time they’re 15 years old helps the whole project that we’re a part of be a lot less daunting.

We can be at a level that’s really hard for us to even appreciate—and just in a generation or two, if we really get going on it now. By “get going,” I mean get immersing, get our hands on the system, get interacting. Especially at a young age, help others get interacting and participating. We can be in a way of relationship, in a depth of relationship that maybe we as adults can’t even appreciate fully right now—but they’ll have in themselves.

You can learn more about Ben Falk’s practice at Whole Systems Design, and we highly recommend his book ‘The Resilient Farm and Homestead’.

1. Night soil cultures in Asia refer to traditional practices involving the use of human excrement, known as "night soil," as a fertilizer for agriculture. This practice has been prominent in various Asian cultures, particularly in China, Japan, and Korea, where it played a significant role in agricultural systems before the widespread adoption of chemical fertilizers.

2. Bill (William) McDonough is an American architect and academic known for his work in sustainable design. Co-author of Cradle to Cradle, he advocates for creating regenerative, waste-free systems in architecture and product design.

3. Wendell Berry is an American writer, poet, and farmer who advocates for sustainable agriculture and environmental stewardship.