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was shameful, home-canned food unsanitary, and old cars symbols of failure. Today’s consumers are already conditioned to throw away perfectly good TVs, computers, and MP3 players to make room for the latest model.
    It’s not easy to see through the consensual illusion that buying stuff will make you happy. But the people I’ve met through Make have succeeded, to one degree or another, in deprogramming themselves of the lifelong consumer brainwashing they’ve received. They’ve learned how to stop depending so much on faceless corporations to provide them with what they need (and desire) and to begin doing some of the things humans have been doing for themselves since the dawn of time. They’re willing to take back some of the control we’ve handed over to institutions. They believe that the sense of control and accomplishment you get from doing something yourself, using your own hands and mind, can’t be achieved in any other way. They make things not because they are born with a special talent for making but because they choose to develop and hone their ability. And yes, some of the things they make are mistakes, but they aren’t afraid of making them, because they’ve rejected the lesson from the Bernays school of brainwashing that says handmade stuff is bad because it isn’t perfect.
    The alpha DIYers I have gotten to know over the years have inspired me to make things and make mistakes. Once I discovered how much fun it was to become active in the process of making, maintaining, and modifying the things I use and consume every day, the little flaws, quirks, and imperfections in my handiwork stopped becoming shameful and instead felt like badges of honor.

2
    KILLING MY LAWN
    “The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”
    —ABRAHAM LINCOLN
     
     
     
     
    In 1978 a Tasmanian field biologist named Bill Mollison and his student David Holmgren published a self-sufficiency guidebook called Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements. The book offers instructions for designing small-scale agricultural systems that are able to use waste products (instead of purchased fertilizers, herbicides, and livestock feed) as raw materials. Permaculture meant “permanent agriculture,” but Mollison later said it could also mean “permanent culture,” because this type of agriculture has a lasting ripple effect on many other aspects of the lives of its practitioners.
    Mollison was born in 1928 and spent much of his early career studying the different ecosystems of Australia and Tasmania, paying special attention to the mutually beneficial relationships among the things that lived in them. In 1959 he designed a system that defined plants, trees, and marsupials as “components” that interacted with one another in Tasmanian rain forests.
    As a result of this work, Mollison had a revelation: Nature’s components could be snapped together like Tinkertoy pieces to create thriving ecosystems that provided fuel for heat, food for people and livestock, and materials that could be used for construction, clothing, furniture, and other needs.
    To give an example of how components can be connected in a simple way, consider the “three sisters” companion-planting method for growing beans, squash, and maize. Cornstalks provide natural climbing poles for beans, beans add nitrogen to the soil (an essential ingredient that many plants deplete), and squash’s broad, prickly leaves provide ground cover to prevent the soil from drying out and discourage vermin from raiding the crop. The three-sisters method saves effort (not having to make a beanpole or spread mulch) and money (for insecticide, fertilizer, and water).
    Over the years, Mollison, Holmgren, and a growing legion of “permies” have continued to develop the process of designing small-scale ecosystems that are beneficial to humans. I became interested in permaculture when my friend Terry