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Speed Permaculture 101
Jul. 21st, 2022 11:50 pmI haven’t had a chance to edit yet but I want to get this up.
Okay, going back to basics a little bit. I'm going to dig into some of the foundational ideas as I tend to apply them, and clarify my thinking as they apply to Threshold etc. I was looking for some 101 articles for a friend and couldn’t find any that thought on an appropriate scale. It looks like folks minimize or discard parts they find inconvenient or grapple with, but I think the thing really sings better as a whole. Permaculture is often thought of as a garden or land design method, but it really is a design method in general: these same principles can inform the construction of built human environment, social structures, etc.
Ethics
Land care can be reductively thought of as maintaining the wellness of the land under stewardship, or reducing inputs or chemicals. The soil, atmosphere, water quality, etc should improve over time, both the parts of the world you have direct impact on and the indirect impacts you can shape in any way. Permaculturalists don’t put off this work until this or that eventuality, it is the foundational first principle. IME care is allowed to have its fullest meaning here: yes, work to the betterment of that land and the system it contains, but also allow your heart into it. Feel about the land and it will help guide your actions and bring you to understand what improvement actually looks like.
People care means actively building people’s well-being into the system: your own well-being (you are a people) and those of community near and far. This can mean anything from not setting yourself up for overwork to bringing your neighbour some eggs so they don’t mind your dog barking to making sure the folks who produce your tomatoes get a living wage, but more foundationally it means we’re not just gardening here. See and consider the people involved and use what you do to be kind rather than to be escapist. We’re all dependent on the people around us to live; a resilient and long-lived system therefore maintains other people’s well-being.
Fair share stands directly opposed to our current capitalist instinct to amass value. Instead it leads us to protect ourselves, not by hoarding, but by protecting those around us: the world is capable of bestowing tremendous and unpredictable abundance; if we keep what we need and share that abundance we’re building a community ethic that’s far more protective of us during times of unpredictable scarcity. This ethic builds resilience into the system for individuals, but it also builds efficiency into the system around the need for storage, uneven but intense work demanded by the land, distribution of specialized knowledge, and ability to average production levels across many people and systems.
Principles
Many of these somewhat overlap. I’ll try not to be too repetitive, but I’ll flag where I think they most strongly feed back into each other.
Observe andinteract is interpreted, often, as sitting back for the first year on a new property to see what happens where. Certainly it emphasizes the importance of not coming to a place with the template you carry in your head on what your space should look like; instead look around and let the particular characteristics of place inform the systems structure and outputs. But! It’s also easy to get lost in watching. You are part of this system, and you can’t entirely learn about it just by sitting back and watching. Try things, small slow things, and see what happens. Learn from that interaction through observation, then interact again. Think of this as a series of conversations between you and the land: you need to both listen and speak to have a good conversation. Do both. This links up to accept feedback which is gained through observation, notice and respond to change, and understand what in your space is a truly renewable resource. Don’t forget to observe, not just the plants and animals and weather and sun patterns on the land, but also the people nearby and what works for them on both a practical and social level.
Catch and store energy of course speaks to systems like passive solar and storing water on the highest feasible point on the property so it doesn’t need to be pumped upwards to work. I also think of it as storing personal energy: when you have a burst of wanting to work outdoors or think about the system, put that to use instead of letting it drain away. It’s easier to catch energy if the system focuses on work you like to do rather than what you dislike; I don’t like weeding or mowing so I have a low-weeding system mowed by geese, and I do like occasionally scything weeds and feeding geese. In this way things that might drain away my energy, like weeding, are replaced by something that works with my natural interest and energy cycles, like big bursts of feeding pigs scythed weeds. This rides on the back of the fundamental observation to know where and how energy flows through the system, where it gets stuck, where and how it originates. Energy is the fundamental building block of renewable resources and they will store it in a good design, similar to how my aspen saplings go from an energy drain (cutting them all the time to keep my lawn free) to a source of abundance (cutting them once a year to chip for chicken runs or pig food, or every couple years for biomass). Waste is unstored, uncaptured energy, so producing no waste keeps the energy in the system.
Obtain a yield stands with interacting in that it situates you as part of the system. Permaculture is not an intellectual exercise. It’s a way to design systems that work. A system works if it produces some sort of abundance. A lot has been written on the way a yield might be beauty or appreciation or relaxation; it can also be food and learning. I want to tie this into the permaculture tool of function stacking though: everything in the system should serve multiple purposes (the guideline is at least 3) so everything should be producing yields for everything else. Make sure you’re a part of that system, and that you’re not shy about taking what you need from it. This is the way the system continues: if it doesn’t provide for you in the form of satisfaction, joy, food, money, whatever-- you won’t keep doing it. That’s just basic sustainability.
Apply self-regulation and accept feedback because you won’t get it right the first, second, third, fourth, or millionth time. Plan for an iterative process with lots of observation. Small and slow changes, allow for course correctiona and deep observation to inform them.. There is a lot to learn about how all the elements in the system interact. Change is a constant. Your system is never finished, it’s constantly moving and you are required to constantly learn with it. Use self-regulation and don’t lead with all your resources even when it’s so exciting in the beginning; don’t be crushed when things don’t work out as you’d hoped. Save some space, time, money, and energy for the next step, when you know a little more. The land and the system are excellent teachers full of free lessons, that is, feedback.
Use and value renewable resources (and abundance) can be read as just, substitute electricity or wind power for gas. When capturing energy well and using small and slow solutions instead of large-scale industrial solutions, though, this principle takes on another meaning. Observe what’s available in abundance in the system. What recurs? What is there so much of that it feels like waste? What can it do? Design your system around that, even if it’s not the system you expected going into the process. Every site is different and every steward is different, so every system will have different resources of value, and different levels of abundance and renewability in them. I have an abundance of water and grass so I use geese as my lawnmowers; they incidentally produce a yield. Understand the difference between this and a solar-powered lawn-cutting robot and a hand mower and a sheep and just not having a lawn. Each one of these relies on different personal, ecological, and industrial resources.
Produce no waste because waste is a sign of an inefficient system. Building these systems is a real intellectual and observational exercise and requires a lot of learning through iterated design and feedback. It takes time to observe waste in a system, rethink it as a renewable resource and figure out how to incorporate it either with intervention or by letting it flow itself back into a system that you add complication to. But producing no waste is also a support to the ethics of land care - to not treating some other place as a dumping ground for undesirable leftovers. In a lot of ways it just means that putting on permaculture lenses turns waste into a yield.
Design from patterns to details is direction for those of us who tend to get lost at one end or the other of the scale. Sure, this one trick is cool, but does it serve the greater pattern? Sure, the greater pattern sounds great, but can it be supported by detail? And detail must be supported by observations for a robust system, and will sometimes not work out, thus giving us valuable feedback and prompting us to change the system over time on both our anticipated pattern and in the details that make it up.
Integrate rather than segregate goes a lot of western thought. One of the reasons given for the colonization of the Americas was that when plants and animals were integrated in space and time we could not understand them as a human-developed, productive system. Learn the relationships between all elements in a system, how and what types of energy flow between them, and how to translate it into abundance elsewhere in the system rather than waste. This in turn can be efficient with energy as natural forces can take over a lot of our work: drop leaves into mulch where they grow to feed a neighbouring plant instead of being carted away to compost and then carted back, run the pigs through the orchard rather than picking up all the apples and moving them. Integrating well, rather than setting up a competing set of individuals, should draw from a good observational knowledge of the elements and is supported by the tool of function stacking.
Use small and slow solutions to learn through observation and feedback and also to reduce the sunk cost fallacy and thus resistance to change. Holding some energy in reserve, be it physical, financial, or emotional, reduces the system’s immediate impact on the land. That energy comes from somewhere, and it will have an impact on the landscape in proportion to the amount of energy used. Fast solutions are flashy and attractive but they don’t grow with the landscape, they tend to leave a hole somewhere else in the world and thus violate the ethic of land care, and -- if something does well in your system it will often self-propagate or grow somewhat easily, reducing the resources required in the end.
Use and value diversity is a hard one for me to speak to because diversity is a joy in itself for me. I think it goes without saying at this point that diversity increases resilience, that when you have many different resources then if one fails the others can still provide: in a wet year maybe the corn does well but the squash fails, or the early corn dries but the late one molds in the field. Diversity allows for more building blocks for the tool of function stacking, which allows the system to catch and store many different kinds of energy and reduce waste when the elements are well integrated. But also: diversity is beautiful. Many of us are just drawn to variety, to a corn with varied colouring or a meal with many elements, and that is a yieldin itself.
Use edges and value the marginal which is basically how to integrate instead of segregating diversity in a slow and small way. When things bump up against each other they can interact, each one lending its own properties to the specific edge between it and its neighbour. This overlap creates a unique set of properties, a diversity of combinations from which surprising properties can arise. Margins are where the elements of the system web into the system itself.
Creatively use and respond to change because change is the one certainty. It is going to happen. A system that doesn’t anticipate and embrace change is a dead system; a system that sees change as an asset and a resource will always have plenty of resources - change is definitely a renewable resource. Resilience and sustainability are a measure of how well a system takes advantage of the inevitability of change. On the other hand change is generative; it opens up opportunities which will allow a system to improve, even if it needs to break first.
Tools
Zones & sectors are a method of understanding energy flow in a system: where is it easiest to apply human energy and attention, and when energy comes in where does it come from, in what forms and what patterns?
Function stacking - input, output, time means that anything within the system should serve more than one function, and that things which provide functions should be appropriately spread over time. For instance, a plant may provide food, shade, and mulch; in turn food plants should ripen across the whole season if you want to eat off them as fresh food, or all at once if you want to have a canning bee. A pond may provide potential energy storage, water storage, plant habitat, heat storage, and fish habitat. The further a designer takes this principle, the more they can see subtle function interdependencies, the more they will understand their system and be able to optimize it.
View relationships, not objects which I think is basically what the above is describing.
Okay, going back to basics a little bit. I'm going to dig into some of the foundational ideas as I tend to apply them, and clarify my thinking as they apply to Threshold etc. I was looking for some 101 articles for a friend and couldn’t find any that thought on an appropriate scale. It looks like folks minimize or discard parts they find inconvenient or grapple with, but I think the thing really sings better as a whole. Permaculture is often thought of as a garden or land design method, but it really is a design method in general: these same principles can inform the construction of built human environment, social structures, etc.
Ethics
Land care can be reductively thought of as maintaining the wellness of the land under stewardship, or reducing inputs or chemicals. The soil, atmosphere, water quality, etc should improve over time, both the parts of the world you have direct impact on and the indirect impacts you can shape in any way. Permaculturalists don’t put off this work until this or that eventuality, it is the foundational first principle. IME care is allowed to have its fullest meaning here: yes, work to the betterment of that land and the system it contains, but also allow your heart into it. Feel about the land and it will help guide your actions and bring you to understand what improvement actually looks like.
People care means actively building people’s well-being into the system: your own well-being (you are a people) and those of community near and far. This can mean anything from not setting yourself up for overwork to bringing your neighbour some eggs so they don’t mind your dog barking to making sure the folks who produce your tomatoes get a living wage, but more foundationally it means we’re not just gardening here. See and consider the people involved and use what you do to be kind rather than to be escapist. We’re all dependent on the people around us to live; a resilient and long-lived system therefore maintains other people’s well-being.
Fair share stands directly opposed to our current capitalist instinct to amass value. Instead it leads us to protect ourselves, not by hoarding, but by protecting those around us: the world is capable of bestowing tremendous and unpredictable abundance; if we keep what we need and share that abundance we’re building a community ethic that’s far more protective of us during times of unpredictable scarcity. This ethic builds resilience into the system for individuals, but it also builds efficiency into the system around the need for storage, uneven but intense work demanded by the land, distribution of specialized knowledge, and ability to average production levels across many people and systems.
Principles
Many of these somewhat overlap. I’ll try not to be too repetitive, but I’ll flag where I think they most strongly feed back into each other.
Observe andinteract is interpreted, often, as sitting back for the first year on a new property to see what happens where. Certainly it emphasizes the importance of not coming to a place with the template you carry in your head on what your space should look like; instead look around and let the particular characteristics of place inform the systems structure and outputs. But! It’s also easy to get lost in watching. You are part of this system, and you can’t entirely learn about it just by sitting back and watching. Try things, small slow things, and see what happens. Learn from that interaction through observation, then interact again. Think of this as a series of conversations between you and the land: you need to both listen and speak to have a good conversation. Do both. This links up to accept feedback which is gained through observation, notice and respond to change, and understand what in your space is a truly renewable resource. Don’t forget to observe, not just the plants and animals and weather and sun patterns on the land, but also the people nearby and what works for them on both a practical and social level.
Catch and store energy of course speaks to systems like passive solar and storing water on the highest feasible point on the property so it doesn’t need to be pumped upwards to work. I also think of it as storing personal energy: when you have a burst of wanting to work outdoors or think about the system, put that to use instead of letting it drain away. It’s easier to catch energy if the system focuses on work you like to do rather than what you dislike; I don’t like weeding or mowing so I have a low-weeding system mowed by geese, and I do like occasionally scything weeds and feeding geese. In this way things that might drain away my energy, like weeding, are replaced by something that works with my natural interest and energy cycles, like big bursts of feeding pigs scythed weeds. This rides on the back of the fundamental observation to know where and how energy flows through the system, where it gets stuck, where and how it originates. Energy is the fundamental building block of renewable resources and they will store it in a good design, similar to how my aspen saplings go from an energy drain (cutting them all the time to keep my lawn free) to a source of abundance (cutting them once a year to chip for chicken runs or pig food, or every couple years for biomass). Waste is unstored, uncaptured energy, so producing no waste keeps the energy in the system.
Obtain a yield stands with interacting in that it situates you as part of the system. Permaculture is not an intellectual exercise. It’s a way to design systems that work. A system works if it produces some sort of abundance. A lot has been written on the way a yield might be beauty or appreciation or relaxation; it can also be food and learning. I want to tie this into the permaculture tool of function stacking though: everything in the system should serve multiple purposes (the guideline is at least 3) so everything should be producing yields for everything else. Make sure you’re a part of that system, and that you’re not shy about taking what you need from it. This is the way the system continues: if it doesn’t provide for you in the form of satisfaction, joy, food, money, whatever-- you won’t keep doing it. That’s just basic sustainability.
Apply self-regulation and accept feedback because you won’t get it right the first, second, third, fourth, or millionth time. Plan for an iterative process with lots of observation. Small and slow changes, allow for course correctiona and deep observation to inform them.. There is a lot to learn about how all the elements in the system interact. Change is a constant. Your system is never finished, it’s constantly moving and you are required to constantly learn with it. Use self-regulation and don’t lead with all your resources even when it’s so exciting in the beginning; don’t be crushed when things don’t work out as you’d hoped. Save some space, time, money, and energy for the next step, when you know a little more. The land and the system are excellent teachers full of free lessons, that is, feedback.
Use and value renewable resources (and abundance) can be read as just, substitute electricity or wind power for gas. When capturing energy well and using small and slow solutions instead of large-scale industrial solutions, though, this principle takes on another meaning. Observe what’s available in abundance in the system. What recurs? What is there so much of that it feels like waste? What can it do? Design your system around that, even if it’s not the system you expected going into the process. Every site is different and every steward is different, so every system will have different resources of value, and different levels of abundance and renewability in them. I have an abundance of water and grass so I use geese as my lawnmowers; they incidentally produce a yield. Understand the difference between this and a solar-powered lawn-cutting robot and a hand mower and a sheep and just not having a lawn. Each one of these relies on different personal, ecological, and industrial resources.
Produce no waste because waste is a sign of an inefficient system. Building these systems is a real intellectual and observational exercise and requires a lot of learning through iterated design and feedback. It takes time to observe waste in a system, rethink it as a renewable resource and figure out how to incorporate it either with intervention or by letting it flow itself back into a system that you add complication to. But producing no waste is also a support to the ethics of land care - to not treating some other place as a dumping ground for undesirable leftovers. In a lot of ways it just means that putting on permaculture lenses turns waste into a yield.
Design from patterns to details is direction for those of us who tend to get lost at one end or the other of the scale. Sure, this one trick is cool, but does it serve the greater pattern? Sure, the greater pattern sounds great, but can it be supported by detail? And detail must be supported by observations for a robust system, and will sometimes not work out, thus giving us valuable feedback and prompting us to change the system over time on both our anticipated pattern and in the details that make it up.
Integrate rather than segregate goes a lot of western thought. One of the reasons given for the colonization of the Americas was that when plants and animals were integrated in space and time we could not understand them as a human-developed, productive system. Learn the relationships between all elements in a system, how and what types of energy flow between them, and how to translate it into abundance elsewhere in the system rather than waste. This in turn can be efficient with energy as natural forces can take over a lot of our work: drop leaves into mulch where they grow to feed a neighbouring plant instead of being carted away to compost and then carted back, run the pigs through the orchard rather than picking up all the apples and moving them. Integrating well, rather than setting up a competing set of individuals, should draw from a good observational knowledge of the elements and is supported by the tool of function stacking.
Use small and slow solutions to learn through observation and feedback and also to reduce the sunk cost fallacy and thus resistance to change. Holding some energy in reserve, be it physical, financial, or emotional, reduces the system’s immediate impact on the land. That energy comes from somewhere, and it will have an impact on the landscape in proportion to the amount of energy used. Fast solutions are flashy and attractive but they don’t grow with the landscape, they tend to leave a hole somewhere else in the world and thus violate the ethic of land care, and -- if something does well in your system it will often self-propagate or grow somewhat easily, reducing the resources required in the end.
Use and value diversity is a hard one for me to speak to because diversity is a joy in itself for me. I think it goes without saying at this point that diversity increases resilience, that when you have many different resources then if one fails the others can still provide: in a wet year maybe the corn does well but the squash fails, or the early corn dries but the late one molds in the field. Diversity allows for more building blocks for the tool of function stacking, which allows the system to catch and store many different kinds of energy and reduce waste when the elements are well integrated. But also: diversity is beautiful. Many of us are just drawn to variety, to a corn with varied colouring or a meal with many elements, and that is a yieldin itself.
Use edges and value the marginal which is basically how to integrate instead of segregating diversity in a slow and small way. When things bump up against each other they can interact, each one lending its own properties to the specific edge between it and its neighbour. This overlap creates a unique set of properties, a diversity of combinations from which surprising properties can arise. Margins are where the elements of the system web into the system itself.
Creatively use and respond to change because change is the one certainty. It is going to happen. A system that doesn’t anticipate and embrace change is a dead system; a system that sees change as an asset and a resource will always have plenty of resources - change is definitely a renewable resource. Resilience and sustainability are a measure of how well a system takes advantage of the inevitability of change. On the other hand change is generative; it opens up opportunities which will allow a system to improve, even if it needs to break first.
Tools
Zones & sectors are a method of understanding energy flow in a system: where is it easiest to apply human energy and attention, and when energy comes in where does it come from, in what forms and what patterns?
Function stacking - input, output, time means that anything within the system should serve more than one function, and that things which provide functions should be appropriately spread over time. For instance, a plant may provide food, shade, and mulch; in turn food plants should ripen across the whole season if you want to eat off them as fresh food, or all at once if you want to have a canning bee. A pond may provide potential energy storage, water storage, plant habitat, heat storage, and fish habitat. The further a designer takes this principle, the more they can see subtle function interdependencies, the more they will understand their system and be able to optimize it.
View relationships, not objects which I think is basically what the above is describing.
