Science is one way of knowing the world. To say that it is the only way or that only it can validate other ways of knowledge is colonizing.
To me science is something I can practice. A methodology that can reveal an understanding about the world. I can ask a question, create an hypothesis, and then verify to the best of my ability its accuracy.
When others tell me “the science is settled”, “follow the science”, or some other “but science” exclamation I have to question an untold number of motivations and influences that can be unpacked from that statement. It leaves the realm of my direct observation and enters the fog of faith. I trust the method can produce but not all the actors involved any statement.
Reduced to the level of all the other second hand information that I have access to, it is worth knowing but always taken with a grain of salt.
Spam is an ever present reality on the internet. I get my fair share here, as I was clearing the backlog this morning one spam comment caught my eye. The text used a quote from Goethe, in order to appear as a real contribution to the conversation, but of course the link provided lead to something unsavory.
I think this quote is worth sharing, I hope it brightens your day!
A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the charm of existence in this spot, which was created for the bliss of souls like mine. I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents. I should be incapable of drawing a single stroke at the present moment; and yet I feel that I never was a greater artist than now. When, while the lovely valley teems with vapour around me, and the meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the inner sanctuary, I throw myself down among the tall grass by the trickling stream; and, as I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants are noticed by me: when I hear the buzz of the little world among the stalks, and grow familiar with the countless indescribable forms of the insects and flies, then I feel the presence of the Almighty, who formed us in his own image, and the breath of that universal love which bears and sustains us, as it floats around us in an eternity of bliss; and then, my friend, when darkness overspreads my eyes, and heaven and earth seem to dwell in my soul and absorb its power, like the form of a beloved mistress, then I often think with longing, Oh, would I could describe these conceptions, could impress upon paper all that is living so full and warm within me, that it might be the mirror of my soul, as my soul is the mirror of the infinite God! O my friend — but it is too much for my strength — I sink under the weight of the splendour of these visions!
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
This is my current thinking on a permaculture design process. I’m sure it will mauture and change on down the road, but this is just a snapshot.
Over the years I’ve never been able to do any of the OBRADIMET or SADIMET type design processes that are commonly taught in permaculture. However, I’ve observed my own process of working in the world with permaculture and have teased out a pattern I’m calling Action Cycle. It works weather you’re designing a property or the next move in your life.
Vision is the why we do. It’s where we are going but not where we will end up, owing to the influence of many other beings we share this world with and their own visions. It reflects the permaculture ethics of earth, people, and future care. Vision keeps us directional and also begets shorter goals that move towards the vision that are the actual apparatus of change.
Awareness is opening yourself up to what is really going on in the world and all the other people that we share it with. It’s an ongoing, ever expanding process itself. If we let awareness completely dominate we would never get anything done but if we ignore it what we do won’t reflect reality. It’s always growing and changing.
Process is how you do things. That can vary from consensus to royal rule, hand made to industry made, fossil fueled to horsepower, improvised to meticulously planned. It affects the actors involved and creates their experience of being. As our awareness and vision change they will affect our process so to can process change awareness and vision.
These spin around until a critical mass is achieved and action begins to happen. Action can inch forward or move in complete units. It brings forth change in the world that moves us closer to our vision, creates new opportunities for awareness, and plays out a certain process that specifically affects the world. Action creates reaction and we begin the whole new cycle begins.
For example, if you were working as a chef for a tech company in central California, you might have a vision of buying a property with no mortgage, starting a mobile pop up concept, and using some perennial veggies/fruits grown on that property to highlight the food for the pop up. And raise chickens too. Process would be working on your chef job to make it more sustainable/profitable, researching land for sale to help shape might include checking land prices, making contacts with farms, researching mobile pop up requirements, calculating how long you would have to work/save to make that happen, figuring out how to do it progressively (what’s the minimum required to start), brainstorming alternative visions. With awareness expanding in these specific ways the next right thing to do to.
Each being that we share the world with participates in the same cycle. When we are aware of something we change our process, thus change the multitude of effects that come from our actions. The action cycle is easy and natural to follow. If your not sure what to do start to increase your awareness, that will change both your vision and process, naturally leading action. And the cycle repeats.
I’ve seen a fair amount of folks reaching out on the internet for help with permaculture design. “How do I add permaculture to my property!” “Help make this more permaculture!” The one thing that I most often recommend to them to give structure to their project is the scale of permanence. It lets us know so much about a site, giving enough information so that I can actually make reasonable suggestions about what ways they might be able to influence it.
The Scale of Permanence is both a description of the local conditions that matter and a guide to the relative ease or difficulty of making any changes on their site. Also any changes to the left side of the scale have effects to the right, so climate affects all the other aspects while buildings (the built environment) really only influences zones, soils, and aesthetics. The idea being that you start making changes from left to right as you design.
How to use the elements of the scale of permanence.
These are some of the things to look for about your site. It can be helpful to put this information together in a document.
Climate type – Where it’s sunny and shady depends on your sun angle, which changes throughout the year. How much rainfall are you expecting? What impact might wind have on your site?
Landform – How do the contours of the site move water, is it an extracting pattern? What are the possibilities to influence the way water flows across your site and capture more? What is the sand/silt/clay content of the soil?
Water – What signs are there of more or less water. Does it pool or flow anywhere? Intentionally or unintentionally.
Access – How do you enter the site? How do people get around? Where do you need to go and what do you need to do on site?
Vegetation & Wildlife – What plants and animals do you already have on your site? What can you add?
Microclimate – Where is the environment enhanced or moderated by things such as sunlight, water, or wind?
Built environment – What buildings are already on the property and how do they interact with it to create additional microclimates?
Zones – How do you visualize the way that your land is used?
Soils – How rich are your soils?
Aesthetics – What does the way it look communicate to others?
Gathering all these data points will give you an excellent window into the current conditions of your land, as well as give insight into what the possibilities for change are and potentially what order to do them in. If you’d like help sorting these all out you can check out my Permaculture Design page. I’d love to help you integrate permaculture into your life!
If you know me, you know that I’m a big fan of working collaboratively. There’s just a way that working with other people makes things real. One project has been working with the Great Lakes Permaculture Design Collaborative, Me, Rhonda Baird, and William Faith.
Originally we recorded these lectures as a intro to each of the topics in our first design course together in 2016. The idea was to divide up the topics between the three of us. One would present 10 slides on a subject and the other two would comment. In combination with the reading from the Designer’s Manual and later Practical Permaculture they’ve provided a solid foundation to conduct meaningful discussions in our PDC’s. We’ve been able to use them again in later courses and have found that the material has held up well.
We’d like to share this material with you, to help you on your own permaculture journey. It can be part of a path forward, away from the multi-layered crises of today and towards the future that we want.
What might look like a mundane categorization, can also be used as a valuable tool when examining and balancing any system.
David Holmgren, the co-originator of permaculture says “The permaculture flower shows key domains that require transformation to create a sustainable culture.” That is, each petal (or domain) represents a category into which we can apply permaculture in the world. But if you try to use the flower as a directional compass to orient yourself in that particular category, you’ll always find every domain simultaneously. Again and again there are always aspects of each topic examined that fit into each petal.
That is precisely what makes the permaculture flower so useful. Any topic examined, from something as general as farming to something as specific as a solar panel, manifests in all of these domains of the flower simultaneously. Together the flower represents the different facets of any single topic or object, therefore we can improve our designs by observing and interacting with each of these domains as we do our work.
As it manifests, permaculture is most obvious in the domains Land, Building, and Tools & Technology, in the physical world. It is less obvious in the other four domains of Education & Culture, Health & Spiritual Well-being, Finance & Economics, and Land Tenure & Community Governance. They represent what has been called “invisible structures” but perhaps is better called social systems as their patterns are quite visible, just often overlooked. An undeveloped petal would be a drag on any system, while conversely an over developed petal can not make up for the lack of development in the others.
In Practice
So for example, when we put up a gutter on a building not only does it interact with the flow of water and change the way that flow is distributed in a physical place(Land & Nature Stewardship), it is made of materials that were sourced, transported, assembled, and then transported again with a certain effect on the larger landscape (Building), and represents its own set of tools and concepts in its construction and installation (Tools & Technology). At the same time it also has a whole set of information about when and how we use it (Education & Culture), how it affects us physically and through our own vision of ourselves (Health & Spiritual Well-being), there is a whole economy behind that gutter as well as our means to obtain it (Finance & Economics), and finally there are certain regulations about what you can or can’t do in putting it up (Land Tenure & Community Governance).
In the example above, putting up a gutter may be no simple act when we consider all of the domains. It comes down to how wide of a view we’re willing and able to take. It also takes some prioritization to realize what is significant or what we can actually change. That’s where the ethics and principles or tools like the scale of permanence or the 8 forms of capital can help us to examine and connect to the different domains and create lasting, beneficial change in a healthy system.
The different petals together represent:
Land & Nature Stewardship – A specific place and its inhabitants, how they increase or decrease the ecology. What is the cause?
Building – The manmade environment. Specific structures and their construction. What is the total cost and effect over the whole life of the structure?
Tools & Technology – Physical objects that are used to manipulate the environment and concepts relating to how they function. – What tools are commonly used? What ideas and ways of thinking are required for us to operate the way we do.
Education & Culture – Specific, local ideas relating to how life is lived and how that information is transmitted. What is unique about the local culture?
Health & Spiritual Wellbeing – The effect that something has on its environment, both physically and mentally. What does it’s scale and demeanor tell us about ourselves?
Finances & Economics – How the materials are obtained and brought to a site vs how they are extracted. The larger flow of materials and its scale. How does it fit into the economy?
Land Tenure & Community Governance – How decisions are made about a space or it’s inhabitants. Who is included. In what ways do you or the world around you participate?
In the permaculture course with the GLPDC, in each of the topics we teach, we strive to fill our designs with all the domains of the petals.
One of the great rules of design is do something basic right. Then everything gets much more right of itself. But if you do something basic wrong – if you make what I call a Type 1 error – you can get nothing else right. – Bill Mollison
Fancy, but is this the right thing to put here?
The quote above is something like how my introduction to the concept of a Type 1 error went, some comment made by Mollison in an interview. A Type 1 error sounds important, something we must never do, but what exactly is it?
When I think of Type 1 errors, I think of things like positioning the length of a house on a North/South axis, designing for the wrong climate, putting rain gardens in in marshy, wet areas, putting tall hugelkultur beds on a steep slope, etc. — from macro to micro, I can name loads of examples, but damn if I can give you a solid definition.
So, let’s try and figure it out.
First, let’s survey the landscape: how has permaculture defined a Type 1 error? A little sleuthing with Google turned up these results:
Bill Mollison, co-originator of permaculture, calls these ‘Type 1’ errors – those we regret making every day afterwards because they make it so hard to get anything else right.
TYPE ONE ERRORS are classified as errors/mistakes on a site which will either cost you or the client a lot of time, money, or energy to replace, redo, or clear out of a system if installed incorrectly.
And of course the quote we started this article off with, from Mollison himself: One of the great rules of design is do something basic right. Then everything gets much more right of itself. But if you do something basic wrong – if you make what I call a Type 1 error – you can get nothing else right.
Based on this I still don’t really know what it is. They define the effect of the error, that it causes a cascading problem or an is element that requires a lot of inputs (such as time or money) to keep it in operation. Yet none of them say anything more specific.
A little additional research turns up that there are other types of ‘Type 1’ errors, in statistics, computers, medical; essentially it’s a false positive. Doing something that doesn’t need to be done.
In all of the cases above it seems to be an error of awareness. In each of the quotes above an overlooked or unknown sector makes a mess of the best laid plans. It also tends toward a lack of respect for what is being designed, what the personality or place offers and asks for. Deep observation and interaction is required to build this respect and begin to hear the voice of the landscape.
Permaculture is becoming aware of this cascading functional relationships, sort of like a fountain. When a piece is out of place we can cause all sorts of problems for the rest of the system.
Lack of observation of the system we’re working with can quickly lead to expensive or ongoing problems if our plans even work at all. So the old permaculture adage “first observe for one year” might be said “in order to not make a type 1 error, first observe for one year”.
Perhaps this could be more flexibly stated as don’t jump in and work on major projects or limit your actions if you haven’t observed for one cycle (this year the garden will be here but smaller , next we’ll see). Be aware of both smaller cycles (daily rhythms, ) and larger cycles (flood, drought, new job, moving, birth, illness, death).
The world is bigger than us, we have to operate by its rules first. Perhaps this is the ultimate source of the error. Granted we can’t be aware of everything but a little humbleness about our place in the world can go a long way.
What is permaculture? What is it to practice permaculture? How does it lead to positive outcomes?
The way I’ve been practicing, I’d call it a philosophy. A way of being. I think you can see it most clearly in the choices I’ve made. It is a process. It is the adjacent possible.
What is this world for? Life happens so that life may happen. It’s there for us. It is a power on a grand scale. How do we tap in to that power when we’ve been so disconnected from it?
That’s permaculture. It is to that which I am a guide.
We sit under the shade of a tree and watch the wind whip the grass. We see where water has rushed past in previous storms. A cardinal, a woodpecker, a nuthatch appear and disappear above. A rabbit peaks out from under a shrub.
Idyllic no? But it is the truth. If you listen hard enough, long enough, you’ll hear what the adjacent possible might be. What would be welcomed. How you could be welcomed.
If you can put your energy behind that, what would happen?
What stands in our way? Nothing but ourselves. We just have to start.
